Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient GreeceThe role of athletics in ancient Greece extended well beyond the realms of kinesiology, competition, and entertainment. In teaching and philosophy, athletic practices overlapped with rhetorical ones and formed a shared mode of knowledge production. Bodily Arts examines this intriguing intersection, offering an important context for understanding the attitudes of ancient Greeks toward themselves and their environment. In classical society, rhetoric was an activity, one that was in essence "performed." Detailing how athletics came to be rhetoric's "twin art" in the bodily aspects of learning and performance, Bodily Arts draws on diverse orators and philosophers such as Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Plato, as well as medical treatises and a wealth of artifacts from the time, including statues and vases. Debra Hawhee's insightful study spotlights the notion of a classical gymnasium as the location for a habitual "mingling" of athletic and rhetorical performances, and the use of ancient athletic instruction to create rhetorical training based on rhythm, repetition, and response. Presenting her data against the backdrop of a broad cultural perspective rather than a narrow disciplinary one, Hawhee presents a pioneering interpretation of Greek civilization from the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE by observing its citizens in action. |
From inside the book
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... athletics were, at times, all these things together. Athletics and rhetoric were thus bound together, as Isocrates points out, in at least two ways: 1) unified training in athletics and oratory provides a program for shaping an entire ...
... athletics and athletic training, for nowhere has athletics been more sociopolitical than in ancient Greece. And nowhere, moreover, as my study argues, has athletics been so intertwined with citizen production. Similarly, the work of ...
Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece Debra Hawhee. tion of ancient training practices, how they developed, what they were modeled on, and how they would become etched into a classical ethos. Yet to stop at questions of training would ...
... athletic and rhetorical encounters—in short, kairos is the time of the agōn, the immediacy that calls for quick ... training, where learning and performing come together most explicitly. Chapter 4, ''Phusiopoiesis: The Arts of Training ...
... athletic and rhetorical training in the ancient gymnasium, the locus for citizen training. Chapter 6, ''Gymnasium II: The Bodily Rhythms of Habit,'' extends the spatial analysis into mechanisms of habit formation by discussing sophistic ...
Contents
Agonism and the Production of Aretē | 15 |
An Intelligence of the Body | 44 |
Kairotic Bodies | 65 |
The Arts of Training | 86 |
The Space of Training | 109 |
The Bodily Rhythms of Habit | 133 |
Rhetoric Athletics and the Circulation | 162 |