Athletics
The coming of Apollo and his Dorians meant also a great impetus to the cult of athletics in Greece. The boxers and the bull-fighters of Cnossos prove that athletics were already at home on Greek soil before the Northerners came, and this fact alone should prove that the earlier civilisation was not Asiatic, not at any rate Semitic. But the Achæans and Dorians were also devoted to manly sport. With them it seems to have had from the first a religious significance, especially in connection with funerals and ancestor-worship. In the Iliad the funeral of Patroclus is honoured with sports at his tomb. The programme of this early meeting was an elaborate one. It might be described in modern technical style somewhat as follows:
Chariot Race. First Prize: A blameless, accomplished woman and a tripod with handles. Second Prize: A brood mare. Third Prize: A new kettle. Fourth Prize: Two talents of gold. Fifth Prize: A new two-handled pan.
Antilochus won the toss and took the inner station. In the first lap there was little in it, but on rounding the turn Eumelus’ team pushed to the front, with Diomede lying second, close up. Phœbus Apollo knocked the whip out of Diomede’s hand, whereupon Pallas Athene responded by breaking the leader’s yoke, the driver being seriously injured. Result: Diomede 1, Antilochus 2, Menelaus 3, Meriones 4, Eumelus 0. The fifth prize was awarded to Nestor as the oldest member present. Menelaus’ objection to Antilochus on the score of dangerous driving was amicably settled.
Boxing Match. Prize: A six-year-old mule. Consolation Prize: A two-handled cup.
Plate XVII. THE “STRANGFORD APOLLO”
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Epeius and Euryalus were the only entrants. Epeius was an early winner, finding the Theban champion’s jaw in the first round and knocking him out like a fish out of water.
Wrestling Match. Prize: A large tripod, value twelve oxen. Consolation Prize: A clever woman, value four oxen.
Of the two wrestlers Ajax showed superior strength, but Odysseus was more than his match in science. This seems to have been a regular rough-and-tumble, both champions being pinched black and blue; there was nothing to choose between them, and after a ding-dong struggle the match was declared a draw.
Foot-race. First Prize: Handsome silver punch-bowl of Sidonian make. Second Prize: Fat ox. Third Prize: Half a talent of gold.
Odysseus, none the worse for his recent encounter, entered in a field of three. Ajax son of Oileus was first off the mark, closely followed by Odysseus. The latter, unable to get on terms with his speedier rival, prayed to Pallas Athene for help. On nearing the prizes Ajax fell, and Odysseus was declared the winner. The objection lodged by Ajax on the ground of celestial interference was dismissed with ridicule.
Sham Duel. Prize: The armour of Sarpedon.
Diomede and Telamonian Ajax were so evenly matched that this event also was pronounced a draw.
Putting the Weight. Prize: A lump of natural iron.
Polypoetes won this event with a record put, amid general enthusiasm.
Archery. First Prize: Ten double axes. Second Prize: Ten single axes.
The mark was a dove tied to a mast. Teucer won the toss and took first shot, missing his bird, but cutting the string by which it was attached. Thereupon Meriones snatched the bow, and, vowing a hecatomb to Apollo, pierced the dove to the heart, thus proving his title to the first prize.
Javelin-throwing. First Prize: Ornamental cauldron, value one ox. Second Prize: Javelin.
Agamemnon walked over.
