Greek Athletic Sports and Festivals

GREEK ATHLETIC SPORTS AND FESTIVALS

BY

E. NORMAN GARDINER, M.A.

SOMETIME CLASSICAL EXHIBITIONER OF C.C.C., OXON.

ΜΗΔΕΝ ΑΓΑΝ

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON

1910

TO

F. E. THOMPSON

IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF ALL THAT THE AUTHOR

IN COMMON WITH MANY ANOTHER MARLBURIAN

OWES TO HIS TEACHING, HIS SYMPATHY

AND HIS FRIENDSHIP

PREFACE

It is my hope that the present volume may prove of interest to the general reader as well as to the student of the past. For though its subject may seem at first sight purely archaeological, many of the problems with which it deals are as real to us to-day as they were to the Greeks. The place of physical training and of games in education, the place of athletics in our daily life and in our national life, are questions of present importance to us all, and in considering these questions we cannot fail to learn something from the athletic history of a nation which for a time at least succeeded in reconciling the rival claims of body and of mind, and immortalized this result in its art.

This is my first and perhaps my chief justification for the length of this volume. My second is that there is no existing work in English on the subject, nor even in the extensive literature which Germany has produced is there any work of quite the same scope. The Gymnastik u. Agonistik of J. H. Krause is a masterpiece of erudition, accuracy and judgment. But this work was published in 1841, and since that date excavation and the progress of archaeology have brought to light such a mass of new material as to change entirely our outlook on the past. The excavations at Olympia have for the first time enabled us to trace the whole history of the festival and to treat Greek athletics historically.

In the first part of this work I have endeavoured to write a continuous history of Greek athletics. The attempt is an ambitious one, perhaps too ambitious for one whose occupation has left him little time for continuous study. The long period covered involves a multitude of difficult and disputed problems, which it is impossible within the limits of this work to discuss fully. In all these cases I have endeavoured to sift the evidence for myself, and to form an independent judgment. Many of the details may be obscure, and many of my conclusions are doubtless open to criticism. Yet the general outline of the story is clear, and I venture to think that it has a more than passing interest and importance.

The second part is more technical, though it may perhaps appeal to those who are actively interested in athletics. It consists of a number of chapters, each complete in itself, dealing with the details of Greek athletics. Many of the chapters are taken from articles published by me in the Journal of Hellenic Studies. The chapters on the Stadium, the Gymnasium, the Hippodrome and Boxing are entirely new. In the first two of these chapters will be found the latest results of excavations at Delphi, Epidaurus, Priene and Pergamum, results which are not readily accessible to the English reader.

The arrangement of the work has involved a certain amount of repetition, and the introduction separately and in their historical order of certain details which it would be clearer perhaps, and certainly more picturesque, to group together. But it seemed to me worth while to sacrifice something of clearness and effect in order to bring out the historical aspect of the subject, an aspect which is completely obscured in most of our text-books. Further, I have endeavoured clearly to distinguish between what is certain and what is conjectural. The words “perhaps” and “possibly” recur, I am only too conscious, with monotonous persistence. But where the evidence is too inadequate or too contradictory to admit of certainty, the only safe and honest course is to confess ignorance and to hope that the discovery of some new manuscript may dispel our doubts. The neglect of this distinction between the conjectural and the certain has been a fertile source of error.

Great importance has been attached to the evidence of contemporary monuments, and illustrations have been given of the principal monuments described. In their selection preference has been given ceteris paribus to objects in the British Museum, because these are likely to be most accessible to the majority of readers. In the case of vases the interpretation often depends on the composition, and whole scenes have as far as possible been reproduced rather than single figures. Museum references are appended to the illustrations wherever available, and also some indication of the date of the objects illustrated. Literary references will be found in the list of illustrations.

Many of the illustrations have been prepared expressly for this book, and for these I am indebted to the careful and excellent work of Mr. Emery Walker. A large number are reproduced from articles by myself and others which have appeared in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, and in expressing my thanks to the Council of the Hellenic Society for permission to reproduce them I should like to render testimony to the value of the Library of that Society to any one who, like myself, does not live in the vicinity of any great Library. But for the generous facilities which this Society affords for borrowing books, any work which I have been able to do would have been almost impossible.

In spelling, consistency appears to be unattainable, and I have in the main adopted the compromise recommended in the Journal of Hellenic Studies. In the case of proper nouns, names of places, people, buildings, festivals, the Latin spelling has been adopted, in the case of other Greek words the Greek spelling, except where the Latin form is so familiar that any other form would be pedantic. Names of months are treated as purely Greek words. With regard to ει, ei has been kept where it occurs in the stem of a word, e is employed usually in terminations.

It is impossible to mention here the many authors whose works I have laid under contribution. Many of my debts are acknowledged in the notes. But I cannot omit to mention three—Dr. J. H. Krause, of whose work I have already spoken; Dr. Ernst Curtius, the writer of the chapter on the history of Olympia in the great work which he edited with Dr. Adler; and Dr. Julius Jüthner, whose Antike Turngeräthe and edition of Philostratus’ Gymnastike published only last year are indispensable to any student of the subject. To Dr. Jüthner I must also express my thanks for his generous permission to make use of the illustrations in his work.

Among the many friends who have helped me I should like especially to thank Professor E. A. Gardner, Mr. G. F. Hill, and Mr. H. B. Walters for their constant readiness to advise me and to give me the benefit of their special knowledge of Greek sculpture, coins and vases. Many of the illustrations of sculpture are taken from Professor E. A. Gardner’s Handbook of Greek Sculpture, and the coins have been especially selected for me by Mr. G. F. Hill. Nor must I omit to mention Louis Dyer, whose death occurred while I was working on the early history of Olympia. He had himself projected a work on Olympia, to which I hoped to refer in confirmation of my views. His minute and accurate knowledge, his readiness to impart his knowledge, his enthusiastic and unselfish sympathy made his death an irreparable loss to me. Many corrections are due to the conscientious care of another of my friends, Herbert Awdry, who was engaged in reading my proofs almost up to the day of his death.

It is a fitting circumstance that this book should have been produced under the auspices of Professor Percy Gardner, seeing that he was unconsciously the originator of it. My interest in the subject was first aroused by the chapter on Olympia in his New Chapters from Greek History, which I read on my return from a cruise in the “Argonaut,” in the course of which I had visited Olympia. Professor Percy Gardner has read the book both in manuscript and in proof, and many improvements are due to his suggestions. He is, however, in no wise responsible for the views expressed, much less for any errors which I may have committed.

E. NORMAN GARDINER.

Epsom College,
Surrey.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LIST OF THE COMMONEST ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

PART I
A HISTORY OF GREEK ATHLETICS AND ATHLETIC FESTIVALS FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO 393 A.D.

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

The recent revival of the Olympic games is a striking testimony to the influence which ancient Greece still exercises over the modern world, and to the important place which athletics occupied in the life of the Greeks. Other nations may have given equal attention to the physical education of the young; other nations may have been equally fond of sport; other nations may have produced individual athletes, individual performances equal or superior to those of the Greeks, but nowhere can we find any parallel to the athletic ideal expressed in the art and literature of Greece, or to the extraordinary vitality of her athletic festivals. The growth of this ideal, and the history of the athletic festivals, are the subject of the following chapters.

