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Title: Greek Athletics

Author: F. A. Wright

Release date: June 7, 2021 [eBook #65554]

Language: English

Credits: Al Haines, Chuck Greif & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREEK ATHLETICS ***





            [Illustration: THE AGIAS OF LYSIPPUS (Delphi)]




                            Greek Athletics

                           _by_ F. A. Wright

                                London
                           Jonathan Cape Ltd

                       FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXV
                    MADE & PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
                        BY BUTLER & TANNER LTD
                               FROME AND
                                LONDON




CONTENTS


   PREFACE                                                             9

1. ATHLETICS AND ATHLETIC FESTIVALS                                   13

2. GYMNASTICS AND MILITARY TRAINING                                   28

3. PHYSICAL EDUCATION                                                 61

4. HEALTH AND BODILY EXERCISE                                         83

5. GALEN’S TREATISE ON THE SMALL BALL                                108

   SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY                                               123




ILLUSTRATIONS


THE AGIAS OF LYSIPPUS (_Delphi_)                           _Frontispiece_

THE WRESTLERS (_Uffizi Gallery, Florence_)                            30

A WRESTLING CONTEST (_Athens_)                                        36

THE DISKOBOLOS OF MYRON                                               40

INDOOR SPORTS (_Athens_)                                              76

THE VICTORY OF PAIONIOS (_Olympia_)                                  104

THE THROW-IN AT THE SMALL BALL GAME
(_Athens_)                                                           110

A HOCKEY MATCH (_Statue base discovered
at Athens_, 1922)                                                    116




PREFACE


In a previous volume[A] an attempt was made to set out the principles
followed by the Greeks in the three sister arts of acting, music, and
painting; and to show how in some respects we have failed to improve
upon their practice. It is perhaps doubtful whether the mass of our
countrymen will ever take a very deep interest in the laws that govern
the right use of colour, sound, and gesture; and even if our inferiority
in art were proved, it is probable that the position would be regarded
with equanimity.

But as regards athletics the case is different; and it is with some
hesitation that in this book, after giving a brief account of Greek
gymnastics and physical training, I have ventured to raise the question
whether Greek systems of bodily culture were not in some ways superior
to ours, and whether on the whole the Athenians of the fifth century
B.C. were not a finer and a healthier people than are the Englishmen of
to-day.

Before the year 1914 such doubts might never have presented themselves.
But one of the many unpleasant truths that the War revealed was that the
physical condition of our average middle-aged citizen was very far from
being what it should be. Indeed, anyone whose business it was then to
examine recruits, if he was at all familiar with the work of Greek
sculptors, must often have noticed with positive pain the difference
that was apparent between the figure of the typical Greek athlete and
the figure of the typical English town-dweller.

The reasons for this poverty of physique were manifold--city life,
alcohol, nicotine, sedentary occupations, unsuitable food among the most
frequent--but there was one that overshadowed all the rest, a complete
ignorance of the structure and functions of the human body. Accompanying
this ignorance nearly always came an utter lack of acquaintance with the
elementary principles of gymnastics. There were very few men who did not
take a passionate interest in the progress of some football team, and
there were equally few who had ever given any intelligent thought to
their own physical condition.

Games have certainly been of immense value to modern England, and we
have succeeded in making of them a real instrument of moral education.
On the cricket and the football field our national qualities of
individual initiative and cheerful obedience have been developed, the
virtues of courage, endurance, and self-control fostered. But the
average man to-day is inclined to take games too seriously, and to the
competitive element in them he attaches an altogether absurd
importance. In cricket, football, or tennis it really makes little
difference which side wins, as long as all the participants get their
due share of exercise. The true object of a game is not to secure runs
or points or goals, but rather to develop and increase the strength of
every part of our body.

On the other hand, gymnastics, in their widest sense, are not taken
seriously enough. It is the duty, and it should be the pleasure, of
every man and woman amongst us to make themselves as healthy and as
beautiful as Nature meant them to be. For this purpose the playing--not
of course the mere watching--of games has a definite value, but it does
not take the place of a properly devised system of gymnastic exercises.
Knowledge of the right methods is here of the first importance, and I
therefore dedicate this book to our real experts in physical science,
the gymnastic instructors of His Majesty’s Army.




1

Athletics and Athletic Festivals


Athletics, whether ancient or modern, is a wide term covering a large
field of bodily activities, while the boundaries between sport and
athletics are often hard to fix. But we may safely distinguish four main
branches of physical energy.

1. Athletics proper, where the essential feature is the competition with
its almost invariable concomitant the prize,--athlon; the two things
going so closely together that, as in the ‘Grand Prix,’ the same word is
used for race and reward.

2. Gymnastics, the training of the body by a system of exercises in
which the naked limbs are allowed free play. Competition is here often
replaced by united action, and there is a close connexion with the
sister arts of music and medicine.

3. Drill, the particular form of bodily training which is necessary to
fit a man for the duties of a soldier. It includes all the varieties of
military exercise and practice with arms, and differs from athletics and
gymnastics in that its formal purpose is purely utilitarian.

4. Games of various kinds, played either singly or in company, and
usually requiring some sort of implement, a ball, a stick, or a hoop.
The elements of competition and united effort are usually present, but
a prize is not essential.

The history of organized athletics in Greece is a very long one, and
extends for some twelve hundred years. The Olympic register of winners
in the foot-race begins 776 B.C., this year being taken as the first
Olympiad when, in the third century B.C., the Olympic register came into
use as the recognized method of reckoning dates. From 776 B.C. to A.D.
217 the list, as drawn up by Julius Africanus, has been preserved intact
for us by Eusebius. In the third century of our era the Roman Empire,
attacked by Goths, was forced to call in the Greeks to fight once more
for their native land, and even when the invading hordes were repulsed
the effects of their ravages were still felt. The Olympic games, as a
permanent institution, apparently ceased after the Gothic invasion, and
the policy of Constantine hastened the process of decay. Christianity,
now the official religion, looked with little favour on the ancient
festivals, and finally Theodosius I, probably on the advice of St.
Ambrose, in A.D. 393 abolished the games by imperial edict, the last
Olympic victor known to history being a certain Armenian knight, a man
of gigantic strength, named Varaztad.

There is hardly any other Greek institution which had so long a career.
Through the centuries, from the age of the tyrants to the great era of
the free States; from the rise of Macedonia to supremacy, through the
troubled years of the Achæan and Ætolian Leagues; while Greece lay
crushed under the rule of the Roman Senate and while it had its brief
revival of prosperity under the Roman Empire; in spite of every
vicissitude of fortune, year by year the Olympic games took place. There
is something impressive in this continuity which links together periods
otherwise so different, and historians have laid full stress on the
services that Olympia rendered in emphasizing the sense of national
unity and goodwill. But exaggeration is very possible here, and no one
can say that these athletic festivals created or maintained an
atmosphere of peace among the constantly warring Greek States, any more
than that their recent revival as an international event has succeeded
in bringing harmony to our modern empires. The chief benefit of all
these gatherings is the stimulus they afford to local and national
patriotism; but whether the dangers of such competitions are not greater
than the advantages is a question still undecided, and it may be useful
to remember that in Greece, despite the general popularity of athletics,
the two leading States, Athens and Sparta, during the greatest period of
their history held somewhat aloof. The reasons that actuated them were
different: for Athens, athletics were too specialized; for Sparta, they
were not specialized enough. But the fact remains that the two cities
which give to us most of what is valuable in Greek culture took but
little interest in this particular organization.

The Athenian, in his indifference, was influenced probably by various
currents of thought. There was the old Ionian vein of softness, which
made the arduous straining of the athlete distasteful and led to the
formation of the adjective _athlios_, ‘distressful,’ from the noun
_athlon_; the spirit that regarded work as a ‘plaguy nuisance,’ the
carrying of burdens as ‘vulgar,’ and any form of manual labour as
beneath the dignity of a gentleman. There was also the finer feeling
that the excessive pursuit of athletics tended to coarsen rather than to
refine the human body by developing particular muscles at the expense of
general grace, and thus destroying that _eutrapelia_, the ready
nimbleness of mind and limb, which the Athenian valued most. Lastly,
there was the just belief that athletics in themselves are but a means
to an end, the health of the body, and that although that end is a
desirable one, a healthy mind is even more important. This is the point
of view that Xenophanes of Colophon (576-480 B.C.) represents when he
says:

‘It is not right to prefer strength to the blessings of wisdom: our
wisdom is better than the strength of men and horses. It is not speed of
foot that gives a city good government; nor does it bring fatness into
the dark places of a land.’

In the next century Euripides repeats the complaint, and in more bitter
language:

‘Of all the countless evils in Greece, none is worse than
the athlete tribe. Slaves of their belly, they know neither how to make
money nor to bear poverty. In early manhood they seem fine fellows and
strut about, the darlings of the town; but when old age comes, like
worn-out cloaks they are flung aside.’

And for all this mischief the athletic gatherings, with their crowds of
useless spectators, are chiefly responsible. The principle of valuation
is wrong, for

‘Who by skill in wrestling, or by lifting the diskos, or by
a shrewd blow on the jaw ever helped his native land, even though he won
the prize? Will men fight the foe holding a diskos in both hands, or
will they get home with one fist through the foemen’s shield? No one
thinks of such folly when he is standing near cold steel.’

These last lines, though written by an Athenian poet, represent the
Spartan reasons for withdrawal from Olympia. In the early days of the
festival--from 720 to 576 B.C.--the number of Spartan victors in the
list is very large, and shows, indeed, an undisputed Spartan supremacy.
After 576 they cease almost entirely, and the disappearance of Sparta
coincides with the specialization of athletics which then began. At
Delphi, Corinth, and Nemea small local games were changed into national
festivals which hoped to rival Olympia. Besides the four great
festivals, there were countless smaller competitions established--at
Athens, for example, at Argos and at Pellene, and the first result was a
distinct rise in the standard of athletic performances, so that definite
training became necessary to win success. Secondly, people began to
attend the meetings purely as spectators, and additional
competitions--in music, poetry, even in beauty--were introduced to
please an idle audience, with the result that at last these gatherings
presented almost as many attractions as a mediæval fair. It was against
this combination of international merrymaking and individual
prize-winning that the Spartan system was a protest. ‘Sparta for the
Spartans’ was the ruling principle of the Spartan State, and aliens who
tried to establish themselves at Lacedæmon were removed by somewhat
drastic methods. In a State where all personal initiative was
discouraged, the international athlete, honoured by poets and sculptors
for his mere personal prowess, could have no place. Moreover, athletics,
which the Spartans were prepared to support as a useful recreation
tending to produce that which alone in their judgment was of importance
to a State, good soldiers, had in the sixth century before Christ
become an end in themselves, and the gulf between the specialized
athlete and the soldier very quickly began to widen. The athlete soon
became a professional in fact if not in name, with little time for
anything else but training. A class of professional instructors came
into existence, and Sparta, after first excluding the trainers, finally
forbade her citizens to take part in such competitions. She saw that the
spirit of the professional athlete was at enmity with the military
ardour which she made it her business to create, and so after about the
middle of the sixth century she practically withdrew from active
participation in the Olympic festival.

The withdrawal of Sparta, however, had also its political reasons, and
was only part of her general disapproval of the Tyrants. While she, the
Dorian ox, represented the principle of individual isolation, the
tyrannis, the Ionian horse, was the champion of expansion and national
unity. Athletic festivals were to the tyrants one of several means
whereby the commercial and social intercourse of all the Greek States,
on the mainland or across the seas, might be encouraged, and the period
of the tyrants’ prosperity was also the period when most of the
Panhellenic Games were instituted. Periander, tyrant of Corinth, founded
the Isthmia about 586 B.C.: Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, about the
same time helped the Amphictyons to establish the Pythia: the Nemea,
which began in 573, almost certainly owed their importance to one of the
tyrants of Argos who succeeded Phidon. As for Phidon himself, it is
probable that he should be regarded as the second founder of the Olympic
Games, and that his was the influence which changed a local festival
into a national gathering where East and West could meet. We know that
the chief object of his policy was to promote free intercourse with
South Italy and Sicily, and the geographical position of Elis, looking
across the western sea, was probably an important factor in his plans.

But however this may be, and we know too little of Phidon to be
dogmatic, it is a certain fact that the Olympic games were reorganized
by the managers at Elis some time in the early part of the sixth century
B.C. The festival, which had been for one day only, was now enlarged and
the chief competitions became races for chariots and single horses,
these taking the place of importance given formerly to the simple
running and wrestling matches of which alone the Spartans approved.
Chariot races, except in so far as they improve the breed of horses,
have no military value, and they also require a considerable expenditure
of money, time and trouble, things of which Sparta thought better use
might be made; but they exactly suited the merchant princes of the
West, and after 550 B.C. we find the Greeks of Italy and Sicily playing
always a very prominent part at Olympia. Of the ten treasure-houses
there that have been identified five belonged to them, and possessing
those material resources which the home-staying Greeks so painfully
lacked they were able both very frequently to win the chariot race and
also to commission Pindar to celebrate their victories. Among other
places that were especially successful in the athletic contests we find
the great African colony of Cyrene, the island of Rhodes, whence came
the famous athlete Dorieus, and, curiously enough, the little State of
Ægina for whose citizens Pindar wrote no fewer than eleven of the
forty-four epinikian odes we now possess. Athens was occasionally
represented, Sparta never.

At the beginning of the fifth century the four great games were all
firmly established. The Olympic took place in the first year of each
Olympiad; the Nemean and the Isthmian came in the second year, the
Pythian in the third, and the Nemean and the Isthmian again in the
fourth. Every year therefore the Greek athlete had one competition open
to him and in alternate years two. Of the four, the Nemean games were
the most purely athletic, as befitted a festival where the old
Peloponnesian traditions still maintained some of their vitality. The
Pythians gave rather more importance to literary and musical
competitions than did the others; one of the chief events was a recital
of the ‘Hymn to Apollo’ and there were also contests in flute playing.
The Isthmians, which were the most frequented by the Athenians, catered
especially for sightseers and there was a large number of side shows of
every kind. But the Olympic festival, the first of the four to be
established, always maintained its premier place, having furthermore the
distinct advantage of a site especially designed and reserved for this
one great occasion. The games were to the ruling families of Elis what
the oracle was to the ruling families of Delphi, a source of honour,
profit and wealth, and every effort was made to glorify and embellish
the precinct of Olympian Zeus.

Of that precinct, the Altis, we have a very full description by the old
Greek traveller Pausanias, who visited it in the second century of our
era. Following his indications German archæologists, assisted by their
Government, excavated the greater part of the site with the most careful
thoroughness between the years 1875-1881, and discovered there, _inter
alia_, nearly all the exterior temple sculptures, the Hermes of
Praxiteles, and the Victory of Pæonius, although they failed to find any
trace of the greatest treasure of all, the sitting figure of Zeus by
Pheidias.

The Altis is a quadrilateral space, where goats now feed, about 750 feet
long by 570 feet broad, lying between the river Alpheus on the south and
a low but steep hill, thickly wooded with pine trees, the ancient Mount
of Cronos, which rises to the north. Immediately to the west, the river
Cladeus flows between high sandy banks into the Alpheus, which now in
the summer is only a trickle of muddy water running over a broad
gravelly bed, but in old times was a navigable stream.

