Whether the gymnasiarchia was a leitourgia or a public magistracy it involved considerable expense. The sums allotted by the state for the service of the gymnasia were often ludicrously inadequate, and the gymnasiarchos had usually to supplement them out of his own pocket; often indeed, disdaining to use the public money at all, he provided for all expenses himself. The chief expense was the provision of oil. Even in a small state like Iasos the supply of oil for a single gymnasium cost 450 denarii a month.[[846]] During the Empire the number of competitions, and consequently the expenses for oil and other purposes, were multiplied at an extraordinary rate. At Tauromenium the number of competitions rose from twenty-four a year in A.D. 69 to eighty-one in A.D. 92.[[847]] Sacrifices, processions, feasts, prizes afforded ample scope to the liberality of the gymnasiarchos, which often took a more permanent form in costly repairs and additions to the buildings of the gymnasia and baths.
The gymnasiarchoi described above must not be confused with the ephebic gymnasiarchoi at Athens, officers elected by the epheboi from their own ranks. The expenses of training were borne to a great extent by the epheboi themselves, and they seem, therefore, often to have elected as captains rich youths who were willing to provide wholly or in part for the public expenses, for any period from a month to a year.
The actual teachers were the paidotribes and the gymnastes. The paidotribes, as his name denotes, was properly the teacher of boys, who trained their bodies as the schoolmaster did their minds; the gymnastes was the trainer of athletes for athletic competitions. This is the original distinction between the two, and though in practice their functions often overlapped, and though in Plato the terms are practically synonymous, the original distinction never entirely disappeared.
The paidotribes existed long before the gymnastes, for athletic exercises formed part of the national education long before the demand for specialised athletic training arose. From the time of Solon education was in the hands of the paidotribes and the schoolmaster.[[848]] In most states education was voluntary, and the paidotribai were usually private teachers, who received fees for their services. In the fourth century the fee seems to have been a mina (about £4) for the whole course.[[849]] Many of the paidotribai had palaestrae of their own; failing that, they must have taken their pupils to the public palaestrae and gymnasia, which they must in any case have used for such exercises as required more space than could be found in the ordinary palaestra.[[850]] Besides those private paidotribai who took pupils from the age of seven upwards, there were others who were paid by the state to superintend the training of the epheboi. At Teos the paidotribes received in the third century 500 drachmae a year.[[851]] The training of the epheboi was practical and military and had no connexion with professional athletics, and the paidotribes regularly figures in the ephebic inscriptions down to the latest times.
Thus the paidotribes had charge of boys from their seventh to their twentieth year. But the training which he gave was not of course sufficient for those who aspired to win prizes in the great games. These required special natural abilities and special practice for the development of their natural abilities; and the special practice they required was supplied by the gymnastai.[[852]] There was, however, nothing to prevent a successful paidotribes if he possessed the necessary skill and knowledge employing them in training athletes. It was not every one who could afford the services of a champion boxer or wrestler. Further, the paidotribes might also devote himself to medical gymnastics.[[853]] Herodicus of Selymbria, the founder of medical gymnastics, is said to be have been a paidotribes who suffered from ill-health, and discovered from personal experience the means of treating disease by diet and exercise. Hence the paidotribes might be also a gymnastes. But such training and such knowledge were really outside his sphere, which was that of the drill sergeant, whose duty it is to teach certain definite movements and exercises to boys of various ages. As athletics became more and more professional, and medical gymnastics developed, the difference between the paidotribes and the gymnastes increased, till in Galen and Philostratus we find the paidotribes subordinated to the gymnastes as the mere drill sergeant to the professor of physical culture. Galen compares them respectively to the cook and the physician.[[854]]
The gymnastes can hardly have come into existence much before the beginning of the fifth century.[[855]] His work consisted partly in perfecting his pupils in some particular form of athletics, partly in developing their strength and training them into proper condition. The earlier gymnastai, such as those whom we read of in Pindar and Bacchylides, devoted themselves chiefly to practical instruction. They were often themselves successful athletes, especially boxers and wrestlers, who having retired from competition took to teaching, and were doubtless richly rewarded by their patrons. Such was Melesias the trainer of thirty victors in wrestling and the pankration;[[856]] Iccus of Tarentum, a winner in the pentathlon at Olympia in Ol. 76, the most celebrated trainer of his day; Dromeus of Stymphalus and Pythagoras of Samos, to whom were attributed the introduction of a meat diet. These trainers, like other teachers, went wherever they could find a market. Menander of Athens trained Pytheas of Aegina to victory.