The athletic ideal of Greece is largely due to the practical character of Greek athletics. Every Greek had to be ready to take the field at a moment’s notice in defence of hearth and home, and under the conditions of ancient warfare his life and liberty depended on his physical fitness. This is especially true of the earlier portion of Greek history, but is more or less true of the whole period with which we are concerned. Greece was never free from war—wars of faction, wars of state against state, wars against foreign invaders—and ancient warfare made no distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Every citizen was a soldier, physical fitness was a necessity to him, and his athletic exercises were admirably calculated to produce this fitness. Running and jumping made him active and sound of wind; throwing the diskos and the spear trained hand and eye for the use of weapons; wrestling and boxing taught him to defend himself in hand-to-hand warfare.

The practical value of these exercises explains their importance in Greek education. They constituted what the Greeks described as “gymnastic,” the term “athletics” being properly confined to competitions. Gymnastic trained the body as music trained the mind. There was no artificial separation, no antagonism between the two such as has disfigured much of our modern education. The one was the complement of the other: together they comprised the whole of Greek education. An ill-trained body was as much a sign of an ill-educated man as ignorance of letters, and the training of the body by athletic exercises distinguished the Greek from the barbarian. The training began often as early as seven, but it did not end at the age when boys leave school. The Greek did not consider his education finished at the age of sixteen or seventeen, and he continued the training of body and mind till middle age or later, daily resorting to the gymnasium for exercise and recreation.

Music and gymnastic reacted on one another. The tone and manly vigour which athletic exercises gave saved the Greek from the effeminacy and sensuality to which the artistic temperament is prone. At the same time the refining influence of music saved him from the opposite faults of brutality and Philistinism. The Greek carried the artist’s love of beauty into his sports. Mere strength and bulk appealed to him no more in the human body than they did in art. Many of his exercises were performed to music, and he paid as much attention to the style in which he performed as to the result of his performance. This love of form refined even his competitions. Hence, in spite of his love of competition, the Greek was no record-breaker. In this we have one of the principal differences which distinguished Greek from modern athletics, in which the passion for records is becoming more and more prevalent.

The Greek did not care for records, and he kept no records. It is futile, therefore, to try to compare the performances of Greek athletes and of modern. But of the effect which athletic training produced on the national physique in the fifth century, we can judge from the art which it inspired. The sculptors of this period portrayed the most perfect types of physical development, of strength combined with grace, that the world has ever seen. The athletic art of Greece is the noblest tribute to the results of Greek education at its best.

A further difference between modern and Greek athletics results from the practical character of the latter. The Greek regarded athletics as an essential part of his education and life; we usually regard them as recreation or play, and it is only of late years that their educational value has been realized. Consequently in England athletic games have to a large extent superseded athletics proper. In some respect games have a decided advantage; their interest is more varied, there is more scope for combination, and they are undoubtedly superior as a training of character. On the other hand, they do not produce the same all-round development as an athletic system like that of the Greeks produced. In many cases the benefit derived from them is confined to the skilled players. They tend to become too scientific, and when this is the case require an expenditure of time and an amount of organization which put them beyond the reach of most men when they have left school.

The interest which is somewhat wanting in pure athletics was provided in Greece by innumerable competitions. The love of competition was characteristic of the Greek. In whatever he did, he sought to excel his fellows, and the rivalry between cities was as keen as that between individuals. On the table on which the prizes were placed at Olympia, the figure of Agon or Competition was represented side by side with that of Ares. There were competitions in music, poetry, drama, recitation. At some places there were beauty competitions for men, or boys, or women. We hear of competitions in drinking and in keeping awake. Strangest of all was a competition in kissing, which took place at the Dioclea at Megara. But no competitions were so numerous or so popular as athletic and equestrian competitions. The Greek was always competing or watching competitions; yet, strange to say, among all the evils produced by over-competition, betting was not found.

Competitions were from an early time associated with religious Festivals. And it is to this association with religion that Greek athletics owed their wonderful vitality. The connexion between sport and religion dates from the early custom of celebrating a chieftain’s funeral with a feast and games. Sometimes the chieftain’s tomb became a religious and political centre for the neighbouring tribes, where a festival was held in his honour at stated periods. Some of these festivals retained their local character, others gradually extended their influence till they became national meeting-places for the whole Greek race.

These Panhellenic festivals played an important part in the politics of Greece. They appealed to those two opposite principles which determine the whole history of Greece, the love of autonomy and the pride of Hellenism. The independent city states felt that they were competing in the persons of their citizens, whose fortunes they identified with their own. At the same time, the gathering of citizens from every part of the Greek world quickened the consciousness of common brotherhood, and kept them true to those traditions of religion and education which distinguished Greek from barbarian.

Enough has been said to show the importance of athletics in the whole life of the Greeks, and their intimate connexion with their education, their art, their religion, and their politics. It is by virtue of this many-sided interest that the subject deserves the attention of all who are interested in the life and thought of Greece.

At the same time, it must be borne in mind that the athletic ideal which we have described was only realized during a short period of the fifth century, under the purifying influence of the enthusiasm evoked by the war with Persia. Even then, perhaps, it was only partially realized. We must not close our eyes to the element of exaggeration inherent in all such ideals. Before the close of the fifth century the excessive prominence given to bodily excellence and athletic success had produced specialization and professionalism. From this time sport, over-developed and over-specialized, became more and more the monopoly of a class, and consequently ceased to invigorate the national life. The old games, in which all competed in friendly and honourable rivalry, gave place to professional displays, in which victory was too often bought and sold, where an unathletic crowd could enjoy the excitement of sport by proxy. Yet in spite of specialization, professionalism, corruption, in spite of all the vicissitudes through which Greece passed, the athletic festivals survived. The athletic ideal, often and long obscured, but never wholly lost, reappeared from time to time in different parts of the Greek world, till, under the patronage of the Antonines, the Panhellenic festivals recovered some semblance at least of their olden glory.

The extraordinary vitality of those festivals gives interest to the attempt to trace their history. This history extends over some 1200 years. We are apt to limit our conceptions of Greek history to the few centuries comprised in the curricula of our universities and schools, and to forget that Greek history does not end with the death of Alexander, or even with the loss of Greek independence, but that, under the rule of Rome, the life of Greece, its institutions and festivals, went on, to a great extent, unchanged, acquiring more and more hold over her conquerors, till the whole Roman world was Hellenized, and with the founding of Constantinople the centre of the empire itself was transferred to Greek soil. To such a narrow conception of history it is a wholesome corrective to trace the story of one branch of Greek activity from beginning to end. And nowhere can the continuity of Greek life be traced more clearly than in the history of her athletic festivals. That we are able to do so is chiefly due to the excavations conducted at Olympia under the auspices of the German government, which are still being continued by Dr. Dörpfeld. It is for this reason that in the following chapters the history of Olympia forms the basis of the history of Greek athletics.

