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2. Conflict and Competition
Agōn
in Western Greece
Selected Essays from the 2019 Symposium on the
Heritage of Western Greece
edited by
Heather L. Reid
John Serrati
and Tim Sorg
Parnassos Press
2020

3. Copyright © 2020 Fonte Aretusa LLC
Individual authors retain their copyright to their articles, which
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First Printing: 2020
ISBN 978-1-942495-35-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-942495-37-6 (ebook)
Parnassos Press
Fonte Aretusa Organization
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Cover illustration: Bronze handle from a cista (toiletries box), 4th
century BCE, from Praenestine (Palestrina), Italy. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Accession Number 96.18.8. License CC0 1.0.

4. iv
Epigraph
ᾗ δὴ τὰ μὲν θεῶν ὀχήματα ἰσορρόπως εὐήνια ὄντα
ῥᾳδίως πορεύεται, τὰ δὲ ἄλλα μόγις: βρίθει γὰρ ὁ τῆς
κάκης ἵππος μετέχων, ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν ῥέπων τε καὶ
βαρύνων ᾧ μὴ καλῶς ἦν τεθραμμένος τῶν ἡνιόχων.
ἔνθα δὴ πόνος τε καὶ ἀγὼν ἔσχατος ψυχῇ πρόκειται.
The chariots of the gods, whose well matched horses obey
the rein, advance easily toward heaven, but the others
with difficulty; for the horse of evil nature weighs the
chariot down, making it heavy and pulling the charioteer
whose horse is not well trained toward the earth. There,
the utmost toil and struggle await the soul.
- Plato, Phaedrus 247b

5. Acknowledgments
The editors thank all the participants of the Fifth Interdisciplinary
Symposium on the Heritage of Western Greece in 2019. Harvard’s
Center for Hellenic Studies supported Prof. Reid during the
conference and during the editing phase of the book. We would
also like to thank Ms. Victoria Garvis for her diligent editing and
proofreading, and the Exedra Mediterranean Center of Siracusa
for their help and hospitality.

6. Table of Contents
Epigraph iv
Acknowledgments vi
Heather L. Reid, John Serrati, and Tim Sorg
Introduction viii
Keynote Address
Rebecca H. Sinos
The Ultimate Prize: An Orphic Image of Victory
Part I: Histories of Conflict and Competition
Parrish Elizabeth Wright
Identity and Agōn: Locri after the Battle at the Sagra
Tim Sorg
Syracuse, City of Unwilling Immigrants:
A Comparative Approach to Competitive Advantage
John Serrati
Agōn Sikelia:
The Hannibalic War and the (Re)Organization of Roman Sicily
Part II: Philosophical Agōn
Federico Casella
Conflict and Opposition:
Pythagorean Strategies for the Construction of an Identity
Drew A. Hyland
Heraclitus: Paradigms of Polemos, Eris, Agōn, Paidia
Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides
A Toast to Virtue:
Drinking Competitions, Plato, and the Sicilian Tyrants
Stephen M. Kershner & Audrey L. Anton
The Ancient Hellenic Virtue of Success

7. Part III: Civic Agōn in Performance
Eleni Kornarou
The Agonistic Element in Euripides’s Hippolytus
Paolo Babbiotti & Luca Torrente
Euripides’s Trojan Women:
A Critique of Asymmetric Conflict?
Part IV: Landscapes and Livelihoods in Conflict
Richard Stoneman
Giants or Science: Cosmic Strife, Mount Etna and Aetna
Flora P. Manakidou
The Geography and Mythology of Athletics in Callimachus:
Olympia, Magna Grecia, and Alexandria
Ippokratis Kantzios
Theocritus Idylls 11 and 6:
The Limitations of the Natural Landscape
Ewa Osek
Agōn, Agonistic Imagery, and Agonistic Argumentation
in Porphyry's De Abstinentia
Part V: A Conflicted Afterlife:
The Reception of Western Greek Agōn
Karen Sieben
Empedocles: Nietzsche’s Failed Reformer
Tobias Joho
Burckhardt and Nietzsche on the Agōn:
the dark luster of ancient Greece
About the Editors
Also from Parnassos Press

8. Heather L. Reid, John Serrati, and Tim Sorg
Introduction
In 2004, the city of Athens hosted the Ολυμπιακοί
Αγώνες, the Olympic Games. From around the world
came athletes and well-wishers, journalists and
enthusiasts, retailers and scalpers. They all came seeking
competition—at the Games, in the press, and in the
market. They reveled in it. They cheered it. They hoped it
would bring them fame and fortune. Agōn in Greek
culture is much more than a game. In antiquity, the term
could refer to a gathering, a war, a court trial, a rhetorical
debate, dramatic action, or almost any kind of struggle.
Even athletic agōnes cast a wide conceptual shadow,
imitating, as they did, the labors of mythological heroes.
These, in turn, reflected the contests between the gods,
which represented cosmic struggles. It is no surprise that
scholars say agōn is a defining characteristic of ancient
Greek culture. Conflict and competition were not
confined to stadia, they were a formative part of Greek
life. The ancient Greeks themselves identified strife and
struggle as a defining characteristic of existence.
Hesiod contrasted a good and bad form of eris (strife),
and promulgated a generational decline of mankind
which reserves a special place for heroes.1 Heroes met
strife with striving, as it were, struggling to improve
themselves and their world through athloi (labors).
Homer described heroic athloi in detail, recounting not
just the personal, social, and military struggles of Achilles
and Odysseus, but also presenting athletic agōnes
(contests) as micronarratives that reflect the epics’ larger
agōn. The Presocratic philosophers imagined heroic athloi
intellectually, in terms of a struggle to understand reality,
but the basic pattern was the same. For Heraclitus of
1 Works and Days, 11-26 (strife), and 109-74 (degeneration).

