Agon

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• In one sense, it meant a contest, competition, or challenge that was held in connection with religious festival
  Religious festival
  
  A religious festival is a time of special importance marked by adherents to that religion. Religious festivals are commonly celebrated on recurring cycles in a calendar year or lunar calendar....
  s.
• In its broader sense of a struggle or contest, agon referred to a contest in athletics, chariot
  Chariot
  
  The chariot is the earliest and simplest type of carriage, used in both peace and war as the chief vehicle of many ancient peoples. Chariots were built in Mesopotamia by the Mesopotamians as early as 3000 BC and in China during the 2nd millennium BC....
   or horse racing, music or literature at a public festival in ancient Greece.
• Agon was also a mythological
  Greek mythology
  
  Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the Ancient Greece concerning their List of Greek mythological figures#Immortals and Greek hero cult, Cosmology#Metaphysical cosmology, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices....
   personification of the contests listed above. This god was represented in a statue at Olympia
  Olympia, Greece
  
  Olympia , a sanctuary of ancient Greece in Elis, is known for having been the site of the Olympic Games in classical times, comparable in importance to the Pythian Games held in Delphi....
   with halteres
  Halteres (ancient Greece)
  
  The term Hualteres comes from the Greek language word for dumbbells . In Ancient Greece sports, halteres were used as lifting weights, and also as weights in their version of the long jump, which was probably a set of three jumps....
   (dumbbells) in his hands. This sta­tue was a work of Dionysius
  Dionysius
  
  The Graeco-Roman name Dionysius, deriving from the name of the Thrace God Dionysus, was exceedingly common, and many ancient people, famous and otherwise, bore it....
  , and dedicated by a Smicythus of Rhegium.
• In Ancient Greek drama, particularly old comedy (fifth century B.C.), the agon refers to the formal convention according to which the struggle between the characters
  Fictional character
  
  A character is any person, persona, identity, or entity that exists in a The arts. The process of conveying information about characters in fiction is called characterisation....
   should be scripted in order to supply the basis of the action. Agon is a formal debate which takes place between the chief characters in a Greek play, protagonist and antagonist, usually with the chorus
  Greek chorus
  
  The Greek chorus is a group of twelve or fifteen minor actors in tragedy and twenty-four in Ancient Greek comedy plays of classical Athens....
   acting as judge. The character who speaks second always wins the agon, since the last word is always hers or his. The meaning of the term has escaped the circumscriptions of its classical origins to signify, more generally, the conflict on which a literary work turns.
• In Ancient Greek drama, particularly old comedy (fifth century B.C.), the agon refers to the sexual position adapted by homosexual greek men.
• Agon is also one of the four elements of play
  Play (activity)
  
  paly is when you have fun...of mind in engaging with one's world view. Play refers to a range of Free will, Motivation#Intrinsic_and_extrinsic_motivation motivated activities that are normally associated with pleasure and enjoyment....
   identified by Roger Caillois
  Roger Caillois
  
  Roger Caillois was a French intellectual whose idiosyncratic work brought together literary criticism, sociology, and philosophy by focusing on subjects as diverse as Gemstones, play and the sacred....
   in his book Man, Play and Games
  Man, Play and Games
  
  Man, Play and Games is a 1961 book by Roger Caillois, a translation of Les jeux et les hommes . It is an influential book on ludology, the study of play and games....
  .

Other sources

• Joel Trapido (1949) Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Oct., 1949), pp. 18-26 doi:10.2307/3204106