Education: New Greeks at Old Sewanee

In mileage, Tennessee’s University of the South at Sewanee is not far from Athens, Ga., but in spirit it is right next door to Athens, Greece. Sewanee’s burly boys chase not the pagan pigskin but good marks in Classics 206—”a study of Greek athletics.” Purpose: to learn the arts of ancient boxing, running, wrestling, the discus, the shot and the javelin, plus “the Greek concept of athletics and its place in Greek education.”

Sewanee still does play smalltime football,* but the real passion at the small (700 men) Episcopal school is for the classics. Latin and Greek are big, and to reinforce the Oxonian atmosphere, upperclassmen who make good grades wear black academic robes to all classes. The school leads the South in per capita production of Rhodes and Fulbright scholars.

In practice, Classics 206 relies on a couple of textbooks on Greek sports, plus the classics’ numerous chorals to coordination, such as Pindar’s Odes to victorious athletes or Theocritus’ blow-by-blow description of fancy-dan Polydeucus outboxing Heavyweight Amycus, which may well be the origin of a human myth most recently disproved by Sonny Liston.

Roaming over nine centuries, and celebrating an amateurism unknown at other Southern campuses, Classics 206 also includes “labs” out on the football field. The students box Greek style, lope like Greek marathoners, toss a round stone “shot,” skim a flat stone “discus,” compete in wildly Hellenic wrestling free-for-alls. Winners go without Achilles’ top prize, “fair-girdled women,” but the exercise is splendid, and Sewanee’s phys ed department is ecstatic.

*In 1899 it flattened five Southern juggernauts, from Texas to Ole Miss, in six days, holding all of them scoreless. But it lost 44 consecutive Southeastern Conference games in the 1930s, and quit subsidized football.