INTRODUCTION: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, KIDNAPPED (1886)

By what I have read in books, I think few that have held a pen were ever really wearied, or they would write of it more strongly.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped

I’VE HEARD that Eskimos have more than a hundred words for snow. Running should have a thousand words for feeling tired.

Runners know tiredness in all its many shades and effects, and we carry among life’s significant memories those races when tiredness was our stepping-stone to high achievement, or the dead weight that sank us; when it crept into our legs like a wasting disease, or suddenly leapt upon us like a cougar from a rock; when we grappled with it, and overcame or were overcome.

Yet when we seek to describe tiredness or fatigue, few words or books or stories are available to help us understand how it truly feels to be “really wearied,” as Stevenson’s David Balfour puts it, to relive the experience, express it, or connect our perceptions with those of others.

In the course of a career as a scholar, writer, and professor of literature, and as a spare-time runner, I have kept one truant reader’s eye open for a literature of running. I look not so much for historical accounts as for words that express, evoke, re-imagine, narrate, celebrate, or make memorable or vivid some aspect of the experience of running.

Sometimes I find them in unexpected places. When Stevenson describes “The Flight in the Heather” of Alan Breck Stewart and David Balfour (Kidnapped, Chapters 20 through 22), he conjures better than anywhere else I know the numb, stumbling, shuffling, stupid weariness that every marathon or ultra runner has lived through. The friends run and walk and crawl for days and nights through the rocks and moors of the Scottish Highlands to elude the English redcoats—”Sometimes we walked, sometimes ran; and as it drew on to morning, walked ever the less and ran the more”—and prose like that catches their anxiety and haste. It evokes heat and thirst and the immense but brief relief that runners also know when we reach water or shade: “I kept stumbling as I ran, I had a stitch that came near to overmaster me; and when at last Alan paused under a great rock . . . it was none too soon for David Balfour.”

As they keep pressing on, the writing becomes as leaden and heavy as their movement, embodying that depleted state when each step is gained only by a separate act of will and the mind knows nothing but a bleary focus on that task: “Toiling and resting and toiling again, we wore away the morning . . . stumbling like babes, and as white as dead folk. Never a word passed between us; each set his mouth and kept his eyes in front of him, and lifted up his foot and set it down again.”

Stevenson understands those almost primeval emotions of despair and resentment that overtake us: “I did not think of myself, but just of each fresh step which I was sure would be my last, with despair—and of Alan, who was the cause of it, with hatred.”

The Scottish Highlands in 1751 may be a long way from Heartbreak Hill, but reading that passage took me right back to the last (and slowest) time I ran Boston. Stumbling, white as a corpse, full of despair. Yes, Stevenson got my number.

At such moments, two strands of my life come together, and Dr. Jekyll, the benign literature professor, merges with Mr. Hyde, the competitive runner. What follows, and in four future installments, is a selection of such moments of recognition, discoveries of good writing where running becomes, if only briefly, the subject of literature. The selections are drawn from my own reading over many years, but not from planned research. I have followed some leads from books on running or anthologies of sports writing, and those acknowledgments are made in the text or at the end of each article. What I offer is not a guide to the best modern running books. That was provided by Scott Hubbard’s excellent “25 Books Every Marathoner Should Own” (see Marathon & Beyond, vol. 5, no. 1, January/February 2001).

Generally, I keep to libraries’ Literature shelves, not Sports. I’ll be looking at the best running novels but not essays, biographies, or autobiographies, however good. My list is not a full catalogue of all passing references to running, whatever their historical interest, unless they meet my test of literary quality.

My compilation is, however, the fullest commentary yet available, as far as I know, on the rendering of running in literature. Many examples will be new to readers; all are well written; some have great curiosity interest. Did you know the rebel fiends in Hell held a track meet after they were thrown out of Heaven? Or that Polynesian priests used to run for 3 days before announcing who was to be eaten in the cannibal feast? Or that in two major twentieth century novels, running is used as a significant recurring metaphor?

My selections range from Ancient Greece to unpublished new poetry, coming mainly from literature in English, along with translated texts that have become part of English-language culture. I include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama—but not film or TV scripts, nor (with special exceptions) the very large body of good sports fiction for children and young adults.

