For the average Athenian spent all his time upon his legs: to sit down was the mark of a slave.[430] He walked nearly all day: the distance which he covered in five or six days would easily stretch from Athens to Olympia. He took a walk before breakfast, another before lunch, another before dinner, and another between dinner and bed.[431]
Games of ball are going on in the ball-court yonder.[432] We may remember that the poet Sophocles was a famous player.[433] But the shadow on the great sun-dial has nearly reached the ten-foot mark which announces dinner-time to the Athenian world. The crowds who have been exercising themselves are scraping off the sweat and dirt with the στλεγγίς or scraper,[434] or else hurrying to the bath-rooms. After the bath comes another anointing, with oil and water this time.[435] Then away through the nearest gate into the city, while the great buildings on the Akropolis grow misty in the twilight and Athena’s guardian Spear catches the last rays of the setting sun.
All this was open to the poorest Athenian: there was no fee for entrance. The only expenses were those incurred in buying an oil-flask and scraper, which the State did not as a rule provide, and any fees that might be paid to a trainer for special “coaching.” The poor could learn as much as they required from watching those who were proficient. It was usual to tip the man in the public baths who poured cold water over the bathers and assisted them generally: but this probably did not apply to the bath-rooms in the gymnasia. The State certainly made it easy for every citizen to take as much exercise as he pleased.
Women were wholly excluded from athletics at Athens. In Sparta girls exercised themselves as much as the boys. In other Dorian States feminine athletics were encouraged to a less degree. At Argos there were foot-races for girls. In Chios they could be seen wrestling in the gymnasia.[436]
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But the gymnasia and palaistrai, though they provided so many different kinds of exercises, did not supply the Hellenes with their sole opportunities for keeping the body in good condition. Hunting was a popular employment at Sparta and no doubt elsewhere: Xenophon, who was devoted to it, would have liked to make it more popular in Attica,[437] where it languished, perhaps from lack of game. Swimming and rowing were usual accomplishments. Riding was compulsory for rich citizens at Athens, for they had to serve in the cavalry; it was also popular in Thessaly, the land of horses. Military service provided both an incentive to physical exercise and a frequent means of obtaining it. Dancing was universal throughout the Hellenic world and played a larger part in Hellenic education than is usually recognised. At Sparta it was of paramount importance. At Athens it was taught free to large numbers of boys under the system of leitourgiai. Plato divides physical education into dancing and wrestling.[438] Aristophanes[439] brackets dancing between the palaistra and music, when he wishes to give the three elements of a gentleman’s education. Choral dancing to a Hellene was at once the ritual of religion, the ordinary accompaniment of a festival or public holiday, the highest form of music, and the most perfect system of physical exercise then discovered.
The modern reader finds it very hard to realise why Hellenic philosophers attach so much educational importance to the various kinds of dance. This is because modern dancing differs from its ancient prototype in two very important particulars: it is not connected with religion and it is not dramatic. In the East dancing was, and is, the language of religion. David, to show his fervour, danced before the Ark with all his might. In Hellas, dancing accompanied every rite and every mystery.[440] The choral dance afforded the outlet to religious enthusiasm which elsewhere is provided by services: any change in its characteristics was a change in ritual and in the inexpressible sentiments and moral attitudes which become so closely bound up with habitual religious observances. And, since it was the usual ritual of worship, dancing became all-important in education, as providing the forms through which the highest aspirations of the children were accustomed to find expression.
The boy who danced in honour of Dionusos was trying to assimilate himself to the god, whose history and personality would be brought home to him vividly by the vineyards around him: they would serve him for a parable. The vine that came so mysteriously out of the earth, lived its short life in the rain and sunshine, and was crushed and killed at the harvest, to rise again in the strange juice which thrilled him with such wondrous power—there was plenty of parable for him there. And while he felt the god’s history so vividly, he was acting it, for acting was the very essence of Hellenic dancing. He would act the sorrows of Dionusos, his persecution from city to city, and his final conquest; he would match each incident in the story with suitable inward feelings and outward gestures of sorrow and triumph. Thus his dancing came to be a keenly religious observance, accompanied by more vivid acting than is possible on a modern stage; such dancing, it must be remembered, was the parent of Attic Drama. The dramatic power of such acting became enormous; one dancer, it is said, could make the whole philosophic system of Pythagoras intelligible without speaking a word, simply by his gestures and attitudes.[441]
In such dramatic dancing the subject or plot was important. Here the weakness of the old Hellenic mythology became fatal. For it was the old myths that supplied the motives of religious dances as well as of the drama, and many of them were morally unsatisfactory. When a chorus of boys danced the Birth-pangs of Semelé, the most famous dithyramb of Timotheos, not unnaturally objections were raised. The new school of musicians and poets, which arose towards the end of the fifth century, tried to represent everything and anything in the most realistic way possible: their dancers had to imitate with voice and gesture “blacksmiths at the forge, craftsmen at work, sailors rowing and boatswains giving them orders, horses neighing, bulls bellowing,”[442] and so forth. They chose the commonest and coarsest scenes, just like Dutch painters. In their hands, dancing became something vulgar, as well as morally risky, though still under a semi-religious sanction. It is this charge which justified Plato’s denunciations of the dramatic element in poetry and music. It must be remembered that the choregos at Athens, who collected the boys from his tribe to dance these dithyrambs, could use compulsion if fathers refused to allow their sons to join his chorus.[443] Yet the advantages of learning to dance were great, quite apart from the religious aspects. Dancing was a scientifically designed system of physical training, which exercised every part of the body symmetrically.[444] The different masters invented systems of their own, just as the paidotribai invented systems of wrestling; in both cases the teaching began with a series of figures, which were afterwards fitted together. Different localities also had their own particular figures.[445]
The solo dance was used for private exercise. It also made its way into the drama. Sometimes, too, in the choral performances one or two of the best dancers were singled out to perform more elaborate evolutions expressing the dramatic course of the subject. But the choral dance was universal throughout Hellas. Its motives ranged from the solemn religious questionings of Aeschylus to the drunken buffoonery of the vine-festivals. The dance might be the act of worship of a whole people, as in the great festivals at Delos. It might, like the Gumnopaidia at Sparta, be designed to exhibit the physical perfection and practise the military evolutions of a nation in arms. It might celebrate the triumphant return of an Olympian victor to his native city, as did many of the dances which accompanied the extant odes of Pindar. The chorus-songs of Tragedy and Comedy were set to dances of a sort; but from these last boys seem to have been excluded.