GREEK GIFTS.

Socrates liked it better than costly perfumes: a compound smell of olive oil, earth, and sweat. He would have grown up knowing it from the playing fields and the gymnasia (literally, "places for training in the nude") at festivals where, for a thousand years, throughout Greece and its colonies, sport and civic and religious observance and, on the evidence of Greek art, sex meshed. ("Each age has its own beauty," Aristotle wrote. "In youth, it lies in the possession of a body capable of enduring all kinds of contests . . . while the young man is himself a pleasant delight to behold.") Athletes oiled and dusted their bodies before competing, and afterward--in an act that had a name: apoxyomenos--scraped themselves clean with curved metal implements called strigils, which appear often in vase paintings. I found myself fixating on those tools of soapless ablution at two museum shows conceived in honor of the 2004 Olympics: the profuse "Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit," at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the modest "The Games in Ancient Athens," at the Metropolitan. I thought of the dazzling bodies they once touched--perhaps female as well as male. (There were games for girls, too.) Harsh caresses of the strigil thickened the summer smell of honorable, exciting dirt, which, like the vanished colors of Greek statuary and the vertiginous intelligence of Greek religion, can only be imagined now.

Television is odorless. Not much besides a core menu of events and a certain vicarious idealism, overlaid with pompous spectacle that is more properly Roman than Greek in heritage, links the modern Olympics to the ancient. Lost is an intimate fullness of humanity--sensual, intellectual, spiritual--that may be represented by the sublime and funny notion, evoked in Plato's Symposium, of Socrates hanging around the gymnasia for reasons that included but were not limited to teaching philosophy. Not that I'm complaining. Our Olympics are fun, and at least their sporting element--the pitting of the best against the best, from around the world--is impeccable, though marred now by the tape measure and the clock. The Greeks were casual about measurements and kept few statistics except for who won. We know that the sixth-century-B.C. wrestler Milo, among his other feats, made four consecutive grand slams of Greece's most prestigious games, at Olympia (the Olympics), Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea. Those "crown" games occurred every two or four years; other festivals, including the very grand Panathenaic, kept athletes busy in between. Team sports were almost unknown--except in Sparta, which also stood out for the violence of its contests and for allowing a considerable degree of female participation. With few exceptions, second place counted for nothing. In each event, the Greeks sought one hero, whom they celebrated, as they did all aspects of their sports, with consummate artistry.

As Keats demonstrated, one gets the most out of decorated Grecian earthenware when caught up in its story lines. This is easy at the Met, and especially so in Boston, given the thematic unity of objects that include sculptures (often Roman copies), reliefs, coins, and such items as discuses of widely different sizes, hand weights used by long jumpers, and an enchanting little ceramic ball that bears a young girl's crudely lettered praise of her favorite athlete. Repetitive images of runners, jumpers, fighters, and chariot racers in action build a visceral intuition of grace and grit a la grecque. The Boston show cogently tracks stylistic evolutions, from the Bronze Age to the Hellenic and beyond (there's marvellous stuff from the Etruscans). Some things are better than others. We grasp anew the supreme mastery and imagination of Greek artists of the sixth and fifth century B.C. in, for example, the goofy glee of two nude males leaping to the accompaniment of a double flute, the grave sensuality of strigil-wielding nude women gathered around a basin, and the oddly unsettling sight of an athlete feeding the accumulated residue from his strigil to a happy dog.

Vase painting is a ...