The Arcadians refused to accept the king’s rescript. When in 365 the Eleans attempted to assert their authority over Lasion, on the Arcadian border, they were driven off by the Arcadians, who followed up their success by overrunning Elis, and occupied Olympia itself, fortifying and garrisoning the hill of Cronus. The next year, under the protection of the whole armed force of Arcadia, the Pisatans at last found themselves presiding over the games. But the festival was not to pass off undisturbed. The Eleans, with some Achaean allies, arrived on the west bank of the Cladeus while the pentathlon was in progress. There was general alarm among the spectators, who had just left the Stadium and were congregated on the steps of the Treasuries and in the Colonnades watching the progress of the wrestling match which took place in the open space between the buildings and the great altar. The Arcadian troops advanced to the Cladeus and fell in opposite to the Eleans. But the latter, having crossed the river, charged them with unexpected courage, and drove them back into the Altis, where a desperate fight took place in the space “between the Council House, the shrine of Hestia, and the Theatre adjoining these buildings.”[[211]] There, however, they were exposed to a shower of missiles from the roofs of the Council House, the Colonnades, and the Temple of Zeus. And though they maintained the combat and bore their opponents back towards the altar, their losses were heavy, and Stratolas, their captain, being slain, they drew off to their encampment. During the night the Arcadians, fearful of a renewed attack, occupied themselves in pulling to pieces their elaborately constructed quarters between the Altis and the Cladeus and making a stockade of the material; and in the morning the Eleans, seeing the strength of the fortifications, returned home, leaving the Pisatans to celebrate the festival. Their triumph was only short-lived. The religious feeling of Greece, outraged by the sacrilege at Olympia, was still further scandalized by the appropriation of the sacred treasures of Zeus for the use of the Arcadian league. There was disunion in the league itself, and when, two years later, the Peloponnese was once more threatened by a Theban invasion, the Arcadians made peace with Elis and acknowledged her rights over Olympia.
This was the last attempt of the Pisatans. The Eleans rapidly recovered their power. The 104th Olympiad was expunged from the records and declared an Anolympiad. And the triumph of the Eleans was commemorated by a colossal statue of Zeus, with an inscription truly appropriate to the part which Olympia had played in Greek history—“The Eleans for concord” (Ϝαλείων περὶ ὁμονοίαρ).[[212]]
CHAPTER VII
THE DECLINE OF ATHLETICS, 338-146 B.C.
From this time onward there is little change to record in the history of athletics. Competitions became more and more the monopoly of professionals and all the evils attendant on professionalism became rampant. The training of the athlete became more artificial and more irrational, rendering him still more unfit for practical life. The degeneration of the physical type and of the artistic ideal is evident in the statue known as the Farnese Heracles, a copy of a Lysippean original exaggerated by the copyist to suit the taste of a later and more decadent age. Those huge bulging muscles,[[213]] which even repose cannot relax, are a type of clumsy, useless strength, utterly foreign to the ideal of the fifth century, or to that of Lysippus himself as we know it from the Agias. Perhaps it was the type of those professional strong men who called themselves successors of Heracles as having, like Heracles, won the wrestling and pankration at Olympia on the same day.[[214]] The first of these was Caprus of Elis, who in the year 212 defeated, in the pankration, the redoubtable Cleitomachus of Thebes, who is sometimes supposed to be the original of the boxer of the Terme (Fig. [136]).
Fig. 21. Farnese Heracles, by Glycon. Naples. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 125.)
A tale told by Polybius about the latter throws a curious light on the state of sport at the time.[[215]] He had, it appears, incurred the displeasure of King Ptolemy—presumably Ptolemy IV.—who went to the trouble and expense of training and sending to Olympia a rival boxer, Aristonicus, to compete with him. The contest excited great public interest, and the fickle crowd favoured the new man until Cleitomachus, exasperated at their attitude, taunted them with backing one who was fighting not for the glory of Greece but for King Ptolemy. This appeal caused such a revulsion of feeling that Aristonicus was vanquished, not, says our author, so much by Cleitomachus as by the crowd. With such hired prize-fighters it was only natural that methods became more brutal, and science deteriorated. The increasing weight of the caestus rendered boxing a contest of brute strength and fit to take its place in the Roman gladiatorial shows. The science of wrestling had also suffered. As early as 364 B.C. we read of one Sostratus of Sicyon who won the wrestling at Olympia not by skill in wrestling but by breaking his opponent’s fingers.
Corruption naturally throve under such conditions.[[216]] Only Olympia, thanks to its ancient prestige and sanctity, maintained the purity of sport, and though even there all sport was professional, cases of corruption were rare.
The decay of athletics was accompanied by an increased activity in the construction and improvement of gymnasia and stadia, which continued all through Hellenistic and Roman times. The stadia at Olympia and Delphi were reconstructed during the fourth century; the Panathenaic stadium at Athens was the work of the Athenian administrator Lycurgus, who also rebuilt the Lyceum Gymnasium, planted it with trees, and built a new palaestra or wrestling-school in it. But this building activity did not denote any improvement of the national athletics. The people took little interest in the games, save as a spectacle, and the improvements made in the stadia were connected solely with the accommodation and comfort of spectators. Some of these buildings were the work of a sort of athletic revival, a temporary demand for physical and military training. Such a movement occurred at Athens in the time of Alexander, under the wise leadership of Lycurgus, who, among the numerous services which he rendered to Athens, reorganized the Athenian epheboi. More often these buildings were the monuments of the generosity or vanity of wealthy princes or ambitious citizens.
But the palaestra and gymnasium, even in the fourth century were no longer devoted principally to gymnastics. The colonnades of the palaestra, the shady walks of the gymnasium were popular resorts and lounging-places. There the Athenian gentleman would betake himself in the afternoon to get an appetite for his evening meal; and a whole series of rooms was provided for his accommodation—dressing-rooms, oiling-rooms, dusting-rooms, bath-rooms, cloisters where he could take his exercise in wet weather, rooms for ball-play, and, for the more active, wrestling-rings and running tracks. Many of the rooms and the walks were provided with benches and seats for the convenience of visitors and spectators. Sophists especially resorted there in the hope of attracting pupils; some of them attached themselves to particular gymnasia. Plato delivered his discourses in the Academy; Aristotle took his morning and evening walks in the Lyceum. Gradually the social and educational side of the gymnasium became more important than the athletic. The gymnasium of Cynosarges in the fourth century was the meeting-place of a celebrated club known as the Sixty Wits. The earlier gymnasia of Athens had been outside the walls. The first gymnasium inside the walls was the gift of the versatile Ptolemaeus Philadelphia (285-247 B.C.), the founder of the museum and library of Alexandria. The gymnasium at Athens bore witness to the culture of its founder: it contained a library formed and increased by contributions from the students who attended it. Lectures continued to be given in it by philosophers and men of science down to the time of Cicero, who listened there to the lectures of Antiochus. These gymnasia were intimately connected with the life of the epheboi in whose training philosophy and literature were rapidly taking the place formerly occupied by athletics and military science. From this ephebic training grew up what has been aptly called the University of Athens, to which the young Romans of the time of Cicero resorted to study philosophy.