But turning cestus champion, to his cost,
These, and still worse! his heritage he lost,
For by his brother su’d, disowned, at last
Confronted with his picture he was cast.[[249]]
Dion Chrysostom gives us an interesting glimpse of the Isthmia during the first century, in the story he tells of Diogenes’ visit to the festival.[[250]] The scene is laid in the fourth century B.C., but the details are clearly drawn from the orator’s own experience. Diogenes the Cynic happens to visit Corinth at the time of the festival. There, at the cross-roads of the world, he finds gathered together visitors from Ionia and Sicily, from Italy and Libya, from Massilia and the Borysthenes. Around the temple of Poseidon are wretched sophists shouting and abusing one another, their pupils are fighting, historians are reading meaningless compositions, poets are reciting verses, miracle-mongers are working miracles, augurs are interpreting omens, thousands of orators are wrangling, and merchants of every sort are bargaining. The crowd, regardless of all other interests, is watching the performances of the athletes, “mere slaves,” he calls them, “that run and jump and dance.” Here Diogenes sees a band of friends carrying a victor in the foot-race in triumphant procession, while the people shout and cheer and heap upon him fillets and garlands. The Cynic stops him and points out that after all he is not as swift as the hare or the deer, the most cowardly of animals. He himself has won a victory over adversaries that cannot be overcome by men “stuffed and puffed, who spend whole days in eating and snore all night like pigs,” for he has won a victory over pain and pleasure. Finally he boldly puts upon his head the celery crown, and when the indignant officials protest, asks them, “Will ye take the crown from me and give it to him who is stuffed with most meat?” The rhetoric is for the most part mere commonplace of the schools; yet we cannot doubt that the description is true of the Isthmia and of other festivals, especially of those in the rich cities of the East.
In such soil corruption throve. Philostratus, writing more than a century later, tells us that victories were publicly bought and sold; even the trainers encouraged the traffic, lending money for bribery to athletes at exorbitant rates of interest.[[251]] At the Isthmia a competitor who had promised his rival 3000 drachmae to let him win, refused to pay on the ground that he had won on his merits. Recourse was had to the oath, and the defeated competitor publicly swore before the altar of Poseidon that he had been promised the money if he allowed himself to be defeated. “What,” adds Philostratus, “might not happen in Ionia or in Asia?”
At Olympia the honour of the games was still maintained. Bribery was severely punished. In Ols. 192 (12 B.C.) and 226 (A.D. 125) we read of fines exacted for corruption from which as of old Zanes were erected.[[252]] In the former case it was a father who bribed his son’s opponent, and the fine was therefore exacted from the parents. In Ol. 218 (A.D. 93) one Apollonius of Alexandria was fined for coming too late and thereby disqualifying himself from competition. He pleaded that he had been detained by contrary winds. But it was proved that the plea was false, and that the real cause of his delay was that he had been “pot-hunting” in Ionia. It seems as if the authorities at Olympia even made an attempt to check the arrogant pretensions and self-advertisements of the professional fighter by abolishing the title “Successor of Heracles.” The title was won for the last time in Ol. 204 (A.D. 37) by one Nicostratus, after whose victories the Eleans made a secret decree that no one should thereafter be allowed to win in both wrestling and the pankration. The account given by Dion of the Isthmia gathers force from its contrast with the veneration which he expresses for the Olympia, and his charming picture of the youthful Melancomas.[[253]] He and his father, himself an Olympic victor, seem even in that age of athletic decay to have lived up to the ideal of the best days.
A curious development of professionalism which we now meet with was the growth of athletic guilds resembling the dramatic guilds which had long existed. Victorious athletes at Rome, as in Greece, received certain privileges, including maintenance at the public cost, which privilege Maecenas advised Augustus to confine to winners at Olympia and Delphi and Rome.[[254]] Augustus, we are told, maintained and increased the privileges of athletes.[[255]] Guilds were one of the features of the early Empire, and it was therefore natural for athletes to form such combinations. These athletic guilds were called Xystoi from the xystos or covered colonnade which formed part of a gymnasium. The most famous of these clubs was that of the Herculanei,[[256]] a club which seems originally to have been formed at Sardis. In the reign of Trajan it was dissolved and transferred to Rome. One M. Ulpius came to the emperor as their spokesman to petition for quarters at Rome, and we possess copies of two letters of Trajan granting their petition.[[257]] He appoints them a house where they may keep their sacred things and records, near the baths built by his grandfather Trajan, and conveniently situated for the great Capitolia. Here they had a gymnasium and a council-chamber in which discussions could take place on all questions affecting the welfare of athletes, the holding of competitions, and the erection of honorary statues. They were a sacred guild, and within their precinct were statues of emperors and members of the guild. Their president or xystarches was also high-priest of the guild. He was often a distinguished athlete and held the office for life; and with it also the office of overseer of the imperial baths. The religious character of these guilds is a curious survival of the immemorial connexion between religion and athletics. Sometimes there were special competitions for members of certain guilds. At the Augustalia at Naples we find a series of competitions confined to members of the Augustan class, while mention is also made of a pankration for Claudian boys. These expressions seem to denote clubs or guilds bearing the name of Augustus and Claudius.[[258]] The most important guild at Naples was “the holy itinerant synod of the Alexandrini.” The term περιπολιστική, which corresponds to our “nomads” or “wanderers,” indicates that they did not confine their attentions to local festivals, but went about from place to place.[[259]] An Olympic inscription of the year A.D. 85 records the erection of a statue in honour of Lucius Vetulenus Laetus by the whole body of athletes gathered together “from the inhabited world” for the festival, and by the holy synod of the Xystos.[[260]] This particular xystos was presumably a local Elean guild. The title xystarches is known also at Sparta, and occurs in an inscription recently discovered at Sparta by the British excavators. The inscription contains regulations for a Spartan festival, probably the Leonidaea, a festival held in honour of those who fell at Thermopylae, and confined to Spartan competitors.[[261]] The xystarches is to place oil in the stadium, and discharge the usual duties of his post. As the president of the local gymnasium, he naturally took an important part in local festivals. He seems generally to have been a man of some importance, often an old athlete. His duties were probably as vague and depended as much on his personal inclination as those of the president of a modern athletic club.
Fig. 22. Athletics under the Romans. From a mosaic found at Tusculum.