Mens Sana in Corpore Sano? Body and Mind in Ancient Greece

Abstract

The popular noations that the ancient Greek athlete was more 'well rounded' than ours is wholly false, nor was there every any Greek ideal to achieve or pursue both intellectual and bodily excellence. Earlier Greeks judged excellence in either category invaluable, but an increasiingly vocal minority of intellectuals, apparently jealous of the athletes' great rewards, denigrated athletes and bodily achievement. Mind, they said, was superior to body. By later antiquity, some authors even asserted that athletes were as stupid as animals, and their achievements no greater. Christianity welcomed the philosophers' depreciation of the body, and mediaeval ascetism carried it to the extremes that de Coubertin and others called "hatred of the flesh." The latter part of the paper explains how the rebirth of athletics dealt with these matters, and how false notions of the Greeks entered popular belief.