As Stevenson’s chapters have already shown, I have not confined myself to accounts of running as an organized sport. My test is that the passages speak to me as a runner, and I hope they will speak to other readers who are runners. If you know something good that I have missed, please write to me c/o Marathon & Beyond or e-mail me at rogerrobinson61@hotmail.com.

1. Ancient Greece: Homer

We begin at the beginning of the western literary tradition. The narrative poems The Iliad and The Odyssey were probably compilations and adaptations of older poems and oral narratives, written down about 800 years BC, at least in part by a poet known as Homer.

The poems are set in the earlier era of Mycenaean Greece, when religious rituals included athletic and cultural “games” held on important formal occasions, especially funeral ceremonies. So Homer put (or retained from his sources) descriptions of such games in both epics. In The Iliad, about the siege of Troy (Ilium), the games are held in honor of Patroclus, the slain friend of the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles (Book 23). In The Odyssey, they are organized to entertain Odysseus (Ulysses) when he is shipwrecked in the land of the Phaeacians (Book 8). In both, the footrace is only one event among many, and The Iliad devotes much more space to the chariot races and wrestling, probably for the same reason that modern Hollywood makes more films about chariots, gladiators, and car crashes than about runners. More speed, more noise, more blood.

In The Odyssey, which some scholars persuasively argue was written by a woman, the main events are dancing and something close to rhythmic gymnastics. Odysseus does toss a mighty discus but excuses himself from the running event on the grounds that he is out of shape because of his sufferings in battle and at sea, tactfully omitting the several years just spent with the beautiful Calypso on her temptation island.

In both cases, the running event is vividly described. The Iliad race seems to be a straightaway sprint, or “stade,” about 150 yards, but is not run in lanes. There are three starters, but Antilochus, “the fastest runner among all the youth of his time,” is never a factor in the race. “Fleet Ajax” leads all the way from “cunning Odysseus,” who hangs in close but cannot get past. He finally resorts to praying for divine assistance. It never worked for me, but the goddess Athene favors Odysseus, and Ajax slips on some offal left from the sacrificial cattle and falls face down in a pile of cow dung. Homer, whoever he or she was, is not overly reverent toward these heroes.

My main concern here is with how the running is described. I have compared many English versions of these two races—the earliest in literature—to try to sort out how well Homer does it. Some good things get lost in translation. Both races begin, for instance, with a phrase usually translated along the lines of “The course was set out for them from the starting post,” which sounds pretty obvious. But H.A. Harris, in one of the great books on the history of running, Greek Athletes and Athletics (1964), translates the line as, “The course stretched out from the starting line,” which, as he says, gives the runner’s view, not the spectator’s: “It recalls perfectly what a sprinter feels in that lonely moment when he goes to the mark and the finishing post recedes into an unimaginable distance.” W.R. Loader, in his fine book about sprinting, Testament of a Runner (1960), describes the same sensation.

Breathing Down His Neck

The real interest for a runner in the Iliad race is in how close Odysseus follows, which Homer emphasizes in three different images. He’s as close as a woman holding the shuttle tight to her bosom when she is weaving and throws the woof across the warp; he’s so close that he treads in Ajax’s footprints while the dust is still flying; he’s close enough for Ajax to feel his breath on the back of his neck. It’s a strange and uncomfortable feeling in a race, when someone runs that close behind you. Their stride threatens yours, even if there is no contact, their breathing seems to insist on its rhythm and to override your own, and you resent it as if they are intruding into your personal space and somehow freeloading on your effort.

It still happens sometimes on the Central Park Reservoir path, and even at geriatric pace, it’s as irritating as in my sub-30 minute 10K days. To be followed closely is a fundamental discomfort of leading; to judge how close to follow is one of racing’s most precise skills; and the relationship between leader and follower one of the sport’s special forms of interpersonal feeling. It seems to me that this poem, nearly 3,000 years old, has caught those complex

tensions. We don’t now see women every day working at the loom, but that image of holding something tight in against you is still an unexpected and telling one.