Even in the account of these games it seems very probable that there has been a process of accumulation in which later bards have added events according to their fancy. Some of the later encounters are described with much less vigour and skill than the earlier. It is, however, important to notice that from the very first Greek athletics were part of religion. They were undertaken in a serious, devotional spirit, to honour some god or defunct hero. It was the same with poetry. Epic was, of course, devoted to the gods and heroes. The early lyric was also in the main devotional, whatever its subject might be. We have seen Hesiod carrying his poetic talents to a contest in song arranged to honour the funeral of
Amphidamas. Tragedy, it is now said, developed out of funeral choruses. It appears also that the great games of Delphi—the Pythian Games—developed from a musical contest. The histories of Herodotus are said to have been declaimed at the Olympic Games, and orators would in later times make them the occasion for Panhellenic orations. There was no divorce between intellect and muscle among the Greeks. Each was a necessary part of areté, the quality of the perfect man. Sport-loving people as we are, there is nothing in all literature so hard for us to comprehend as the work of Pindar, the Bœotian poet of the early fifth century. His professional business was only the writing of the Epinikia, songs and music in celebration of athletic contests at the great games, Pythian, Nemean, Isthmian, and Olympic. But the spirit in which he approaches his task is that of a man writing about the most solemn and important achievements in the world. He assumes that success in a boys’ wrestling match or a mule-race is an episode in the history of the successful athlete’s country, and does not find it inappropriate to speak of the gods and heroes in the same breath. “Far and wide shineth the glory of the Olympian Games, the glory that is won in the races of Pelops, where swiftness of foot contends, and feats of strength, hardy in labour. All his life long the victor shall bask in the glory of song for his prize. Daily continued blessedness is the supreme good for every man.” We cannot understand the devotional spirit of Pindar unless we realise that the Greeks dedicated their bodily strength and grace to the honour and service of heaven. The Hebrew praised Jehovah in dance and song; the Greek honoured Zeus and Apollo with wrestling and races and the beauty of trained bodies.
The Olympian Games[21] had originally belonged to the service of local heroes, Œnomaus and Pelops, but as they gained in popularity Father Zeus took them under his ægis. Apollo was said to have outrun Hermes in a race there and to
Plate Plate 18.—Head of Apollo, from the Western Pediment, Olympia.
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have beaten Ares in boxing. The traditional date for the founding of the festival was 776 B.C., and that became the era from which all Greek dates were subsequently settled. But the actual date has no special significance: in origin the games were much older, and their great importance begins a good deal later—begins, in fact, with the real hegemony of Sparta. Though the games were not in Spartan territory it was undoubtedly from Spartan support that their importance arises.
At first the only contest was a foot-race, but various events were added until at last five days were necessary for the whole meeting. The most important contests were the following: (1) Short foot-race; (2) double course; (3) long foot-race; (4) wrestling; (5) pentathlon, consisting of five feats, long jump, foot-race, quoit-throwing, javelin-throwing, wrestling; (6) boxing; (7) four-horse chariot-race; (8) pancration, a mixture of boxing and wrestling—in fact, a combat between two naked unarmed men, with scarcely any rules; (9) horse-race; (10) hoplite-race for soldiers in full armour. Besides these there were six special events for boys and various other contests, such as mule-races and trotting races, which did not become permanent fixtures. There was a regular competition for heralds and trumpeters.
Sacrifice and ritual accompanied every stage of the proceedings. Before the meeting, which took place every four years, ambassadors went from city to city proclaiming a Sacred Truce. All people who could prove Greek nationality were invited. From its situation Olympia naturally attracted support from the flourishing communities of Sicily and South Italy. Whether they sent competitors or not, most of the States would send embassies to the festival, and a great point was made of their lavish equipment. The judges were chosen by lot from the citizens of Elis, who managed the contest; they received a ten months’ course of instruction beforehand in the duties of their office. All the competitors had to undergo a strict examination as to their qualifications, and to take an oath on the altar of Zeus that they would compete fairly and that they had been in training for the previous ten months. The only prize was a crown of wild olive, cut from a certain tree of special sanctity, but the victor’s name and country were proclaimed to the assembled multitude and the highest honours awaited him on his return. He was welcomed in procession, led in through a breach specially made in the wall of his city, and granted immunities from taxation, or, as at Athens, free meals in the Presidential House for all his life. The chariot-races were especially the object of ambition and the opportunity for display to the wealthy. Tyrants of Syracuse competed in them, but the brilliant Athenian Alcibiades outstripped all competitors by sending in no fewer than seven teams.