In the precinct itself stood the Temple of Zeus, built by the architect
Libon, about 460 B.C., to house the statue of the god; the Temple of
Hera, one of the oldest of Greek shrines, dating back perhaps to the
tenth century B.C.; the Treasuries of the various states; and the
Council House. The stadion, some 230 by 32 yards, where the athletic
contests took place, was just outside the precinct at the north-east
corner, the spectators being accommodated on raised embankments of earth
which may have contained as many as forty-five thousand people standing.

The festival took place at the time of one of the summer full moons, and
as soon as the sacred truce was proclaimed, sightseers began to flock in
by sea and land from all parts of the Greek world. The first day of the
five, to which the games in 472 B.C. were extended, was spent in
sacrifices and general festivity, while the competitors and the judges,
the Hellanodicæ, took the oath of fair dealing. On the second morning at
daybreak the judges, in purple robes, were conducted to the special
seats reserved for them, the herald proclaimed the names of competitors,
and the day was spent in chariot and horse races and in the pentathlon
competition for men; the crown of wild olive, which was the only prize,
being presented by the judges to the victors at the conclusion of each
event. The boys’ contests came on the third day; the men’s foot-races,
wrestling, boxing and pankration on the fourth; and the last event of
all was the race for men in armour. On the fifth day there were
sacrifices again, and in the evening a ceremonial banquet at which the
victors were entertained. This was the beginning of that athletic
glorification to which Sparta so strongly objected, and their homecoming
was usually made the occasion of the most elaborate celebrations.
Exainetos of Agrigentum, for example, who won the foot-race in 416 B.C.,
was brought into the city in a chariot to which his fellow townsmen
harnessed themselves and was escorted by three hundred cars drawn by
white horses. In the western states especially they sometimes received
almost divine worship: their exploits were recorded on stone monuments,
and songs composed in their honour were sung by bands of youths and
maidens, while for the rest of their lives they had the privilege of a
front seat at all public festivals, and often also the right of taking
their meals free in the town hall.

All this was part of the exaggerated pomp with which the festival itself
in all its details was conducted; its processions, feastings,
proclamations, and sacrifices, where each state vied with the others in
making a show of gold and silver plate and displaying all the wealth
they possessed. Ostentation was not a common fault in Greece, but it had
full scope at Olympia. The two worst defects of the Greek character were
also prominent there--a contempt for women which forbade any female even
to be present, and an exaggerated idea of racial purity which shut out
all competitors except those of undisputed Greek descent. But the
spectacle must have been a splendid one, and it undoubtedly inspired
some of the finest works of Greek art. The erection of a statue in the
Altis was one of the honours given to victorious athletes to glorify
their triumph, and if the victor was unable himself to meet the expense
of setting up such a monument, the cost was often borne for him by his
native city. ‘In the courts of Olympia,’ as Walter Pater says, ‘a whole
population in marble and bronze gathered quickly,--a world of portraits
out of which, as the purged and perfected essence, the ideal soul, of
them, emerged the _Diadumenus_ and the _Discobolus_.’ Pausanias gives
us a list of some of the great sculptors whose works were still standing
there in his time--Hagelaidas, Pythagoras, Kalamis, Myron, Polycleitus,
Lysippus, and possibly Pheidias--and these nude figures established a
canon of bodily perfection which had no little influence in actual life.

Poets also vied with sculptors in glorifying the Olympic victor.
Simonides of Keos and Bacchylides sang his praise, and in the Epinikian
Odes of Pindar we have the greatest of all memorials to the athletic
spirit--‘Verse that is all of gold and wine and flowers, and is itself
avowedly a flower, or “liquid nectar,” or “the sweet fruit of his soul,
to men that are winners in the games.” “As when from a wealthy hand one
lifting a cup, made glad within with the dew of the vine, maketh gift to
a youth”: the keynote of Pindar’s verse is there.’ With a choral music
unsurpassed in any language, with wealth of legend and myth, with
accumulation of epithet and metaphor, Pindar bears his witness to the
pride of physical perfection. And with all the grandeur of his odes it
is significant that he lacks conspicuously both the Spartan virtue of
simplicity and the Athenian desire for economy of effort.

‘His soul rejoiced in splendour--splendour of stately palace
halls where the columns were of marble and the entablature of wrought
gold; splendour of temples of the gods, where the sculptor’s waxing art
had brought the very deities to dwell with man; splendour of the
white-pillared cities that glittered across the Ægean and Sicilian seas;
splendour of the holy Panhellenic games, of whirlwind chariots and the
fiery grace of thoroughbreds, of the naked shapely limbs of the athlete,
man and boy.’[B]

Splendour was the ideal alike of the Achæan chieftain, the Corinthian
tyrant, and the Olympic judge. But the stern lesson of the Persian Wars
led the Greek people in the fifth century to higher things, and the true
spirit of athletics passed from the magnificent precinct of Olympian
Zeus to the simple exercising grounds which every town possessed.
Olympia and its prizes fell into the hands of professionals; but
gymnastics remained an essential part of national education.




2

Gymnastics and Military Training


The various athletic exercises, which are here for convenience classed
together under the word ‘gymnastics,’ fall into three main classes,
depending respectively on strength of body, of leg, and of arm. To the
first class belong boxing and wrestling, to the second running and
jumping, to the third throwing the diskos and the javelin. The last five
of these six sports--boxing being excluded--formed the Pentathlon, a
combined competition of five events arranged to suit the all-round
military athlete, for whom Greek athletic training at its best was
especially designed. In such a competition the foot-race probably came
first and the wrestling last; the three middle events--the field events,
as we should call them, jumping, throwing the javelin, and hurling the
diskos--being those that were particularly identified with the
five-sport system which aimed at producing, not a specialized athlete,
but a man who combined strength with agility and skill. Victory in the
Pentathlon depended, not on success in all events, but on a system of
marks; victory in three of the competitions was sufficient in itself,
but if no competitor won three times, and two competitors tied with two
victories each, it is highly probable that account was taken of second
and third places.

Of the separate exercises, wrestling perhaps was the favourite. It was
the oldest of all sports, and to the Greeks one of the most important.
To them it was both a science and an art. Theseus, its inventor, was,
according to the myth, taught the rules by Athena herself. Victory alone
was not sufficient; the winner must win gracefully and according to the
precepts of the schools. It was from wrestling that the palæstra took
its name, and the Greek language is full of metaphors and expressions
borrowed from the technical phraseology of the ring. The contests
between Heracles and Antæus, and between Atalanta and Peleus, are two of
the best known and most frequently depicted episodes of the heroic saga,
and wrestling was one of the sports in which women were allowed by some
States--by Sparta and Chios, for example--to take part, competing even
against men. Instruction was given in the school; there were separate
rules for men and boys, and the different movements, grips, and throws
were taught on a system of progressive difficulty; textbooks were used,
and fragments of such a manual have recently been found on an Egyptian
papyrus. There were two principal styles, the upright wrestling, in
which the object was to throw one’s opponent to the ground, three falls
being necessary for victory, and the ground wrestling, in which the
struggle was continued even after a fall until one of the combatants
yielded. The first style, however, was the only one regarded as strictly
legitimate, the second being merely part of the pankration. The attitude
of a Greek before coming to grips was very similar to that of modern
wrestlers, and is beautifully illustrated in the pair of boy statues
from Naples which may be seen in the Embankment gardens. Standing square
to one another, they endeavoured to get a hold from the front or the
side. The defence was often a grip on the opponent’s wrist, which might
lead to the offensive if his elbow could also be seized and the throw we
call ‘the flying mare’ be then executed. Of front body-holds, the most
effective was gained by catching the waist with both hands and then
lifting the opponent off his feet, such a hold as Heracles used against
Antæus. Of side-throws the best known was ‘the heave,’ usually ascribed
to Theseus, where one hand was passed round the opponent’s back and the
other hand slipped underneath him. Another favourite hold was by the
neck--a strong neck was essential for a wrestler--and when this was
secured a sudden turn of the body would lead to the throw that we call a
‘cross-buttock.’ In all wrestling tripping played an important part, and
there are a very large number of technical terms in Greek for the
different trips that are

[Illustration: THE WRESTLERS (Uffizi Gallery, Florence)]

employed. Every district in Greece had a style of its own, and these
diversities of method helped to keep active an interest in wrestling and
to preserve it from the disease of professionalism, so that even when
other sports had been ruined the wrestling ring still remained a useful
and a popular institution.

It is this popularity in actual life that accounts for the frequency of
descriptions of wrestling matches in Greek literature. Two of them at
least are worth quoting; the first from the _Iliad_, Book XXIII, the
contest between Ajax and Odysseus at the funeral games of Patroclus:

    He said; and straight uprose the giant form
    Of Ajax Telamon: with him uprose
    Ulysses, skilled in every crafty wile.
    Girt with the belt, within the ring they stood,
    And each, with stalwart grasp, laid hold on each;
    As stand two rafters of a lofty house,
    Each propping each, by skilful architect
    Designed the tempest’s fury to withstand.
    Creaked their backbones beneath the tug and strain
    Of those strong arms; their sweat poured down like rain;
    And bloody weals of livid purple hue
    Their sides and shoulders streaked, as sternly they
    For victory and the well-wrought tripod strove.
    Nor could Ulysses Ajax overthrow,
    Nor Ajax bring Ulysses to the ground,
    So stubbornly he stood; but when the Greeks
    Were weary of the long protracted strife,
    Thus to Ulysses mighty Ajax spoke:
    ‘Ulysses sage, Laertes’ godlike son,
    Or lift thou me, or I will thee uplift:
    The issue of our struggle rests with Jove.’
    He said, and raised Ulysses from the ground;
    Nor he his ancient craft remembered not,
    But locked his leg around, and striking sharp
    Upon the hollow of the knee, the joint
    Gave way; the giant Ajax backwards fell,
    Ulysses on his breast; the people saw,
    And marvelled. Then in turn Ulysses strove
    Ajax to lift; a little way he moved,
    But failed to lift him fairly from the ground;
    Yet crooked his knee, that both together fell,
    And side by side, defiled with dust, they lay.
           (Homer: _Iliad_, XXIII, 820-851,
               Derby’s translation.)

The second description is separated from Homer by some twelve centuries,
but it is equally vigorous. In the tenth book of _The Æthiopian History_
of Heliodorus, the hero Theagenes, as his last trial before winning his
beloved Chariclea, is matched against a stalwart Æthiopian, and in
Underdowne’s quaint Elizabethan version the passage thus appears:

‘Then hee tooke dust, and cast it upon his armes and
shoulders, and stretched foorth his hands, and tooke some footing, and
bent his legges a little, and stouped lowe, at a word all partes of his
body were ready, so that he stoode, and with great desire awayted for
the advantage at the close. The Æthiopian seeing this laughed irefully,
and triumphed scornefully upon him: and ranne suddenly upon him, and
with his elbowe hit Theagenes in the necke, as sore as if he had
stricken him with a leaver, and then drewe backe, and laughed againe at
his owne foolish conceite. But Theagenes like a man alway from his
cradle brought up in wrastling, and throughly instructed in Mercuries
arte, thought it good to geve place at first, and take some triall of
his adversaries strength, and not to withstand so rude a violence, but
with arte to delude the same. Therefore he stouped lower, and made
semblance as though he had beene very sorrowfull, and layde his other
side to receive his other blowe. And when the Æthiopian came upon him
againe, he made as though hee would have fallen flat upon his face; but
as soon as the Æthiopian began to despise him, and was incouraged well,
and came unadvisedly the third time, and lyfted up his arme againe to
take holde of him, putting his right arme under his left side, by
lifting up his hande he overthrew him in a heape, and casting himselfe
under his arme pittes gryped his gorbelly with much a doo, and forced
him with his heeles to fall on his knees, and then leapt on his backe,
and clasping his feete about his privie parts made him stretch out his
legges, wherewith he did stay up himselfe, and pulled his armes over his
head behinde him, and laide his bellie flatte upon the earth.’

Boxing also, like wrestling, always retained its attractiveness, and in
its ancient form offers some varieties from the modern mode. There were
three stages in its history, depending largely upon the instruments of
fighting used. Down to the beginning of the fourth century B.C. it was
customary to wind soft strips of leather--_meilichai_--round the hands
and arms, which served, like our light gloves, to protect the knuckles
and so increased the power of attack, but did not in themselves add to
the severity of the blow. Early in the fourth century the _meilichai_
were superseded by gloves--_sphairai_--made of hard pieces of leather
with projecting and cutting edges, real weapons of offence, like our
knuckle-dusters. From these the Roman _cæstus_ was developed, where the
glove was weighted with pieces of iron and metal spikes placed in
position over the knuckles.

In Greek boxing there was no ring and therefore little close fighting,
there were no rounds and therefore the pace was slow, for rushing
tactics marked the untrained man; lastly, there was no classification
by weight; the heavier the man the greater his chance of success, so
that a meat diet for boxers was almost compulsory, and boxing became
practically the monopoly of the heavy-weights. As thongs or gloves were
always used on the hands, wrestling was impossible, and in later times
at least the defence was all-important. It seems fairly well established
that body-hitting was not practised, and in the Hellenistic age a fight
was usually decided by a knock-out blow on the jaw. But in the best
period the Greek boxer used both his hands freely, was active on his
feet, and had a considerable variety of attack. The introduction of
heavy gloves vitiated the art, and boxers began to rely merely on their
weight and defensive powers.

Of all these stages we have plentiful evidence both in art and
literature, for boxing and its preliminaries are among the favourite
subjects of vase painters, while in poetry, beside the account of the
fight between Odysseus and the beggar Irus in the _Odyssey_ and between
Entellus and Dares in the _Æneid_, we have a really enthusiastic and
expert description by Theocritus of the great struggle between Amycus
and Polydeuces. The battle is as vividly described as the epic contest
in the Dell between Lavengro and the Flaming Tinman, and the poet, by
making it a fight between the old school of scientific activity and the
new method of stolid strength, ingeniously enlists our sympathies from
the first upon the side of skill against brute force.

‘Then Amycus came on furiously, making play with both hands; but Pollux
smote him on the point of the chin as he charged, maddening him the
more, and the giant confused the fighting, laying on with all his might,
and going in with head down.... But the son of Zeus stepped now this
side, now that, and hit him with both fists in turn, and checked his
onslaught, for all his monstrous strength. Like a drunken man he reeled
beneath the hero’s blows, and spat out the red blood, while all the
princes shouted together, as they marked the ugly bruises about his
mouth and jaws, and saw his eyes half closed by puffy flesh. Next Pollux
began to tease him, feinting on every side, and at last, seeing that he
was now quite bewildered, he got in a smashing blow just above the
middle of the nose beneath the eyebrows, and laid the bone of his
forehead bare. Stretched on his back the giant fell amid the flowers;
but he rose again, and the fighting went on fiercely. They mauled each
other hard, laying on with the weighted thongs; but the giant was always
busy with his fists on the other’s chest and outside his neck, while
Pollux, the invincible, kept on smashing his opponent’s face with cruel
blows.’ (Theocritus: _Idyll_, XXII, 87-111.)