The story of Greek athletics has a peculiarly practical interest in the present day in view of the development of athletics which has taken place in the last fifty years, and of the revival of the Olympic games. There are striking resemblances between the history of modern athletics and of Greek. The movement began in the sports of our public schools and universities, spread rapidly through all English-speaking lands, and is now extending to the Continent. Athletics are as popular among us as they were in Greece, and for us, as for the Greeks, they have been a great instrument of good. Unfortunately the signs of excess are no less manifest to-day than they were in the times of Xenophanes and Euripides. History repeats itself strangely. We have seen the same growth of competition, the same hero-worship of the athlete, the same publicity and prominence given to sport out of all proportion to its deserts, the same tendency to specialization and professionalism. Sport has too often become an end in itself. The hero-worship of the athlete tempts men to devote to selfish amusement the best years of their lives, and to neglect the true interests of themselves and of their country. The evil is worse with us, because our games have not the practical value as a military training which Greek sports had. Still more grievous than this waste of time and energy is the absorbing interest taken by the general public in the athletic performances of others. The crowds which watch a professional football match, the still larger crowds of those who think and read of little else, the columns of the daily press devoted to accounts of such matches, are no proof of an athletic nation, but rather of the reverse. They are merely a sign of an unhealthy love of excitement and amusement, and of the absence of all other interests. Of the evils of professionalism this is no place to speak. They are well known to any one who has followed the history of boxing, wrestling, or football. The history of football during the last two years is ominous. On the one hand we see the leading amateur clubs revolting from the tyranny of a Football Association conducted in the interests of various joint-stock companies masquerading as Football Clubs; on the other hand we see the professional players forming a trades-union to protect themselves against the tyranny of this same commercialism. The Rugby Union has struggled manfully to uphold the purity of the game, and has often received but scanty encouragement for its efforts. Fortunately there are signs that public opinion is changing, and is beginning to appreciate the efforts of the amateur bodies controlling various sports. The very existence of these bodies proves how real the danger is. Under these circumstances the history of the decline of Greek athletics is an object-lesson full of instruction.

What has been said above explains perhaps why the revival of the Olympic games has not been received in England with any great amount of enthusiasm. The promoters of these games were inspired by the ideal of ancient Greece, and wished to establish a great international athletic meeting which would be for the nations of the world what Olympia was for Greece. We must all sympathize with their aspirations. Unfortunately they do not seem to have realized the full lesson of Greek athletics, nor did they realize the dangers of competition on so vast a scale under the more complicated conditions of modern life. In England, where athletics have already developed to an extent unknown on the Continent, we have begun to realize the dangers of over-competition. The experience of recent years has taught us that international competitions do not always make for amity, and do not always promote amateur sport. The events of the last Olympic games, and the subsequent performances of some of the victors of these games, particularly of the fêted heroes of the so-called Marathon race, have gone far to justify the forebodings of those who feared that one of the chief results of such a competition would be an increase in professionalism.

CHAPTER II
ATHLETICS IN HOMER

Greek civilization is regarded by modern authorities as the result of a fusion between two races—a short, dark, highly artistic race belonging to that Eurafrican stock which seems at one time to have peopled not only the Aegean, but all the coasts of the Mediterranean, and a tall, fair-haired, athletic race the branches of which penetrated by successive invasions into the southern extremities of Europe, while their main body spread over central Europe westwards as far as our own islands. It was to the physical vigour and restless energy of the latter race that the Greeks owed their colonial activity and their love of sport. And it is perhaps no mere accident that these same characteristics have been so marked in our own history. But if the Greeks owed to the fair-haired invaders from the North the athletic impulse, the development and persistence of Greek athletics is largely due to the artistic temperament of the original inhabitants.

The practical character of Greek sports indicates a nation of warriors. The chariot-race and foot-race, boxing, wrestling, throwing the stone and the spear, were as naturally the outcome of the Homeric civilization as the tournament and the archery meeting were of the conditions of fighting in the middle ages, or the rifle meeting of those of our own day. Moreover, the myths with which Greek fancy invested the origin of their sports point to an age of fighting and conquest. Olympia, as we shall see, stood on the highway of the northern invaders, and at Olympia the institution of the games is connected with such tales as the conquest of Cronus by Zeus, of Oenomaus by Pelops, of Augeas by Heracles, and the return of the Heracleidae, tales which clearly had their rise in the struggles of rival races and religions. Again, Greek athletics were chiefly, though not entirely, the product of the Peloponnese. Three of the four great festivals were in the Peloponnese, including the Olympic festival, the prototype of all the rest; the athletic school of sculpture originated in the Peloponnese, and physical training was carried to its highest point in Sparta. Now it was in the Peloponnese that the invading races established themselves most strongly; the fair-haired Achaeans made themselves masters of the Mycenaean world, and their Dorian successors preserved their own characteristics in their greatest purity at Sparta. These considerations justify us in ascribing the athletic impulse to the northern invaders.

Fig. 1. Fragment of Steatite Pyxis. Cnossus.

Excavations on Mycenaean and pre-Mycenaean sites furnish some testimony, chiefly negative, in favour of this view. The civilization disclosed by the excavations at Cnossus and other Cretan sites is an Aegean product influenced possibly by Egypt and the East, but certainly not by the mainland of Greece, though its own influence was probably extensive. Cretan civilization, like Egyptian, seems so much a thing apart that it hardly comes into our subject. In Egypt, indeed, we find depicted in the tombs of Beni-Hassan a varied array of athletic sports and games, including a most wonderful series of over 300 wrestling groups, but even Herodotus does not venture to ascribe Greek athletics to the Egyptians. At Cnossus the favourite sport seems to have been a sort of bull-baiting.[^[1]] A fresco discovered by Dr. Evans represents a girl toreador in a sort of cowboy costume in the act of being tossed by a bull, while a youth appears to be turning a somersault over the animal’s back into the arms of a girl who stands behind the bull. Sometimes on gems a youth is depicted “springing from above, and seizing the bull’s horns in cowboy fashion.” The latter scene has also been found in a fresco at Tiryns, and a similar sport known as ταυροκαθαψία survived in historical times in Thessaly.[^[2]] These purely acrobatic feats have nothing distinctively athletic about them, any more than dancing, another favourite Minoan spectacle, for which possibly was intended a square theatre surrounded by rows of seats at the north-west of the palace. Indeed, such scenes are the very reverse of athletic; for history has shown that the peoples who find pleasure in such performances have ceased to be, even if they ever have been, themselves athletic. The only form of true athletics represented is boxing, which occurs on some clay sealings, on a steatite relief (Fig. [1]), and in conjunction with a bull-hunting scene on a steatite rhyton found at Hagia Triada.[^[3]] The boxers are muscular and athletic-looking, their attitude is decidedly vigorous. They wear, according to Dr. Evans, a kind of glove or caestus, but the illustrations do not enable us to determine its character, and I do not feel sure that any such covering is intended. Anyhow, the Minoan boxer has a distinctly gladiatorial look, which is quite in harmony with the bull-baiting scenes. We shall probably not be far wrong in assuming that Minos, like oriental despots, kept his own prize-ring, and that his courtiers preferred to be spectators of the deeds of others rather than to take any active part in sports themselves. Sports and games, of course, existed in Crete as in all countries, but there is no evidence in Crete of anything from which Greek athletics could have developed. The unathletic character of the Aegean people is confirmed by the absolute absence of anything athletic at Mycenae and Tiryns, if we except the bull scenes, a fact which certainly supports the modern view that the Mycenaean civilization was due chiefly to the conquered inhabitants, and not to the Achaean conquerors, whom we know from Homer to have been skilled in all games.

In Homer we find ourselves at once in an atmosphere of true sport, of sport for the simple love of the physical effort and the struggle. The wrestling and boxing may be “distressful,” but just as every sportsman finds a “hard game” the most enjoyable, so the struggle in Homer is a joy to the young man who makes trial of his strength, a joy to the veteran who, as he watches, revives in memory the triumphs of his youth, and a joy too to the poet.[^[4]] It is this feeling that makes the description of the games of Patroclus a perpetual delight to any one who has ever felt himself the joy of sport, and that almost justifies the words of Schiller, that he who has lived to read the 23rd Iliad has not lived in vain. The joy is never quite the same afterwards. Even in Pindar it is no longer unalloyed. With the stress of competition other feelings and motives have entered in, and something of the heroic courtesy is lost: side by side with the joy of victory we are conscious of the bitterness of defeat. In Homer we feel only the joy, the joy of youth.

