Article
Play and childhood in ancient Greece
The traditional games of children are the maximum exponent of a people’s culture of play, and though these games are sometimes derived from adult ceremonies, in spirit they belong to the world of children. Most authors assume that games depend on biological, cultural and psychological influences; they are considered a typical anthropological phenomenon in humans that is always transformed by culture. In Mediterranean countries, the climate was favourable for open-air play, which may have meant that it was possible to go without toys to have fun; the imagination developed with the natural surrounding elements, such as water, animals, flowers and shells. Play, childhood and physical education have formed an inseparable union throughout history, and Greece is no exception. Classical authors provided ample documentation on how children played, making it possible to identify analogies in play over the centuries. The agon as play applied from the very first instant of life and survived generation after generation.
The Mediterranean was the cradle of Western civilisation and the scene of many notable examples of expansion throughout history Jenkins (1998). Relations between peoples of the Mediterranean existed long before the height of the Bronze Age, though it was in this period that trade routes became established. The Phoenician and Greek civilisations developed in the Mediterranean (Andreu-Cabrera, 2009) during the first half of the first millennium BC – one of the most important cultural and political facts of ancient times.
The Mediterranean Sea has always been a meeting place for peoples separated by large geographical distances and who speak different languages. As Colet states (1993:7): “The Mediterranean, the Mother Nostrum of the Latin, the Great Sea mentioned by the Holy Writ or the Sea of the Greeks of the Arabic version, the waters of that they join three continents, is the cradle and the crucible of the western civilization. For what it concerns to the arts, the ideas or the thought, the Greeks, who, across them his colonies, were influencing everything the Mediterranean, were introducing also the worship to the one that was by all appearances useless: the love for the beauty, the pleasure of thinking and talking simply for the pleasure of doing it and also the pleasure of writing, reciting, doing; in a word, the pleasure of creating. The Greeks don´t want to leave of side the sport, since this activity was representing the accomplishment of an effort for the simple pleasure of competing, gaining as much the symbolic and only prize of a branch of olive tree…
Journal of Human Sport and Exercise, Vol 5, No 3 (2010)
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