Greek Athletic Sports and Festivals

by E. Norman Gardiner

If Sparta took little part in the great competitions, she had her own games and her own competitions. One of these, the Leonidaea, was celebrated in honour of those who fell at Thermopylae. Two inscriptions have been discovered containing regulations for this festival which it appears must have been reorganized about the time of Nerva.[^[277]] It was a yearly festival, and only Spartans were allowed to compete. This is perhaps the reason why the programme contained the pankration, an event for which no Spartan might enter at other festivals. The most interesting inscriptions are those referring to certain games in which teams of Spartan boys competed. The late Mr. Kenneth Freeman, in his book, The Schools of Hellas, maintained that the prototype of the English public school system was to be found in the Spartan system of education. Certainly the Spartan games resemble our English games more closely than any other games of which we know in the ancient world. The game of Platanistas was played on an island surrounded by a ditch, between two teams of boys who, entering the ground by bridges at either end, strove by fighting, hitting, kicking, and biting, to drive their opponents into the water. But for the absence of the ball, this game bears considerable resemblance to the primitive football scrimmage before any of the existing rules were introduced, and, as we shall see, ball games were of considerable importance at Sparta. The game of Platanistas, like the scourging, may have had its origin in some ritual practice denoted by the sacrifice of a boar, but in the time of Pausanias it was certainly played in the form described.

A series of inscriptions, all with one exception dating from the time of the Antonines, commemorate victories won by teams of ball-players at some yearly competition.[^[278]] The name σφαιρεῖς was given to Spartan youths in their first year of manhood. The competitions took place in the Dromos under the direction of the Bideoi, a board of five officials responsible for the management of the Platanistas and other ephebic games. The teams represented the local districts of Sparta called the Obes, and it seems probable that the expenses connected with the team were provided by a local obe official, the διαβετής, who is mentioned in the inscriptions. Each team was under a captain called the πρέσβυς, but the number of members in a team cannot be decided owing to the mutilation of the inscriptions. It seems not to have been less than fifteen. The competition was arranged on the tournament system, for several inscriptions record the fact that the winning team had not drawn a bye. Unfortunately, we have no clue to the manner of playing the game.

A yet more numerous group of inscriptions found in the Artemisium, and belonging mostly to the same period, consists of dedications to Artemis in honour of victories won by teams of young boys in certain musical and athletic competitions.[^[279]] The competitors seem to be mostly about the age of ten, the age denoted by the term μικιζόμενοι, and each team was under a captain, βοαγός, chosen perhaps for family reasons, who held the title for life. There seem, however, to have been similar competitions for older boys, for one of the inscriptions commemorates a βοαγός whose team was successful in a boys’ competition and also in a competition for youths of twenty (εἴρενες). Two musical contests are mentioned, called, respectively, Μῶα and Κελῆα, the precise nature of which cannot be determined. The third competition bears the name Καθθηρατόριν, which seems to describe some rough game resembling the hunting of wild beasts, perhaps some such game as prisoner’s base. The victor was crowned with bay and received as a prize a sickle which was affixed to the inscribed tablet and dedicated to Artemis. The presence of musical competitions suggests that the narrowness of Spartan education has been perhaps exaggerated by Greek historians. Much of our knowledge of Sparta is derived from the accounts of her enemies.

In spite of all these outward signs of athletic life, the writers of this period leave us in no doubt as to the real character of the athletic revival. We are no longer forced to draw what inferences we can from the doubtful evidence of casual allusions; we possess in the works of Plutarch, Galen, and Philostratus definite treatises on physical culture and gymnastic. Different as is the point of view of these authors, they agree in condemning the athletics of their day, and prove beyond possibility of doubt how far from realization was the old ideal set forth by Lucian and Dion of Prusa. That old ideal, in which the culture of body and of mind went hand in hand, was inseparable from the ideal of free citizenship that existed when every citizen was both soldier and politician, and when to develop mind and body to the full extent of which each was capable was a duty that the citizen owed to the state. All this had long been changed; war was now the business of paid professional soldiers, politics of the imperial government. The individual, thrown back on self, had no other interest but personal profit and enjoyment. Speculative and mystical philosophy and religion taught men to despise the body, and as a consequence the training of the body no longer maintained its importance in education. Gymnastic, deprived of its proper province in education, found itself confined to the training of professional athletes, who developed the body but neglected the mind. But as life became more sedentary and less active the claims of the body reasserted themselves: hunting was impossible except for the few, games were of little importance in most places, hence there arose a need for artificial exercise, and the need was supplied by the medical gymnastic which aimed at producing health. The Romans, though they despised athletics, realized the importance of exercise for maintaining health. The bath and massage were essential parts of this gymnastic, and the exercises prescribed included walking, gentle running, jumping up and down, the use of halteres as dumb-bells, throwing the diskos and the javelin. Health-culture has its use for men who lead a sedentary, artificial life, but it is not athletics; neither is physical training or gymnastics, to use the word in its restricted modern sense—invaluable as such training is in education of the young, especially in thickly populated cities. But health-culture and gymnastics lack the moral value which friendly rivalry gave once to Greek athletics and gives to-day to the games of our public schools. Professional athletics equally lack this moral value; for when livelihood depends on success, rivalry ceases to be friendly, and the door is opened for corruption. Both health-culture and professionalism are poles removed from the true Greek ideal of athletics.

