La educación heróica y agonal en el mundo homérico y su repercusión en las manifestaciones artísticas

Abstract

The oldest testimony of the old Hellenic aristocratic culture is Homer, if by this we desing the two big epic poems: The Iliad and The Odyssey. In this brief article, the poems of Homer are analysed as a basic source of information to establish the type of activity that, with anachronism we call «sport», which was carried out in the Greek World during the archaic period. Once this is established, we will search through the artistic manifestations to establish the repercussion of the activities described in the poems. But we are not only interested in the description of the activities by themselves, we also want to establish the reasons that impelled the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey to compete, to understand the evolution of the physical education idea. The descriptions of the trials are not going to be as important, as to know what was the sense in which they were performed.