Sofie Remijsen

Challenged by Egyptians: Greek Sports in the Third Century bc

In the third century BC, Ptolemaic Egypt was very successful on the Greek sports circuit. This essay analyses the prominent position of Egyptian competitors – that is, residents of Ptolemaic Egypt competing for a traditional Greek city or for Alexandria – both in equestrian and athletic events. Their achievements were no coincidence: sport was actively promoted by the Ptolemies, through the construction of sports infrastructure, financial help for promising athletes and the introduction of Greek games in Egypt. The publicity of their success was directed towards the Greek world. The aim of this Ptolemaic focus on sports was to create an ‘image of power’ and to stress the Greek identity of the Ptolemies.

Incest or adoption? Brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt revisited

In JRS 97 Sabine Huebner argued that the brother-sister marriages in Roman Egypt could be explained as marriages between an adopted son and a natural daughter, a widespread family strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Remijsen and Clarysse now return to the traditional view that Egyptians did marry their full sisters. Ancient authors considered brother-sister marriages as a peculiarity of the whole Egyptian population and, moreover, papyrological sources do not prove any connection between adoption and brother-sister marriage. Neither the household size nor the onomastic pattern in families with brother-sister marriages are consistent with the usual adoption practices of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The end of the ancient Olympics and other contests: why the agonistic circuit collapsed in late antiquity

In the second and third centuries AD, many of the cities in the eastern Mediterranean could boast about having their own athletic games. In the fourth century, however, these games quickly declined. In recent years, the traditional explanations for the end of athletic games, most prominently the supposed ban by Theodosius, have been proven unfounded. This paper proposes an alternative explanation: institutional and financial changes hindered the successful organization of athletic contests by the cities in the fourth and fifth centuries. In order to show the effect of these changes, this paper first offers a detailed analysis of how athletic contests were founded and funded in the early imperial period. It then examines how and to what extent these procedures and funds were affected by changes in late antiquity. The decline was not caused by a general financial crisis - in fact the estates (partially) funding the games remained a stable form of financing. Instead the shift of power to a centralized bureaucracy limited the cities in their administration of the games: they could no longer independently meet deficits in the agonistic budget from the city treasury and had to rely increasingly on elite sponsors, whose ambitions focused mainly on the provincial capitals and who gradually lost their interest in athletics.