Gymnasia and Athletic Culture in Western and Southern Asia Minor in the Hellenistic and Roman period – GymnAsia

The working method has been tested in two «laboratory regions« in southwestern Asia Minor, Caria and Lycia, the best known in Ausonius and Munich, and is now being extended to the whole of western and southern Asia Minor, including the neighbouring islands (from Aeolian to Cilicia).

The systematically collected epigraphic and archaeological documentation is compiled in an indexed database, which will be published online by AusoNHum at the end of the programme. It will not only make it possible to link common sources for a given monument, institution or city, by making the document(s) immediately accessible, but also to multiply the angles of reflection, both on a local and regional scale, or by comparison between regions. It will also support a diachronic approach, as well as a spatial one, as it will allow the generation of maps, which, on all aspects of the subject, remain to be elaborated.

At this stage, it is difficult to present any firm results, as the interest of the project lies in the comparison between all the project regions. Nevertheless, for the regions where the work has been completed, the following can be highlighted: 1) the athletic and gymnasium culture is attested (by literary sources) from the classical period in Rhodes and Cos, but not elsewhere; the first clues, exclusively epigraphic, attest to the first building of gymnasiums at the end of the 4th century (Halicarnassus, Mylasa), but the gymnasium life was not yet established. The first evidence, exclusively epigraphic, attests to the first building of gymnasia at the end of the 4th century (Halicarnassus, Mylasa), but gymnasium life is only known everywhere from the 2nd century onwards (the competitions, around the middle of the century) and the archaeological sources offer a gap: nothing or almost nothing is prior to the 2nd century. The gap is greater in Lycia, where the first gymnasiums do not seem to predate the end of the 3rd century, and the competitions the middle of the 2nd century: there is a gap of a century between the two regions, due, no doubt, to a very different development of the cities and perhaps to the interventions of the dominant powers which are quite different (the financing seems to be private in Lycia). The latest testimonies also come from Caria (Aphrodisias).

It is hoped to have part of the database in summer 2023, region by region, starting with Caria.
The collection of sources continues (Ionia, Lydia are in progress).
A book will present all the results of the project at the end of the project.
An exhibition, intended for a wider public, will present some aspects of the project in 2024, in Bordeaux (Musée d'Aquitaine) then in Munich (Museum für Abgüsse).

Papers:
-1. P. Fröhlich et C. Schuler, « ‘Compétition’. Gymnases et culture athlétique en Asie Mineure », colloque Pour une Europe des sciences humaines et social. 15 ans de recherches franco-allemandes, colloque franco-allemand ANR-DFG, Paris, 16.06.2022
1. P. Fröhlich, « Gymnases et culture athlétique en Asie Mineure (IVe s. a.C.-IIIe s. p.C.). Questions méthodologiques autour d’un projet en cours », Poitiers, 07.05.2021, Journée d’études Les lieux d’éducation de la jeunesse en Grèce antique. Recherches récentes sur les gymnases

The project is devoted to the study of the material and institutional forms of agonistic and gymnasial culture in the Greek cities of Asia Minor from the 4th century BC to the 3rd century AD.
The Hellenistic and imperial periods saw athletic contests thrive: they increased in number from the middle of the third century BC, particularly in Asia Minor, and reached their peak in the imperial period. The precondition for this phenomenon was the generalization of athletic training, so that the gymnasium as an institution and a building became a symbol of civic life in Greek cities. As places for athletic and military training, education, sociability, and the transmission of civic practices and values, gymnasiums were a major preoccupation of Greek cities as well as a financial burden. During six centuries of history, they also underwent many transformations and mutations, in their use, their meaning and their form, but many of these are not well understood, such as for example the place that the baths and thermal culture took in these buildings. Among the other buildings linked to the celebration of gymnastic contests, the stadia are even less well studied. As institutional, architectural and cultural phenomena, gymnasia and contests constitute a privileged observatory to examine the evolutions of the civic societies in the long term: cultural, sports and military practices, civic life of the democracies, paideia, civic cults, personal investment of the notables, interventions of the kings and emperors in their organization and in their financing, urban and architectural evolutions, diffusion of Greek and later Roman ways of life, etc. Gymnasia have never been studied as an object of total history, despite the abundance of epigraphic and archaeological sources; nor have they been examined diachronically, throughout the whole Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods. The objective is to conduct a systematic study of these phenomena in Western and Southern Asia Minor. This area offers an unparalleled record of sources and a variety of cultural and historical situations: regions of ancient Greek colonization, indigenous communities that adopted the city way of life, with very different rhythms and modalities, as well as Hellenistic and Roman foundations. The chosen area therefore enables us to study the above-mentioned phenomena in a nuanced way and to make a representative contribution to the general history of gymnasia in the Greek world. Both the collection of documentation and the problems of the project were tested by the two teams in Bordeaux and Munich in an experimental phase, dedicated to Caria and Lycia. The result of the project will be published in a monograph. The collected data will be published in parallel in a database currently under development at Bordeaux.