The episode of Ajax’s fall can distract attention from the fact that the goddess Athene also enables Odysseus to finish fast. “She made his hands and feet feel light,” says the Butler translation, but the Greek says something more like “raised his hands and feet high,” a perfect description of a sprinter in full flight, whether on a Greek vase or an all-weather track. Also entirely recognizable is the spectator experience of seeing runners flash instantaneously by you at top effort: “The Achaeans all shouted applause as they saw him [Ajax] straining his utmost, and cheered him as he shot past them.” I thought of that image not long ago at an indoor meet, where as a spectator you get a potent mix of close-up and speed.

The Odyssey race is less dramatic and more perfunctory (the authoress perhaps anxious to get to the dancing). Clytoneus wins by a street, or, as the poem puts it, since there were no streets in those days, “by the length of the furrow that a pair of mules can plow in a fallow field.” Presumably therefore it’s a longer race, though there is no detailed report. But the description of the runners “raising a cloud of dust upon the plain as they all flew forward at the same moment” is a real one to anyone who has watched or run in a crowded start on a dry grass or cinder track in summer.

In Pursuit of Hector

The other Homeric running episode is the pursuit of Hector by Achilles in the climactic hand-to-hand fight of the war. Garth Battista includes this, in the free verse translation by Robert Fitzgerald (1974), in his indispensable The Runner’s Literary Companion. I prefer the vigorously readable prose version of Samuel Butler (1898). Butler had been a good schoolboy runner (see Installment 2 in the next issue of M&B) and is better at catching the tensions of the chase in the rhythms of the prose, as well as retaining an important cross-reference to track running that Fitzgerald misses. I will offer some highlights.

Achilles, incensed that Hector has killed his friend Patroclus, runs flat out towards the city, “as the winning horse in a chariot race strains every nerve when he is flying over the plain.” His armor, which has lain unused for so long, now gleams on his breast as radiant as the harvest star, while Hector waits in the gateway like a serpent in its den.

But when Achilles came up to him, looking like the very god of war, “Hector fled in dismay from before the gates, while Achilles darted after him at his utmost speed.” Then the pursuit, three times around the walls of Troy, and we are back to the racing situation of hunted and hunter.

For Achilles, running behind, think Lasse Viren or Derartu Tulu, those runners who look always in charge even when back in the pack. Homer, at least in The Iliad, seems to have known track, and Butler was an experienced handicap track runner and paper-chaser, who had often been a “hound” in his school days (see Roger Robinson, “On the Scent of History,” Running Times, December 1998).

As Achilles follows, behind yet in control, the images are drawn mainly from predatory nature: “As a mountain falcon, swiftest of all birds, swoops down upon some cowering dove. . . . As a hound chasing a fawn . . . will scent her out and follow her up until he gets her.”

But Homer also relates the chase to track racing: “swiftly indeed did they run, for the prize was no mere beast for sacrifice or bullock’s hide, as it might be for a common foot race, but they ran for the life of Hector.” Then, to convey the speed and excitement, comes comparison with the thrills and spills of chariot racing: “As horses in a chariot race speed round the turning posts when they are running for some great prize—a tripod or a woman—at the games in honor of some dead hero, so did these two run full speed three times round the city of Priam.”

A final powerful image convinces me that Homer is a fine writer who can find memorable language not only for what runners look like but how they feel, the inward, almost sub-conscious drama of the race. As they surge and dodge, Hector trying to get close to the city, Achilles heading him off, they become locked in a dream-like contest at full speed that neither can change or end: “As a man in a dream who fails to lay hands upon another whom he is pursuing—the one cannot escape nor the other overtake—even so neither could Achilles come up with Hector, nor Hector break away from Achilles.”

The end comes when Hector is deserted by the god Apollo, “who thus far has sustained his strength and nerved his running.” We do not now attribute the front runner’s concentration and will-power to Apollo, but every competitive runner will understand “sustained his strength” and “nerved his running.” And divine power still often gets credit in postrace TV interviews.

2. Ancient Greece: Pindar and Others

To compare runners with diving falcons or racing chariots might seem an exaggeration—what we literary critics call hyperbole. But competitive running is an extreme sport and requires colorful language. Modern runners and sports writers use our own age’s most potent images of speed and power. I have seen “. . . ran like a train,” “like a truck,” or “like a missile.” One once wrote of me, a very long time ago: “He made his break uphill like a jet taking off.”