The description of the games in the Iliad could only have been written by a poet living among an athletic people with a long tradition of athletics, and such are the Achaeans. Sports are part of the education of every Achaean warrior, and distinguish him from the merchant. “No, truly, stranger,” says Euryalus to Odysseus, “nor do I think thee at all like one that is skilled in games whereof there are many among men, rather art thou such an one as comes and goes in a benched ship, a master of sailors that are merchantmen, one with a memory for his freight, or that hath the charge of a cargo homeward bound, and of greedily gotten gains; thou seemest not a man of thy hands.”[^[5]]

Euryalus is a Phaeacian, and the Phaeacians, be it remarked, are not Achaeans. Who they are we know not—whether, as Victor Bérard assures us, Phoenicians, or a branch of that Aegean folk whose wondrous civilization has been revealed to us at Cnossus, or a creation of the poet’s brain. In Homer they are a mysterious folk, and this is not the place to try and solve the mystery. One thing is certain: they are not true Achaeans, and though the poet ascribes to them much of the manners of the Achaeans, including their games, he lets us know with a delightful humour that they are not quite the real thing. Their love of sport is assumed, and consequently somewhat exaggerated. “There is no greater glory for a man,” says Laodamas, “than that which he achieves by hand and foot.”[^[6]] We can hardly imagine such a sentiment from one of the heroes of the Iliad, or from the Odysseus of the Odyssey. The Phaeacian, however, is somewhat of a braggart, and wishes to pose as a sportsman before a stranger, who is no longer young, and whom he certainly does not suspect of being an athlete. “Let us make trial,” says Alcinous, “of divers games, that the stranger may tell his friends when home he returneth how greatly we excel all men in boxing and wrestling, and leaping and speed of foot”[^[7]]—a harmless boast and safe apparently. But Odysseus, stung by their taunts, picks up a diskos larger than the Phaeacians ever threw and hurls it far beyond their marks, and then in his anger challenges any of the Phaeacians to try the issue in boxing, or in wrestling, or any sport except running, for which, after his buffeting in the sea, he is not quite in condition. At once the tune changes, and Alcinous confesses that after all the Phaeacians are no perfect boxers nor wrestlers, but (a safe boast after what Odysseus has said!) speedy runners and the best of seamen. And then the truth comes out: “Dear to us ever is the banquet, and the harp and the dance, and changes of raiment, and the warm bath and love and sleep!” Clearly the Phaeacians are no sportsmen, nor Achaeans, and we have really no concern with them; but I may be pardoned for dwelling on this delightful scene, because through it all we can trace the truth that to the poet every warrior is a sportsman, a man of his hands, and that the sportsman is not occupied with “greedily gotten gains.”

The same scene tells us, too, that sports are no new thing among the Achaeans. Odysseus, when challenging the Phaeacians, recalls the prowess of his youth, just as in the Iliad the aged Nestor recalls his victories in the games which the Epeans held at Buprasium at the funeral of Amarynces. But there is a yet remoter past in which heroes and gods contended. “There were giants in those days” is always the theme of the aged sportsman, and Odysseus, though more than a match for all his contemporaries, confesses that with the men of old he would not vie, with Heracles and Eurytus, “who contended with the immortal gods.”

But though the Achaeans were an athletic race with a long tradition of athletes, we must beware of the common fallacy of introducing into Homer the ideas and arrangements of later Greek athletics. Homeric tradition undoubtedly influenced Greek athletics, but to talk of the Homeric gymnasium, the Homeric stadium, the Homeric pentathlon, or solemnly to explain Homer in the light of these institutions, is as ridiculous as to talk of King Arthur’s school of physical training or Robin Hood’s shooting gallery. The Homeric Greek had no gymnasium, no race-course, no athletic meeting. There was nothing artificial about his sports: they were the natural product of a warlike race, part of the daily life of the family. They were the education of the boys, the recreation of the men, and even the elders took their share in teaching and encouraging the younger. For physical vigour and skill in military exercises were indispensable to the chieftain in an age when battles were won by individual prowess. No elaborate arrangements were necessary; the courtyard would serve for a wrestling ring, the open country for a race-course, and when sports were to be held on a larger scale a suitable space could be quickly cleared. For though there were no athletic meetings, there were friendly gatherings for sports in plenty. On the occasion of any gathering, whether to entertain a distinguished guest, to offer a sacrifice, or to pay the last rites to a departed chieftain, sports formed part of the programme. Sometimes prizes were offered—a victim or an ox-hide for the foot-race, a woman or a tripod for the chariot-race. Particularly was this the case in the funeral sports, when the prizes were rich and numerous.

The value of the prizes seems intended to mark the generosity of the giver of the games, and to show honour to the dead rather than to attract or reward competitors. That they were rather gifts, mementoes of the dead, than prizes, is clear from the fact that at the games of Patroclus every competitor receives a prize, in one case even without a competition. Sometimes, as in the days of the tournament, a weighty issue might be decided by an athletic contest. Instances of this are frequent in the legends of the Greeks: in Homer we have the fatal contest with the bow of Odysseus by which Penelope proposed to decide between her importunate suitors. But whatever the occasion, the Homeric games differed entirely from the athletic festival or meeting. They were impromptu, almost private entertainments, in which only the invited guests, or, in the case of a prince’s funeral, the neighbouring princes or leaders of the army took part. When Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, craved leave to try the bow, the request was met with a storm of protest from the suitors.

From what has been said it is clear that the Homeric games were chiefly aristocratic: it was the sceptred kings and their families who excelled in all games, and who alone entered for competitions, though, as we shall see, the common soldiers too had their sports.

In considering the different events of the Homeric sports, it will be convenient to follow the description of the funeral games of Patroclus in the Iliad. First in order of time and of honour comes the chariot-race, the most aristocratic of all the events, the monopoly of chieftains who went to war in chariots. Too important an event for casual gatherings, it was especially connected with great funeral games. Here, as we have noticed, rich prizes were offered, and the possession of a fine stud of horses was a source of considerable profit. Thus Agamemnon enumerates among the gifts with which he hopes to appease Achilles twelve “prize-winning” steeds who have already won him no small fortune.

In the Odyssey we have no mention of the chariot-race; and naturally so, for Ithaca (wherever it be) is no land “that pastureth horses,” nor does it possess “wide courses or meadow-land.” In the Iliad it is otherwise; the plains of Thessaly and Argos, the homes of Achilles and the Atreidae, were always famed for their horses, and in the plain of Troy the Greek charioteers found ample scope. It is interesting, too, to note that, except at Troy, the only other chariot-races mentioned in the Iliad are in spacious Elis,[^[8]] which was in Homeric times the land of the Epeans, where the lords of Ithaca kept studs of horses, and in historic times the scene of the Olympic festival. It was at Buprasium in Elis that Nestor competed at the funeral games of Amarynces; and on a former occasion his father Neleus had gone to war with Augeas because the latter had seized four horses which he had sent to Elis to compete in the games for a tripod. The mention of four horses is suspicious, for the chariot in which the Achaean heroes raced was the two-horse war-chariot. There are also other reasons for supposing the passage to be a late interpolation subsequent to the institution of the Olympic chariot-race.

