All this at Athens, as befits a true democracy, was open without restriction and without payment to every citizen. In the palæstra rich and poor met on equal terms without regard for rank or position. A strigil and an oil flask were the only implements that were needed, and on occasions the State even supplied the oil. We have scarcely anything like it in modern days; perhaps a racecourse, in its mingling together of all classes for sport, is the nearest equivalent. But our racecourses have some peculiar features that need not now be specified, from which the Greek palæstra was free.
4
Health and Bodily Exercise
FOR the attainment of the perfect health which is one of the highest goals of human endeavour, the Greeks of the fifth century b.c. in comparison with ourselves were placed under some disadvantages. Firstly, their racial stock, a difficult blend of the old Mediterranean people with central European immigrants, was not so good, for purposes of active strength, as our mixture of Saxon, Norman and Dane: the inhabitants of Attica claimed with some reason to be autochthonous, but in historical times they were already showing plain signs of race decay. Secondly, their climate on the whole was inferior to ours, the summer too hot and enervating, the winter dank and depressing rather than sharp and bracing: Attica in this respect also was more favoured than many states, and Athenian authors are very fond of contrasting the clear brilliance of their native air with the heavy dullness of the Bœotian plain. Thirdly, they lacked most of those sanitary appliances without which life in our cities now would seem almost impossible, and their doctors and surgeons had not that wealth of drugs and instruments which we possess.
On the other hand the Greeks, or at least the Athenians, had some points in their favour. Of all the people that we know the citizens of Attica did the highest thinking on the lowest feeding. They were naturally temperate both in food and drink, and a very great contrast both to the Romans and such other Greeks as the Bœotians and Thessalians. In this, at any rate, they were feminists; like most women they did not pay much regard to their stomachs, and made their meals not the most important but the least important thing in their lives, so that a Greek banquet was a very simple affair, compared with an English or a Roman repast, and its chief attraction was the music and conversation which followed the mere eating and drinking. The ordinary diet of the Athenians consisted almost entirely of cereals; porridge and bread were the staples, and although sometimes a little salt fish, cheese, honey or olives might serve as a relish, yet porridge in various forms was the staff of life. Their drink was usually water; a good supply was brought in to the city by pipes dating apparently from the time of Pisistratus, and the big fountain of the nine springs is mentioned by Thucydides. They realized all the benefits that come from a copious use of nature’s chief medicine: ‘best of all things is water’—such is the motto on the entrance portal to the great temple of Pindar’s poems, and the Athenians, knowing the truth, acted on their knowledge. Wine, of course, they drank and enjoyed—there were teetotalers amongst them, Demosthenes, for example, and they were regarded as crabbed, unpleasant fellows—but they enjoyed in moderation, and always diluted their wine copiously with water. To drink wine neat was to be a barbarian, and the story of the Spartan king who was driven mad by his unmixed potations was often repeated at Athens. The typical citizen was a thin wiry person, active and restless, and the highest praise you could give to an Athenian was to call him εὐτράπελος, ready to turn his hand to anything. As Aristophanes says, the Athenians were wasplike, thin-waisted and ready to sting—while one of commonest terms of political approbrium was παχύς—‘fat’—the word applied by the democrats to the idle rich.
Again, as we have said, the Athenians were autochthonous—such was their favourite boast—sprung from the land, born from the actual womb of mother Attica. Without examining too closely the exact truth of their claim, or accepting the origin of their grasshopper king, we may regard it as an historical fact that the Athenian stock remained undisturbed and without admixture for a very long period in Attica. They had therefore all the advantages which are derived from a pure and an old race; they were thoroughly suited to their environment, and had developed strong special characteristics. They were fully conscious of this themselves, never admitted aliens to Athenian citizenship, and took the most careful precautions to see that all citizens on the roll should be of pure Athenian parentage. In its relation to general health this steady continuity of race and domicile is more important than is often recognized. Only long centuries of undisturbed habitation can bring man into real harmony with nature, and this is one reason why the English peasant is so much finer a man, physically and intellectually, than the mixed breed of a great town. Half the diseases of our time are of nervous origin, caused ultimately by a feverish attempt to adapt oneself too rapidly to a new environment.