Vividness is more important than strict realism when writers seek images for the speed or passion of runners. Hiawatha could shoot an arrow and then run and beat it to where it landed, so Longfellow said, as we shall see later. Shakespeare’s Puck could also “go swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow.” We talk of Kenyan or Ethiopian runners who “fly” or “float” or “skim” or “glide,” none of which are literally true, since they have feet and tendons and hamstrings and hit the ground left-right-left like the rest of us. The very word “fly” has taken the secondary meaning of “run fast in order to escape.”

Greek writers used the same kind of imagery to praise fast running, often with delightful inventiveness. One anonymous poet speaks of a winner whose speed dazzles the spectator’s eyes, so that you don’t even see him till he’s reached the finish—a nice exaggeration. It’s in praise of Arias, from the city of Tarsus, which was supposedly founded by Perseus, a demi-god with feathered wings on his feet (“thy founder, Tarsus”). In the following passage, the terms “essays” means “tries,” “barrier” is the “start,” “career” the “course,” and “goal” the “finishing post.” The translation is a witty one, by Gilbert West in 1749:

The speed of Arias, victor in the race,
Brings to thy founder, Tarsus, no disgrace:
For able in the course with him to vie,
Like him he seems on feather’d feet to fly.
The barrier when he quits, the dazzled sight
In vain essays to catch him in his flight.
Lost is the racer through the whole career,
‘Till victor at the goal he re-appear.

The other major texts of Greek literature to be inspired by running are the Odes of Pindar, which date from about 460 BC. This was the height of Greek civilization, when the great Games were flourishing, the most famous being the Olympian, Nemean, Isthmian, and Pythian (at Delphi). Pindar, and the less-well-known Bacchylides, made a specialty of composing (for a good fee) “Victory Odes,” or encomiums, for successful athletes, in elaborate form, for performance with music and dancing on return to their home town.

It sounds curious to us, and indeed the practice did not last, but the impulse to write poetry in praise of great runners (and other athletes) is not wholly dead. There have been poems for Steve Prefontaine and Joan Benoit-Samuelson in the last few years. And though we don’t hire poets, we still celebrate famous winners in the art forms of our own time: speeches at award ceremonies, television and video, film, photography, personal Web sites, features in Marathon & Beyond, and so on.

Little But Poetic Running References

For my purpose, although Pindar’s shortcoming is that he gives almost no space to actual running and although most of the surviving 45 odes are in praise of chariot-race winners, his references to running are moving. Boxing, wrestling, trial of strength, and flute playing also feature, and some odes are for winners of the boys’ foot race, whose fathers probably hired the poet. (Should I offer my writing services to soccer-moms? Could be a market niche there.)

And the poems themselves, as brilliantly wrought in their formal way as a classical sonata, are concerned less with running and more with the origins and glory of the winner’s city and family and connecting these to the most revered mythology.

There are fine phrases—”the glint of foot,” “a day of fast running,” “the blood in him follows his father’s tracks” (those from the 1969 translation by C.M. Bowra), or, from an older translation: “fleetness of foot and flower of strength.” There is one poem I really like (Olympian 12) about a winner who had found his way to success in the dolichos, the long track race, only because he had been forced to leave his own country at a time of civil war:

The fame of your running would have shed its leaves
Had not the quarrel of men with men
Robbed you of your Knossian fatherland.

And I think of many in our own time who escape turmoil and persecution at home, and through their running ability find unexpected applause and reward in a new land. They are racing on roads all over America even as I write.

Pindar also gave us the deservedly famous sentiment that life has no happiness purer, or better deserved, than the satisfaction of winning an award by your own speed and strength, achieved through determined preparation and courage in the race. “Sweet is the end of endeavor,” Pindar also said, which puts nicely the feeling of seeing a good time on the finish-line clock after a long hard race.