[[857]] We cannot for a moment suppose that men like these descended to the work of the ordinary paidotribes, though, as I have suggested, the reverse must often have been the case. It was an age of science, and in the hands of gymnastai and paidotribai there arose in the middle of the fifth century a new science of gymnastic which aimed not at the performance of particular exercises but at the production of certain physical conditions (ἕξις),[[858]] especially the condition required for athletic success. Its professors in the fourth century are in ordinary speech called paidotribai, and Isocrates[[859]] describes it as a branch of the art of the paidotribes, undoubtedly because so many paidotribai professed it. The new science was closely allied to medicine. The trainer, like the doctor, required some knowledge of diet and the effects on the body of different kinds of food;[[860]] he required, too, some knowledge of the body itself, and the effect on it of various exercises; he required, too, to be a judge of the human animal, and to be able to tell in what form of athletics any individual had most chance of excelling, and what particular form of training he required.[[861]] The ideal gymnastes, according to Aristotle,[[862]] should know what is the ideally best condition for the ideally best man, what is the best for the average man, and what is the best for any particular man. Unfortunately the art of the gymnastes was almost from the first connected with the training of professional athletes, and the condition which they aimed at was that artificial condition required for success in some particular form of athletics. At the same time medical gymnastics was corrupted by the quackery which from the fourth century was rampant in all departments of knowledge.[[863]]
There were also other officials connected with the gymnasia. The xystarches was the president of one of those guilds of professional athletes which we find under the Empire. The aleiptes was properly the person who oiled and rubbed people who exercised in the gymnasia. This was part of the work of the paidotribes or the gymnastes, and it is doubtful whether there were special officials for the purpose. In Aristotle aleiptes is merely another name for gymnastes.[[864]] In Roman times we find slaves (unctores) performing this work in the public baths, and possibly these existed in the Greek gymnasia. Subordinate officials are also mentioned, the hypopaidotribes or assistant, and others who had charge of the palaestra and its contents, variously described as palaistrophylax, epimeletes, epistates. Besides these there were in Hellenistic times special instructors for special exercises, the sphairistes who taught ball-play, the akontistes and toxotes who gave instruction in the use of the javelin and the bow, and the hoplomachos who gave lessons in the use of arms.
Of the special training prescribed for athletes little is known beyond a few details as to diet which have been noticed in the earlier chapters of this book, and a few other details noticed under the special exercises with which they are connected. There were manuals of athletic training, but all are lost except the late treatise by Philostratus to which we have so often referred. With regard to athletics as a branch of education we are somewhat better informed, and it is instructive to compare the physical training given in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. with the system described by Galen in the second century A.D.
The training given in the earlier period was based on those athletic exercises which at all times formed the programme of Greek athletic meetings. To these we may add ball-play, which is enumerated by Plautus among the exercises which formed a young Greek’s training till the age of twenty.[[865]] These exercises were taught progressively, at first the simple movements or positions (σχήματα) separately, then combinations of these movements which involved more exertion.[[866]] Many of these movements admitted of being taught to classes as drill to the accompaniment of music. Such drill, especially with halteres, is sometimes represented on vases.[[867]] The various holds and throws of wrestling were taught in this way, and we possess on the Oxyrhynchus papyrus, to which we have already referred, a portion of such a wrestling lesson.[[868]] Dances could be utilised in the same way: the movements of wrestling were imitated in a dance performed by Spartan boys called the gymnopaidike[[869]] just as the movements of war were imitated in the Pyrrhic and other war dances. In the fourth century particular attention was given to exercises of a military character, the use of weapons of all sorts, and riding, but these exercises must have been confined chiefly to older pupils of the age of the epheboi. Proficiency in all the various exercises taught was encouraged by numerous festivals and local competitions where prizes were offered for boys of various ages. The training of teams for the torch-races and choirs for dancing competitions, though not formally a part of the education given by the paidotribes, must have afforded those who took part in them a considerable amount of healthy and agreeable exercise.
Life in this period was spent mostly in the open air, and the formal training of the palaestra was supplemented by hunting, swimming, rowing, and other forms of exercise. Cities in Greece were small, and hunting was as a rule easily obtainable. In Attica, owing to the increase of population and the spread of cultivation, game was scarce, and sport had therefore declined in Xenophon’s time; but the red-figured vases prove its popularity in the fifth century. Swimming and diving were common recreations. Every Greek could swim, and not to know how to swim was as much a sign of an uneducated person as ignorance of letters.[[870]] Rowing must also have been a universal accomplishment, at least among the Greeks who lived near the sea; but we know nothing of the teaching of rowing or swimming. Probably the Greek boy taught himself to swim and row or picked it up from his fellows.