For the chariot-race Achilles provides five prizes—“for the winner a woman skilled in fair handiwork and a tripod, for the second a six-year-old mare in foal, for the third a goodly caldron untouched by the fire, for the fourth two talents of gold, for the fifth a two-handled urn.” For the five prizes there are five competitors. On the details of the competitors and of their horses we must not linger, nor on the lecture on the art of driving which the aged Nestor reads to his son Antilochus. Critics complain that it interrupts the narrative; but the rambling, prosy speech is delightfully characteristic of the garrulous old sportsman, and so human! Its point seems to consist in certain information which he gives about the course; for it is no regular race-course, like the later hippodrome. It is a natural course selected for the occasion like that of a point-to-point race, save that in this case the chariots after rounding the goal return to the starting point. On such a course local knowledge is invaluable. The point selected for the goal is a withered tree-stump with a white stone on either side of it—a monument of some dead man, or a goal for the race set up by men of old—and round it is smooth driving ground. At this point, which is just visible from the start, the two tracks meet—not necessarily parallel tracks, for chariots cannot take a bee-line from point to point, but must follow the lie of the ground. Here Achilles places an umpire, godlike Phoenix, “to note the running and tell the truth thereof”; for though the goal is just visible, the track is sometimes lost to the spectators’ view, and as the chariots round the mark they disappear from sight for a time. The track, like Greek roads in general, is not of the smoothest, and in one part has been partially washed away by a torrent, so that there is no room for two chariots to pass. Possibly the road in this part, as is often the case, passed along the actual bed of the winter torrent.

The charioteers draw lots for their places, and then the chariots take their place in a line. Commentators gravely debate whether the Greek means “in a line” or “in file,” like a row of hansom cabs! But there is no subject wherein commentators are so rampant as in athletics, and there is no athletic absurdity which they do not father upon the Greeks, who, after all, really did know a little about sports. We are not told how the horses were started—we must hurry on with the poet to the finish. How Apollo made Tydeides drop his whip, and how Athene restored it to him and then made the leader’s horses run off the course and wreck his chariot; how Antilochus when they came to the broken part of the course “bored” Menelaus and deprived him of the place; how the spectators quarrelled as to which chariot was leading, and Idomeneus offered to bet Aias a caldron or a tripod; how Antilochus apologised for his youthful impetuosity and Menelaus generously forgave him; how every man received his prize, even he whose chariot was broken,—all this is known to every reader of Homer; to retell it would be sacrilege. Particularly charming is the scene where Achilles presents Nestor with a prize which has been left over as a “memorial of Patroclus’ burying.” In recalling his youthful victories at Buprasium the old man mentions that he was defeated in the chariot-race by the two sons of Actor, one of whom held the reins while the other plied the whip. Here apparently we have a hint of an earlier form of the chariot-race, where, as in war, the chieftain was accompanied by his charioteer. In Achilles’ time there is already a difference between the sport and the reality.

The next two events—the boxing and the wrestling matches—are described as ἀλεγεινός, “hard” or “distressful,” an epithet which, as before observed, seems rather a recommendation than otherwise. Indeed these two sports, which are always mentioned together, already held the position of pre-eminence which they held at the time of Pindar, and they formed the chief part of the Achaean chieftain’s athletic education. For boxing and wrestling are essentially exercises of skill. The child and the savage hit, kick, tear, scratch, bite, and from this primitive rough-and-tumble the Greek in later time developed the scientific pankration; it is only the civilised man who distinguishes boxing and wrestling, who uses the fist to strike and conducts a fight by rules. In Homer both wrestling and boxing are already arts, and though in their rougher form popular sports, the science of them seems to have been the monopoly of the chieftains, perhaps, like the Japanese jiu-jitsu, jealously handed down from father to son. The importance of the art of self-defence in those unsettled times is obvious from the many legends of robbers and bullies who challenged strangers to a bout of wrestling or boxing, till their career of murder was cut short by a Heracles, a Theseus, or a Polydeuces, in whose victories later art and story represented the triumph of science and Hellenism over brute force and barbarism. Such a victory Odysseus himself is said to have won in Lesbos over Philomeleides, whom he threw mightily, and all the Achaeans rejoiced.[^[9]] In Homer, Polydeuces is already “the boxer,” and Odysseus “of many counsels” wins glory both as boxer and wrestler.

For the boxing Achilles offers two prizes. Epeius at once advances and claims the first prize. In his somewhat brutal arrogance, and his admission that, though superior to all in boxing, he falls short in actual warfare, we have perhaps a foretaste of the later professional boxer. But mock modesty is no characteristic of the Greeks, and poetic nemesis was not to be meted out; moreover, his boastfulness is atoned for by his courtesy in his victory. Still, in the contrast between real war and the sport we seem to see the poet’s judgment that athletics are man’s recreation, not his business. The challenge of Epeius is accepted by Euryalus, who came of a boxing stock; for his father Mecisteus had formerly defeated all the Cadmeans at the burial of Oedipodes. Their friends help to gird them, and bind on the well-cut thongs of oxhide. The loin-belt was, as we shall see, discarded later on, but the thongs remained unchanged till the fifth century, when we shall find them constantly depicted on the vases. Then the two “lifted up stalwart hands and fell to. And noble Epeius came on, and as the other cast a glance around, smote him on the cheek, nor could he much more stand, for his fair limbs straightway failed under him, and as when beneath the north wind’s ripple a fish leapeth on a tangle-covered beach, and then the black wave hideth it, so leapt Euryalus at that blow. But the great-hearted Epeius took him in his hands and set him upright, and his dear comrades stood around him and led him through the ring with trailing foot, spitting out clotted blood, drooping his head awry, and they set him down in his swoon among them.” The description is perfectly clear. Epeius forced the fighting, and catching his opponent off his guard knocked him out in orthodox, or, as some purists would say, unorthodox, fashion with a swinging uppercut on the point of the jaw.

A yet better description of a fight with a similar finish occurs in the Odyssey.[^[10]] Odysseus, returning to his home disguised as a beggar, finds installed there the professional beggar Irus, who at once picks a quarrel with him. The suitors, delighted and amused at the prospect of a fight between a pair of beggars, form a ring round the pair and egg them on, promising to the winner a haggis that is cooking at the fire. But when the beggars strip and gird up their rags they see that they are mistaken in one of their men. Odysseus strips like an athlete, clean and big of limb, and the suitors marvel. Irus too, despite his bulk, marvels, and would fain withdraw. But it is too late: the suitors will not be baulked of their fun, and the fight starts. Of course it is a foregone conclusion, and Odysseus himself knows it. He knows, too, what he can do; his only doubt is whether he shall kill the braggart outright, or strike him lightly to the earth. He decides on the latter course, and proceeds to dispose of him in most artistic fashion. Irus leads off with a clumsy left-hander at Odysseus’ right shoulder, and Odysseus cross-counters with a blow on the neck below the ear which knocks him out. Fights of this sort were doubtless common occurrences, and a little science must have been a very useful possession. That the Achaeans did possess something of the science is clear from the two fights described in Homer, though their science seems rather of the unconventional American type, and does not commend itself to staunch supporters of the orthodox English school.

