We pass to the position which riding held in Athenian education. The two richest classes in the State were liable to service in the cavalry. They had to supply their own horses, which were examined and, if unfit, rejected; but the State paid them a sum of £8 annually for maintenance and arms in time of peace. As, however, the number of the citizen cavalry never rose above 1000, the whole of these two classes can never have been so employed at once: the remainder served in the heavy infantry. The two Hipparchoi elected for the year, and their subordinates, the ten Phularchoi, who each commanded a tribal contingent, on coming into their office, would note how many of the thousand who had served in the former year were no longer liable to service owing to age, and would fill up the vacancies; they would also make good those gaps which occurred from time to time during their term of office owing to wounds or death or sudden poverty. To secure a recruit, they had only to go to some rich and active young man who was not already serving; if he refused to be enrolled, they could prosecute him. The training often began before eighteen, for Xenophon speaks of persuading the recruit’s guardians,[460] from whom he would be free at that age. So Teles mentions the horse-breaker as among the teachers of the lad in the secondary stage of education. No doubt it took some training to make an efficient cavalryman, and the Hipparchoi liked to take the recruits young; but to keep a stud was the favourite amusement of a rich young Athenian, and many would learn to ride without any view to military efficiency. As the Hellenes rode without stirrups, mounting was one of the great difficulties of the young rider, and figures chiefly on the vases. Often they used the long cavalry-spear as a vaulting-pole.[461] Otherwise a groom or the master gave the pupil a leg up: on a vase[462] in the British Museum the master is seen simply pushing the boy into his seat. A comic poet,[463] who has left us a picture of the young recruits learning to ride under the eye of their Phularchoi, speaks only of mounting and dismounting.[464] “Go to the Agora,” says the speaker to his slave, “to the Hermai, where the phularchoi keep coming, and to the pretty disciples whom Pheidon is teaching to mount their steeds and to get down again.” Xenophon, among much sound advice to the young rider about buying, training, and keeping his horse, gives the Hipparchos the following suggestions:—
“Persuade the younger men to vault on to their horses. It will be best if you supply the teacher for this. The older men may be put up by some one else in the Persian way. To practise the men in keeping their seats over difficult country, frequent riding expeditions are a good thing, but will be unpopular. So tell your men to practise by themselves whenever they are in the open country. But take them out yourself occasionally and test them over all sorts of ground. Give them sham fights in different kinds of country. In order to make them keen about throwing the javelin from horseback,[465] stir up rivalry between the different squadrons and give prizes for this and for good riding and the like. Above all make yourself and your attendant gallopers as smart as possible.”[466]
There were frequent reviews under the eyes of the Boule. In the race-course at the Lukeion there was a sham fight, each hipparchos commanding five squadrons which pursued one another, and then charged front to front, passing through the gaps in one another’s lines. They had, also, to wheel in line. The review was followed by javelin-throwing.[467] Another review was held at the Akademeia, on a course with a hard soil (ὁ ἐπίκροτος)—good practice for cavalry intending to fight in rocky Attica. Here they had, among other manœuvres, to charge at full gallop and suddenly come to a halt.[468]
One of the attractions of the cavalry service was the great Panathenaic procession, where the horsemen played a leading part: an idealised picture of them may be seen on the frieze of the Parthenon. Xenophon gives a series of directions how to make the horses prance and hold their heads up on this great occasion, and suggests devices in gait which will attract popular notice. This and kindred processions must have made recruiting for the cavalry easy.
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Swimming seems to have been, as would naturally be expected, an exceedingly common accomplishment in the maritime states of Hellas; even at inland Sparta the boys must have learnt it for their daily plunge in the Eurotas. According to tradition,[469] there was a law at Athens that every boy should be taught reading, writing, and swimming: the proverb for an utter dunce was “he knows neither his letters nor how to swim.”[470] Herodotos distinctly implies that all Hellenes knew how to swim. “The Hellenic loss at Salamis,” he says, “was small. For, as they knew how to swim (as opposed to the barbarians who did not), when their ships were destroyed, they swam over to the island.”[471] He takes it as a matter of course that every sailor could swim. The whole crew of a captured trireme during the Peloponnesian War as often as not jumped overboard and escaped by swimming.[472] In a story in Athenaeus the boys of Lasos, on coming out of the wrestling-school, go off together for a bathe and begin to dive. A friend of Aristippos used to boast to him of his diving.[473] During the blockade of Sphakteria by the Athenian fleet, numbers of Helots swam over from the mainland to the island under water.[474] Scanty and scrappy as they are, these details show that swimming must have been taught to most boys, at any rate if they were ever likely to serve in a fleet. Plato twice[475] uses a metaphor drawn from a man swimming on his back, showing that this method was known. When a young disputant is being severely handled in a discussion, Sokrates intervenes, “wishing to give the boy a rest, since he saw that he was getting a severe ducking and he feared that he might lose heart.”[476] The phrase suggests that the sight of boys learning to swim was familiar. They could learn either in the innumerable creeks and bays of the sea, or in the lakes and rivers, or in diving-pools.[477] There were also various “gymnastic games” which young people played in the water together;[478] but of their nature nothing is known.
It cannot reasonably be doubted that in the maritime states a large proportion of the boys, at any rate of the lower classes, were taught to row, since each trireme required a crew of 200, nearly all of whom had to use the oar. In the good old days, according to the Wasps, the main object was to be a good oar,[479] and rowing-blisters were a sign of patriotism.[480] In an emergency, the Athenians could make the whole citizen force under a certain age embark on the fleet and could win a victory with these rowers; this would have been impossible if the average citizen had been ignorant of rowing.[481] On such occasions many even of the Hippeis embarked: Aristophanes jestingly asserts that in an expedition to Korinth the horses tried also, shouting, “Gee-ho, put your backs into it. Do more work, Dobbin.”[482] Before the close of the war,[483] Charon, the ferryman of Styx, assuming that every Hellene knows the way to row, makes the souls of the departed row themselves across. Boat-races were certainly known at this period. A client of Lusias asserts that he has won a race with a trireme off Cape Sounion.[484] Probably the trierarchoi, the rich men appointed to fit out the State navy, either voluntarily or by regular custom, made the ships race one another. Thus the races would be as much inter-tribal contests as the dithyrambs or torch-races. Two crews of the epheboi of a later date used to race in the two sacred triremes. The vessels sailing out for the Sicilian expedition raced as far as Aigina.[485]
A fragment of Plato the comic poet[486] refers to similar contests:
Thy high-heaped tomb on this fair promontory
Shall take the greetings of our far-flung fleets,