The athletes of the second century must at least be credited with a certain amount of brute strength, but in the generation which succeeded Galen even their strength fell off, if we may believe the statement of Philostratus, who wrote in the first half of the third century. His work on the art of gymnastic reads like an answer to Galen’s attack on athletics, and is marked by a strong bias against the medical profession, whom he holds responsible for enervating athletics by the introduction of ridiculous and effeminate rules of diet.[[281]] By gymnastic, he understands the art of training athletes, which in opposition to Galen he describes as an art inferior to no other and akin to the arts of the doctor and paidotribes. The latter is concerned merely with actual exercises and movements, while the trainer requires a knowledge of the human body which may enable him to prescribe in each case the diet and training necessary to correct any defect. Thus the gymnastes cures by exercise and massage diseases for which the doctor employs potions, plasters, and fomentations. The decline in the athlete’s physique Philostratus ascribes to a vicious system of training due in the first instance to the quackery of doctors. The valetudinarianism of the second century had produced, as it always does, a host of impostors with quack systems and rules for health, some of which were imported into athletics. Medicine, says Philostratus, has pampered athletics, and rendered athletes dainty and luxurious. They are told to remain seated, stuffed with food, for a long time before taking exercise. Their diet consists of seasoned breads, of fish, and pork. Different kinds of fish are credited with different qualities; their pork must come from pigs fed only on cornel nuts and acorns and not reared in the neighbourhood of the sea or of rivers. We all know this sort of fad; our own age has produced by the score systems no less absurd. The inventors of such systems always insist that their patients must follow their rules without deviating from them a hairbreadth. So the Greek trainers developed hard-and-fast systems of training which they applied indifferently to all alike, to boys as well as men, without any regard to the individual’s needs. Boys trained on the same principles as men lost all the buoyancy and activity natural to their age and became lazy, heavy, and sluggish. The most absurd of these systems was that known as the Tetrad, a scheme of work for four days, by which the athlete’s life was regulated. Each day had its own work. The first day’s work, consisting of light and quick movements, “prepared” the athlete; the second “extended” him and tested all his powers of endurance; the third “relaxed” him by means of gentle movements; the fourth, consisting apparently of movements of defence, left him in a middle state.
Such is the somewhat obscure account given of the tetrad.[[282]] It was intended clearly for pankratiasts and boxers who practically formed the whole class of professional athletes. The principle of the gradual increase and diminution of work on which it is founded is absolutely sound, and is one of the essential principles of the “Ling” system of physical training. The fault lay in the ignorant and pedantic application of the principle. No deviation from its routine was permitted, and no account was taken of the individual’s actual condition. Philostratus tells a story of a contemporary athlete, Gerenius, who three days after winning an Olympic victory celebrated his success by a banquet at which he ate and drank things to which he was not accustomed. The next day, suffering from indigestion and want of sleep, he repaired to the gymnasium as usual, and being put through a more than usually severe course of exercise by his irritated trainer, actually died under the treatment. The tetrads, says Philostratus, have ruined all athletic training; and the purpose of his book is to show the absurdity of such artificial systems, and by introducing sounder principles of athletics to restore the glory of the stadium. The main principle which he inculcates is the necessity of a thorough knowledge of the human body, and of suiting the training to the individual’s requirements. He discusses at length the various physical qualities which are best for different sports,—the qualities of the boxer, the wrestler, or the runner,—and gives a fanciful classification of the different types of athletes, the lion type, the eagle type, the bear type, the plank type, the rope type! He has a profound reverence for the traditions of Olympia, and regards the Eleans as the sole repositories of athletic lore, accepting all that they tell him with childlike simplicity. With much common sense he mingles an amount of rhetoric and fancifulness such as we should expect from the credulous biographer of Apollonius of Tyana, which seriously diminishes the practical value of his work.[[283]]