For wrestling also two prizes are offered, a tripod valued at twelve oxen, and a “woman skilled in all manner of work” valued only at four oxen. For the two prizes there are two competitors, no less persons than Odysseus and Ajax, the types respectively of cleverness and strength. The match is conducted under definite rules, the rules of what was called “upright wrestling,” in which, the object being to throw the opponent, ground wrestling was not allowed. Girding themselves the two advanced “into the midst of the ring, and clasped each the other in his arms with stalwart hands like gable rafters of a lofty house.” The attitude is identical with that adopted by Westmorland and Cumberland wrestlers to-day. Then came the struggle for a closer grip; but when after much striving neither could gain an advantage, Ajax suggested an expedient that each in turn should allow the other to obtain a fair grip and try to throw him by lifting him off the ground. There is here no suggestion of unfairness, but undoubtedly the advantage is with the heavier man. Odysseus, however, was equal to the occasion, and as Ajax lifted him, not forgetful of his art, he struck him with his foot behind the knee, in technical language “hammed” him, and so brought him to the ground, falling heavily upon him. As both wrestlers fell together the bout was inconclusive. Next came Odysseus’ turn: unable to lift his bulky opponent off the ground “he crooked his knee within the other’s, and both fell sideways.” The chip employed was apparently “the hank” or “the inside click” of the modern wrestler. But the fall was what is known as a dog-fall, and inconclusive. The two were proceeding to the third bout when Achilles put an end to the contest, and awarded to each an equal prize.

Futile efforts have been made to explain the verdict by showing that Odysseus won the first bout and Ajax the second; the explanation given above rests on the simple supposition that when both wrestlers fell, no fall was scored. If each had won one bout, the excitement would have been too intense for the contest to be stopped, but two inconclusive bouts were naturally tedious to the spectators.

The foot-race need not detain us long. There were three prizes and three competitors; among them, in spite of his recent exertions, the veteran Odysseus. The course was of the same impromptu type described for the chariot-race, round some distant mark and back to the starting place, where the ground was wet and slippery with the blood of the oxen slaughtered for sacrifice. It was a great race. Ajax, the son of Oeleus, led, while Odysseus followed closely in his track amid the cheers of the Achaeans. As they neared the finish Odysseus prayed to Athene, who “made his limbs feel light, both feet and hands”—a delightful description of the spurt; but not content with such legitimate aid, she caused Ajax, just as they reached the prize, to slip in the victim’s blood. But in Homer there is no ill-feeling at such incidents; the defeated rivals merely comment good-humouredly on the interference of the goddess, just as the modern sportsman, not always so good-humouredly, on his opponent’s luck. “Friends, ye will bear me witness when I say that even herein the immortals favour elder men.” What the moderns ascribe to luck, the Achaeans, like all the ancients, ascribed to the direct action of the gods: it is a later age that makes fortune a goddess.

Of the four remaining events, three at least—the single combat between Ajax and Diomede, throwing the solos, and the contest with the bow—are admitted even by the most conservative critics to be a late interpolation; the fourth event—throwing the spear—is usually assigned to the earlier account of the games, though one of the arguments adduced, that spear-throwing formed part of the Homeric pentathlon, seems singularly weak! There is no suggestion in Homer of any such thing as the pentathlon, a competition consisting of five events in which the same competitors competed, and to talk of the Homeric pentathlon merely because Nestor happens to mention five events in the games at Buprasium is quite unhistorical and most misleading. It would be more to the point to urge that spear-throwing, throwing the solos or diskos, and archery go together, because these same three events are mentioned together in the 2nd Iliad.[^[11]] But this is no place for the details of Homeric criticism. For our present purpose we can learn nothing from the passage about Homeric spear-throwing, for the simple reason that the competition never came off, Achilles out of courtesy to his leader assigning the first prize to Agamemnon without a contest.

Fig. 2. Scene from Clazomenae Sarcophagus in British Museum.

It is unnecessary to consider in detail the confused and lifeless descriptions of these events, but a word must be said of the events themselves. The combat between armed men is depicted on a sixth-century sarcophagus from Clazomenae, now in the British Museum (Fig. [2]).[^[12]] Here, among chariots in full course, or preparing for the race, we see pairs of warriors fighting. They are armed with helmet, spear, and shield, and between each pair stands a youth playing the pipes to show the nature of the fight. At either end stands a pillar bearing a bowl for the prize, while against the pillar rests a naked figure leaning dejectedly upon a staff, the spirit apparently of the dead man in whose honour the games were held. The armed combat was alien, however, to the spirit of the Greeks; we hear of it, indeed, in later times at Mantinea and at Cyrene, but it found no place in any of the great Greek festivals.[^[13]] It was probably connected exclusively with funeral rites, a substitute for human sacrifices. In the earlier part of the book Achilles slays twelve Trojan captives upon the pyre of his friend; in the latter part armed warriors fight in his honour. The one scene is but the later doublet of the other.

The description of the archery competition is simply ludicrous. The first prize is for the man who hits a dove fastened by a cord to the top of a mast, while the second prize is for the man who performs the infinitely harder feat of severing the cord. The choice of ten double axes for the first prize and ten single axes for second suspiciously suggests a reminiscence of the more serious competition with Odysseus’ bow in the Odyssey, where the twelve axe-heads to be shot for are part of the treasures that Odysseus had once won as prizes.[^[14]] In the Odyssey the bow holds an honourable place, but in the Iliad, though a few heroes are famed for their skill in archery, the bow is rather the weapon of the soldiery, and especially of the Trojans, and skill with it is regarded by the Achaean noble who fought in his chariot with the same not unnatural dislike and contempt, not unmingled with fear, as it was by the chivalry of France in the days of Agincourt.[^[15]]

Archery was regarded with the same contempt by the Greek hoplite of the fifth century, and though it formed part of the training of the Athenian Epheboi, it never entered largely into Greek sports. The diskos, however, was always and in all places a favourite exercise. Odysseus, as we have seen, to prove his strength to the Phaeacians, hurled far beyond all their marks a diskos larger than his hosts themselves ever threw.[^[16]] The word diskos means nothing more than a “thing for throwing,” and the object thrown by Odysseus was a stone. Whether the artificial diskos of later times was known to the poet may be doubted, although the words “diskos” and “a diskos’ throw” are of frequent occurrence. In the later gymnasium there was no doubt always a supply of diskoi of various weights and sizes, like the supply of dumbbells in our own gymnasia. But we should hardly expect to find such a stock of athletic implements in the agora of the Phaeacians hard by the ships where these impromptu after-dinner sports took place. It seems more likely that the diskoi were merely the large round pebbles of the seashore, such as the Phaeacian fisher-folk used for holding down their nets and tackle laid out to dry in the agora, and such as every visitor to the seaside instinctively picks up and throws. A stone, a lump of metal, or a tree-trunk provides for early man a natural weapon in time of war, a test of strength in time of peace. From such simple forms are derived the weight, the hammer, and the caber of our modern sports. In Homer stones still played no small part in actual warfare. Even heroes use them. Diomedes hurls at Aeneas a “handful such as two men, as men now are, could scarcely lift,”[^[17]] and with a similar rock, which he wields as lightly as a shepherd waves a fleece, Hector himself bursts in the gate of the Achaean wall.[^[18]] But stones are more especially the weapon of the common soldiery, and when the fight grows general round the body of Cebriones the stones fly fast.[^[19]] Naturally, then, throwing the stone forms a part of the Achaean sports. From the use of the term κατωμαδίοιο,[^[20]] “thrown from the shoulder,” it has been supposed that the Achaeans put the weight from the shoulder. They may have done so; but “the whirl” with which Odysseus hurled the stone, and the distance that he threw it, clearly indicate an underhand throw.

