Gymnasia and Athletic Culture in Western and Southern Asia Minor During the Hellenistic and Roman Periods

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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.