The Reality of Sweat

In Bacchylides, though a less highly regarded poet, I found the smell of sweat and taste of tactics that I prefer (being a prosaic old distance runner) to Pindar’s high abstract thoughts. In one ode, “Isthmian for Aglaus of Athens, foot race,” Bacchylides gives a terrific picture of the pressure of racing on an up-and-down straight track (no curves, just turning posts at each end), and of the Michael Johnson of 460 BC, powering away at the start, intensely focused, swinging the sharp turn without pause, springing across the line, and finally (smeared with oil as all athletes were), racing on to crash right into the recoil-

ing crowd. Not many sports poems get action and comedy this well. The translation, catching perfectly the tense speed of the race, is by Robert Fagles:

In games of Poseidon,
Fine on the fields of praise
You amazed the Greeks
With a rushing sprint;
No break and back
To the ring’s first mark—
Breath hot and short—
You tensed, sprang, sprayed
Admirers’ robes with oil,
Carved the roaring crowd
On rounding the track’s fourth lap.

3. Greek Philosophers and Thin Runners

A number of Greek philosophers refer to athletics in interesting ways. Plato prefers military training to training for the games, which he thinks makes young men self-centered, interested only in exercise, sleep, and food (Republic III, pages 403-404). But he was well ahead in his view that women should have the same opportunities in physical education as men (pages 452-453).

Aristotle wrote of how difficult it is to keep changing pace at the turns in the dolichos (distance race). Epictetus uses training for the Olympics as a moral lesson about committing yourself to a goal in life, however hard and however great the risks that you won’t succeed (Golden Sayings, page 104). He also gives a familiar list of the discomforts of being an Olympic spectator: “Are you not scorched by the heat? Are you not cramped for room? Have you not to bathe with discomfort?” Obviously, Epictetus was at the 2000 U.S. Trials at Sacramento. His moral is to “bear it all patiently,” because the “splendor of the spectacle” makes it all worthwhile—so look on the bright side, in other words, and hold back your complaining e-mails.

A comic-ironic view of athletics training is provided by Lucian, a Greek satirist of the Roman period (ad 125-180), since a screw-up he made is largely responsible for the strange literary story of the Marathon. In a satiric dialogue, supposedly between a Greek admirer of athletics in the era of the Games (some 700 years before he wrote), Lucian has a foreign visitor innocently ask what on earth is the point of all these young men wrapping their arms round each other and groveling in the mud like swine. And there are some who “jump up and down as if they were running, but stay in the same place. They leap up and seem to kick thin air. What good can that do?” It’s a good comic device. Imagine bringing a Martian down to watch the runners warming up for the New York City Marathon and having to explain the social usefulness of it all.

In a magazine dedicated to going “beyond,” the last word from the moralists should go to Galen, father of modern medicine (ad 130-200). Writing in Latin in his On Health, he sticks his scalpel in us runners without mercy: “Whatever lacks moderation is not good. Therefore I do not approve of running, for it wears a man down thin and furnishes no training in bravery.”

4. Rome: Atalanta

One of the great running myths, and inspiration of many women runners, is the story of Atalanta’s race and the golden apples of Venus. This story exists in several forms, and the idea of a race as means of selection is quite frequent in classical myth and legend; in one instance a king’s sons race at Olympia to decide who will succeed to the throne (Pausanius, Description of Greece, vol. 8).

Atalanta’s story, though an old Greek one, took its finest literary form in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses (stories of transformation), written in Latin about ad 1-8. Ovid deals separately with the other myth of the archetypal virgin huntress, also called Atalanta, who was suckled as an infant by a she-bear (sacred to the nature goddess Artemis), was raised by hunters, and then shot the first effective arrow in the great Calydonian boar hunt, when Jason and other heroes combined to kill a monstrous boar. Often these two stories are connected, as in Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon (see Installment 3).

Atalanta the runner was as “surpassing in her gift of glorious speed as in her loveliness.” When her father wanted her to marry, an oracle warned her against it. She stipulated that she would marry only a suitor who could beat her in a race and that those who failed would suffer death. (The myth probably derives partly from ceremonial tests of manhood for adolescents, as well as dramatizing the evolutionary sexual selection of the fittest.) Having seen many “rash lovers” cut down “for their love’s excess,” the hero Melanion (called Hippomenes in Ovid’s version) is not inclined to risk it.

But then Atalanta disrobes to run, he sees her face and body in their full beauty, and “love burgeoned,” or “his heart took fire,” or “he burned with love,” or whatever variant translation you prefer. It’s accurate enough of male psychology. He quickly sends in his entry blank.

