The ancient Greek contests were usually winner-take-all contests. The winners received all the honor. No honor came from finishing in second place. In short, like other Mediterranean cultures of the time, ancient Greece was an honor/shame culture, as was and is China.
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We in the United States today certainly speak of honors (e.g., honorary degrees and other kinds of awards), and we routinely address certain elected and appointed officials with the title "The Honorable [fill in the person's name here]." But in the United States today, we do not have a strong sense of honor. Instead of speaking of honor (as in the expression "very honorable," "most honorable," and the like), we speak of prestige.
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Nevertheless, perhaps the proliferation of broadcasts of professional athletic contests on television in the United States today can be understood as showing that some Americans are downright nutty about watching athletic contests, most of which usually result only in a winner and a loser (except for games that end in ties).
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Plato and Aristotle referred to the psychological dynamism that is involved in the contesting spirit as one part of the human psyche, the part known in Greek as "thumos." This term is rendered in English as the spirited part of the psyche, as in our expression "fighting spirit." When we in the United States today speak of fight/flight/freeze responses, we are referring to the part of the psyche known in Greek as "thumos." The Homeric epics are deeply attuned to this part of the human psyche.
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Unfortunately, patriarchy in Western culture has historically usually led to the comparative under-development of the thumos part of the psyche in many girls and women, even though there have obviously been exceptions such as Queen Elizabeth I.
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Related Reading: Readers who are interested in Diane Sawyer's use of the expression "Game on!" should check out Johan Huizinga's book HOMO LUDENS: A STUDY OF THE PLAY-ELEMENT IN CULTURE (Routledge, 1949) and Walter J. Ong's book FIGHTING FOR LIFE: CONTEST, SEXUALITY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS (Cornell University Press, 1981). Because contesting behavior inherently involves agency, see the discussion of both agency and communion in David Bakan's book THE DUALITY OF EXISTENCE: AN ESSAY ON PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION (Rand McNally, 1966) and in Vicki S. Helgeson's textbook THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENDER, 3rd ed. (Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2009).
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WALTER ONG'S ACCOUNT OF WESTERN CULTURAL HISTORY
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Even though Walter J. Ong's family name is English (for centuries it was spelled "Onge"; it is probably related to the English name "Yonge"), he was born and raised and educated in the United States, even though he lived abroad, with the financial assistance of two Guggenheim fellowships, for about four years when he was researching his Harvard University doctoral dissertation. His ancestors immigrated from East Anglia, which is where Cambridge University is located, arriving on the same ship that brought Roger Williams to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631.
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