[Illustration: A WRESTLING CONTEST (Athens)]

Boxing and wrestling were combined in the pankration and allied with
many other devices, such as kicking, strangling, twisting, etc.; it was
a versatile performance, the joint invention of Heracles and Theseus,
and considered both by Pindar and Philostratus as ‘the fairest of all
contests.’ There was an element of danger, but it was no more brutal
than is the almost similar method of jujitsu; moreover, strict rules
were enforced by umpires who closely watched the combatants. Biting and
gouging were strictly forbidden, although frequently attempted, as for
example by Alcibiades. ‘You bite like a woman,’ cried his opponent.
‘No,’ said the young Athenian, ‘like a lion.’ Of gouging we have a
picture on a cup in the British Museum, where one figure has inserted
his finger into his opponent’s eye, while the umpire hurries forward
with uplifted rod. But nearly every manœuvre of hands, feet, and body
was permissible. You might catch your opponent by his foot and throw him
backwards; you might seize his heel or ankle, and then, if you could,
twist his foot out of its socket; you might kick him violently in the
stomach; you might plant your foot against the other man’s waist and
throw him over your shoulder; you might even stand on your own head, if
that position seemed expedient. All these tricks were used in the
standing position, but the issue of the combat was usually decided on
the ground. There you might twist arm or hand, break fingers, and
strangle. All neck holds were allowed, but the favourite method of
strangling was known as the ‘ladder grip,’ in which you mounted your
opponent’s back and wound your legs round his stomach and your arms
round his neck. Ground wrestling was indeed the distinctive feature of
the pankration, and the well-known group in the Uffizi Palace at
Florence represents one of the last stages in such a contest.

Of running and jumping little need be said, for it is very possible that
in neither sport had the Greeks much to teach modern athletes. They were
a short-legged people, and although they may have had some advantages in
long-distance races they probably would be much inferior to our
specialized sprint runners: length of leg must tell, and as in
horse-racing ‘a good big ’un’ is better than ‘a good little ’un,’ so in
a short-distance race length of stride ensures victory. But running was
very popular in Greece, and of the eight events in the early Olympic
games no less than four were foot-races, three for men--at 200 yards,
400 yards, and three miles--and one for boys. The running course--the
stade--was a straight 200 yards; for the diaulos of 400 yards the
runners turned at a post and came back to the starting-point. The start
was marked by two parallel lines, for a Greek runner began in a somewhat
cramped position, with the feet close together. The runners ran naked,
their bodies carefully oiled, and for each man there was a post at the
starting and at the finishing point to which he ran; there were no
dividing strings, nor was there any tape. Vase paintings of runners are
very frequent and plainly show the difference of style between the
sprinter and the long-distance man; in the early vases a short, thickset
type is common, in the later the thin sprinter is preferred. The most
famous names are those of long-distance runners--e.g. Pheidippides and
Ladas, whose statue by Myron was even more admired than the same
master’s Diskobolos,--and in these races the Cretans and Arcadians
especially excelled, while the Athenians were better at short distances.
Beside races proper there were various running contests; for example,
the race in armour, which was introduced at Olympia towards the close of
the sixth century and was the final event of the games, the competitors
running in full panoply of shield, helmet, and greaves. Other similar
events were the Oschophoria, where youths ran in women’s clothes, and
the Lampadophoria, in which a lighted torch was carried by single
runners or by teams. These latter were very popular at Athens, and they
illustrate the difference between the ancient and modern view of
running. They were not serious and specialized enough for a modern
athletic meeting, where everything is a matter of record and a fifth of
a second is of vital importance.

Jumping, also, was comparatively simple and restricted in its scope. Of
high jumping and pole jumping the Greeks had none, for athletics were
always practical, and as there were no hedges in Greece for soldiers to
jump over it was unnecessary to practise high jumping in the school.
Their long jump differed from ours in that it was always performed with
the help of jumping weights--_halteres_--things much like our dumb-bells
and used in a very similar fashion. With these implements a class of
pupils would practise together to the music of the flute. Both standing
and running jumps were performed from a take-off into a
pit--_skamma_--and jumps of over twenty feet were common; the fifty-five
feet ascribed to Phayllus is an impossible exaggeration.

But if in running and jumping we have little to learn, it is very
different in regard to the ‘field events,’ the throwing of the javelin
and the diskos. Here the Greek system of body poise and muscular
development gave their athletes an enormous advantage and enabled them
easily to perform movements which to our modern bodies seem almost
impossible. Both exercises were especially popular at Athens, and were
there regarded as part of gymnastics rather than athletics: i.e. they
were designed, not as

[Illustration: THE DISKOBOLOS OF MYRON]

competitive sports, but as means to improve bodily efficiency.

The javelin was a light stick of wood, usually pointless. Distance
throwing was far more usual than throwing at a mark, and for this
purpose a thong--_amentum_--was used, fastened near the centre of the
javelin shaft. Such a thong practically quadruples the range of throw,
but the process needs long practice and is of course highly artificial
in comparison with the natural use of the spear in hunting or in war.
Greek athletics had a definite purpose, and we may be sure that it was
not the actual throw but the movements necessary for the throw that gave
its value to the exercise. These movements, the short, quick steps
before the cast and the sharp turn of the body to the right, are
illustrated frequently on the vases; the throw itself is seldom
represented, and then with very poor results. The diskos was a flat and
fairly heavy circle of bronze. It was thrown from behind a line and in a
restricted space, a throw of 100 feet being exceptionally good.


II

Such is a brief account of the gymnastic sports and exercises which
formed so important a part of a Greek’s everyday round. Each one of them
had its own special value in developing the strength of some particular
part of the body, and taken together they formed a complete and
adequate training for what was to an ancient citizen the chief business
of life--war.

To us, whose civilization is based on the habits of peace and to whom
war means the negation of all the humanities, it may seem illogical to
think of fighting as a business. But it was not so in Greece. Warfare
was _the_ art of life, so far surpassing all the other arts that it was
regarded not so much as an accidental state but rather as a vital
function, as necessary to existence as breathing, sleeping, eating, and
drinking. It would accept what help the other arts could give: athletics
made a soldier nimble and supple; medicine kept him in health; the music
of the flute was useful in marching; the lyric poet and the dramatist
could foster and elevate the martial spirit; but all these were
subservient to the one engrossing purpose. Men fought to live and lived
to fight.

For the Greeks it was war, not peace, that seemed the natural state of
an organized community. War was part of their civilization: they liked
fighting and they fought like gentlemen. The Romans, on the other hand,
had no love for fighting in itself and fought without much regard to the
rules of the game. And yet the Romans were more successful in the
conduct of war, for, as our English general says, Courage, Common Sense
and Cunning are the essentials of victory, and if by courage we mean
endurance all three were Roman rather than Greek qualities. The Romans
were always anxious to win and get finished with it, and for this
purpose they were willing to fight on year after year in order that at
last they might inflict a crushing defeat on the enemy and then return
home to their flesh-pots. The Greeks were satisfied with one indecisive
success and never tried to annihilate their opponents; for then the
sport would have come to an end. To the Romans, in spite of their many
campaigns, war was an unpleasant interruption of their usual way of
life; to the Greeks, it was simply an exciting but somewhat dangerous
diversion, which was, however, an integral part of the citizen’s service
to the state.

The Greek attitude may be easily understood if we consider their
history. They were never, like the Romans, a pastoral or agricultural
community. Their culture was cradled on the battle-field and the more
intense the fighting the more intense the literary and artistic effort
of the nation. The constant stress of battle wore the race out
eventually, but it never hurt their civilization. From the earliest days
peace was unknown in the land. The raids of sea pirates, the forced
migrations of peoples, tribal wars, trade wars, dynastic wars: such is
the history of Greece in its first, middle, and concluding stages. If
war is a curse that can only bring evil, then the Greeks were the most
unhappy of nations, for the noise of battle was seldom hushed, and
instead of declaring war they thought themselves fortunate if
occasionally they could declare peace.

This constant presence of the martial spirit is visible in all that
remains to us of their art and literature. Upon the silver ware of
Mycenæ we see the Minoans fighting naked, crouching with bow and arrow
behind their shields. The statues from Ægina are all of men arrayed for
battle with lance, shield, and sword. Even Pallas Athene, the goddess of
wisdom and the household arts, is usually represented wearing the
panoply of war, and the decorations of her temple are mostly pictures of
battle or of preparation for the fray, the combats between Centaurs and
Lapithæ and the marshalling of the mounted soldiers for her solemn
procession. Painters, like sculptors, found their chief subjects in war,
either in the ancient combats of the epic lays or in the actual life of
the parade-ground and the guard-room. The Attic vases of the sixth and
fifth centuries, the best example we possess of truly popular art,
repeat the warrior motif almost to satiety, and they did so because the
potter knew that of this subject at least his clients would never be
weary.

It is the same in Greek literature, from first to last. In the Homeric
poems fighting is the normal business of man. There are fairy-lands, the
poet can imagine, where fighting is not the common rule of life, the
land of the lotus-eaters, the orchards of the Phæacians, the island
realms of Circe and Calypso: but these are all uncanny magic places
where decent everyday rules do not hold good. In Homer it is a man’s
function to fight, by sea and land, in a chariot or on foot, to use
spear and sword, to attack and plunder, or to defend himself from the
enemy’s raids. So also with the lyric poets of the next era, from
Archilochus downwards; they are men of battle first and men of letters
afterwards, squires of the War god, as Archilochus cries:

    ‘My spear is bread, white kneaded bread,
     My spear’s Ismarian wine,
     My spear is food and drink and bed,
     With it the world is mine.’

We get the same refrain in Hybrias the Cretan, the verses known to
English musicians by Campbell’s translation:

    ‘My wealth’s a burly spear and brand
     And a right good shield of hides untanned
       Which on my arm I buckle.
     With these I plough, I reap, I sow,
     With these I make the sweet vintage flow
       And all around me truckle.

     But your wights that take no pride to wield
     A massy spear and well made shield,
       Nor joy to draw the sword,
     Oh I bring those heartless hapless drones
     Down in a trice on their marrow bones
       To call me king and lord.’

‘King and lord’--they are the only words that the lyrists
have for the soldier, and the elegiac poets repeat the idea in the more
serious fashion appropriate to their poetical form. Tyrtæus, for
example, the lame schoolmaster lent by Athens to Sparta, in those poems
which the Spartans regarded as one of the chief causes of their military
success, emphasizes the supreme importance of martial valour:

‘I would never remember a man nor hold him of any account
because of his speed of foot, or skill in wrestling, his bigness, or his
strength, his beauty, or his wealth. He might be more kingly than
Pelops, more eloquent than Adrastus; but all his fame would avail him
naught unless he were a man of mettle in fight. This is the supreme
virtue, the best sport, the highest prize that a young man can win.’

Tyrtæus, as we see in his verses, regarded the art of poetry as
ancillary to the art of war, and the greatest of the Athenian dramatists
shared his views. The real gravamen of Æschylus’ attack upon Euripides
in the _Frogs_ is that the latter did not sufficiently exalt the martial
spirit among a nation, of whom the old poet says:

    ‘Their life was in shafts of ash and of elm, in bright plumes
        fluttering wide,
     In lance and greaves and corslet and helm and heart of seven
        bulls hide.’

Prose literature gives us the same evidence as poetry. Thucydides and
Xenophon look upon history chiefly as a succession of battles and
campaigns. Of the social history of their time they tell us scarcely
anything, but they will dilate with the most intense interest on the
smallest details of a skirmish. To them, as to most of their
contemporaries, war was the one thing that mattered, the great business
and the great sport of life, and our historians have only in
comparatively recent times escaped from their point of view.

It is probable indeed that many of those Athenians, whom we think of
only as men of letters, were viewed by their contemporaries in rather a
different light. Æschylus was perhaps better known as one of the heroes
of Salamis than as a dramatist. Sophocles was an admiral in charge of
the Athenian fleet the year after the performance of the _Antigone_, and
the anecdote that his military position was due to his literary skill is
probably a literary invention. Thucydides had been appointed to the
command of the Athenian troops in Thrace long before he set to work on
his history. The stubborn courage of Socrates was proved upon the field
of Delium, and Euripides, that keenest critic of the war spirit, served
his forty years in the Athenian army when fighting was at its fiercest.
We generally imagine Pericles and Nicias as being civilian ministers,
men holding the same sort of position as Pitt and Walpole: in reality
through most of their lives they were soldiers on active service, and
Cleon, who was almost a professional politician, was ready and willing
at a moment’s notice to take command of a difficult and dangerous
military expedition and, what is more, had enough technical knowledge to
bring it to a successful termination.

As every Athenian citizen was a soldier serving under equal conditions,
there was no military caste and no military discipline as we know it.
The cavalry, once the preserve of the richer classes, was in the fifth
century B.C. confined to decorative peace functions. The higher officers
of the army were elected by their fellows, walked in the ranks, and had
no distinguishing badges.

The Athenian, who supplied his own elaborate equipment and was trained
to a particular kind of fighting, refused to become part of a military
machine. A general was forced to adapt his tactics to the temper of his
men, and the personal element entered very largely into all questions
of army organization. The accoutrement of the hoplite was the deciding
factor in strategy and tactics, and the character of fifth-century
fighting can only be realized by considering first the weapons with
which the citizen soldier was armed and the fashion in which he was
accustomed to use them.

If a citizen were to play his part properly in the great war game, long
and constant bodily training was necessary. At Sparta, the complete type
of a militarist state, everything was made subservient to physical
fitness, and even at Athens the claims of the body came before the
claims of the mind, so that when Socrates wanted patients for his
dialectic he had to go to the gymnasia to find them. And this was
reasonable, for only a man in perfect condition could fight under the
conditions imposed upon a Greek heavy-armed soldier. The mere weight of
a hoplite’s accoutrement would astonish a modern infantryman. His
defensive armour consisted of four pieces: helmet, cuirass, greaves, and
shield; and even the first of these, especially if it were of the
Corinthian type, was a considerable burden and involved a severe strain
on the neck muscles. It was very heavy, twice as heavy as any of the
mediæval helmets that we possess, was made usually of thick iron and
completely covered the head and neck. Holes were left for eyes and
mouth, the nose was protected by a vertical strip of metal, and a
lining of felt or leather was sewn inside to save the skin from
abrasion. After the fifth century, it is true, the Corinthian type began
to go out of use, and the Attic shape became more common. This was
considerably lighter and in appearance resembled a metal cap with extra
pieces protecting neck, cheeks and nose, which could be detached at
will. It was graceful both in its proportions and its adornment: a
crest, and often a triple crest, was usually worn with it, the three
plumes being carried in elaborately modelled supports.

The cuirass in its first form consisted of two bronze plates, roughly
carved to fit the body and fastened on the sides and shoulders. The
bottom edge was turned up to leave the hips free and the lower parts of
the body were thus dangerously exposed. Moreover, the rigid metal
seriously hampered all movement, and this type was generally superseded
by the cuirass proper, a garment worn much in the fashion of a modern
corset, but made of leather plated with bronze and buckled down upon the
breast by means of shoulder straps. The bronze plating was mostly in the
form of round scales sewn on to the leather with wire and overlapping so
as to present three thicknesses of metal.

The greaves were thin sheets of bronze shaped to fit the leg, which they
clasped and held by their own elasticity. They were often adorned with
embossed work and the fittings were sometimes of tin or ivory. Their
length varied; some went only to the knee, others covered part of the
thigh and an ankle pad was worn to keep the bottom edge from chafing the
foot. They were a protection against minor hurts, scratches, bruises,
etc., rather than a defence against spear thrusts, but their general
adoption is synchronous with the disappearance of the oblong covering
shield in favour of the smaller oval, carried on the left arm.