The weight hurled at the games of Patroclus was no stone but an unwrought metal of mass, probably the contents of one of the open-hearth furnaces of the Mediterranean world. This “pig of iron,” which had been taken by Achilles from Eetion of Thebes, is not only the weight to be thrown but the prize, and contrary to the courteous Achaean custom the only prize, although there are four competitors. “The winner’s shepherd, or ploughman,” says Achilles, “will not want for iron for five years.” But in spite of its weight Polypoetes hurls it as far as a herdsman flings the bola[^[21]] “when it flieth whirling through the herds of kine.” The word solos occurs only in this passage and in later imitators of Homer; the passage is, as has been said, a very late one, so late that the writer seems to be consciously archaizing, and I believe that, wishing to give the description a primitive appearance, he substituted the solos for the athlete’s diskos, with which he was undoubtedly familiar. The word seems to be connected with the Semitic sela, a rock, but at an early date to have been used to describe the pigs of iron produced on the island of Elba and elsewhere. In late writers it is sometimes a poetical synonym for the diskos.

The chariot-race and the strictly athletic events, such as boxing, wrestling, and running, were essentially the sports of the nobles; but though the latter excelled the common soldiery in throwing the spear, heaving the weight, and shooting with the bow, as they did in everything else, there is in these three events a distinctly popular element. The bow, the javelin, and the stone were the weapons of all alike, and so, when Achilles was sulking in his tent, his folk, we read, “sported with diskos, with casting of spears, and archery.” The diskos and the spear were also the favourite recreation of the suitors of Penelope, who had, we may suppose, no taste for more strenuous exercises. Their popular character is clearly indicated by the use of the terms “a diskos throw” or “a spear throw” as measures of distance.[^[22]]

Jumping, which was an important event in the later pentathlon, is in Homer only mentioned as one of the sports in which the nimble Phaeacians excelled. Among these we meet with ball-play, a favourite amusement of the Greeks in all ages. Not only do Nausicaa and her maidens disport themselves with the ball on the seashore, but all her brothers give a display of their skill before Odysseus, and in both cases the players, as they toss the ball from one to another, move in a sort of rhythmic dance to the strains of music in a way which would have delighted the heart of some modern professors of physical culture.[^[23]] Dance and song were always dear to the Greeks. We have also hints of acrobatic shows that remind us of the Cretan scenes. On the shield of Achilles was wrought “a dancing place like unto that which once in wide Cnossus Daedalus wrought for Ariadne of the fair tresses ... and among the dancers as the minstrel played two tumblers whirled.”[^[24]] “Verily,” says Patroclus to Meriones, as smitten by a stone he falls from his chariot, “verily there are tumblers among the Trojans too.”[^[25]] Still more suggestive of the circus is the comparison of Ajax rushing over the plain to a man driving four horses and leaping from horse to horse as they fly along.[^[26]]

With the origin of the Homeric poems we are not here concerned. Whether we regard them as the work of a single poet or as evolved by a series of poets, whether as a contemporary picture of the Mycenaean age or as based upon tradition, it is generally agreed that the state of society described is separated by a long interval from any of which we have historical knowledge in Greece, and that, despite slight discrepancies, this description is in its general features consistent. Of this society the games are the natural product. Just as in the Homeric polity we can trace the elements from which the various later institutions were evolved, and yet the polity as a whole is distinct from all later developments, so in athletics the events are the same as are found in the later festivals, but the spirit that pervades them is purely Homeric and separated by a wide interval from the spirit of the Olympic games. Critics tell us that the chief passages referring to the sports are comparatively late, later than the founding of the Olympic games in 776 B.C. If this is so, the poet must have followed closely traditions of a much earlier date. Otherwise we can hardly explain the contrast between the Homeric and the Olympic games, and the absence, with one doubtful exception, of any allusion to the latter. This silence is especially remarkable when we remember the large part played in the games of the Iliad by Nestor and the Neleidae, who lived in the neighbouring Pylos, and the close connexion in the Odyssey between Elis and Ithaca.

The distinctive character of the Homeric games may be summed up in two words—they are aristocratic and spontaneous. They are spontaneous as the play of the child, the natural outlet of vigorous youth. There is no organized training, no organized competition, and sport never usurps the place of work. They are aristocratic because, though manly exercises are common to all the people, excellence in them belongs especially to the nobles; and when sports are held on an elaborate scale at the funeral of some chieftain, it is the nobles only who compete.

CHAPTER III
THE RISE OF THE ATHLETIC FESTIVAL

The athletic meeting was unknown to Homer: in historic times it is associated with religious festivals celebrated at definite periods at the holiest places in Greece. If the growth of the athletic festival was due to the athletic spirit of the race, its connexion with religion may be traced to those games with which the funeral of the Homeric chieftain was celebrated. Though the origin of the great festivals is overgrown with a mass of late and conflicting legends in which it is difficult to distinguish truth from fiction, there is no reason for discrediting the universal tradition of their funeral origin, confirmed as it is by survivals in the ritual of the festivals, by the testimony of the earliest athletic art, and by later custom.[^[27]] So we may conjecture that these games, originally celebrated at the actual funeral, tended like other funeral rites to become periodical, and as ancestor-worship developed into hero-worship became part of the cult of heroes, which seems to have preceded throughout Greece the worship of the Olympian deities. When the latter superseded the earlier heroes, they took over these games together with the sanctuaries and festivals of the older religion.

The custom of celebrating funerals with games and contests is not confined to Greece. Among the funeral scenes that decorate the walls of Etruscan tombs we see depicted chariot-races, horse-races, boxing, wrestling, and other athletic sports, together with contests of a more brutal nature.[^[28]] From the Etruscans the custom spread to the Romans, who borrowed from the same people their gladiatorial games, which were likewise possibly of funeral origin. Funeral games are found in Circassia, in the Caucasus, among the Khirgiz, and yet further afield in Siam and in North America.[^[29]] But the most instructive example for our purpose is furnished by the old Irish fairs, which lasted from pagan times down to the beginning of the last century.[^[30]] These fairs, founded in memory of some departed chieftain, took place at stated intervals commonly in the neighbourhood of the ancient burial-place. Thus the triennial fair of Carman, near Wexford, was instituted in fulfilment of the dying charge of Garman “as a fair of mourning to bear his name for ever.” These fairs, which lasted several days, and to which people of all classes flocked from every part of Ireland, and even from Scotland, furnished an opportunity for the transaction of a variety of business public and private. Laws were promulgated, councils and courts were held, marriages were arranged and celebrated.

There was, of course, buying and selling of every sort, but the principal business of these gatherings was the holding of sports and competitions. Of these there was an endless variety—horse-races, athletic exercises, games, pastimes, special sports for women, competitions in music, in the recitation of poems and tales. There were shows and performances by jugglers, clowns, acrobats, circus-riders, and for everything there were prizes, “for every art that was just to be sold, or rewarded or exhibited or listened to.” Like the sacred month of the Olympic festival, the time of the fairs was “one universal truce,” during which all quarrels and strife were repressed, no distraint for debt, no vengeance was allowed, and the debtor might enjoy himself with impunity. “The Gentile of the Gael,” says an old writer, “celebrated the fair of Carman without breach of law, without crime, without violence, without dishonour.” On the introduction of Christianity the Church took over the old pagan fairs; the pagan rites were abolished, each day began with a religious service, and the fair concluded with a grand religious ceremonial. In every detail the history of these fairs bears an extraordinary resemblance to that of the Greek athletic festivals.

Fig. 3. Amphiaraus Vase. Berlin, 1655.

Fig. 4. Dipylon Vase. Copenhagen.

