The gymnasium and palaestra at Olympia[[828]] (Fig. [185]), situated on the left bank of the Cladeus to the north-west of the Altis, are far more symmetrical in plan and more elaborate than those at Delphi. The palaestra appears to be somewhat older than the gymnasium, and was built in the third century B.C. It is a building 66 metres square enclosing an open court 41 metres square, surrounded by a colonnade of Doric columns on which numerous rooms open. There are two entrances at the corners of the southern wall, and a third door in the middle of the northern wall gives access to the gymnasium proper. The two chief entrances consist of pillared vestibules leading into small anterooms which open on to the covered colonnade. In the eastern anteroom are remains of a hearth or altar. Between the two anterooms is a long narrow room or gallery only separated from the colonnade by a row of pillars, in which we may certainly recognize the apodyterion. In the north-eastern corner is a bathroom, and in it were found remains of a brick-lined bath of Roman date 4 metres square and 1·38 metres deep. There is another basin in the adjacent corner of the gymnasium at the point where the southern corridor opens on to the street. There are no signs in the palaestra or gymnasium of the warm baths which are so important a feature of the gymnasium described by Vitruvius. In Roman times warm baths were installed at Olympia not in the palaestra but in a separate building to the south-west. It is impossible to determine the uses of the various rooms surrounding the court. Some of them are closed with doors, and doubtless served for storing the oil, sand, and other requisites of the palaestra. The larger rooms are open in front. In five of the rooms there are remains of stone seats round the walls, and the floor is paved with concrete. Such rooms must have been used as exedrai or galleries for the spectators, but hardly, as it is sometimes stated, as lecture rooms for philosophers and other teachers, who would certainly have preferred the greater publicity afforded by the opisthodome of the temple of Zeus or by the stoai. The palaestra and gymnasium at Olympia must have been practically confined to the use of competitors, and the practice of these competitors naturally drew thither crowds of friends and interested spectators. In some of the rooms there are traces of altars and bases of statues. Such buildings were always under the patronage of certain gods and heroes. Hermes was in a special sense the patron of the palaestra, and at Athens festivals were held there in his honour. At Elis one of the gymnasia contained altars to Idaean Heracles, to Eros and Anteros, to Demeter and Persephone, and the statues of the first three were placed in the gymnasium called Maltho which was specially reserved for wrestlers. Honorary statues were also sometimes placed in the gymnasia, and at Olympia there were tablets inscribed with the lists of Olympic victors.
The most curious feature in the palaestra at Olympia is a strip of tiled pavement along the north side of the court. It is 24 metres long by 5 metres broad, and consists of two bands of rough ribbed tiles 1·60 metres in breadth divided by a band of smooth tiles 1 metre broad, while a double row of these same tiles runs along the upper edge of the pavement. The edges of these smooth tiles are raised so as to form continuous ridges running the whole length of the pavement. The purpose of this curious pavement is unknown; it certainly cannot have been intended as a wrestling ring, or as a jumping ground, as certain learned writers have with unconscious humour suggested. The most plausible hypothesis is that it was used for some unknown game of ball, and this hypothesis finds some support from the existence of a somewhat similar bowling alley in the larger Thermae at Pompeii, on which two large heavy stone balls were actually found.[[829]]
Of the gymnasium proper which lay to the north of the palaestra nothing remains but portions of the southern and eastern colonnades. All the western side has been destroyed by the floods of the Cladeus. The southern colonnade consisted of a single row of pillars parallel to the north wall of the palaestra, with which it communicated by a door in the centre of the wall. The eastern colonnade was not, however, continuous with the east wall of the palaestra, but, to avoid the slope of Mount Cronius, was diverted so as to form a slightly acute angle with the southern colonnade. It was 210 metres long by nearly 12 metres broad, and divided into two tracks by a row of Doric pillars. The similar row of pillars which formed its western front began only on a level with the third of the central pillars from the south, and ended with the third pillar from the north. At these two points are traces of the attachment of stone sills such as were found in the stadium, and the distance between these two points, 192·27 metres, is exactly the distance of the Olympic stadium. This double track was the xystos, or covered running-track, and athletes could practise there under precisely the same conditions as in the actual stadium. On the western side of the gymnasium were rooms for the accommodation of competitors during the festival, and possibly in front of them another xystos. In the centre of the open court was constructed a sort of stone stand for the spectators described by Pausanias as κρηπίς, the term which he uses for the rows of stone steps below the treasury terrace in the Altis. But of this and of the lodgings of the athletes, and of the paradromides or uncovered tracks which doubtless existed here, not a trace is left.
