Why read A Visitor's Guide to the Ancient Olympics?

Book cover of A Visitor's Guide to the Ancient Olympics

Book description

An essential book for the 21st-century citizen who seeks a lively guided tour of the ancient Greek Olympics

What was it like to attend the Olympics in 388 B.C.? Would the experience resemble Olympic festivals as we celebrate them today? This remarkable book transports us back to the heyday of…

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Why read it?

1 author picked A Visitor's Guide to the Ancient Olympics as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Wray Vamplew

Author

Again, this is a book that I picked up second-hand. I missed it the first time around when preparing a paper on the commercialization of sport in Ancient Greece and Rome. An earlier reading would have improved my work.

Classicists, who study ancient Greece and Rome, actually come from a branch of history that embraced sport as a subject long before sports history became an accepted academic sub-discipline.

Here Neil Faulkner presents a synoptic history of Ancient Greece within a discussion of the first Olympics in the form of a travelogue. The scholarship is sound, the knowledge imparted often an…

From Wray's 3 favorite reads in 2023.