9. Miletus, panta rei (everything flows), and eris (strife) is
dikē (justice), when it finds a harmony through palintropos
(bending back), as in the spring tension created by a lyre
or a bow.2
Agōn was especially important among the Western
Greeks, not just because its geographical location at the
center of the Mediterranean made it a place for contact
and competition among diverse people and ideas, but also
because of their ongoing rivalry with the mainland.
Athletes, artists, politicians, and intellectuals from the
West felt a special need to prove their “Greekness” in
formal and informal agōnes at Olympia, Athens, Delphi,
and elsewhere in the Fatherland. Living both next to and
among non-Greeks not only heightened the need to prove
their “Greekness,” but equally gave them the opportunity
of portraying themselves as the defenders of civilization
in their frequent military struggles with the barbaroi. In
addition, they fought wars against their ancestral
countrymen, wrote poetry that dazzled them, staged
dramas that scandalized them, and developed ideas that
amazed them.
Indeed, the competing cosmologies of early Greek
thought in the West consistently conceived an agōn
between some orderly, perfected ideal and the disorderly,
imperfect realm experienced by human beings.
Pythagoras of Croton thought that the world was made of
numbers and the mathematical movement of the planets
and the stars created an inaudible harmony. Parmenides
of Elea, in the northern part of Western Greece, imagined
the “real world” as static and unchanging, relegating
strife to the world of appearances. Empedocles of Akragas
2 DK B80 Εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τὸν πόλεμον ἐόντα ξυνὸν καὶ δίκην ἔριν, καὶ
γινόμενα πάντα κατ' ἔριν καὶ χρεών. Translation from Charles H.
Kahn, The art and thought of Heraclitus ( Cambridge University
Press,1979), 270-1.

10. in Sicily countered that the cosmos was constantly moved
by the opposing principles of philotēs (Love) and neikos
(Strife). The agonistic metaphysics of real versus ideal
would be made famous by the philosophy of Plato, but the
worldly agōnes of human life inhabit almost every form of
ancient Greek literature including history, poetry, drama,
and even the tiny inscriptions on Orphic gold tablets.
One such tablet, found in a tomb at Thurii, a Greek
settlement near Sybaris in southern Italy, inspires the
keynote address that opens our volume. Rebecca Sinos
analyzes the poetry inscribed on the tablet, which evokes
the agōn of life and death by combining images of a
victorious athlete with the reunion of mother and child
characteristic of the cult of Demeter and Persephone. The
deceased seems to race toward a victory in a hereafter
characterized by harmony and reciprocity, and
reminiscent of the kind of paradise described by Dante.
The first section of the volume chronicles histories of
conflict and competition in Western Greece, beginning
with Parrish Elizabeth Wright’s analysis of the mythology
surrounding the battle at the Sagra River. Wright
demonstrates how the Locrians promoted stories that not
only portrayed them as allies to major powers and favored
by the gods, but also helped them to form political
connections with cities in mainland Greece through a
process known as kinship diplomacy. Next, Tim Sorg
interprets Syracusan conquest as a zero-sum competition
among states. He shows how the Syracusans moved
conquered peoples not as a means of punishment, but
rather to gain economic advantage over their rivals.
Similar themes involving the wealth of Syracuse wealth
and the city’s interaction with outsiders are covered in
John Serrati’s essay, “Agōn Sikelia.” This paper reveals the
connected layers of social, economic, political, and even
ethnic agōn at work within the history surrounding the
Hannibalic war in Syracuse.