The gymnasia at Epidaurus and Delos belong apparently to the same period, and as far as can be judged from their scanty remains were very similar in type. They bear a much closer resemblance to the buildings described by the Roman architect Vitruvius, who lived in the time of Augustus, than do the elaborate gymnasia of later times, which we find at Ephesus and Pergamum. They differ, however, from the Vitruvian type in the absence of hot baths. In Lucian’s time the Lyceum at Athens certainly possessed a hot bath and a plunge bath, and perhaps these existed in Hellenistic times. It is probable that such gymnasia, which were the daily resort of the inhabitants of Athens, resembled the Vitruvian type more closely than did the gymnasia of Olympia and Delphi, which were chiefly used at the seasons of the festivals by competitors. Now that excavation has revealed to us the actual plans of so many gymnasia and palaestrae, the descriptions of Vitruvius are of only secondary importance, and it is needless to discuss the various reconstructions of his plans which the reader will find fully treated in all books of reference. It will be sufficient here to discuss briefly such of the various parts of the building mentioned by him as have not already been noticed.
The palaestra of Vitruvius is of the same type as that at Olympia, a square court surrounded by colonnades on to which the various rooms enter. On three sides the colonnades are single, and the rooms are provided with benches for the use of philosophers, rhetoricians, and men of letters, who can sit there and converse with one another, or lecture to their pupils. The colonnade on the fourth side, which faces south in the ideal palaestra, is double, and the rooms behind it are devoted to the needs of those who take exercise in the palaestra. These rooms are elaborations of the simple apodyterion and bathroom. In the centre is a large hall provided with seats called the ephebeion,[[830]] which probably served rather as a general club-room for the epheboi than as a dressing-room. For dressing and washing, full provision is made in the rooms to left and right.
To the right are the elaiothesion, and a series of rooms connected with the hot baths. The elaiothesion is the room where the oil was stored, and perhaps also where athletes and bathers oiled themselves. Oil was used not only before exercise, but both before and after the bath. A large supply was required, and, as has been already mentioned, there was no better way in which a gymnasiarchos could show his liberality than by providing oil for the use of the epheboi at his own expense. We even hear of cases where a sum of money was left to form an endowment for this purpose.[[831]] The oil was kept in amphorae or tanks. A picture of such a tank occurs on the funeral stele found at Prusa of one Diodorus, a gymnasiarchos, who, we may suppose, had celebrated his term of office by himself providing the oil (Fig. [186]). It is a large circular tank, somewhat resembling a font, supported on three elaborately wrought legs. On its side hang three ladles (ἀρυτῆρες), which were used for measuring out the oil. Each perhaps held a kyathos, a small liquid measure equal to about 1/12 of a pint. A Spartan inscription referring to some athletic contest, perhaps the Leonidaea, directs that the gymnasiarchos shall provide daily four kyathoi for each man, three for each ageneios, and two for each boy.
Fig. 186. Stele of Diodorus. Prusa. (Imperial period.)
Next to the elaiothesion comes the frigidarium, a term usually denoting the cold bath, but here apparently corresponding to the tepidarium of the Roman baths, a room kept at a moderate temperature, heated if necessary by a brazier, where bathers were oiled and scraped and massaged before or after the bath.[[832]] A passage separates this room from the propnigeion, a hot-air chamber connected with the furnace, and adjoining this is the large vaulted sweating-room (concamerata sudatio) which contains the hot-water bath (calda lavatio) and the hot-air bath (laconicum). It is curious to find one of the principal parts of those luxurious hot baths bearing a name which denotes its Spartan origin. Perhaps the Spartans employed this means of reducing weight in training. Exposure to the heat of the sun’s rays was a recognized part of athletic training, and helped to give the skin the rich brown tone which the Greeks so greatly admired. Philostratus in the chapter in which he deals with this point ridicules the use of the sweating-bath (πυριατήριον) and rubbing with oil without a bath (ξηραλοιφεῖν) as parts of the unscientific system of training adopted by the Spartans, the object of which was merely to produce the power of endurance.[[833]]
On the other side of the ephebeion are three rooms, the korykeion, the konisterion, and the cold bath. The korykeion can hardly mean anything else than the room of the korykos, or punch-ball. Some writers have objected to this interpretation on the ground that the korykos was not of sufficient importance to have a room especially allotted to its use, and they have therefore suggested that the korykos referred to in this term was not a punch-ball but a basket or string bag, in which visitors to the palaestra brought their luncheon. The explanation is ingenious, but hardly satisfactory. The punch-ball, as we have seen, was known in the fifth century, and is represented on works of art. It was used by boxers and pankratiasts, and, as has been made clear in the first part of this work, boxing and the pankration were by far the most popular events, especially in Hellenistic and Roman times. Hence it is not evident that the korykos was of secondary importance. Moreover, it is a most significant coincidence that the chapter in Philostratus describing the korykos follows immediately on the chapter on the various kinds of konis, and in Vitruvius the korykeion and konisterion are next to one another.