With Philostratus our history draws to a close. The Olympic records of Africanus end with Ol. 249 (A.D. 217); the last victor recorded on Olympic Inscriptions is the herald Valerius Eclectus of Sinope, who won the heralds’ competition in Ol. 256 and the three succeeding Olympiads; the lists of Olympic officials cease almost at the same time. The Roman empire was now engaged in a desperate struggle with hordes of invading Goths, and in the struggle the Greeks were once more called upon to fight for their country. The Goths were repulsed, but the silence which ensues tells but too clearly of the effects of their ravages. The end was close at hand. Hitherto the Greeks had preserved some semblance of political liberty; but the policy of centralization and unification introduced by Constantine stamped out the last vestiges of the city state. The ancient festivals of Greece were the stronghold of paganism, and therefore recognized as the greatest obstacle of Christianity, now adopted as the Imperial religion. Delphi was dismantled by Constantine, and its treasures removed to adorn his new-built Hippodrome at Constantinople, and in the time of Julian its site was desolate. The Olympic festival was abolished by the emperor Theodosius, though whether by Theodosius I. or Theodosius II. is not certain. The generally received tradition is that it was abolished in 393 by Theodosius I. The emperor had set himself to sweep away all vestiges of paganism, but in 390 he had incurred the displeasure of the all-powerful St. Ambrose by his cruel massacre of the Thessalonians, and had been forced to do public penance for his sin. Was the edict that abolished the Olympia a token of his new-born zeal for righteousness? Be this as it may, the last Olympic victor whose name we know was the Armenian prince Varazdates, who won the boxing-match in Ol. 291 (A.D. 385). Varazdates traced his descent from the Arsacidae, and was subsequently placed by Theodosius on the throne of Armenia. There is a pathetic irony in the circumstance that, at the festival linked beyond all others with the cause of Hellenism at war with barbarism, the last-recorded victor came not from Hellas but from the land of her hereditary foes.
CHAPTER IX
THE OLYMPIC FESTIVAL
Fig. 24. Staters of Elis, in British Museum (enlarged). Fifth century. (a) Head of nymph Olympia. (b) Victory seated, with palm; olive twig below.
Many of the details and regulations connected with the Olympic festival have been already mentioned in previous chapters, where the reader can readily find them by consulting the index. In the present chapter we shall attempt to give some account of the festival itself, as it existed in the fifth century. First we must premise that the details of the festival are involved in the greatest obscurity, largely owing to the fact that the bulk of our information is derived from late writers whose evidence as to what took place five or six hundred years before their time must always be received with a certain amount of reserve. Still, religious conservatism was nowhere stronger than at Olympia, and much that is recorded of the second century of our era existed with little difference in the fifth century B.C. Therefore, though many details remain obscure we can feel fairly certain as to the general outline of the festival.
The festival took place at the second or third full moon after the summer solstice, in the months of Apollonios and Parthenios respectively.[[284]] Its date was fixed by a cycle of eight years or ninety-nine-months, the divergence between the year of twelve lunar months and the solar year being rectified by the insertion of three intercalary months, one in the first four years, two in the second. Thus it fell alternately after forty-nine or fifty lunar months. The fourteenth day of the month seems to have been reckoned as the day of the full moon, though the actual full moon varied from the 14th to 15th. This day must, from the earliest time, have been the central day of the festival.[[285]] The Greek day was reckoned from sunset to sunset, and as Greek custom demanded that sacrifice to the Olympian gods should be offered in the morning, before mid-day,[[286]] it follows that the great sacrifice to Zeus was offered on the morning after the full moon. The festival lasted five days. According to Herodotus, a historian of the fifth century, the five days’ festival was ordained by Heracles.[[287]] Certainly it lasted five days in Pindar’s time.[[288]] Scholiasts of various dates, while affirming that it lasted five days, state that it began on the 10th or 11th and lasted till the 15th or 16th.[[289]] The discrepancy may be due to the variation in the date of the full moon already noticed, more probably to the addition to the festival of one or more preliminary days necessitated in later times by the multiplication of competitions and religious ceremonies. To these days the preliminary business of the festival may have been transferred, but they were not reckoned as part of the actual festival. The seventh ode of Bacchylides, written in honour of Laches of Ceos, who won the boys’ foot-race in 452 B.C., proves beyond doubt that in this year the festival ended on the sixteenth day. If then the festival lasted five days, the fourteenth, the day of the full moon, was the central day of the whole festival. The recognition of the importance of this fact is due to Ludwig Weniger, whose conclusions I have in the main adopted in the following pages.