The Homeric shield, ‘great as a tower,’ and large enough to cover a man
from head to foot, had in the fifth century gone completely out of use.
In art we have no representation that corresponds to the descriptions in
the _Iliad_, and the heroes whose combats are pictured on the Attic
vases are armed either with a round shield which protects their body
only, or else with the oval shield about three feet long which after 500
B.C. had become the normal type in Greece. These shields bore usually
the blazon of their owner and often served to identify his body: man and
shield were inseparable and the fighter who threw his shield away
revealed himself as destitute of knightly honour. The character of the
blazonry varied as much as our heraldic designs. Sometimes it was
decorative and depended on individual caprice; Capaneus, in Æschylus’
play, carries as his device a naked man with a torch; beneath, the words
‘I will burn your city’; Alcibiades had merely a little Cupid with a
toy thunderbolt. In other cases it was the city or a god who supplied
the design: for example, the Mantinean hoplites had on their shields a
trident, the symbol of their state god, Poseidon; the Thebans, a sphinx
in memory of Œdipus; while others were merely marked with an initial
letter, the Argives with an A., the Sikyonians with the Doric San. These
devices were on the outer surface: the inside of the shield was supplied
with a leather or metal strap across its middle through which the left
arm was passed, and one or two grips of cord or leather at the side and
end to give a firm hold; for this shield was a heavy implement, very
different from the light buckler, with which the cavalry and the
skirmishers were armed, and it required strong and well-trained muscles
to wield it effectively in the stress of battle.

The race in armour, therefore, often called simply ‘The Shield,’ was not
only one of the most popular of gymnastic contests, but also had a very
practical value; although as a concession to human weakness the runners
were usually allowed to divest themselves of cuirass and greaves. The
picturesqueness of the race appealed especially to the vase-painters,
and we have many pictures of it, the best perhaps being those on a red
figured cup in the Museum at Berlin. On one side is a group of three
runners, the right-hand one bending ready to start, the left-hand one
turning the half-way post, and the central one hastening back on the
home stretch. On the other side are three runners one behind the other,
while in the interior of the vase is a single figure looking back, in
rather unsportsmanlike fashion, as he runs.

So far for a hoplite’s body armour; but he had also to carry his weapons
of offence, his sword and his spear. The first was of many different
shapes and has many different names in Greek, but all its varieties
belong to three main types.

In the first, dating from the earliest age, the blades are short and
heavy, made in one piece with the hilt. The guard is usually straight,
the pommel a round knob, the space between being filled with bone or
ivory to form a grip. This pattern, really a survival from the Bronze
Age, was transferred to the iron sword and is occasionally found even in
the classical period.

But the ordinary Greek sword of the fifth century is of quite a
different shape. The hilt is round and the long thin blade swells from
the hilt towards the point, showing that it was meant for cutting rather
than thrusting. Flat scabbards, often highly ornamented with the
precious metals, were used and occasionally the spear would be discarded
for single combat and two swords employed, one in the hand, the other
hanging ready in its sheath, as we see it in the well-known vase
painting of the combat between Achilles and Memnon. This was the usual
infantry sword, but there was another cutlass shape, the ‘machaira,’
which was especially suited to the cavalry soldier. Here the blade
curved and the whole weapon was heavier, with knife-like cutting edges.
The hilt was usually bent--often in the shape of a bird’s head--and gave
a secure grip, so that it was possible to deal heavy blows from above.

The spear, however, rather than the sword, remained always the chief
item in a Greek soldier’s equipment, for the Mediterranean peoples,
unlike the northerners, have always preferred the thrust to the cut. In
Greek poetry the word for spear is used indifferently for any weapon and
includes sword, while on the drill-ground the commands--‘To the spear,’
‘To the shield’--corresponded to our ‘Right’ and ‘Left Turn.’ In shape
there seems to have been but little variation. The iron head was
sometimes formed like a spike, with three or four blades tapering to a
point, but more commonly it was of the flat dagger type, with a raised
central rib and two cutting edges. The shaft, usually of stout ashen
wood, was about six feet long and the weapon was chiefly used for
thrusting at close quarters. Occasionally it was thrown from a distance,
but for this purpose the light cavalry lance of cornel wood was more
suitable. The spear, used like a pike, was too heavy for any but close
fighting, and there was a constant tendency to increase its length and
weight until the Macedonian sarissa reached an average of twelve feet
and required both hands for its effective use.

Such was the accoutrement of the Greek citizen soldier, and the
character of his arms fixed the character of his fighting. It was not
stupidity and lack of judgment that led the Greeks to fight in the way
that Mardonius the Persian thought so foolish, but rather the fact that
a Greek fighting man was almost useless on rough ground. ‘These Greeks,’
the old general told his young master, ‘when they have declared war upon
one another choose out the best and most level piece of ground they can
find, and there go down and fight so that the winners get off with the
maximum of loss: as to the beaten side I need not say anything; they are
completely wiped out. Speaking all the same language they ought to
settle their differences by any method rather than battle. But if in
spite of everything war becomes inevitable, then each side ought to
discover its strongest points and try to take advantage of them.’ The
passage is interesting, for it shows that total inability to comprehend
the psychology of any nation but one’s own, which is one of the most
pathetic things in history. Mardonius was among the wisest of the
Persians, but he could not understand that to the Greeks war was not
merely a business, but also the highest form of sport, and that it may
be carried on under rules of honourable conduct which rob it of most of
its worst features. In the great age, from causes partly physical,
partly moral, a Greek battle was fought on a system as formal and well
defined as the precepts of mediæval chivalry. The herald was an
important figure; due proclamation had to be made to the enemy; there
was a definite acknowledgment of defeat; and an elaborate ceremonial of
triumph and trophy. The battle once over, no bad blood was left: it was
a fair fight with equal weapons on the plain, and no attempt was made to
annihilate the enemy or to annex his territory. The losses in killed and
wounded were by no means as heavy as Mardonius believed, for these were
not big battalions directed by invisible generals, but citizen soldiers
who were sensible enough to know when they were beaten. The procedure
was fixed. The army marched out from the city at dawn until it found
itself face to face with the enemy on the traditional battle ground, one
of those alluvial plains, comparatively rare in Greece, upon which the
city depended for its supply of corn, the prize of victory being indeed
the ground on which the fighting took place. Then the generals on either
side would address their men with some final words of exhortation (there
was a special style of rhetoric held appropriate for such occasions)
and the two armies would advance to the attack.

With waving plumes and glittering spears, the sun striking upon the gold
ornaments of breastplate and sword-belt, the hoplites pushed forward,
slowly at first but quickening their step as they approached the enemy,
and at last the two lines, moving now at the double, would meet with a
crash in the shock of battle. Then came the moment for which the Greek’s
whole life was one long preparation: swaying, struggling, heaving, with
every muscle tense and every limb engaged, the opposing masses strove to
hurl one another back. All the tricks of the wrestling school and the
boxing match were designed for use in this hour, and even courage was of
little avail unless it was supported by that perfection of physical
fitness which the ancient Greeks alone of all nations attained. Success
in an ancient battle depended upon the quality of the men engaged, and
the men derived little aid from external sources: cavalry, engineers and
artillery played no part. The issue was decided by the final shock of
two bodies of heavy armed infantry relying on solidity and weight, and
momentum in the attack was all important, for the ranks once broken
could seldom be reformed. Long training in the drill ground must have
been necessary for the orderly advance of formations so dense as these
(the average depth of men in the fifth century seems to have been about
eight, but at Delium in 421 the Bœtians massed their men in files of
twenty-five), and however good the marching there was a constant
tendency for the front line to slant as each man edged under his right
hand neighbour’s shield. A Greek hoplite like a modern Rugby forward
depended upon his formation, and without a comrade on either side of
him, and ranks of men behind or in front, he felt himself lost. His
formation broken, the natural impulse was to retire, and a withdrawal to
the city walls was the usual result of defeat. Once behind his ramparts
the citizen soldier was safe, for in the fifth century sieges were
costly, tedious, and usually indecisive. Open fighting was the cardinal
rule: cunning surprises and unforeseen attacks were as difficult for an
Athenian hoplite as they were for an English knight. Both, when encased
in their armour, were conspicuous figures incapable of any very nimble
movements, and needing an attendant squire to take charge of their war
panoply. With both physical conditions led to a moral code of ‘noblesse
oblige,’ and for a time war became almost a gentlemanly diversion. In
neither case it is true did these conditions last long: the moral
degeneration caused by the Peloponnesian War destroyed the one, and the
physical changes brought about by the invention of gunpowder put an end
to the other.

Ancient as distinguished from modern warfare really ends with the fifth
century B.C., for the next age brought a revolution to Greece. War
ceased to be an art and became a science. The end of the Peloponnesian
War coincided with the spread of the Sophistic spirit; warfare was
subjected to the same sort of investigation and criticism as the other
departments of life; and specialization, with all its advantages and
disadvantages, began.

The later years of the Peloponnesian War had shown the importance of
cavalry and its proper functions in the attack and support of infantry;
but the first great change came when Iphicrates the Athenian discovered
that a hoplite force was not invincible by light armed troops, if these
latter were properly handled. His defeat of a detachment of Spartan
heavy armed infantry was in itself an insignificant event, but it
created a revolution in military tactics comparable to that brought
about by the success of the English archers over the French knights at
Creçy. Up till that time the hoplite in popular estimation held much the
same position as a battleship does in modern sea warfare; it was
considered as hopeless for peltasts to engage hoplites as it would be
for a light cruiser to attack a Dreadnought.

With the fall of the citizen soldier came the rise of the mercenary and
the professional fighting man. A Greek force ceased to be a homogeneous
unit and split up into the component elements of a modern army. ‘The
light armed men are the hands, the horse the feet, the infantry the
breast, and the general the head’; such was the saying of Iphicrates;
and the Theban tacticians, notably Epaminondas, followed him in
combining cavalry and light infantry with the heavy armed phalanx.
Philip of Macedon improved upon his Theban teacher’s example and soon a
standing army was established which disregarded all the old traditions
of chivalry. The Greeks had their first warning in the ruthless
destruction of Olynthus and the two systems met in final conflict at
Chæronea. The professional soldier won, and by the end of the fourth
century the ancient ideals had disappeared.

But it is well still to remember them. The system of orderly combat in
the open remains the best for developing the manly virtues; and any
nation that relies over-much on the mechanical and the unseen in war
will inevitably fall away from those standards of conduct which we in
our half humorous, half depreciatory way call sportsmanlike, and to
which the Greeks gave the truer name of ‘Aidôs,’ the quality alike of
the sportsman and the gentleman. Aidôs is ‘ruth,’ and the man who has no
aidôs in him will be ready to employ all means to achieve his aims, and
in the end perhaps will even delight in ruthlessness for its own sake.




3

Physical Education


Education, mental and physical, falls into three sections, according as
it deals with the training of the child, the boy, and the man; the word
boy including girl, and the word man woman. Of these three stages the
second seems to us so much the most definite that it has almost
appropriated the word to itself. Education in common judgment does not
begin until the boy goes to his school, while it ceases when he leaves
his university.

The Greeks, or rather the Athenians, looked at things differently. They
paid much less attention than we do to the training of young children,
and in this respect were distinctly inferior to most modern nations.
Even the second stage, that of boyhood, was not taken very seriously,
and the word for youthful education, Paideia, by the slightest of
changes gets the meaning of ‘a joke.’

Education at Athens began when the youth reached years of discretion,
and the true Greek word for education is neither Paideia nor Didaskalia
but rather Philosophia, love of knowledge. The real teacher was not the
Grammatistes but the Sophistes, the ‘sophist’ whose business it was to
train men in practical wisdom. Adult education in fact was the most,
not the least, important of the three stages.

Furthermore, in the early stages of life the training of the body was
regarded as more essential than the training of the mind. When his
education was finished, the Athenian boy knew his elements, he could
wrestle and box, he could recite Homer and play the lyre, he could swim
and dance: but of ‘useful’ knowledge, so called, and especially of that
horrid travesty that we call ‘technical education,’ he possessed
nothing. In most of the qualities of discipline, as Plato complains, the
Athenian system was lacking; but it had one great practical virtue: it
kept the mean, and neither over-stimulated nor yet over-repressed a
boy’s natural attitude towards imparted knowledge. An Athenian, when he
emerged from boyhood and became a man, was neither a pedant nor a
barbarian. In the fifth century B.C. it was realized that with growing
animals the demands of the body must come before the demands of the
spirit. Physical perfection, if it is to be won at all, must be secured
in youth: the final training of the mind can be left to a later stage of
life. The method had its obvious defects, but at least it did not create
that distaste for all study which more perfect theories of education
have often produced. An Athenian till the end of his life was always
eager and ready to learn.

There were two systems of education known to the Greek world, that of
Athens and that of Sparta; but in an Athenian, as in a Spartan,
household, the first six or seven years of a child’s life were spent at
home in the women’s quarter of the house. A Spartan mother, however,
only received her child to rear after it had been carefully examined by
the elders of the tribe to which the parents belonged: if its physical
condition was unsatisfactory it was exposed on Mount Taygetus, there to
die or be brought up by Helots. Consequently the Spartan women, who were
famed all over Greece for their skill as nurses, had only the best
material to work upon.

In both states such education as the children received at this period of
life was almost entirely physical. They were taught how to stand, how to
sit, and how to walk correctly: on a vase painting in the British
Museum, for example, we see a small child moving unsteadily towards its
mother, who waits with open arms to receive it, while an instructor with
long wand stands in the background. Athenian mothers usually were
inclined to delegate the care of their children to a hired nurse, and
there is an implied reproof to their indifference in the elaborate
precepts that Plato gives in the _Republic_ for the proper management of
infants. For example, he combats the idea that a good child should be
quiet, and insists upon the importance of constant motion for the young
baby, who in an Athenian nursery was often closely bandaged in swaddling
clothes and then left to its own resources.

‘The first principle,’ he says, ‘in relation both to the
body and the soul of very young creatures is that nursing and moving
about by day and night is good for them all, and that the younger they
are the more they will need it. Infants should live, if it were
possible, as if they were always rocking at sea. Exercise and motion in
the earliest years greatly contribute to create a part of virtue in the
soul: the child’s virtue is cheerfulness, and good nursing makes a
gentle and a cheerful child.’

Greek ears were very sensitive to sounds, and the noise of the
uncheerful infant protesting against life was doubtless very trying to
the father in the few hours that he spent at home. We have no
information of Plato’s practical experience of children, for, as far as
we know, he never married, but both he and Aristotle love to criticize
the customs of their native city. In the _Politics_, for example, as in
the _Republic_, the importance of the child is emphasized.

‘Young children,’ says Aristotle, ‘should be kept healthy by
exposure: to accustom children to the cold is an excellent practice
which greatly conduces to health and hardens them for military service.
Children should be amused till they are five years old, but the
amusement should not be vulgar or tiring or riotous. Their sports should
be imitations of the occupations which they will hereafter pursue in
earnest. Crying and screaming should not be checked, for they contribute
to growth, and in a manner, exercise the body. The Directors of
Education must keep a careful eye even upon young children, who will
stay at home until they are seven; and they must see that they are left
as little as possible with slaves. Formal education will begin after
seven years; it will be the same for all, given in public, and directed
to promote the good of all. Nature requires that we should be able not
only to work well but to use leisure well. Work and leisure are both
necessary, but the latter is the more important; and it is the chief
function of education to teach us how to use our leisure rightly.
Gymnastics and music are the chief branches of education; but for
children gymnastic exercises should be of a light kind. Children should
not be brutalized, as they are at Sparta, by laborious toil. Music
should be studied both for its intellectual and its ethical virtue.
Children should be encouraged to sing and play, for it will keep them
out of mischief; but the flute should be forbidden as over-exciting, and
musical studies should cease at manhood.’