Although the prize was but a spiritual one, we cannot say that the contests were always conducted in what we should call a spirit of pure amateur sport. Perhaps the incentive to trickery was excessively great. Anyhow, there stood at Olympia an ominous row of statues dedicated to Zeus which had been set up as fines by athletes guilty of discreditable practices, generally of the kind we associate with the “pulling” of horses. But when it is considered that the Olympian Games continued in an almost unbroken series for twelve centuries—that is, until the Emperor Theodosius abolished them in A.D. 393—the list of such irregularities is not unduly long.
In the very minute account of Olympia which we owe to the traveller Pausanias there are some curious and interesting anecdotes of the games. For example, he saw the statue of the boy Pisirodus, who was brought to the Olympian Games by his mother disguised as a trainer, because no women were allowed to be present. “They say that Diagoras came with his sons Acusilaus and Damagetus to Olympia, and when the young men had won their prizes they carried their father through the assembly, while the people pelted him with flowers and called him happy in his children.” Then there is Timanthes, the strong man, who won the pancration. “He had ceased practising as an athlete, but still he continued to test his strength by bending a mighty bow every day. Well, he went away from home, and while he was away his practice with the bow was discontinued. But when he came back and could no longer bend his bow he lit a fire and flung himself on the flames.” There is the plough-boy Glaucus, whose father noticed him one day fitting the ploughshare into his plough with his fist instead of a hammer. His father thereupon took him to Olympia to box, but as he had no skill in boxing he was badly punished and almost beaten. Suddenly his father called out, “Give him the plough-hammer, my boy!” Whereupon he knocked his adversary out, won the prize, and became a famous pugilist. “The mare of the Corinthian Phidolas was named Aura; at the start she happened to throw her rider, but continuing, nevertheless, to race in due form, she rounded the turning-post, and on hearing the trumpet quickened her pace, reached the umpires first, knew that she had won, and stopped.”
That there was a good deal of extravagance in the cult of athletes was not likely to escape the critical eye of a people who so detested extravagance in any form. The outspoken Euripides had a violent tirade against athletes in his satyric drama Autolycus. “It is folly,” he says, “for the Greeks to make a great gathering to see useless creatures like these, whose god is in their belly. What good does a man do to his city by winning a prize for wrestling or speed or quoit-heaving or jaw-smiting? Will they fight the enemy with quoits? Will they drive the enemy out of their country without spears by kicking? No one plays antics like these when he stands near the steel. Garlands of leaves should be for the wise and good, for the just and sober statesman who guides his city best, for the man who with his words averts evil deeds, keeping battle and civil strife away. Those are the real boons for every city and all the Greeks.” Twenty-three centuries stand between this and “The flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf at the goal.” I fear that Euripides got no more attention than Mr. Kipling.
As with us, professionalism grew upon them in later days. The old ideals of bodily grace and all-round excellence were deserted. In their place the boxing and pancration encouraged a coarse type of heavy-weight bruiser. The training and meals of the athletes became a by-word in vegetarian Greece, and romantic sporting reporters enlarged upon the gastronomic feats of the famous athletes.