11. Philosophical agōn is the subject of the second section,
“Civic Agōn in Debate,” which begins with Federico
Casella’s examination of the agonistic nature of
Pythagorean history. Casella’s study reveals the rivalries
that led to comic, conflicting, and even contradictory
accounts of Pythagoras’s life and activities in Croton. In
the next essay, Drew Hyland argues that agonistic
language in Heraclitus, often translated as “war” and
understood in violent terms, may be better thought of in
terms of games and play. Such an interpretation resonates
better with ancient and modern theories of play, and also
makes sense of his claim (cited above) that eris is the
source of all harmony. To many ancients, the battlefield
was the ultimate agōn; indeed, this is the starting point for
the papers of Sorg and Serrati in the previous section.
However, Hyland’s is the first of two papers in the
volume which nuances this notion, illustrating how
malleable the concept of agōn truly was. Indeed, in the
following paper, Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides explores the
agonistic nature of ancient drinking culture, linking the
social competition between the old elites and the nouveaux
riches, in particular Sicilian Tyrants, with various agōnes
in Platonic literature, especially the Symposium. In the
next essay, Stephen M. Kershner and Audrey L. Anton
claim that agōn is necessary, but may not be sufficient for
Hellenic virtue in ancient Greek ethics. They argue that
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and even the Stoics require
success as a condition of virtue.
The third section, “Civic Agōn in Performance,” deals
with agōn in and around drama, specifically through the
analysis of two Euripidean tragedies. Interlocking levels
of agōn is the subject of Eleni Kornarou’s paper on
Euripides’s Hippolytus. Not only was the play composed
and performed in a competitive environment, argues
Kornarou, it presents agōnes within and between
characters on stage, which reflect the larger unresolved
cultural agōnes between reason and emotion, truth and

12. falsity, human and divine. Euripides is also the subject of
Paolo Babbiotti and Luca Torrente’s essay, which argues
that the tragedian is criticizing the practice of
asymmetrical conflict—one in which the stronger takes
unfair advantage—in the Trojan Women. To do this, they
apply Roger Caillois’s modern theory of competitive
games to show that the conflict depicted in the play
represents a degeneration of agōn into destructive
conflict, especially for women. This takes Hyland’s
conception of non-violent agōn even further, and argues
that Euripides, in opposition to many of his fellow
Greeks, believed that most wars were not rightly
classified as agōnes at all.
The fourth section, “Landscapes and Livelihoods in
Conflict,” begins with Richard Stoneman’s account of how
Mount Etna came to be the site of the agōn between the
gods and giants, an ancient emblem of cosmic strife.
Using the anonymous Latin poem Aetna, Stoneman
suggests that Empedocles may be the source of this
location, as well as the tradition of discussing “natural”
phenomena like volcanoes to address moral issues in
philosophy. Next, the theme of constructed lineages and
kinship diplomacy, first explored in Wright’s paper, are
taken up by Flora Manikidou, who shows how the poet
Callimachus fashions the Ptolemies’ Hellenic identity by
linking them athletically with Sicily and Magna Graecia
through the myths of Heracles and other heroic athletes,
as well as geography. As with Stoneman, Ippokratis
Kantzios examines the agōn in relation to poetry, looking
at Theocritus’s dichotomy between countryside and sea,
arguing that it represents the inner struggle between
reason and temptation popular in contemporary
Epicurean philosophy. Ewa Osek closes the section by
showing how Porphyry argues for vegetarianism by
setting up a fictional agōn between Empedocles and the
Hellenistic philosophers.

13. The final section of the volume, “A Conflicted
Afterlife: The Reception of Western Greek Agōn,”
considers the reception of Greek agōn in the work of
Nietzsche and Burckhardt. First, Karen Sieben examines
Nietzsche’s evaluation of Empedocles as a failed
reformer. She argues that the Sicilian philosopher failed,
in Nietzsche’s eyes, to move beyond religious thought not
least by opposing the principle of strife with Aphrodite.
Tobias Joho concludes the volume with a detailed analysis
of Nietzsche’s and Burckhardt’s accounts of agōn as a
primary cultural principle in ancient Greece. While both
philosophers recognized the importance of agōn to
Hellenic achievement, Burckhardt lamented the misery it
wrought while Nietzsche saw it as the source of cultural
vitality.
The idea that agōn has two inseparable faces—one
constructive and one destructive, as Hesiod said of
strife—is confirmed by the essays in this volume. The pain
of death brings the comfort of reunion with loved ones in
the afterlife, the heated debates of philosophers move
them closer to truth, the dramatic struggles of tragic
figures help audiences to make sense of their daily agōnes,
even natural conflict among volcanoes, meadows, rivers,
and the sea becomes, through poetry, a way to learn about
ourselves. That learning itself requires pain and struggle
is something the ancient Greeks realized but nevertheless
committed themselves to. This is why they saw Homer’s
wars and nostalgia as primary education. This is why
they founded gymnasia in which the intellectual wrestling
was just as fierce as the physical kind. This is why they
put pain up on the stage, evoking fear, pity, and often
tears from audiences. This is also why even bucolic poetry
is never free from conflict.
Perhaps what this collection of essays best illustrates
is the commitment to learning of ancient Hellenes,
particularly those in Western Greece whose ancestors left
the comfort of home in painful pursuit of the good in an

14. unfamiliar landscape at the other end of a dangerous sea.
Perhaps by learning through agōn, they understood what
Heraclitus meant when he said that justice and harmony
resulted from the tension created through conflict, as in
the stringing of a bow. And maybe they experienced the
catharsis that Odysseus did when he famously strings the
royal bow, establishing his noble identity and regaining
his kingdom.