It will be seen that Aristotle recognizes the necessity of amusement,
and Greek children seem to have had most of the toys familiar to our
nurseries. Little girls played with their terra-cotta dolls, boys with
their hoops and balls, and with the knuckle bones that took the place of
our marbles. An Alexandrian epigram (_Anth. Pal._ VI, 309) records the
dedication to Hermes of one such playbox.

    ‘This noiseless ball and top so round,
     This rattle with its lively sound,
     These bones with which he loved to play,
     Companions of his childhood’s day;
     To Hermes, if the god they please,
     An offering from Philocles.’

Of dance games too, which give exercise both to mind and body, they had
an abundant variety; some simple like ‘The Wine-skin and Hatchet,’ which
could be played upon the stomach of a complaisant guest, others more
elaborate in their dramatic ritual, such as ‘The Swallow’ procession, of
which our ‘Jack in the Green’ is a reminiscence.

At the beginning of their lives then children were treated in much the
same way at Sparta and at Athens; but in the next stage of education,
after the period of early childhood was past, there was a sharp
divergence between Spartan and Athenian practice. At Sparta boys and
girls alike, over the age of seven years, were taken in hand by the
state, and given the most thorough of physical trainings. The girls
were allowed their meals at home, but otherwise were subjected to the
same discipline as the boys. They had to harden their bodies, so that
they might bear strong children, and among their sports were wrestling,
running, and swimming. They learned to throw the diskos and the javelin;
and wearing only the short Doric chiton engaged in contests of speed
with youths. The result we may see in the statue of the girl runner, a
copy of a fifth-century original, which is now in the Vatican at Rome,
and in the description of the Spartan woman envoy in Aristophanes’ play
_Lysistrata_, who looked ‘as though she could throttle a bull.’ The
boys, for their part, were organized in the strictest fashion into
‘packs’ of sixty-four and into divisions. Each pack fed together, slept
together on bundles of reeds for bedding, and played together. They had
to go barefoot always, wore only a single garment summer and winter, and
provided for their own wants.

One boy in the pack was appointed as ‘Bouagor,’ or ‘Herd-leader,’ and
could give orders and inflict punishment. Over him was a young man,
above twenty years of age, of tried character and courage, the ‘Eiren’
who was in charge of the pack’s organization and lived always with the
boys. In control of the whole system was the ‘Paidonomos,’ the minister
of education, an elderly citizen of rank and repute who had the ultimate
powers of discipline over boys and eirens alike. In the three ranks we
see something resembling the prefects, assistant masters, and Heads of
our schools: in manner of life there was a close approximation to the
boy-scout movement.

This Spartan type of education in some respects was not unlike the
English public school system, as we owe it to Dr. Arnold, before it was
affected by the spread of competitive examinations and the demand for
utilitarian knowledge. The qualities that the Spartans wished to
cultivate were not intellectual acuteness or literary taste, but the
moral virtues of obedience, discipline, and endurance. To obtain these
the lads were kept under constant supervision by grown men, and the
weakness of the system was that individual initiative was not
sufficiently encouraged, and that the claims of the mind were too
persistently disregarded. Of book study there was practically none.
Hunting, scouting, and foraging for food took up most of the boys’ time.
Fighting, both in play and in earnest, was encouraged, together with
gymnastics of an unspecialized sort, especially the musical drill which
the Spartans called gymnopædia. Competitions between individuals and
divisions were very frequent, and in many of them girls met boys on
equal terms. Above all things, the idea of military efficiency was kept
before the children’s eyes, and a strict military discipline was
enforced. In fact, the Spartan system had all the strength and weakness
of an exclusively military regime. The young Spartans were brave,
healthy, modest, hardy and obedient: on the other hand, they were
stupid, quarrelsome, brutal, lacking in self-restraint, and inclined to
a gross immorality when once they were free from the close restraint of
Spartan law. As long as a Spartan lived in his own country he behaved
well, but the vices that the system produced showed themselves
unpleasantly in any dealings with others. To the rest of Greece the
vices seemed more than to counterbalance the virtues, and the Athenian
ideal of education became the model for most of the other Greek States.

At Athens, everything was left to the individual parent and to the
private schoolmaster. The State recognized its responsibility for the
maintenance of children, and if a man died in battle his orphans were
reared at the public expense; but it did not recognize its
responsibility for their education. Some ancient laws, attributed to
Solon, did indeed enact that all free-born children should be sent to
school and there taught ‘letters and how to swim.’ Other regulations
fixed the school hours, and in the interests of morality forbade boys to
come home from school in the dark. But as regards the methods and the
subjects of education given to boys, the Athenian Government was
indifferent. The keeping of a school was a private speculation, and the
State required no evidence of moral or intellectual qualifications from
the schoolmaster. Accordingly, schools and the fees charged varied very
greatly. Poor folk sent their children to establishments where only the
elements of reading and writing were taught χαχὰ χαχῶς as the
sausage-seller in Aristophanes says. Richer parents not only gave their
children a better training in the early stages, but kept them at school
for a longer period.

The schoolmaster himself was regarded with extreme contempt. The father
of Æschines belonged to the despised class, and Demosthenes draws a
scornful picture of his youthful rival helping to mix the ink, scrub the
forms, and sweep the schoolroom. The fees were due on the last day of
the month; but they were grudgingly paid and mean parents would keep
their children away from school in those months of the year when the
State festivals gave the schoolmaster an opportunity of granting his
pupils a holiday. Of long intervals from work, such as our summer and
winter vacations, we have no trace in Athens, and the precept of the
Roman poet ‘æstate pueri si valent satis discunt’ apparently went
unregarded.

The school hours were arranged to suit the time of meals in the boys’
homes. After the early breakfast, taken at sunrise, the boy sets off to
his teacher, with whom he remained till noon. Then came the midday
meal, followed by a siesta, and then afternoon school. Discipline was
lax. The schoolmaster certainly had a rod to assist him in maintaining
order, but his social inferiority deprived him of any real authority.
Children would bring their pet dogs to school and play with them under
the master’s chair. The master usually was sitting, a position which an
Athenian despised as unworthy of a free-born man, and we have the
typical schoolmaster pictured for us on a vase by Euphronios. He is a
small, ill-developed man, with a bald head and a prominent nose. His
body twisted, he leans forward with a threatening gesture, his
forefinger raised in warning. In his left hand there is a stylus, for a
writing-lesson is in progress; his stick with crooked handle and
formidable knobs lies convenient to his right. He is drawn by a
malicious hand with something of the caricaturist’s touch, but he is
thoroughly alive and evidently closely resembles a real original. We may
imagine that not unlike him even in bodily form was the schoolmaster in
the third mime of Herondas who beats his idle pupil with his bull’s tail
strap until he is ‘black and blue like a spotted snake.’

The ordinary system of elementary education at Athens, as followed by
boys from seven to fourteen, consisted of three parts: letters, music
and gymnastics, presided over by the grammatiste, kithariste, and
pædotribe respectively. The grammatiste taught reading, writing and
simple arithmetic, and his methods, on the evidence of the papyri and
ostraka which have recently been discovered in Egypt, were not very much
unlike those of a modern school. We have long lists of alphabets, and of
simple and difficult combinations of letters; passages for dictation and
recitation, the conjugation of verbs, and elementary grammatical rules.
The kithariste taught ‘music’; i.e. the words of the lyric poets and the
simple lyre accompaniment which went with the words. In general
estimation he ranked a little higher than the grammatiste, but they both
taught under the same conditions, and usually in the same building. The
pædotribe was a much more important person than the other two, and his
teaching, which directed the boy’s physical development upon scientific
lines, lasted usually till manhood. He taught the rules of health,
‘dancing’ in the Greek sense of the word, and especially the five
exercises of the pentathlon, which aimed at producing a perfect,
all-round athlete. The palæstra was his school-room, and he was always
sure of eager pupils and interested spectators.

But upon the smaller boys no very arduous tasks were imposed.
Deportment, how to sit, stand, and walk gracefully, the correct manner
of salutation, a decorous and becoming carriage of the body; these with
some easy gymnastic exercises, together with a multitude of games and
an occasional cockfight, occupied most of a boy’s day. He spent much
more time at the palæstra than he did anywhere else, but the border-line
there between instruction and amusement was not very rigidly drawn. This
was the sort of education that seemed to Aristophanes ideal, and nowhere
is a better picture given of it than in the _Clouds_:

    ‘To hear then prepare of the Discipline rare which flourished in
          Athens of yore,
     When Honour and Truth were in fashion with youth and Sobriety bloomed
          on our shore;
     First of all, the old rule was preserved in our school that “boys should
          be seen and not heard”:
     And then to the home of the harpist would come, decorous in action
          and word,
     All the lads of one town, though the snow peppered down, in spite of
          all wind and all weather;
     And they sung an old song as they paced it along, not shambling with
          thighs glued together...
     But now must the lad from his boyhood be clad in a man’s all
          enveloping cloke;
     So that, oft as the Panathenæa returns, I feel myself ready to choke,
     When the dancers go by with their shields to their thigh, not
          caring for Pallas a jot.
     You therefore, young man, choose me while you can; cast in with
          my method your lot;
     And then you shall learn the forum to spurn and from dissolute
          baths to abstain,
     And fashions impure and shameful abjure, and scorners repel
          with disdain,
     And rise from your chair if an elder be there, and respectfully
          give him your place.
     And with love and with fear your parents revere, and shrink
          from the brand of disgrace...
     Not learning to prate, as your idlers debate, with marvellous
          prickly dispute,
     Nor dragged into court day by day to make sport in some small
          disagreeable suit:
     But you will below to the Academe go, and under the olives
          contend
     With your chaplet of reed, in a contest of speed, with some
          excellent rival and friend;
     All fragrant with woodbine and peaceful content and the leaf
          which the lime blossoms fling,
     When the plane whispers love to the elm in the grove in the
          beautiful season of spring.’
              (_Clouds_, 961-1008, Rogers’ translation.)

Boyhood at Athens was a time of preparation; the real education of an
Athenian, in physical and in mental studies, began when ours too often
ceases, in the year when he reached manhood. Then, and not till then,
did the State step in and accept responsibility for his training. The
ephebe of eighteen enrolled, in his deme register, had first to take
the oath:

‘I will not disgrace my sacred weapons nor desert the
comrade who is placed by my side. I will fight for things holy and
things profane, whether I am alone or with others. I will hand on my
fatherland greater and better than I found it. I will hearken to the
magistrates, and obey the existing laws and those hereafter established
by the people. I will not consent unto any that destroys or disobeys the
constitution, but will prevent him, whether I am alone or with others. I
will honour the temples and the religion which my forefathers
established. So help me Aglauros, Enyalios, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo,
Hegemone.’

Then under the direction of specially appointed magistrates, the
‘Sophronistai’ or ‘Moderators,’ a definite and thorough course of
gymnastics and military training began. The young recruits were first
taken round the temples and afterwards put into garrison at Munychia and
Piræus. They had masters and undermasters to teach them the use of the
hoplite’s accoutrement, and pædotribes for their gymnastic exercises.
Discipline was fairly strict, but there were plenty of amusements, and
many festivals in which the ephebes played a special part. When they
were not engaged in military drill they were usually to be found in the
gymnasia and palæstræ, and at the end of their first year of training
they were reviewed in the theatre during the celebration of the greater
Dionysia. After the ceremony they received a spear and shield as a gift
from the State and marched out of Athens, spending most of their final
year patrolling the country and garrisoning the outlying forts. Then,
this first initiation into the science of physical fitness achieved,
they returned to the city, and during the rest of their lives devoted a
large proportion of their time to perfecting their knowledge of the laws
of health and developing the strength of their body.

The academies, where these studies in a Greek city were pursued by young
and old together, were of two kinds, and were called either ‘gymnasia’
or ‘palæstræ.’ A gymnasium was an open space, with trees for shelter
from the sun and, if possible, near a stream of running water; and there
went on those sports that required plenty of room. The two chief
gymnasia at Athens were both outside the town walls, the Academy in the
sacred grove of the hero Academus and the Lyceum in the precinct of the
hero Lycus. They corresponded fairly closely to the playing fields about
our public schools, except that they belonged to the whole community and
were used by all classes and ages alike. If we could imagine Hyde Park
thronged every day and all day with men and boys running, jumping,
hurling quoits, and throwing javelins,

[Illustration: INDOOR SPORTS (Athens)]

we should get some idea, although of course on a very much larger scale,
of the appearance of the Lyceum in the time of Socrates.

The palæstra, on the other hand, bore more resemblance to our school
gymnasium. It was a covered building used especially for the indoor
sports of boxing and wrestling. Built round a central court which in
fine weather was normally the scene of these competitions, it had also a
large hall opening on to the court and a number of smaller rooms used
for bathing, rubbing down and undressing. In the large hall the
spectators gathered, and a vivid picture of the impression made upon a
foreigner by the sight is given in Lucian’s dialogue _Anacharsis_. The
young Scythian speaks:

‘Why do your young men behave like this, Solon? Some of them
grappling and tripping each other, some throttling, struggling,
intertwining in the clay like so many pigs wallowing. And yet their
first proceeding, after they have stripped--I noticed that--is to oil
and scrape each other quite amicably; but then I do not know what comes
over them--they put down their heads and begin to push, and crash their
foreheads together like a pair of rival rams. There, look! that one has
lifted the other right off his legs, and dropped him on the ground; now
he has fallen on top, and will not let him get his head up, but presses
it down into the clay; and to finish him off he twines his legs tight
round his belly, thrusts his elbow hard against his throat, and
throttles the wretched victim, who meanwhile is patting his shoulder;
that will be a form of supplication; he is asking not to be quite choked
to death.’

           (Lucian, _Anacharsis_, I, Fowler’s translation.)

There were only three gymnasia in all Athens, but there was a very large
number of palæstræ, some public, some private, some frequented by men,
some by boys, the majority used indifferently by men and boys together.
In the public establishments the instructors were provided and paid by
the State, and were probably at the head of their profession, for as the
oligarch who wrote the treatise on the Athenian Republic bitterly says:

‘As for gymnasia and baths, some rich people have their own,
but the people also have built palæstræ for their own use, and the mob
now has far more advantages in this respect than the fortunate few.’

The popularity of a private palæstra, especially if it were intended
chiefly for the instruction of boys, depended largely on the personality
of the pædotribe who there gave instruction, and Athenian fathers were
as fond of expounding the merits of their own favourite teacher as
Englishmen are of singing the praises of their old school. The pædotribe
was usually assisted by subordinates--_gymnastæ_, who coached pupils in
special exercises and prepared them for competitions, and _aleiptæ_ who
undertook for boys the actual rubbing down and massaging which men and
youths performed for themselves; but he alone was the directing spirit
of the place. He required to have considerable medical knowledge, and
held a rank in popular estimation of equal importance with a physician.
His business was to prevent, the doctor’s only to cure, disease. He had
to know what exercises would suit what constitutions; he was called on
frequently to prescribe in matters of diet and sometimes must advise a
strengthening and sometimes a lowering regime. Besides giving his pupils
health, he was expected also to increase their beauty and their
strength. Finally, according to Plato, a good pædotribe was able to
produce by his teaching firmness of character and strength of will:
therefore he must know exactly how much training to administer to each
boy, for too much of these qualities is as bad as too little. It will be
seen that a successful pædotribe combined in his person most of the
capacities and duties which in our educational institutions are shared
among the headmaster, the games master, the school doctor, the drill
sergeant and the cricket professional; with the additional
responsibility of having frequently to teach both parents and children.