In Metamorphoses the story is told by the goddess of love, Venus (Aphrodite in her Greek form), in the course of an amorous afternoon on shady grass when she wants to distract her adored Adonis from going hunting.

Ovid is a gifted and sensuous love poet (his The Art of Love has often been suppressed) and enjoys letting Venus take credit for Hippomenes’s success. When the eager runner prays for help from the goddess, she gives him three golden apples to drop in the race, knowing they will distract Atalanta. Ovid (or Venus) indulges in some seductive descriptions of Atalanta, who wears very little for her races except ribbons or some kind of bindings that flutter alluringly at her ankles and knees, whose “long hair streamed out behind her pure ivory back,” and who shows the effort of racing only in “a rose flush coloring the youthful paleness of her body.”

Love Requited

But Ovid also shows his psychological insight, making it clear that Atalanta, though aware of her beauty and susceptible to all that glisters, also knows perfectly well what’s going on, and is much more attracted to Hippomenes than the apples:

Many a time she slowed
When she might pass and gazed into his eyes,
And with a heavy heart left him behind.
—A.D. Melville translation, OUP World Classics, 1986

Ovid’s stories have had a huge influence on English literature, and there are many excellent English versions of the Metamorphoses. Two major poets in the nineteenth century retold the story of Atalanta’s race. One of the last works of the English poet Ted Hughes, who died in 2000, was a selection called Stories from Ovid, including Atalanta, though I found his usual rugged lyricism fell a bit flat there. Maybe he had no sense of running. Allen Mandelbaum is another poet who has recently done the job pretty well (1993).

My favorite for Atalanta, however, is in a 1717 translation of Ovid by various “eminent hands” (including Dryden and Pope), in this case the unjustly neglected Laurence Eusden, who became poet laureate in England in 1718. His verse has a sprightliness appropriate to the speed of the race and the competitive ebb-and-flow, yet also nicely captures the undercurrent of sexual attraction and Atalanta’s emotion at having either to lose the race for the first time in her life or condemn to death a man she fancies. Here is Eusden’s version of the key point of the race, when Atalanta is trying to slow it down, and Hippomenes is hitting the wall:

When a long distance oft she could have gain’d,
She check’d her swiftness, and her feet restrained:
She sigh’d, and dwelt, and languish’d on his face,
Then with unwilling speed pursu’d the race.

O’er-spent with heat, his breath he faintly drew,
Parch’d was his mouth, nor yet the goal in view,
And the first apple on the plain he threw.

Here is a simpler version of the whole race specifically for Marathon & Beyond, that keeps close to Ovid’s account of the whole race but puts the running references into familiar modern terms. I am indebted to the Harvard University Press Latin/English text, 1916, revised 1984. The only detail I have added is the taking of hands at the end. The last sentence is exactly Ovid’s:

They crouched close together, tensed for the start. The trumpet blared, and away they flashed, their flying feet seeming to the spectators hardly to touch the sandy ground. They just skimmed along—imagine them racing over water without getting their feet wet, or flitting like birds over a field of corn without bending the stalks. The crowd got behind Hippomenes, up on their feet, yelling: ‘Now! Now! Give it all you’ve got! [Nunc, nunc, incumbere tempus!] Great job! Now, focus, good work, push it, Hippomenes, you can do it!’ All the support of her challenger privately pleased Atalanta as much as it encouraged him. She was in no mood to beat him. Time and again she drew level, gazed affectionately across into his face, and eased back the pace again. But the pressure was beginning to tell on Hippomenes. His breathing heaved and cracked, his throat burned, his mouth felt parched, and the finish was still way off. He pulled out the first golden apple and rolled it glittering across the course. Atalanta, astonished at its beauty, checked stride and stooped to pick it up. The crowd was going crazy as Hippomenes went back into the lead, but she powered right back into full stride, closed the gap, and moved ahead. The second apple came bouncing by. Again she checked stride, pulled up, grabbed it, and went after him. They were coming off the last bend with the finish in sight when he muttered a quick prayer to Venus and threw the last apple, putting it obliquely across her path and off to the side. For a stride she hesitated, but an impulse of love sent her after it once more. Now she was clutching three apples. They weighed heavy, and the gap was too great. She slowed to a jog. The race was over. Hippomenes passed the finish. Atalanta jogged up to him, slipped the apples into the crook of one arm, and took him by the hand. The victor led away his prize. [duxit sua praemia victor].

