How to Compete: An Ancient Guide to the Virtues of Sports

Sports and philosophy went hand in hand for the ancient Greeks and Romans, and philosophical conversation was a recognized part of gym life throughout Greco-Roman antiquity. Athens’s Lyceum was a gym—and reportedly a hangout of that philosophical gym rat Socrates—before it became the site of Aristotle’s school. Fittingly, that gym is the setting of the Greek satirist Lucian’s _Anacharsis_, a witty philosophical dialogue that wrestles with questions about the purpose and value of sports—questions that we are still grappling with in our own sports- and fitness-obsessed times. _How to Compete_ presents a new translation of Lucian’s timeless classic, inviting us into a ringside debate about the point of sports.