The end of ancient athletics

The decline and eventual end of the Greek athletic contests has long been neglected in research. This dissertation aims to describe and explain the evolution for the first time. A major challenge was the evidence: obviously the decline of athletics led to a decrease in sources referring to athletics, but the decrease of sources attested in the fourth century not does not necessarily evidences decline, as there were other factors at play too, such as the popularity of new genres or the epigraphic habit.The first chapter gives for each region of the Mediterranean (the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Italy, Gaul and Northern Africa) the history of athletic contests in late antiquity, focusing on the period between the reigns of Diocletian and Theodosius II. A crucial period was the second quarter of the fourth century, when the first regional circuits of rather small-scale games were falling out. By the end of the fourth century, however, an international circuit of some major games still existed, which only collapsed between circa 410 and 435.The second chapter deals with mentality: how the attitudes toward exercising, attending contests and talking about athletics changed. The research revealed that the influence of Christianity was limited, but that the inhabitants of the east of the Roman Empire did start to feel more Roman, and therefore included more Roman customs in their acts of self-representation and looked at games from a Roman perspective, all of which strongly influenced their attitude toward athletics.The third chapter discusses the effect of institutional, economic, social and political changes on how the civic elites, the athletes and the emperor looked at games. It starts from an analysis of how the complex international circuit worked in practice. The idea of an imperial ban is not correct. The imperial policy was in fact supportive of athletic contests. This dissertation argues that the institutional evolutions on the level of the cities, and their economic problems, had a crucial role in the decline of the athletic contests, because it were the cities that organized the games.status: publishe