Myron’s “Discobolus,” showing the head turned the wrong way
Athleticism, however, gave one thing to the Greeks that we lack. It was from the models in the palæstra and the stadium that the sculptors of Greece drew their inspiration. It was of course an immense benefit to that art to be able to see the stripped body at exercise in the sunlight, and that, coupled with the natural Greek sense of form, is the secret of the unchallenged supremacy of Greek sculpture. Perfect anatomy of the body was achieved even before the face could be properly rendered. The nude male figure was the favourite theme of fifth-century art, and extraordinary perfection was reached by Myron and Polycleitus. Myron’s “Discobolus” is, of course, one of the best known of ancient statues. Myron, an Athenian artist, is an elder contemporary of Pheidias, and therefore belongs to the earlier stages of the great period. But he had already begun to feel the artist’s sense of mastery over his material, and he delighted in rather strained poses, therein starting a tendency for sculpture which would surely have led to a premature
| FIG. 1. THE “DISCOBOLUS” OF MYRON | FIG. 2. THE “DIADUMENUS” OF POLYCLEITUS |
Plate XIX
decadence if it had not been for the extraordinary genius of the inspired Pheidias. My illustration gives one of many modern examples of this much-copied statue.[22] But it is leagues removed from the original bronze. The “Discobolus” is an instantaneous photograph of an athlete just poising the heavy disk and preparing to throw. In another moment he will turn right-about on the pivot of his right foot. There are few statues of the fifth century which thus select an instant out of a series of movements. For athlete statues two types stand pre-eminent. One is the athlete[23] just fastening the diadem upon his victorious brow (“Diadumenus”), a type due to Polycleitus, whose examples of figure-drawing were taken even by the Greeks as “classics”—that is, as models of perfection in the direction attempted. His “Doryphorus”[24] was known as “the Canon,” as being a model of proportion, on which subject Polycleitus wrote a treatise. Unfortunately we are compelled here again to rely upon inferior marble copies of an original in bronze, copies which probably do injustice to their model in exaggerating its heaviness and muscularity. The other fine athletic type is that of the “Apoxyomenus,” the athlete engaged with the strigil in scraping off the oil with which all athletes, and especially wrestlers, were anointed.[25] Of all statues dealing with athletics one of the most impressive is the bronze charioteer lately discovered by the French at Delphi. There is a wonderful calm and dignity about the long-robed figure.[26]
To be naked and unashamed was one of the glories of the cultivated Greek. It astonished (and still shocks) the barbarian. When Agesilaus, the Spartan king, was fighting on Persian soil he caused his Oriental captives to be exhibited naked to his men, in order that they might have no more terror of the great king’s myriads. Alone among civilised peoples of the earth the ancient Greek dared to strip his body to the sun, and this too, as Thucydides witnesseth, came from the manly city. “The Lacedæmonians,” he says, “were the first to use simple raiment of the present style, and in other respects were the first to adopt a similar scale of living for rich and poor. They were the first to strip and undress in public, for anointing with oil after exercise. Originally the athletes used to wear loin-cloths about their middles even at the Olympic Games, and that practice has not long been discontinued” (actually in 720 B.C.). “Even now some of the barbarians, especially the Asiatics, continue to wear clothes at contests of boxing and wrestling. One might point to several other analogies between the customs of ancient Greece and modern barbarism.” With female nudity the case is different. Although the girls of Sparta used to strip for their gymnastic exercises, that was a notorious Spartan idiosyncrasy. It is only under foreign influence and in the later periods that feminine nudity is exhibited in Greek art. Hear Plato on the subject: Socrates has been led by the logic of his argument into the assertion that the women of the Ideal Republic ought to be educated just like the men, to go through the semi-military training of the wrestling school and the gymnasium along with them. The only objection he can see to such a course is that the public exercises of women would appear ridiculous to the Athenians of his day. That objection he dismisses as follows:
“Well, then,” says Socrates, “as we have begun the argument we must take the rough with the smooth, and we must beg the wits to leave their usual trade and be serious. They must remember that it is not very long since it seemed to the Greeks ugly and ridiculous that men should appear naked, as it does now to most of the barbarians. And when the Cretans first, and after them the Lacedæmonians, began their stripped exercises the wits of the day had occasion to make fun of such things. Don’t you suppose they did?”
“I do indeed.”
“But when experience showed that it was better to strip than to cover the body, what the eye thought ridiculous was
| FIG. 1. THE “DORYPHORUS” OF POLYCLEITUS | FIG. 2. THE “APOXYOMENUS” |
Plate XX
overwhelmed by what logic declared to be best, and it became apparent that it is only a fool who thinks anything ridiculous, except what is evil.”