—Translation Roger Robinson.

In another account of the event, by Apollodorus, Atalanta gave her challengers a start, ran armed, and then killed them as she passed. So Melanion (as

he is called in that version) simply drops the apples behind him and keeps his lead as she stops to collect them. That works technically but loses the great moment when she pulls alongside and looks (“languished,” as Eusden says) into his face.

I don’t like the usual ending of the story. Though Atalanta and Hippomenes/Melanion are married happily, they improperly make love one day in a holy sanctuary and are punished by being turned into lions. Ovid needed that for the story to count as a “metamorphosis” (change in form). I guess it would add a new dimension to those running magazine “Where are they now?” features. (“And now an interview with Dick ‘Leo’ Beardsley at feeding time in the Minneapolis Zoo.”) But I prefer the story to end when the race does, with the result they both choose.

5. Rome: Later Epics

Homer was the dominant literary influence on all later Greek and Latin literature, so imitations of his epic poems usually included “games” and often a race won by some mishap or stratagem, such as Odysseus’s defeat of Ajax in The Iliad. In Virgil’s Aeneid (about 30 bc), the race leader again slips on blood, but then as he falls manages to trip up one of his opponents, so that his friend, previously in third, gets the win. In the Thebaid of Statius, late first century ad, the front-runner’s long flowing hair tempts his rival, who grabs it as they race for the line, tugs him back, and so wins. After much dispute, the race is re-run. The fourth-century poet Quintus has the leader trip over a tree root, which is more realistic, but the fifth-century Nonnus resorts to the ubiquitous pool of manure.

The best piece of genuine sports writing in any of these comes when Statius describes the runners’ warm-up: “Then they go through the ritual of tuning up and trying out their paces, and with many tricks of the game they liven their sluggish muscles with well-tried exercises. Now they do a ‘knee bend,’ now they slap their chests with loud smacks, now their fiery legs prance in ‘knees up’ and they take short sprints and suddenly stop.”—Translation H.A. Harris

That has an authentic ring. Harris considers Statius, “For the student of the techniques of athletics by far the most interesting” of these later epic poets. He also writes colorful narrative. There is uproar after the hair-pulling incident. The runner who was fouled protests operatically, sobbing, scratching his own cheeks, and pulling at the offending hair. Spectators take sides, threaten to invade the track, and come close to a full mass fight. Everybody screams abuse at the dithery referee. And on that note, I take my leave of the polished and elegant literature of the gracefully ordered classical world.

Installment 2 of Roger Robinson’s examination of running in literature, which will appear in our March/April 2002 issue, will take us to the nineteenth century and includes Shakespeare, the Track Meet from Hell, More Cesspools, Tom and Jerry, and the Strange Literary History of the Marathon, or How to Drop Down Dead.

Sources

• Bacchylides, Complete Poems, trans. Robert Fagles (Yale, 1961).
• Homer, The Iliad, trans. Samuel Butler (1898). This translation is also used in Barnes & Noble Classics, 1942, 1995.
• Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Samuel Butler (1900). Also used in Barnes & Noble Classics, 1993, and Simon & Schuster Pocket Books, 1969, 1997.
• Ovid, Metamorphoses (see text for translations).
• Pindar, The Odes, trans. C.J. Bowra (Penguin, 1969).
• E.N. Gardiner, Athletics of the Ancient World (OUP, Oxford, 1930).
• Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (2 vols.) (Penguin, London, 1955).
• H.A. Harris, Greek Athletes and Athletics (Hutchinson, London, 1964).
• Rachael Sargent Robinson, Sources for the History of Greek Athletics (self-published, 1955).
• Richard Stoneman, Greek Mythology (Aquarian Press, London, 1991).
• Gilbert West, A Dissertation on the Olympic Games (London, 1749).
• N. Yalouris, The Olympic Games in Ancient Greece (Ekdotike, Athens, 1982).