Greek Exercises: the Modern Olympics as Hellenic Appropriation and Reinvention

Thesis Eleven 93 (1):72-87 (2008)
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Abstract

`From Aristotle to Us', the conference held at La Trobe University in May 2007, names a powerful and highly influential Romantic trajectory, one which posits a particular conception of the ancients, a particular conception of the moderns, and a complex conception of the relationship between the two. Using the modern Olympic Revival as a case study and a case in point, this article argues that such `exercises' in Greek appropriation always operate with largely unstated assumptions about the nature of the present's relation to the past, and the enormously complex quality of the Greek past. In becoming self-critical about such appropriations of the Classical legacy, contemporary critics are forced to contend with the spectre of religion, a topic that `Greek exercises' almost inevitably carve in high relief. The article concludes with an historiographic meditation on varying images of `paganism' in contemporary culture, images that link the Greeks to athletics to such modern and post-modern `revivals'

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Agape: An Ethical Analysis.Gene H. Outka - 1972 - Yale University Press.
Greek Homosexuality.Nancy Demand & K. J. Dover - 1980 - American Journal of Philology 101 (1):121.

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