Saverio Battente's book is a bold, fascinating, and too often exasperating investigation into the longue durée links between Greek, Roman, and modern European sport. He aims to “reflect on the idea of sport in the contemporary era through synchronic and diachronic comparisons among various locations and time periods, attempting to identify longues durées as well as original and innovative aspects” (ix). Battente argues that there are significant continuities in the way that Europeans used sport to educate elites and popular classes, prepare for war, and as leisure. He considers how sportspeople across the continent played with these continuities and ruptures to continually redefine sport and its purposes.
Battente's work is brash; he takes on some of the most prominent voices in the field, hoping to offer correctives to Norbert Elias, Eric Dunning, and Allen Guttmann, whose oeuvre argue for what the author calls a “clear break between the ancient and...