But the larger palæstræ, as we have said, were usually public and free,
and it may be useful to give here a brief account of their
arrangements. On entering from the street the visitor passed down a
short passage into the _‘Apodyterion_,’ the undressing room, a large
hall with one side opening directly on to the cloisters which surrounded
the central court. His first business was to strip; for all the
exercises of the palæstra were performed naked; and then to anoint
himself all over, and carefully rub the oil into his skin. As Lucian
says again in the _Anacharsis_, speaking now through the mouth of the
great law-giver, Solon:

‘When their first pithless tenderness is past, we strip our
youths and aim at hardening them to the temperature of the various
seasons till heat does not incommode them nor frost paralyse them. Then
we anoint them with oil by way of softening them into suppleness. It
would be absurd that leather, dead stuff as it is, should be made
tougher and more lasting by being softened with oil, and the living body
get no advantage from the same process.’

Another room, the ‘_Konisterion_,’ was set apart for athletes to powder
themselves with dust before exercise. The effects on the body of powder
were regarded as no less beneficial than those of oil. It closed the
pores of the skin, checked excessive perspiration, and kept the body
cool, thus protecting it from chills and rendering it less susceptible
to fatigue. Special sorts of powders were supposed to have special
virtues; those of a clayey nature were particularly cleansing, those
that were gritty stimulated perspiration if the skin was inclined to be
over-dry, the yellow earthy kind made the body supple and sleek, and
gave that glossy appearance which was the sign of good condition and
training.

Yet another apartment was the ‘_Korykeion_,’ where the punch-balls hung;
some of them large skins filled with sand hanging about waist-level and
used by wrestlers who would try and check their rebound, others smaller
and lighter filled with fig seeds or meal, hanging as high as the
athlete’s head and used by boxers as a mark for their blows.

And, lastly, there was the bathroom, a severely simple place with a
large stone basin on a stand as its chief feature. Bathing
establishments with hot and vapour baths existed in Athens, but they
were discouraged by manly folk as corrupting athletic vigour and
considered only truly suitable for the old and feeble. In the palæstra
cold water was used alone, and the bath was either taken direct from the
basin or else the athlete stood while a friend swilled him down from a
bucket. Before the actual washing a flesh scraper was used to remove the
dust and dirt from the skin, and a sort of lye obtained from wood ashes
took the place of soap.

All this at Athens, as befits a true democracy, was open without
restriction and without payment to every citizen. In the palæstra rich
and poor met on equal terms without regard for rank or position. A
strigil and an oil flask were the only implements that were needed, and
on occasions the State even supplied the oil. We have scarcely anything
like it in modern days; perhaps a racecourse, in its mingling together
of all classes for sport, is the nearest equivalent. But our racecourses
have some peculiar features that need not now be specified, from which
the Greek palæstra was free.




4

Health and Bodily Exercise


For the attainment of the perfect health which is one of the highest
goals of human endeavour, the Greeks of the fifth century B.C. in
comparison with ourselves were placed under some disadvantages. Firstly,
their racial stock, a difficult blend of the old Mediterranean people
with central European immigrants, was not so good, for purposes of
active strength, as our mixture of Saxon, Norman and Dane: the
inhabitants of Attica claimed with some reason to be autochthonous, but
in historical times they were already showing plain signs of race decay.
Secondly, their climate on the whole was inferior to ours, the summer
too hot and enervating, the winter dank and depressing rather than sharp
and bracing: Attica in this respect also was more favoured than many
states, and Athenian authors are very fond of contrasting the clear
brilliance of their native air with the heavy dullness of the Bœotian
plain. Thirdly, they lacked most of those sanitary appliances without
which life in our cities now would seem almost impossible, and their
doctors and surgeons had not that wealth of drugs and instruments which
we possess.

On the other hand the Greeks, or at least the Athenians, had some points
in their favour. Of all the people that we know the citizens of Attica
did the highest thinking on the lowest feeding. They were naturally
temperate both in food and drink, and a very great contrast both to the
Romans and such other Greeks as the Bœotians and Thessalians. In this,
at any rate, they were feminists; like most women they did not pay much
regard to their stomachs, and made their meals not the most important
but the least important thing in their lives, so that a Greek banquet
was a very simple affair, compared with an English or a Roman repast,
and its chief attraction was the music and conversation which followed
the mere eating and drinking. The ordinary diet of the Athenians
consisted almost entirely of cereals; porridge and bread were the
staples, and although sometimes a little salt fish, cheese, honey or
olives might serve as a relish, yet porridge in various forms was the
staff of life. Their drink was usually water; a good supply was brought
in to the city by pipes dating apparently from the time of Pisistratus,
and the big fountain of the nine springs is mentioned by Thucydides.
They realized all the benefits that come from a copious use of nature’s
chief medicine: ‘best of all things is water’--such is the motto on the
entrance portal to the great temple of Pindar’s poems, and the
Athenians, knowing the truth, acted on their knowledge. Wine, of course,
they drank and enjoyed--there were teetotalers amongst them,
Demosthenes, for example, and they were regarded as crabbed, unpleasant
fellows--but they enjoyed in moderation, and always diluted their wine
copiously with water. To drink wine neat was to be a barbarian, and the
story of the Spartan king who was driven mad by his unmixed potations
was often repeated at Athens. The typical citizen was a thin wiry
person, active and restless, and the highest praise you could give to an
Athenian was to call him εὐτράπελος, ready to turn his hand to anything.
As Aristophanes says, the Athenians were wasplike, thin-waisted and
ready to sting--while one of commonest terms of political approbrium was
παχύς--‘fat’--the word applied by the democrats to the idle rich.

Again, as we have said, the Athenians were autochthonous--such was their
favourite boast--sprung from the land, born from the actual womb of
mother Attica. Without examining too closely the exact truth of their
claim, or accepting the origin of their grasshopper king, we may regard
it as an historical fact that the Athenian stock remained undisturbed
and without admixture for a very long period in Attica. They had
therefore all the advantages which are derived from a pure and an old
race; they were thoroughly suited to their environment, and had
developed strong special characteristics. They were fully conscious of
this themselves, never admitted aliens to Athenian citizenship, and took
the most careful precautions to see that all citizens on the roll should
be of pure Athenian parentage. In its relation to general health this
steady continuity of race and domicile is more important than is often
recognized. Only long centuries of undisturbed habitation can bring man
into real harmony with nature, and this is one reason why the English
peasant is so much finer a man, physically and intellectually, than the
mixed breed of a great town. Half the diseases of our time are of
nervous origin, caused ultimately by a feverish attempt to adapt oneself
too rapidly to a new environment.

Moreover, the chief means whereby we stave off for the moment the
results of this strain, drugs and stimulants of every kind, were unknown
to the Greeks, and they were all the better for their ignorance. Tea,
coffee, tobacco, opium; all these poisons are among the blessings of
modern civilization, and in the fifth century B.C. were as unfamiliar to
the Greeks as the countries from which they come. Here again the Greeks
were closer to nature than we are. When they needed a stimulant--and
stimulants are on occasion a real necessity--they took wine, the natural
product of their own country, not something only to be found among
totally different conditions. They knew nothing of the poisons of
tropical countries, and nothing of the diseases which we have imported
from the tropics. Asiatic fever, smallpox, cholera, syphilis, typhus
were diseases of which the Greeks had neither knowledge nor experience,
and even from our milder infectious complaints, such as measles and
scarlatina, they were immune. Until the advent of malaria during the
Peloponnesian War their most common malady seems to have been ophthalmia
in its various forms, and consumption was their only serious scourge.

This would seem to be a fair statement of our respective advantages and
disadvantages; and on the whole perhaps the balance of the account is in
our favour. But all these considerations are counterbalanced and more
than counterbalanced by one fact: an ancient Greek took a lively and
intelligent interest in his own physical condition, and devoted most of
his time, not to making money, or reading books or playing cards, but to
what is a more remunerative investment than any of these, to the care of
his health.

The most precious thing that a Greek possessed was not his soul, the
existence of which he doubted, but his body. He took an interest in his
body; he was not afraid of it in any of its parts, and he was not always
trying to cover it up as something of which he was ashamed. He had none
of those curious and morbid feelings that still linger on amongst us as
an inheritance from Syrian conventicles and Egyptian monasteries. He
stripped himself freely and often, in public as in private, and he
allowed the sunlight, the fresh air, and the running water to reach
every limb. Dirt was not to a Greek a proof of holiness, nor neglect of
one’s person the sure sign of a love of learning. Cleanliness was not
merely next to godliness; it was godliness itself. To be χαθαρός--clean,
pure, free from defilement--was the ideal, and an ideal generally
attained.

A Greek concentrated his attention on the care of his skin by means of
baths, massage, and external applications. Bathing with the Greeks of
the classical period was not the elaborate function that it became with
the Romans, who used it indeed, as we use drugs, to correct the results
of their own follies and self-indulgence; but it was thorough and it was
constant. Moreover they knew the value of sun and air baths, a thing
almost unattainable in England, and their dress allowed the free-play of
air round the body. Hats, stockings, and gloves were practically
unknown, and the feet were usually bare.

Of massage, both by the hand and by the instrument, which they called a
‘strigil,’ great use was made. The ‘rubber’ was as important for
purposes of health as the ‘doctor,’ and an Athenian put aside a certain
proportion of his time every day for his duties in this respect. In
connection with rubbing comes the universal use of olive oil as an
external application; the oil flask--_lecythus_--was as indispensable to
a Greek as an umbrella is to an Englishman; and as a consequence the
Athenians seem to have been seldom troubled with those coughs and colds
which so harass modern men. Under the stimulus of the bath and frequent
massage the skin performed its natural cleansing functions, and the oil
served as an invisible protection against sudden chills, while from one
of our greatest dangers, the hot polluted air of a crowded room followed
by the cold dampness of a raw February evening, the Greeks were free,
for artificial heating and lighting were little used and all gatherings
of people took place in the open. By constant exposure to sun and air,
by massage, by regulated exercises, and by rubbing with oil the Greek
gained an elasticity of skin which meant health, vigour and beauty. A
large proportion of our community take an interest in their complexions
and spend a considerable amount of effort in trying to produce an
artificial softness of face tissue, but to the far more important task
of stimulating and strengthening the skin of the body and larger limbs
they give scarcely any time at all. A delicate skin is not the
essential, either from the point of view of health or real beauty; for
though it may render details visible in an elegant fashion, only a skin
that is well knit to the subjacent tissues shows the true configuration
to advantage. This firm elasticity cannot be obtained except by
attention, and in this respect we are inferior, not only to the Greeks,
but to such different and widely separated modern peoples as the Red
Indians of North America, the Malays of the Eastern Archipelago, and the
Kanakas of the South Seas. A very large number of our minor maladies and
disabilities come to us from our closed pores and our flabby epidermis,
and from all these the Greeks escaped, owing to the care they gave to
the outer surface of the body.

In the day-time a Greek was usually to be found upon his feet. Of the
value of walking as the best of all the more gentle forms of exercise he
was well aware, and he normally took a brisk walk in the early morning,
another before the mid-day meal, another in the late afternoon, and
another before he went to bed. Fortunately for him cycles and motor-cars
were not yet invented. When he was not walking he usually stood, for the
sitting position was regarded as more appropriate to slaves than to free
men, and in any case he knew that sitting tends rather to cramp than to
invigorate the body. If he wanted to relieve his leg muscles for a
moment, which he seldom did, he dropped down easily into the squatting
position, which those other scientific gymnasts, the Japanese, now use,
a mode of resting especially valuable for women, as it strengthens all
the muscles about the pelvis and gives vigour to the most vital portions
of the female anatomy. When the time for a complete rest came he lay
down, either propped upon one elbow or at full length, and allowed all
his muscles to relax. If ever it was necessary to sit--in the theatre of
Dionysus, for example, where an audience sat attentive in the open air
for hours together--he sat on a plain flat seat without a back, his legs
straight down in front of him, his feet resting on the floor. He did not
loll or lounge, and when he was sitting he did not have that
round-shouldered appearance, which is now so noticeable in a room full
of people: he kept his diaphragm firm with the upper part of his body
correctly balanced, the centre of gravity being exactly over the base of
the spine; and in this position he was able to remain for long periods
without effort or fatigue.

But as we have said sitting to a Greek was not a matter of choice, and
was for him the exception rather than the rule; he preferred an erect
position. The chief reason for this very considerable difference between
his custom and ours is to be found in a simple fact: he was taught in
childhood how to stand and how to walk _properly_, so that both actions
were to him a pleasure and not a labour.

It may seem strange at first sight, but as an actual fact the operations
of standing erect and walking straight are not in the strict sense of
the word ‘natural’ to creatures like ourselves who have painfully
evolved from a lower form of life. The awkward hesitations of the baby
learning to walk are natural; the supple activity of the athlete is the
result of art. To stand gracefully and easily is an accomplishment that
must be acquired; it does not come to us of itself.

If a man stand erect, firmly planted on both feet at the same time,
exerting as little muscular effort as possible, the hip joint is always
a little overextended; the body would fall backward were it not for the
ilio-femoral ligament which suspends the body to the hip joint. On the
length and strength of this ligament depends both the position of the
pelvis in relation to the thigh and also eventually the graceful
carriage of the whole body. A lack of strength in this ligament and in
the muscles of the abdomen means that the pelvis is too much inclined,
the abdomen projects forward, and in the back there is a deep hollow:
results unsightly and unhealthy enough, but unfortunately with us far
too common, for we do not take means, as did the Greeks by a scientific
system of gymnastics, to strengthen all these body muscles in early
youth. Jumping with dumb-bells (performed in squads to music), throwing
the diskos, and casting the javelin were exercises expressly designed
for this purpose, and combined with daily practice in the wrestling
school they gave the ancient Greek a different and a superior body to
ours, a body which in outward contour and muscular development was much
further removed from the ancestral ape than is that of the ordinary
middle-aged citizen of to-day. A Greek could ‘stand at ease’ without any
difficulty: the attempts that may be seen on any drill ground now when
recruits attempt to carry out the order would be ludicrous if they were
not so painful.

In order to stand correctly the legs and feet must be of a proper shape;
a man must not be knock-kneed or splay-footed. When the legs and feet
are close together, the two legs should be in contact at four points: at
the upper part of the thigh, between the knees, at the point where the
calves come furthest inwards, and at the inner ankle bones. The body
muscles also must be well developed and under control, and the stander
should know exactly where the centre of his body’s gravity is and how to
obtain correct poise. Our drill-book advises that the weight of the body
be balanced on both feet and evenly distributed between the fore part of
the feet and the heels. With our present type of boot this represents
probably the best position possible, but it should be remembered that it
is not the best that can be devised. The perfect position for standing
is this: the heels should just touch the ground, but there must be no
weight on them; the feet should be close together so that the heels and
the whole of the inside line of the feet are touching; the whole weight
of the body should be got well forward _over the ball of the foot_.

Right standing is as essential to beauty as is the care of the skin, but
most women now, like most men, stand wrongly. The head is not held in
its right position by the neck muscles but hangs negligently forward, so
that eventually the beauty of the nape of the neck is destroyed. The
back muscles of the neck, thus overstretched, cause the large chest
muscle, on which the breast is supported, to sink, and then the abdomen
is forced upward and forward. Body poise is thus completely lost, the
weight of the upper trunk is left to be supported by the legs alone, and
all the conditions of unnecessary fatigue, weariness, and lack of vigour
come into existence. The whole art of standing consists in the knowledge
of body poise, and this has to be learned.

