Here too the element of competition came in. At Hermione we hear of a competition in diving (or perhaps swimming[[871]]), and also boat-races.[[872]] We have seen that boat-racing took place at the Isthmia and at various Athenian festivals. There was also a boat-race at the Actian festival in the time of Augustus; and Professor Percy Gardner has shown that there is a possible reference to this contest on the coins of Corcyra and Nicopolis, on which a victorious galley is sometimes represented. The coins suggest a race between galleys such as that described in the Aeneid, but the boats used in the Athenian races were probably not triremes, but small boats with a single bank of oars, tender-boats (ὑπηρετικά) such as always accompanied a fleet. A boat of this description is depicted on a stele in the Museum of Athens of Hellenistic or Roman period (Fig. [190]). It is a long narrow boat with a pointed beak in front, and a curved aplustre at the stern, and in it there sit eight oarsmen. There is no sign of the oars. The men are naked and are sitting at ease, and bow, who is the smallest of the crew, holds a palm-branch. The number eight is of course a pure accident. There is no cox in the boat, but on the upper part of the stele are three figures standing, a draped figure in the centre, probably the gymnasiarchos who fitted out and trained the crew, on his left a naked youth bearing a palm, on his right a youth in a chlamys crowning the man in the centre. These two Professor Gardner identifies with the stroke and cox of the victorious crew.
Fig. 190. Stele representing victorious crew. Athens. (Hellenistic period?)
When we come to Galen, we seem to pass from the free and open atmosphere of the playing-field and the country into the artificial air of the town gymnasium. The simple exercises of the earlier period, so inseparably bound up with the lives and habits of the people, have given place to a scientific system of physical training based on the teaching of generations of gymnastai. In his treatise on Health[[873]] he describes at length the exercises suited for youths between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. He distinguishes exercises for the legs, the arms, and the trunk. He further classifies exercises into those which exert the muscles and give them tone without violent movement (τὰ εὔτονα), quick movements which promote activity (τὰ τάχεα), and violent exercises (τὰ σφόδρα). As examples of the first class he mentions digging, driving, carrying heavy weights, rope-climbing, and exercises of resistance such as holding the arms extended while another person tries to pull them down. Among quick exercises he enumerates running, sparring, the use of the korykos or punch-ball, ball-play, rolling on the ground “either alone or with others,” an exercise which seems to resemble “tackling” at football, and a variety of leg and arm movements. Many of these movements are well known in our modern physical drill. That known as ἐκπλεθρίζειν is the familiar running figure in which the runner runs in an ever-decreasing circle till he comes to the centre. Another exercise (πιτυλίζειν) consisted in marching on the toes, and at the same time swinging the arms. The leg exercises include jumping up and down, and raising the legs alternately backwards and forwards. The arm exercises are the usual dumb-bell movements performed rapidly without dumb-bells, with the hands either open or clenched. Finally, any of the exercises of the first class may become violent if practised rapidly and without interruption, and quick exercises become so if practised with weights or in heavy armour. Besides prescribing exercises Galen lays down elaborate rules for the time of exercise, and for massage both before and after exercise. The actual teaching of these exercises must have been in the hands of paidotribai, but the direction of the training and the arrangement of the exercises is, according to Galen, the work of the gymnastes, who alone has a scientific knowledge of physical training.
The details of this training are full of interest to the student of education and hygiene. There is, indeed, little in our modern systems of physical education which he will not find anticipated in Greek medical writings. We do not know how far Galen’s principles were ever carried into practice, though we may suspect that it was only in the case of individuals, and that they had little influence on the nation. But of this we may be certain, that physical training did not, and could not, do for Galen’s contemporaries what athletics had done for their ancestors. Nor can physical training ever take the place of our own games. For it lacks the element of competition and cannot inspire. There is no antagonism between the two. Both are valuable, but their spheres are different. Physical training is a branch of education—a most important branch, and one hitherto shamefully neglected in England—and it must therefore be carried out under discipline: it is a matter of compulsion. Athletics and games are, or ought to be, a matter of free choice, and compulsion tends to kill the spirit of joy which is their essence. Physical training develops the body and imparts habits of discipline, but it cannot impart those still higher qualities, courage, endurance, self-control, courtesy, qualities which are developed by our own games, or by such manly sports as boxing and wrestling when conducted in the true spirit of friendly rivalry: it cannot teach boys “to play the game” in the battle of life; it could never have inspired the poetry of Pindar, or the art of Myron.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
N.B.—No references are given to articles or sections on athletics or athletic festivals in the following books of reference:—
Baumeister, A. Denkmäler des klassischen Altertums.
Daremberg et Saglio. Dictionnaire des antiquités.
Frazer, J. G. Pausanias.