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ABSTRACT
Trainers played an immensely important role in ancient sports. Yet, they often disappear in the descriptions of great athletic feats in epinician poetry, the poems of praise that celebrated great athletes in the ancient world. This paper examines the manner in which trainers fade from epinician narrative and argues that their disappearance may have to do with the nature of the body and the role of trainers and physicians in the Greek world. Admitting the importance of trainers might challenge the notion that the greatness of athletes stemmed from birth and breeding. The fact that trainers sold their services as commodities would exacerbate this.
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Notes
1. For the translation, see Nicholson (Citation2005, 146) and Poliakoff (Citation1982, 137–142).
2. Pritchard (Citation2003, 300–4), argues that a pupil could be prepared for competition in the group classes of a wrestling school, but it is important to distinguish elite games from local competitions.
3. Melesias’ pupils won at least thirty victories at Panhellenic contests, while those of Menander, another trainer named by Pindar, enjoyed considerable success also (Nicholson Citation2005, 136–8, 167–8). Other famous trainers included Herodicus of Selymbria, one of the few authorities to be referred to by name in the Hippocratic corpus (Dugand Citation1990, 151) and Iccus of Taras, a pentathlete-turned-trainer proverbial for his chastity and training (Nicholson Citation2016, 3).
4. Exceptions include Pi. Py. 8, Is. 8, Bacch. 1–2, Bacch. 11, as well as Pi. Is. 6 which pretends that the father acted as the trainer. See Hamilton (Citation1974, 108), Nicholson (Citation2005, 121–3), and Nicholson and Gutierrez (Citation2012, 103–4). Pi. Is. 4 and 5 name a trainer in the context of youth combat victories, even though the odes celebrate open victories; the trainer named in Is. 5 is also a fantasy, the victor’s older brother.
5. Van der Eijk (Citation2004, 195–6), suggests that Regimen was intended for ‘fitness trainers’, among others, and (Citation2008, 400–1), that the author of Regimen was a trainer.
6. For the date of this other Hippocratic treatises given here, see Jouanna (Citation1999, 373–416).
7. Bartos (Citation2015, 31–2), argues that Herodicus only treated athletes, while Dugand (Citation1990, 153–4), sees him as starting as a trainer and becoming a physician later. This distinction relies on an anachronistic sense of separation between these functions. It is easy to imagine how a successful trainer would find himself treating family members of athletes or simply those who were aware of his work with athletes, even as he continued training athletes (something a physician would not do). Training was surely Herodicus’ core competence, as Plato’s designation of Herodicus as a trainer in this passage makes clear. Cf. also Pl. Prot. 316d-e, where Herodicus is again linked with athletics but also paired with Iccus of Taras (on whom, see n.3 above).
8. The date of Regimen is disputed (Jouanna Citation1999, 480–9), but the material on regimen itself fits well with a late fifth-century date. Jouanna treats all four books as a unified treatise, but there are reasons to separate off Regimen IV as a later addition (cf. Hankinson Citation1998, 28–33), which would make a date nearer 400 much more likely for Regimen I–III. Bartos (Citation2015, 4), dates Regimen to 400–350.
9. Bartos (Citation2015, 47–8), argues that the author of Regimen saw himself as an expert in dietetics, but not necessarily in medicine. It is clear that some who advocated for dietetics did see themselves as physicians, however, as Regimen in Acute Diseases makes clear; see Bartos (Citation2015, 103 n.440).
10. Regimen I.2 says that the perfect regimen can only be determined if precise knowledge of the individual’s body has been ascertained, but that such knowledge is impossible unless one were to watch a patient stripping and doing his workouts. Bartos (Citation2015, 60–2), argues persuasively that the medical dietician (as much as a trainer) would do such an examination; the qualification is included here simply to inform the reader that the treatise cannot provide this kind of precision.
11. Gardiner slips in referring to Melesias as ‘a teacher of boxing.’
12. Cf. also Nicholson and Gutierrez (Citation2012), which argues that the (non-)representation of the trainer in Bacch. 1 is informed by the medical practice of the victor’s family.
13. Lehmann (Citation2009, 189), concludes that the title gymnastes, which seems to appear around the end of the fifth century and associated the trainer with expertise in health and diet, ‘came to sound more impressive than paidotribes, which suggested training for children in the schools’.
14. Possible examples of socially mobile doctors include the Agrigentine physician Acron, mocked by Empedocles for wanting to construct a showy family tomb (Nicholson and Selden Citation2019, 132) and Sombrotidas of Megara Hyblaea, possibly an immigrant to the colony, who was commemorated by a fine kouros (Nicholson and Selden Citation2019, 69–72).
15. [Hipp.] Epidemics 5.71 (fourth century) tells how Bias, a boxer, became feverish after eating undercooked meat. Patients’ occupations are rarely given in these case studies, so the fact that he is a boxer is significant. His athletic conditioning, it is implied, is a reason for his illness. Epidemics 6.30 (c.400) tells of a wrestler who fell on his head while wrestling and died two days later. On the Hippocratic body, see further Nicholson and Selden (Citation2019, 37–42).