These five days included sacrifices, sports, and feasts. Sacrifices and feasts, both private and public, formed part of each day’s programme, especially of the first and last days, which must have been largely, if not entirely, occupied by such ceremonies. How many days were devoted to the actual sports we do not know. A scholiast states that they took place on five days,[[290]] but the statement is unsupported and certainly was not true of earlier times. The growth of the programme must have necessitated readjustment from time to time, and an extension of the time allotted to competitions. Such an extension took place, according to Pausanias, in Ol. 77, though it did not, of course, take effect till Ol. 78. “The order of the competition,” he says,[[291]] “existing in our time—which is that the sacrifice to the god is offered after the pentathlon and the horse-race—this order was introduced in the 77th Olympiad. Previous to this date, events both for men and horses took place on the same day. But on this occasion the competitors in the pankration were kept on into the night, not having been called in time, and the delay was caused by the horse-races and still more by the pentathlon.” This passage gives no countenance to the statement commonly made that at this time the length of the festival, or the number of days allotted to sport was suddenly extended from one day to five. Nor does it prove that before this date all events for men took place on the same day as events for horses, and that after this date none did. If the literal meaning of the words is pressed, it may be argued, and indeed has been argued, that from this date a separate day was assigned to the horse-races, and a separate day to the pentathlon. Unfortunately, we have a definite statement by Xenophon[[292]] proving that in Ol. 104 the horse-races preceded the pentathlon on the same day. Those who assert that they took place on different days are forced[[293]] to reject the evidence of a contemporary writer, who lived for years in the neighbourhood of Olympia, in favour of a doubtful interpretation of an obscure and ill-expressed passage written by a traveller who owed his information to a visit paid to Olympia some five hundred years later. The alternative is to assume that after Xenophon’s time a separate day was assigned to the horse-races, presumably at the time when the programme of these events was raised to its full complement of six. But this is a mere supposition. All that we can definitely assert is that, after Ol. 77, the pentathlon and horse-races were transferred to the day before the sacrifice to the god.
What is “the sacrifice to the god”? and when did it take place? On the answer to these questions depends the interpretation of the passage of Pausanias, and the reconstruction of the order of the festival. There can be little doubt that the sacrifice was the official offering of a hecatomb to Olympian Zeus by the Eleans.[[294]] It is generally assumed that this took place on the 16th, the last day of the festival, and it is certainly natural to connect it with the official banquet in the Prytaneum which took place on the evening of that day. This arrangement naturally appeals to a modern sentiment which demands a climax. But the Greeks had not this sentiment, and there is a mass of evidence to prove that the usual order of a Greek festival was—sacrifice, sports, feast.[[295]] That this was the ancient order at Olympia is clear from two odes in which Pindar describes the inauguration of the games by Heracles. In the eleventh Olympian we read how Heracles, returning victorious from Cleonae, marked out the Altis, and paid honour to the river Alpheus and the great gods. Then, having first offered sacrifice of his spoil, he ordained the games, and in the evening the precinct resounded, as in Pindar’s time, “with songs of festal glee.” So, too, in the third ode, first he sanctifies the altars, then he ordains the games. The scholiast, commenting on this ode, explains carefully that the full moon came first, then followed the sacrifice, and “the rest of the competitions.” If the games followed the sacrifice, the sacrifice cannot have taken place on the 16th, but rather on the 14th, the morning after the full moon. In speaking of “the rest of the competitions” he is thinking, of course, of the order of the festival in his own time, and this phrase is a strong argument in favour of the views of Weniger.