Moreover, the chief means whereby we stave off for the moment the results of this strain, drugs and stimulants of every kind, were unknown to the Greeks, and they were all the better for their ignorance. Tea, coffee, tobacco, opium; all these poisons are among the blessings of modern civilization, and in the fifth century b.c. were as unfamiliar to the Greeks as the countries from which they come. Here again the Greeks were closer to nature than we are. When they needed a stimulant—and stimulants are on occasion a real necessity—they took wine, the natural product of their own country, not something only to be found among totally different conditions. They knew nothing of the poisons of tropical countries, and nothing of the diseases which we have imported from the tropics. Asiatic fever, smallpox, cholera, syphilis, typhus were diseases of which the Greeks had neither knowledge nor experience, and even from our milder infectious complaints, such as measles and scarlatina, they were immune. Until the advent of malaria during the Peloponnesian War their most common malady seems to have been ophthalmia in its various forms, and consumption was their only serious scourge.
This would seem to be a fair statement of our respective advantages and disadvantages; and on the whole perhaps the balance of the account is in our favour. But all these considerations are counterbalanced and more than counterbalanced by one fact: an ancient Greek took a lively and intelligent interest in his own physical condition, and devoted most of his time, not to making money, or reading books or playing cards, but to what is a more remunerative investment than any of these, to the care of his health.
The most precious thing that a Greek possessed was not his soul, the existence of which he doubted, but his body. He took an interest in his body; he was not afraid of it in any of its parts, and he was not always trying to cover it up as something of which he was ashamed. He had none of those curious and morbid feelings that still linger on amongst us as an inheritance from Syrian conventicles and Egyptian monasteries. He stripped himself freely and often, in public as in private, and he allowed the sunlight, the fresh air, and the running water to reach every limb. Dirt was not to a Greek a proof of holiness, nor neglect of one’s person the sure sign of a love of learning. Cleanliness was not merely next to godliness; it was godliness itself. To be χαθαρός—clean, pure, free from defilement—was the ideal, and an ideal generally attained.
A Greek concentrated his attention on the care of his skin by means of baths, massage, and external applications. Bathing with the Greeks of the classical period was not the elaborate function that it became with the Romans, who used it indeed, as we use drugs, to correct the results of their own follies and self-indulgence; but it was thorough and it was constant. Moreover they knew the value of sun and air baths, a thing almost unattainable in England, and their dress allowed the free-play of air round the body. Hats, stockings, and gloves were practically unknown, and the feet were usually bare.
Of massage, both by the hand and by the instrument, which they called a ‘strigil,’ great use was made. The ‘rubber’ was as important for purposes of health as the ‘doctor,’ and an Athenian put aside a certain proportion of his time every day for his duties in this respect. In connection with rubbing comes the universal use of olive oil as an external application; the oil flask—lecythus—was as indispensable to a Greek as an umbrella is to an Englishman; and as a consequence the Athenians seem to have been seldom troubled with those coughs and colds which so harass modern men. Under the stimulus of the bath and frequent massage the skin performed its natural cleansing functions, and the oil served as an invisible protection against sudden chills, while from one of our greatest dangers, the hot polluted air of a crowded room followed by the cold dampness of a raw February evening, the Greeks were free, for artificial heating and lighting were little used and all gatherings of people took place in the open. By constant exposure to sun and air, by massage, by regulated exercises, and by rubbing with oil the Greek gained an elasticity of skin which meant health, vigour and beauty. A large proportion of our community take an interest in their complexions and spend a considerable amount of effort in trying to produce an artificial softness of face tissue, but to the far more important task of stimulating and strengthening the skin of the body and larger limbs they give scarcely any time at all. A delicate skin is not the essential, either from the point of view of health or real beauty; for though it may render details visible in an elegant fashion, only a skin that is well knit to the subjacent tissues shows the true configuration to advantage. This firm elasticity cannot be obtained except by attention, and in this respect we are inferior, not only to the Greeks, but to such different and widely separated modern peoples as the Red Indians of North America, the Malays of the Eastern Archipelago, and the Kanakas of the South Seas. A very large number of our minor maladies and disabilities come to us from our closed pores and our flabby epidermis, and from all these the Greeks escaped, owing to the care they gave to the outer surface of the body.