Plutarch’s opinion about the athletics of his day is evident from many passages in his Lives, to which reference has already been made. His tract on the Preservation of Health, intended as it is chiefly for the ordinary, middle-aged, business man, hardly concerns us here except so far as it continually condemns by implication the artificial and unhealthy training to which athletes were subjected. Galen and Philostratus are so little known to the ordinary reader, and their works are so important, that some account of them is indispensable.

Born at Pergamum in A.D. 130, Galen studied philosophy and medicine at Alexandria, Smyrna, and Corinth. At Alexandria he was appointed physician to the school of gladiators. At the age of thirty-four he came to Rome, where he became the friend and physician of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, but after a few years he returned to his native land. His wide experience of men and countries, his knowledge of medicine and anatomy, his breadth of mind and fearless love of truth make his judgment of special value. He wrote numerous works on Health, but the two which are of most importance to us here are his essay on “Exercise with the Small Ball,” a masterly statement of the true principles of exercise, and his “Exhortation to the Arts,” an attack on professional athletics.

The best of all exercises, he says in his treatise on Ball-play, are those which combine bodily exertion with mental recreation, such as hunting and ball-play. But ball-play has this advantage over hunting that its cheapness puts it within reach of the very poorest, while even the busiest man can find time for it. Moreover, it can be practised with any degree of violence or moderation, at all times and in all conditions. It exercises every part of the body, legs, hands, and eyesight alike, and at the same time gives pleasure to the mind. In contrast with athletic exercises, which make men slow or produce one-sided development, ball-play produces strength and activity, and therefore trains all those qualities which are most valuable for a soldier. Finally, it is free from dangers, and does not expose the player to all those accidents which too often leave the wrestler, “like the Homeric Litai, either halt, or distorted, or altogether bereft of some limb.” The practice of games of ball is of particular interest in view of the importance which they possessed at Sparta. These games must have varied in character almost as much as those with which we are familiar to-day, and no better defence of such games has ever been written, though we may doubt whether Galen would have approved of the extent to which they are carried in the present day.

The ostensible object of the “Exhortation” is to urge men to devote themselves to some art or profession which will last them all their life; but the real subject of the discourse is whether athletics deserves the title of an art or profession. τέχνη is defined as having for its aim “the improvement of life,” and therefore there can be no art in tumbling or walking the tight-rope. Does the athlete’s life benefit the athlete himself or the state? To this question Galen replies emphatically, “No.” “The mind is higher than the body, for the mind we share with the gods, the body with the animals. In the blessings of the mind athletes have no share. Beneath their mass of flesh and blood their souls are stifled as in a sea of mud. Nor do they enjoy the best blessings even of the body. Neglecting the old rule of health, which prescribes moderation in all things, they spend their lives in over-exercising, over-eating, over-sleeping, like pigs. Hence they seldom live to old age, and if they do, they are crippled and liable to all sorts of disease. They have not health nor have they beauty. Even those that are naturally well-proportioned become fat and bloated; their faces are often shapeless and unsightly, owing to the wounds received in boxing or the pankration. They lose their eyes and their teeth, and their limbs are strained. Even their vaunted strength is useless. They can dig and plough, but they cannot fight. They cannot endure heat and cold, nor, like Heracles, wear one garment summer and winter, go unshod and sleep on the open ground: in all this they are weaker than new-born babes.” Such is the picture which Galen draws of the professional athletes of his day, most of whom, as we have seen, were boxers and wrestlers; and we can judge of the truth of the picture from the mosaics in the baths of Caracalla, where we see represented, in all their brutality and coarseness, the portraits of those professional prize-fighters and athletes whom the degraded and unathletic mob and court of Rome delighted to honour (Fig. [23]).[^[280]] There they stand with their clumsy, ill-proportioned bodies, their scarred and mutilated faces, their small and brainless heads rendered yet more hideous by the top-knot (cirrus) in which their scanty hair is tied. It is the last stage in the decline of athletics, which had begun centuries earlier in the exaggerated honours paid to mere bodily strength, to that lower nature which man shares with the animals, and in which man must remain the inferior of the animals. Galen ends his argument by pressing home this lesson in a parable, in which he imagines an Olympia to which the heralds have summoned all the animals to compete. There man would not win a single event. The horse would win the long race, the hare the short race, the deer the diaulos. None of the successors of Heracles could compete with the lion or the elephant. And I expect, says he, that the bull will win the crown for boxing, and the donkey in a kicking match will carry off the crown. Yes, and in an elaborate history, donkey will record that “once he defeated man in the pankration, and that it was the twenty-and-first Olympiad when Brayer was victorious.”

Fig. 23. Professional boxer, from mosaic in Thermae of Caracalla. Lateran.