1. Simon Hornblower & Antony Spawforth, edited, Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1999, p.41.
2. This book is a speech anthology of Burckhardt, firstly published in 1902. The first selected English edition was published in 1963. In 1998, a new selected English edition entitled the Greeks and Greek Civilization (Harper Collins Publishers, London) was published, translated by Sheila Stern, edited with an introduction by Oswyn Murray. In Murray's long introduction, he pointed out the importance of the great discovery of agon by Nietzsche and Burckhardt (xxxii), “apart from the creative enthusiasm which resulted from their meetings, undoubtedly the most significant specific idea about the Greek world that Burckhardt and Nietzsche shared was the belief in the importance of the ‘agonal’ aspect of Greek and (in Nietzsche's case) modern culture. The realization that individual contest and the desire to be supreme lay at the centre of Greek attitudes to the world is their joint discovery. Nietzsche seems to have realized the importance of agon or contest, even before he arrived in Basle; but Burckhardt had already formulated it independently and was busy working out in detail the consequences of this discovery for the understanding of every aspect of Greek culture. This is indeed the most important of all Burckhardt's insight into the Greek mentality, and has proved continually fruitful in Greek history to the present day, where Greek ethical values are often seen as a conflict between competitive and cooperative virtues.”.
3. M.I.Finley, Ancient History, Evidence and Models, Viking Penguin Inc., New York, 1986, p.3.
4. Mark Golden, Sport and Society in Ancient Greece, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.29.
5. In the appendix of Mark Golden's book Sport and Society in Ancient Greece, there is a bibliographical essay, it makes comprehensive summery of the achievements about Greek athletic games research in western academic field (including Germany, France, Italy, etc.) in the past 100 years.