There are numerous technical terms of wrestling and the pankration known to us only from scholiasts and lexicographers. These are of very doubtful interpretation and of no practical importance, and it is therefore unnecessary to discuss them here.[[767]]
CHAPTER XXI
THE HIPPODROME
Chariot and horse races were so important a part of most Greek festivals that, though we cannot strictly describe them as athletics, a brief account of the hippodrome and the events which took place there will not be out of place.
Hippodromes must have abounded in all parts of Greece which offered any facilities for riding or driving. The fifth-century inscription of the Spartan Damonon[[768]] enumerates sixty-eight victories won by himself and his son in the chariot-race and the horse-race at no less than eight distinct festivals, all of them in Laconia or in the immediate neighbourhood. The plains of Argos, Athens, Euboea, and Thessaly were famed for their breeds of horses, while the passionate devotion of the Sicilian and Italian Greeks to horse-racing is proved by the constant occurrence of the racing-chariot or the race-horse on the coins of various cities from the beginning of the fifth century onwards.[[769]]
Yet of all the hippodromes which must have existed hardly a trace is left, and we are forced to fall back on the scattered notices of Pausanias and other writers. The fact is that the Greek hippodrome as a rule was a very simple affair, hardly more elaborate than the course selected on the plains of Troy for the funeral games of Patroclus or the course of a local race meeting to-day. All that was necessary was a fairly smooth open plain, if possible, in a valley or at the foot of some hill, the slopes of which formed a natural stand for spectators.
At either end of the track a pillar was erected to mark the place where chariots and horses turned. These pillars are generally represented on coins and vases as Ionic or Doric columns; sometimes, it appears, movable pillars[[770]] were used, perhaps for safety, like the posts used in modern driving competitions. Occasionally we see a pillar which has been knocked over by a chariot.[[771]] But usually the pillars were fixed, and then it was the chariot that suffered. There is not a particle of evidence for the existence in any Greek hippodrome of the low wall (spina) which ran down the middle of the course between the pillars in the Roman circus, though this wall regularly appears in the fanciful plans of the hippodrome which adorn our works of reference. There were no stone seats, and as a rule no permanent structures of any kind.[[772]] Given the ground, the necessary arrangements for the start or the turn could be readily made in a few days whenever required. In the intervals between one festival and another the ground might be let out for pasturage, as it was at Delos.
The only hippodrome of which any remains exist, almost the only one which can be located, is that mentioned by Pausanias on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia.[[773]] It is 240 metres long by 105 broad. Possibly the actual course was exactly a stade in length. It seems likely that the usual course was two stades long, and that from this circumstance the four-stades foot-race was called the “horse-race” (hippios).[[774]]
The hippodrome at Olympia was larger and more elaborate than the ordinary hippodrome. Unfortunately, the floods of the Alpheus and other catastrophes have removed every trace of its remains, and we must be content with what we learn from Pausanias and other writers.[[775]] The hippodrome lay between the stadium and the river. On its north side it was bounded by the southern embankment of the stadium, and farther east by a projecting spur of Mount Cronius. To the south a long embankment protected it from the floods of the Alpheus. The western end was formed by the portico of Agnaptus, but we do not know whether this portico extended along the whole end. Here presumably was the official entrance; there was another entrance at the south-east end of the course through the embankment.
The dimensions of the hippodrome are given in a manuscript discovered in the old Seraglio at Constantinople.[[776]] The circuit of the course was 8 stades (1538·16 m.), or nearly a mile. The width was 1 stade 4 plethra (320·45 m.), and the length of the sides was 3 stades 1 plethron (608·85 m.). It is not clear how the circuit is measured, but the fact that twice the long side + the short side gives the desired result suggests that half the short sides only are counted, and that 1 stade 4 plethra is the outside measurement, 5 plethra the inside measurement. The actual course traversed by the horses measured from pillar to pillar and back was, however, only 6 stades (1153·62 m.).
