Olympic Victor Lists and Ancient Greek History

Description

This book is a comprehensive examination of Olympic victor lists. The origins, development, content, and structure of Olympic victor lists are explored and explained, and a number of important questions, such as the source and reliability of the year of 776 for the first Olympics, are addressed. Olympic victor lists emerge as a clearly defined type of literature that is best understood as a group of closely related texts. This book offers a fresh perspective on works by familiar writers such as Diodorus Siculus and a sense of the potential importance of less-well-known authors such as Phlegon of Tralleis.

As a work of scholarship, the book is impressively thorough...For a student or scholar who ishes to wade into the murky waters of ancient chronography, Christesen provides a challenging, but on the whole useful, guide." --New England Classical Journal