Even when we have acquired that knowledge we are still at a
disadvantage. We stand upon our feet, and under modern conditions our
feet do not have a fair chance. Sculptors know that it is possible to
get living models for other parts of the body, even though those models
rarely approximate to perfection; but for the foot the only safe method
is to copy direct from the antique. The Greek sandal was in every way
superior to our boot: it protected from injury and yet did not hinder
movement: it was easily taken off and when in use left all the top part
of the foot exposed to the light and air. Our feet, imprisoned from
early childhood in closely fitting socks and in boots that impede the
play of the toe muscles, can hardly be said to be alive. The great toe
is usually twisted towards the median line, and the joint consequently
has an ugly knotted appearance: all five toes are crushed together, and
lose their natural shape, while the last, and often the last but one, is
altogether distorted and deformed. Nor is the mischief confined to the
toes: the whole foot, so seldom exposed to the open air, has a dry,
lean, ill-nourished look. It shows itself the starved captive that it
really is, and, as our modern schools of dancing and eurhythmic have
discovered, the first condition of beauty and of graceful movement is
that the foot should be free.

The Greeks were too sensible and too well aware of the importance of
securing true body poise to deprive of its vitality that part of the
body which is the chief factor in balance, as being the main point of
contact between ourselves and the solid ground. As a result the Greek
foot was in some important respects differently shaped from ours. The
first three toes were longer and were thin and nervous like fingers; the
second toe was often the longest of the three; the fourth and fifth toes
were little used and were usually off the ground, being thus raised by a
pad of firm fleshy tissue, spreading under the foot, on which all
movement centred. The instep was not quite so high as with us, but the
tendon Achilles was finer, the heel considerably smaller and much less
used, for a Greek child was trained to dispense with it as a security
for balance and to keep the centre of gravity over the forward part of
the foot.

All these points of difference are perfectly well known to modern
artists and can be observed in most ancient statues. It rests with
ourselves, if we wish it, to recover the combination of beauty and
strength which the Greek foot possessed; and if the attempt be made it
will be found that it is not impossible even for us soon to approach
with some closeness to that desirable ideal.

Let us suppose then for a moment that our feet are sensibly shod and
that their muscles are properly exercised: let us suppose also that we
have learned enough of the principles of body poise and balance to be
able to ‘stand at ease.’ With the next order ‘Quick march!’ a new series
of difficulties will begin. Correct walking requires that the centre of
gravity of a moving weight should be kept constant over its base, and to
do this the muscles must be in a state of elastic tension. If the
diaphragm is not doing its work, the act of passing the weight of the
body from one foot to another results in an effort to feel forward for a
new base, and movement proceeds in jerks. The way to avoid this jerky
movement is to carry the whole weight forward at the same time as the
advancing foot, and this can only be done if mind and muscle work
together. The essential difference between a soldier’s march, if it be
properly performed, and the civilian’s walk, degenerating into a slouch,
is that the first calls for a definite mental effort; the second is mere
mechanical habit. As soon as men march mechanically they cease to march,
and that is the value of a regimental band: it stimulates the connection
between mind and muscle that centres round our diaphragm.

Unfortunately, very few men know where their diaphragm is, or what
purpose it serves. They think they know the position of their heart and
their liver (although experience on the drill ground shows that they are
generally wrong), but as regards their diaphragm, their ignorance is
even as the night. As they plaintively remark, ‘How should they know?
They have never been taught.’ And that is really the mischief. As
children they were laboriously instructed in the anatomy of the world:
they knew what a promontory and a peninsula were, and could tell you the
names of the principal rivers from China to Peru. But as for the anatomy
of their body they were left in almost complete darkness. Many people
cannot even spell the word diaphragm correctly; the ancient Greeks were
so convinced of the influence of the diaphragm on mental and physical
conditions that in their language the same word ‘phrenes’ stood for
diaphragm and mind. It is a fact that if the diaphragm muscles are
flabby and loose (as with undrilled men they almost invariably are), the
whole mental system becomes infected with the resultant slackness. An
alert mind is only secured by an alert body, and the call, ‘Attention!’
is, in fact, a stimulus to the abdomen muscles, which spring up
vigorously and raise the weight of the body from the centre. A
heightening of vitality and a sense of spiritual power follow as surely
as it did on the ancient hymn--‘Sursum corda’--‘We lift up our hearts
unto the Lord.’

Walking is of all forms of exercise the best for women; but it loses its
value if a woman’s gait is radically wrong. Instead of walking from the
hips, most women walk from the knees: the result is a strut, a shuffle,
a stamp, a shamble, a waddle, or a hobble, never a true walk. To walk
correctly, feet, legs and body must be under control. The feet must be
allowed to keep their proper shape and position, and while the inside
of the foot is used the toes should be planted in a straight line with
the heel, never turned outwards. Uncertain balance produces bent knees,
and one of the first results of a true walk is an increase of beauty in
all the leg muscles, an increase of strength in the knees and in the
deep-set muscles of the lower back. A woman’s knees, which nature meant
to be strong and elastic, are now, with the abdomen, the weakest part of
the female frame. There is nothing that women fear so much as a jump,
and this timidity is purely the result of knee weakness, and the
consequent inability to distribute body weight correctly. In the
interests of health, beauty and comfort, correct walking is essential
for women, and yet not one woman in a thousand would satisfy an expert.

To walk properly, then, the diaphragm must be on the alert, and a lifted
diaphragm in a state of muscular tension cannot exist side by side with
a large flabby abdomen. If a man’s body is to be beautiful, and if the
man himself is to be in perfect physical condition, the abdomen must be
reduced to the smallest possible dimensions and not overloaded with fat.
The size of the abdomen is increased by the absorption of large masses
of food, especially if they are of a gaseous and indigestible nature; it
is decreased if the amount of food taken is reduced and if the food
itself is rich in nutriment so that less bulk is required. Above all,
if the muscles of the abdomen and back are strengthened by a
carefully-designed system of exercises, they will take their share in
bearing the weight of the upper part of the body and will prevent it
from settling down, an inert mass, in the socket of the pelvis. As
things are now, our hip muscles have usually too much work to do and are
exaggeratedly developed, and an examination of any Greek athlete
statue--the Diadumenos will serve as one example of many--will show that
the Greek hip was much finer and slimmer than ours: it was more behind
the body than under it and a far greater freedom of movement was thereby
made possible.

An even more striking change will be seen in the muscles of the abdomen.
With us a young, well-proportioned man has usually a depression just
above the iliac ridge, and the iliac line descending from the hips to
the top of the legs makes only a slight inward curve. In the Greek body
we see a firm roll of flesh lying just above the iliac crest, the iliac
line running beneath it for a short distance inwards in a horizontal
direction, and then bending downwards at an obtuse or sometimes almost a
right-angle.

Of this plain fact two explanations are possible. Either the ancient
sculptors wilfully falsified their models’ contours in the interests of
ideal beauty, or else this difference between the ancient and modern
abdomen really did exist. The first explanation is highly improbable
considering the Greeks’ artistic conscience, and furthermore in their
statues of women no trace of this horizontal iliac line is ever
apparent. The only reasonable inference is that these muscles, which
with us are so undeveloped as to be invisible, were the result of the
constant physical training to which the Greek man, but not the Greek
woman, was habituated.

In an artistic sense there can be no doubt as to the excellent effect
which the ancient line produces. It gives proportion and an air of
solidity and greatly diminishes the superficial area of the abdomen. And
that it represented a real condition rather than an artistic ideal is a
very probable fact, for the statues of Greek athletes often represent
positions which for us with our weak abdomens are almost impossible of
attainment. One of the most perfect of all, Myron’s Diskobolos--the
young athlete throwing the diskos--seemed to Herbert Spencer ‘an
impossible contortion’; and after a close examination of its poise he
declared that at the next moment--if the action were continued--it would
fall upon its nose. It is quite possible that such a regrettable
accident would have been the result if our revered philosopher had
attempted to perform the movement, but the muscles of the Greek body,
properly trained and hardened, found in it no insuperable difficulty.

The movement that Myron represents is the swing back of the diskos. The
athlete has already taken his stance, and with left foot forward has
extended the diskos horizontally to the front in his right hand. Then
comes the decisive action: the whole weight of the body is transferred
to the right foot, whose toes grip the ground at full tension; the left
foot trails back, offering no resistance either to the pause or the
coming momentum; the body swings round upon the fixed pivot of the right
foot. The diskos held in the right hand comes downwards and backwards;
head and body turn with it; the next moment the body will swing round
again with a forward lift and the diskos will fly from the extended
hand. Whether the force of the throw relies entirely upon the lift of
the thighs and the swing of the body, or upon the arm alone, swinging
rapidly in a free shoulder socket, will depend upon the weight of the
diskos used. In either case it is the pause at the end of the backward
swing that the sculptor has fixed in the bronze.

Only in imagination can we see the actions by which the body has got
into this position and by which it will again recover its equilibrium.
It illustrates one of Lessing’s sayings in the _Laocoön_: ‘Of ever
changing nature the artist can use only a single moment and this from a
single point of view. And as his work is meant to be looked at not for
an instant but with long consideration, he must choose the most fruitful
moment, and the most fruitful point of view, that, to wit, which leaves
the power of imagination free.’

One of the greatest benefits that the ancient Greeks have bestowed upon
the modern world, if only we like to make use of it, is the standard of
bodily perfection they have bequeathed to us in the remains of their
sculpture. Just as Greek literature is eternally precious, not only for
itself but as a criterion of beauty, so Greek statuary supplies us with
visible proof of the power and grace to which the human body with proper
care and training can attain. Besides the Diskobolos we have an
admirable example of slender vigour in the Hermes of Praxiteles, of
athletic strength in the Hagias of Lysippus, of grave dignity in the
Charioteer of Delphi, of poise and balance in the Archers of the Ægina
pediment, and of what the Greeks considered perfect proportion in the
various copies--all unfortunately rather late and lifeless--of the
Doryphoros of Polycleitus, from which the sculptor himself worked out
his ideal canon.

Of examples of female beauty we have an equal wealth, and almost every
movement of the body may be illustrated from some extant statue. For
walking, we have the Victory of Pæonius, stepping freely forward with
her light linen robe blowing back against her girlish limbs, and the
more mature figure of the Victory of Samothrace. To some modern critics
both statues seem to be flying through the air, but the appearance of
winged motion is in reality simply due to the fact that they are walking
_correctly_, using about half the effort, and covering at each pace
nearly double the ground that a modern woman would traverse.

As types of the standing position there are the three great statues of
Venus in Paris, Rome, and Florence. The Venus de Milo, more beautiful
than any modern body with her mingled charm of grace and vigour, the
tapering waist line and fine hips giving grace, the strength and
development of the abdominal muscles promising the perfect fulfilment of
woman’s noblest task; the Venus of Cnidus, where again the line of
beauty is the line of the hips, as the goddess stands with left knee
bent resting the weight of her body on the right flank; the Venus de
Medici, less vigorous at first sight than the other two, but revealing
on a closer view a subtle complexity of sinew and muscle about the waist
line, where the modern corset leaves unsightly rolls of fat and muscles
atrophied.

For sitting, there is the group known usually as ‘The Three Fates,’ from
the east pediment of the Parthenon; the figures resting, but resting
with knowledge, the shoulders square and thorax high

[Illustration: THE VICTORY OF PAIONIOS (Olympia)]

arched, the body not allowed to collapse in an inert mass, but ready at
need to spring again at once into active life. Another example is the
crouching Venus of the Vatican, set in a position of modest grace which
a modern woman would find almost impossible of attainment. With us the
cartilages of the breast bone are practically useless and the thorax is
left unsupported; Greek women were able to move the entire thorax
sideways, a capacity we have lost, and when lowering their bodies they
kept them, as does the goddess here, with the longitudinal axis of the
torso remaining as far as possible in the vertical plane.

If we need types of more active motion, there is the Amazon from the
pediment at Epidaurus, her body perfectly poised as her thigh muscles
press the horse’s side; or the Athena of the Æginetan pediment showing
us how with proper control of the muscles it is possible to turn the
body through three-quarters of a circle without moving the feet; and the
exquisite bronze Fortune at Naples, a perfect example of muscular
balance--‘drawn up on the extreme points of her toes, she looks as
though hovering over the world, light as thistledown, and yet in her
tense immobility the very essence of Force.’

It has often been said that the marvellous achievements of Greek
sculptors were a result of their daily opportunities of seeing the nude
form; but nudity alone does not suffice. The greatest sculptor of our
time tried the experiment of studying his nude models as they walked to
and fro at their ease in his great room at the Hotel Biron. We saw the
result: critics accused him of a love for the grotesque and the uncouth,
while Rodin himself was reduced to the theory that for the artist
nothing is ugly. The truth is that the naked body of a modern grown man
is not beautiful, and therefore a faithful transcription such as Rodin
gives cannot be beautiful. But the Greek models were beautiful, because
beauty of body had been developed by a system of gymnastics universally
applied.

With their statues to guide us, it will be our own fault if we do not
again reach the standard of physical perfection which the Greeks
attained; for it is a curious and inspiriting fact that the human form
almost immediately responds to any opportunity that is given it, and
that with each child the race begins anew. What we need is a national
training, carefully planned by experts and adapted alike for children,
youths and grown men. And with it we need a fuller realization of the
duty that every one owes to himself, and a deeper determination to make
each part of our body as beautiful as nature allows. Listen to the words
of the wisest of philosophers:

‘It is a shameful thing to grow old in neglect, without having realized
to the utmost such strength and beauty as your body is capable of.
Strength and beauty will not come of themselves: the man who takes no
care for them will never possess them.’




5

Galen’s Treatise on the Small Ball


Ball games, as we know from Homer, were from the earliest times popular
among the Greeks, being especially esteemed for the grace of body which
the act of throwing and catching gives. The central incident of the
_Odyssey_ is connected with such a game, for it was a lost ball that
roused Odysseus from his sleep in the bush and led to his discovery by
Nausicaa. At Athens in the fifth century they were, for men, rather
overshadowed by the gymnastic exercises already described, but youths
found in them a favourite diversion, and the poet Sophocles in his
tragedy of the _Nausicaa_ won particular praise in the title-rôle--a
non-speaking part--because of his dexterous skill. Those who played, as
Athenæus tells us, always paid great attention to elegance of attitude,
and he quotes from the comic poet Demoxenus:

    ‘A youth I saw was playing ball,
     Seventeen years of age and tall;
     From Cos he came, and well I wot
     The gods look kindly on that spot.
     For when he took the ball or threw it,
     So pleased were all of us to view it,
     We all cried out; so great his grace
     Such frank good humour in his face,
     That every time he spoke or moved,
     All felt as if that youth they loved.
     Sure ne’er before had these eyes seen,
     Nor ever since, so fair a mien:
     Had I stayed long, most sad my plight
     Had been, to lose my wits outright,
     And even now the recollection
     Disturbs my senses’ calm reflection.’

Of the actual details of these ball games we have very few accounts in
literature or representations in art. One of the most recent
archæological discoveries has, however, thrown light on one point. Up
till lately we had no instance of implements being used; but in
February, 1922, while the foundations of a shop were being constructed
at Athens, sections of the Themistoclean circuit wall were brought to
light. Built into them were three quadrangular bases of Pentelic marble
with sculptured reliefs on their sides and one of these reliefs shows
clearly the details of a hockey match. The ball is on the ground in the
exact middle: two youths with sticks are engaged in a ‘bully’ for it
precisely in the modern fashion: on either side of them stand two other
pairs of youths, with sticks, representing, it may be presumed, the rest
of the two competing teams.

