Seen on the Classics list:
Crowned Victor: Competition and Games in the Ancient World
4th Annual Center for Ancient Studies Graduate Conference
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Friday, March 2 to Saturday, March 3, 2012
Submission Deadline: January 7, 2012The graduate students of the University of Pennsylvania seek abstracts
for the fourth annual Center for Ancient Studies graduate student
conference. This conference aims to explore the theme of competition
in the ancient world. Competition was a key component of many aspects
of life in the ancient world and was found in areas people in the 21st
century might not expect. We plan to focus on the role of competition
and its associations with society at large, be it in the form of games
or sports, interactions between members of a community, rivalries
between communities, or the way culture and literature channeled
competition. Our goal in presenting this conference will be to compare
how competition manifested itself in the disparate societies of the
ancient world and highlight similarities across cultures.
The conference invites papers on topics involving competition such as
(but, of course, not limited to):Conspicuous consumption and status competition
Games as education
Competition as a structural force in society
Political competition
Ancient theories of competition
Competition and literature
Ideologies of competition
Sports and diplomacy
Place of athletes in the communitySubmissions are welcome from graduate students working on ancient
topics in such fields as: Ancient History, Anthropology, Archaeology,
Art History, East Asian Studies, Classics, Egyptology, Linguistics,
Middle Eastern Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Pre-Columbian Studies,
Religious Studies, and South Asian Studies.If you are interested in presenting a paper, please submit a 250-word
abstract for a 15 minute talk by January 7, 2012 including your
contact information (including name, institution, and e-mail) to
Arthur T. Jones at ancient AT sas.upenn.edu. Speakers will be notified of
the status of their submissions by January 15, 2012.
rogueclassicism 
For me, competition has always been about making the participants or products better, but it, like every well understood thing, has its limits. Seeing all the strife in the world today has caused me to question the effects of forms of competition to which the young are casually exposed, and even indroctrinated by. This is certainly a far cry from the results produced in the gymnasium of the Greeks.
I am a layman (small fish) looking forward to comments and hopefully papers written on the subject as it is of interest to me in understanding the world I view; and I feel that our understanding of human relations surely must advance if we our to survive.