This article treats representations of victors in the Greek athletic games in the artistic and poetic media of the early classical age, and argues that fifth-century sculptors, painters and poets similarly constructed the athlete as an object designed to arouse desire in audiences for their works. After reviewing the very scanty archaeological evidence for the original victory images, I seek to recover something of the response elicited by these monuments by looking to visualizations of athletes in contemporary vase-painting and literary (...) sources, and most particularly in the epinician odes of Pindar. Poets and painters, I suggest, both place their subjects within an erotically-charged atmosphere which replicates that surrounding actual athletes in the city gymnasia and at the games, and encourage audiences to regard the youthful bodies on display as "spectacularized" objects, sources of both aesthetic and sensual pleasure. The makers of monumental images work within the same paradigm, also prompting the viewer to transfer the sentiments aroused by the real-world athlete and victor to his re-presentation in bronze. Through an examination of the conventions used for victor images, and a close study of the so-called Motya charioteer, I propose that the sculptor deploys techniques analogous to those of artist and poet to highlight the appeal of the athlete's body, and displays the victor in a mode calculated not only to mark him as the alluring target of the gaze, but even to cast him as a potential erômenos. The concluding section of the article investigates the impetus behind this mode of representation, and seeks to place the dynamic between the viewer and the viewed within the context of the early fifth-century polis. (shrink)

In Archaic Athenian vase-painting, silens are often sexually aroused, but only sporadically satisfy their desires in a manner acceptable to most Athenian men. François Lissarrague persuasively argued that the sexuality of silens in vase-painting was probably laughable rather than awe-inspiring. What sort of laughter did the vase-paintings elicit? Was it the scornful laughter of a person who felt nothing in common with silens, or the laughter of one made to see something of himself in their behavior? For three reasons, I (...) argue for the latter interpretation. First, some vase-paintings are constructed so as to invite the viewer to adopt imaginatively the persona of a silen. Second, parallels for the less-than-triumphant sexuality of silens occur in Archaic iambic poetry. Like the vase-paintings, the poetry was often constructed so that performers of the poems are incorporated into the narratives as all-too-human protagonists. Third, certain formal features of classical satyr-play encouraged the audience to identify with the point of view of the satyr-chorus, while others reminded it that there were better role models than silens. In all three media, a negative characterization of male characters or silens is combined with a manner of presentation that invites the viewer or performer to see himself among those characters despite their negative traits. That form of humor may have been common in Archaic symposia, but its presence in satyr-play suggests that it may also be a fundamental characteristic of silens. (shrink)