Another of the six reliefs, equally interesting, shows probably the
beginning of the most popular and the most energetic of all forms of
ball games, the Phæninda, played with a small hard ball stuffed with
hair, the Harpastum. The game bore some resemblance to our Rugby, except
that the ball was always thrown and never kicked. The scene on the
relief represents a throw-in from the touchline; one youth is preparing
to throw, the rest are waiting either to seize the ball in the air or to
tackle the next possessor. A passage from the comedian Antiphanes,
quoted by Athenæus (Bk. I, ch. 26), gives a lively picture:

    ‘The player takes the ball elate,
     And gives it safely to his mate,
     Avoids the blows of the other side
     And shouts to see them hitting wide.
     List to the cries, “Hit here,” “hit here,”
     “Too far,” “too high,” “that is not fair”--
     See every man with ardour burns
     To make good strokes and quick returns.’

Another sort of game, less rough in character and more akin to our
lacrosse, was possibly played with a lighter feather stuffed ball, in
Greek, _sphaira_, the Latin _follis_. Here, tackling was not allowed,
and the ball was thrown from hand to hand while the players were running
at full speed.

In playing with the _harpastum_ or the _follis_ the main object was to
drive your opponents to retreat behind their base line, and in both
styles there

[Illustration: THE THROW-IN AT THE SMALL BALL GAME (Athens)]

was a good deal of running. The third type of game, played with the
_trigon_, required less exertion. The players here were only three in
number, and stood at the three-corners of a triangle, throwing balls
quickly one at the other: both hands were used and caddies supplied the
players with missiles.

All three games were Greek inventions; but they reached the height of
their popularity under the Roman Empire. Seneca, writing on the brevity
of mortal life, complains that there are many people who have no other
occupation but to play ball from morning till night. Martial frequently
mentions the dusty _harpastum_, the warming _trigon_, and the feathered
_follis_, and in one of his epigrams praises a young student for taking
his exercise in the form of a long run rather than waste his time on the
‘busy idleness’ of a ball game. To this period also belongs the one
serious account that we have in Greek of any game, Galen’s treatise on
exercise with the small ball.

Claudius Galenus, born at Pergamum in the reign of Hadrian, 131 A.D., is
one of the most notable figures of a notable age. Courtier-physician,
scholar-diplomat, the friend of princes and the trainer of gladiators,
he recalls the versatility of the great sophists of the fifth century
B.C., and he equals them in the breadth and profundity of his knowledge.
His writings embrace four distinct fields: medicine in all its aspects,
philosophy, rhetoric, and grammatical logic; and although he is best
known as a physician his commentaries on Hippocrates may claim to be the
beginning of truly scientific scholarship.

His long life was spent in acquiring and imparting knowledge. A thorough
education, conducted under his father’s eye, rendered him apt for every
art. His wealth enabled him to travel and study at his leisure, and in
early manhood he made the ‘grand tour’ of the ancient world, living for
a time at Smyrna, Alexandria, and Rome before he returned to his native
town. We have now 118 genuine extant works from his pen, which
translated from the Greek into Arabic and thence again into Latin, were
the chief text-books in all the mediæval universities. Editions were
innumerable, and even to-day the name of Galen occupies more than fifty
pages in the British Museum Catalogue. In a production so immense we
must not expect consummate grace of language, but his own maxim, ‘the
first merit of style is clearness’ is well exemplified in the ‘Small
ball,’ which is short enough to be translated here in its entirety.

‘How great an advantage for health gymnastic exercises are
and what an important part they play in questions of diet has been
sufficiently explained by the best of our ancient philosophers and
physicians. But how superior to all other exercise is the use of the
small ball has never been adequately set forth by any of my
predecessors. It is only right then for me to put forward my ideas for
your criticism, Epigenes, since you have the very best practical
experience of the athletic art, in the further hope that they may be
useful also to all those to whom you communicate your knowledge.

‘The best forms of gymnastic, I think, are those which are
able not only to work the body but also to delight the mind. Those men
were true philosophers who invented coursing and the other varieties of
the chase, tempering the labour they involve with pleasure, exultation
and rivalry, and they had an accurate knowledge of human nature. So
powerful an effect has mental emotion upon the stuff of which we are
made that many people have been cured of ailments merely by the effect
of joy, while many others have fallen ill from sorrow. Indeed, of all
the affections that are rooted in the body none is strong enough to
master those others that have the mind for their sphere. So it is wrong
to neglect the character of our mental emotions; we ought for every
reason to give more attention to them than to the condition of our body,
especially as the mind is more important than the body can be. This care
is the common function of all gymnastic exercises that have an element
of pleasure in them, but there are other special points in small ball
play which I will now describe.

‘Firstly, it is easy. If you consider what time and trouble
all the business of hunting involves, especially coursing, you will
clearly see that no one who is engaged in public service or who follows
an art or trade can take part in these forms of exercise; they require
abundant wealth and a person who enjoys considerable leisure. But ball
play is different. It is so democratic that even the poorest can spare
the necessary trouble. It needs no nets, nor weapons, nor horses, nor
hounds: all it requires is one small ball. Moreover, it suits itself so
well to a man’s other pursuits, that it does not compel him to neglect
any of them for its sake. What could be easier than a sport which allows
any form of human occupation or condition? As regards the exercise that
hunting gives, it is out of our power to enjoy it easily: it requires
money to provide an elaborate equipment and freedom from occupation to
wait for a suitable opportunity. But with ball play even the poorest
have no difficulty in getting the implements; it will wait for us, and
quite busy people find opportunity to enjoy it. Its accessibility is a
very great advantage.

‘If you consider the effect and nature of each of the other
kinds of exercise, you will see clearly that ball play is the most
satisfactory of them all. You will find that the others are either over
violent or not violent enough; that they give disproportionate exercise
to the lower or to the upper part of the body or to one part at the
expense of the others; the loins, the head, the arms, the chest.
Something which keeps all parts of the body moving alike and admits
either of the most violent strain or the gentlest relaxation, this can
be found in no exercise except the small ball. The game can be sharp or
slow, soft or violent just according to your own inclination, as your
body seems to need it. You can exercise all parts of the body at the
same time, if that appears best, or if it should seem preferable, some
parts rather than others. When the players form sides and try to stop
their opponents midway and rob them of the ball, the exercise is very
severe and violent. You often have to grip your man in wrestling fashion
or else collar him; the latter method giving plenty of work for head and
neck, the former exercising ribs, chest and stomach, as you fasten your
own grip or escape from your opponent’s. Sometimes you make your mark,
sometimes you use one of the holds that are taught in the wrestling
schools; and this means a very considerable strain on the loins and the
legs. And so for this sport a man must be a strong runner: he will have
to swerve and leap sideways as well as run straight forward and this is
hard exercise for the legs. Indeed, to speak the truth, it is the only
sport that properly exercises the legs in all their parts. When you run
forward one set of sinews and muscles comes into play; when you jump
backwards others have more work to do, and others again when you change
direction sideways. In track-running on the contrary, only one sort of
movement is necessary and the exercise is unequal, not affecting all
parts of the legs alike.

‘And as with the legs so also with the arms, the exercise is
very fairly apportioned, for the players are accustomed to catch the
ball in every kind of attitude. This variety of attitude inevitably
exercises different muscles at different times in different degrees of
intensity. Every muscle has its turn of work and an equal share of rest:
they are now active, now quiescent; none remains altogether idle, none
is overcome with weariness by working alone. As for the training that
the eye receives you may realize this by remembering that unless a man
anticipates exactly the flight of the ball and its direction, he must
inevitably fail to make his catch. Moreover, the wits are sharpened by
the game: you have to think carefully how best to stop your opponent,
and not drop the ball yourself. Thought by itself makes a man thin; but
when it is combined with exercise and the pleasant rivalry of a sport it
is of the very greatest benefit. The body improves in health, the mind
is turned to practical knowledge. When exercise can render service both
to body and mind, each in its own special form of excellence, it is a
blessing indeed.

[Illustration: A HOCKEY MATCH (Statue base discovered at Athens,
1922)]

‘It is easy too to see that ball games can give men practice
in two most important forms of training, those two which the royal
ordinance of law bids our generals most sedulously to pursue. The
functions of a good general are these: to attack at the proper time and
to seize quickly each opportunity for action: to secure the property of
the enemy either by force or by an unexpected assault, and to keep safe
any possessions already acquired. In short, a general should be an
expert guardian and an expert thief: that is the sum of his trade.

‘Now, can any exercise but ball games train a man so well
how to keep what he has got, to recover what he has lost, and to
anticipate his opponent’s plans? I should be surprised, if you could
tell me of one. Most forms of exercise have the opposite effect: they
make men lazy, slow-witted and fond of sleep. The competitions of the
wrestling school tend to make people corpulent rather than to train them
in virtue. Many wrestlers become so fat that they have difficulty in
breathing, and such folk could never be good generals in time of war or
good administrators either in a royal or a republican state: you might
sooner trust pigs than them.

‘Perhaps you may think that I approve of running and any
other form of exercise that reduces fat. I do not. I disapprove of
excess in all matters, and I think that every art should aim at
symmetry. If a thing lacks measure, it is in so far bad. So I cannot
approve of track athletics, for they reduce a man’s physical condition
and give him no training in manliness. Victory does not come to those
who run quickly but to those who are able to hold their own in a close
fight, and the Spartans owed their greatness not to their speed of foot
but to their stubborn courage. Even if you considered it purely on
grounds of health, a sport is not healthy in so far as it exercises the
parts of the body unequally. Inevitably, some parts are overstrained,
some left quite idle. Neither of these conditions are good: both foster
the seeds of illness and produce a weak state of health.

‘The exercise I approve of most is one that can give health
of body, symmetry of limbs and excellence of mind: and all these virtues
are found in the small ball. It can benefit the mind in all kinds of
ways; it exercises every part of the body alike--and this is of the
greatest importance for health--for it produces a regular state of
constitution; and it does not lead either to undue corpulence or
excessive thinness: it is competent to perform such acts as require
strength, it is suitable also for those that need quickness.

‘Now if we consider ball games in their most violent form
they are inferior in no respect to any sort of athletics. But we must
also look at them in their milder aspect, for sometimes we need gentle
exercise. We may be either too old or not old enough to stand a severe
strain; we may wish to relax our efforts or be recovering from illness.
I think that in this respect also the small ball has a great advantage,
for no game is quite so gentle, if you wish to take it gently. Should
you need moderate exercise and desire to avoid excess, you will
sometimes step softly forward, sometimes stand quite still: you need not
make any violent effort and you can add to the effect by a warm bath or
a gentle rub down with oil. Of all exercise this is the most gentle: it
is most suitable for one who needs useful recreation, it can revive
failing strength, it is most suitable for old and young alike. There
are, however, some stronger sorts of exercise which can be obtained by
the use of the small ball, although they are milder than the most
intense form of the game, and these must now be considered if we really
wish to treat the subject completely. If ever some unavoidable task,
such as often falls to many a man’s lot, has caused an excessive strain
to all the upper or all the lower parts of the body, or to the arms
alone or to the feet, by the help of the small ball you can rest those
parts that have been overstrained and give the same amount of exercise
to those other parts that were then left quite idle. To stand a fair
distance apart and throw the ball vigorously, without using the legs
hardly at all, rests the lower limbs and gives a somewhat violent
exercise to the upper parts of the body. On the other hand, if you run
most of the way at a good speed keeping a wide distance and seldom throw
the ball, the lower limbs have more work to do. The quickness of action
and the speed required, involve no great muscular strain but they
exercise the lungs, while the vigorous effort, as you grasp the ball and
catch and throw it, although it needs no speed of foot, yet braces and
strengthens the body. If the ball is thrown both vigorously and at full
speed there will be a considerable strain on the body and on the lungs:
it will be indeed the most violent form of exercise possible. But how
far this strain should be relaxed or intensified, as circumstances
require, it is impossible to set down in writing--exact quantities
should never be stated; in actual practice it is easy enough to discover
the proper limit and to instruct others. On actual experience all
depends. The quality of a thing is useless if it is spoilt by a wrong
quantity, and this will be the business of your trainer, who will act as
guide in all matters of exercise.

‘But I must bring my subject to an end. In addition to all
the other advantages, which, as I have said, the small ball possesses,
there is one more which I should not like to omit. It is free from all
the risks to which most other athletic exercises are liable. Before
to-day many a man has died of a broken blood-vessel after a violent
race: and so also the practice of loud and furious shouting, if pursued
without intermission for some time, has often proved the cause of very
serious mischief. Continuous horse-riding ruptures the parts about the
kidneys and often injures the chest, besides in some cases doing harm to
the generative organs. I say nothing of the mistakes that horses make,
whereby frequently their riders have been unseated and killed on the
spot. Many men have also been hurt while jumping, or throwing the
discus, or turning somersaults. As for the frequenters of the wrestling
school, what need I say of them? They are all scarred more shamefully
than the Curse-hags of whom Homer tells us. The great poet describes
them: “Lame and wrinkled and with eyes askance.” And so with the
wrestling master’s pupils, you will find them lame, distorted, battered,
and maimed in some part at least of their body. Since then, in addition
to the other advantages, this freedom from danger is the particular
attribute of small ball games, they must be regarded as the best of all
inventions, so far as actual utility is concerned.’

There are many striking points in the little essay; the importance that
Galen assigns to athletics as part of military training; his insistence
on the moral and intellectual virtue of games and their value in
producing a cheerful frame of mind; his depreciation, on social and
physical grounds, of track-running. It is written obviously from the
standpoint of a physician and not of an athlete or a sportsman. The
athlete might well wish for fuller details of the three different games
of ‘harpastum,’ ‘trigon,’ and ‘follis,’ which are here mentioned rather
than described. The sportsman would probably object to the strictures on
hunting and riding, and reply that a spice of danger gives an additional
zest to exercise. It is noticeable also that in discussing the moral
virtue of games Galen makes no mention of that which we consider their
most important feature, the ‘team-spirit,’ the working not for yourself
but for your side.

Criticisms such as these, however, are ungracious. The ‘small ball’ is a
delightful example of the work of a great practical genius who devoted
his whole life to the service of his fellow-men. In spirit, moreover,
and in method it follows the true Greek tradition, and regards athletics
not as a mere diversion but as the best practical preparation for the
strenuous business of life.




SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY


     _E. N. Gardiner_: Greek Athletic Sports and Festivals. Macmillan,
     1910.

     _K. J. Freeman_: Schools of Hellas. Macmillan, 1907.

     _W. W. Hyde_: Olympic Victor Monuments. Washington, U.S.A., 1921.

     _Walter Pater_: Greek Studies. Macmillan, 1895.

     _J. B. Bury_: The Nemean Odes of Pindar. Macmillan, 1891.

     _E. Bruecke_: The Human Figure. Grevel, 1900.

     _D. Watts_: The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal. Heinemann, 1914.

     _E. Jaques-Dalcroze_: Rhythm, Music and Education. Chatto and
     Windus, 1921.



FOOTNOTES:

[A] _The Arts in Greece._ By F. A. Wright. Longmans, 1923.

[B] E. Myers: _Odes of Pindar_.








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