In Greek lands there is everywhere evidence of the existence of funeral games at all periods, from the legendary games of Pelias to those celebrated at Thessalonica in the time of Valerian, or perhaps in his honour.[^[31]] The games of Pelias and those celebrated by Acastus in honour of his father were represented respectively on the two most famous monuments of early decorative art—the chest of Cypselus dedicated in the Heraeum at Olympia, and the throne of Apollo at Amyclae. Both works are lost, and known to us only from the descriptions of Pausanias, but the manner in which the games of Pelias were represented can be judged from the similar scene on a sixth-century vase, the Amphiaraus vase in Berlin (Fig. [3]).[^[32]] A still earlier representation of funeral games occurs on a geometric cup from the Acropolis, possibly dating from the eighth century (Fig. [4]).[^[33]] On one side are two naked men, with one hand holding each other by the arm, and with the other preparing to stab one another with swords, a mimic fight perhaps rather than a real one, but one which, like the Pyrrhic dance depicted on the other side, may recall more sanguinary funeral contests. On the reverse stand two boxers in the centre between a group of warriors, and a group of dancers; an armed dancer leaping off the ground to the accompaniment of a four-stringed lyre, and two others holding possibly castanets. A similar scene occurs on a silver vase from Etruria, said by Furtwängler to be of Cyprian origin; while the wide distribution of funeral games is further shown by the Clazomenae sarcophagus already described, and by a fragment of a sixth-century vase manufactured at Naucratis (Fig. [140]).[^[34]] The games depicted on these monuments are very similar to those described in Homer. The prizes are generally tripods and bowls which stand between the combatants or at the finish of the course. The contests were not confined to athletics and chariot-races. Hesiod tells us that he was present at Chalcis at the games held in honour of Amphidamas by his sons, and himself won a tripod as a prize for a “hymn.”[^[35]] At Delphi, too, the only contests previous to the sixth century were musical.

Of periodical games in memory of the dead the earliest example, apart from the great festivals, is furnished by the games of Azan in Arcadia, where, according to Pausanias, the chariot-race was the oldest event.[^[36]] At Rhodes the festival of the Heliea seems to have originated in the funeral games of Tlepolemus.[^[37]] In more historical times we frequently find the memory of generals and statesmen kept alive by games founded in their honour by their countrymen, or those whom they had benefited. Miltiades was honoured by games in the Chersonese, Leonidas and Pausanias at Sparta, Brasidas at Amphipolis, Timoleon at Syracuse, Mausolus at Halicarnassus. Kings and tyrants followed the example: Alexander instituted games in honour of his friend Hephaestion. Those, too, who had fallen in war were often commemorated by their states with athletic festivals. The Pythia were reorganized by the Amphictions as a funeral contest in honour of those who fell in the first Sacred war, in memory of which the victors received crowns of bay cut in the Vale of Tempe, and the Eleutheria at Plataea were established by the victorious Greeks to commemorate those who had died in battle against the Persians. At Athens, too, a festival was held in the Academy under the direction of the polemarch in memory of those citizens who had died for their country.[^[38]]

The origin of funeral games is too difficult a question to be discussed here. Many explanations have been offered. Roman critics held the Etruscan combats, from which their own gladiatorial games were borrowed, to have been originally a substitute for human sacrifice; and this explanation has been suggested above in connexion with the armed fight in the games of Patroclus. This view receives some support from the occurrence of the armed fight, whether real or mimic, and of the armed Pyrrhic dance, which was certainly a mimicry of battle, on some of the monuments representing funeral games, perhaps, too, from the prominence in these games of boxing, which may be regarded as a further modification of the more brutal combats. Plutarch suggests apologetically that in early days such fights took place even at Olympia,[^[39]] and the lads of the Peloponnese, we are told, every year lashed themselves upon the grave of Pelops till the blood ran down. But the significance of the latter rite is doubtful. Another view connects these contests with those fights for succession with which Dr. Frazer’s Golden Bough has made us familiar. In support of this we may cite the famous chariot-race between Pelops and Oenomaus for the hand of Hippodameia, or such later myths as the wrestling match by which Zeus won from Cronus the sovereignty of heaven. Connected with the idea of succession is the credit and popularity accruing to the heirs from the magnificence of the games with which they celebrated their dead predecessor. The costly prizes offered must assuredly have caused no less pleasure to the living than to the dead. Comparatively late is the idea that the dead man somehow assisted as spectator and enjoyed the games held in his honour.[^[40]] In all these views there is probably some truth, the amount of which varied in different places; but whatever truth there is in any or all of them as applied to the Greeks, they afford no adequate explanation of the variety and importance of Greek funeral games unless full account be taken also of the intense love of competition and the strong athletic spirit of the race. But whatever the origin of funeral games, there can be no doubt that they adequately account for the close connexion between athletics and religion; nor is this view discredited by doubts as to the particular funeral legends which later invention attached to particular festivals.

The athletic festival required for its growth fairly settled conditions of life, and during the troubled period which intervened between the time of Nestor and the first Olympiad no progress was possible. Long before the Homeric poems were composed, love of adventure, quickened perhaps by pressure from the North, had driven the Achaeans and other kindred tribes forth from the mainland of Greece to find fresh homes in the islands and on the eastern shores of the Aegean. Other tribes, Aeolians, Ionians, Dorians, followed, and for centuries the stream of colonization flowed eastwards, carrying Greek civilization to every part of the Aegean. This civilization gathered fresh life from contact with the East. There, while Greece itself was paralyzed by wars and migrations, great cities grew and flourished, cities great not only in material prosperity but in art and literature and science. Of the history of these cities unfortunately we know nothing; we can only judge of their greatness by the results which we find in the seventh and sixth centuries when the rise of the Lydian and Persian empires first brought them into conflict with these powers. But of one thing we may be sure—the Greek settlers brought with them their love of sport. This must be a truism to all who hold that the 23rd Iliad was composed in the Eastern Aegean; it is confirmed by the many victories gained in later days at Olympia by athletes from the cities and islands of the East, and by the numerous athletic festivals existing in those parts in historical times.

Under the settled and luxurious conditions of Eastern life it is probable that the athletic festival developed at an early date,[^[41]] though owing to the same conditions athletics never attained in the East to the position which they occupied in the Peloponnese, and the athletic business was often secondary to the other business of the festivals. This at least is suggested by the history of the Delian festival. The antiquity of this festival is vouched for by the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. At a time when Olympia was still little more than a local gathering, the long-robed Ionians were already flocking to Apollo’s isle with their children and their wives. Even from the mainland of Greece choirs came with hymns to Apollo. We still possess a fragment of Eumelus, a Bacchiad of Corinth, said by Pausanias to have been written for the Messenian choir sent to Delos in the eighth century.[^[42]] “There when the games are ordered they rejoice to honour Apollo with boxing and dance and song.” The picture in the Hymn to Apollo is full of joy and grace: the fair ships drawn up by the water’s edge, the costly merchandise spread out upon the shore, the throng of long-robed men and fair-girdled women, and in the background the slopes of Mount Cynthus, halfway up which stands out the rocky archway of Apollo’s ancient shrine. A fair scene truly, and typical no doubt of many another festival where men of kindred race gathered together for sacrifice and song, for sport and traffic. But in this joyous festival of the jovial Delians we feel that athletics hold but a secondary place. For the more serious business of athletics we must go to the sterner, more strenuous festivals of the Peloponnese—above all to Olympia.

“Best of all is water and gold as a flaming fire in the night shineth eminent amid lordly wealth: but if of prizes in the games thou art fain, O my soul, to tell, then as for no bright star more quickening than the sun must thou search in the void firmament by day, so neither shall we find any games greater than the Olympic whereof to utter our voice.”[^[43]] The sanctity of Olympia and its festival go back to days far earlier than the coming of the Dorians, perhaps of any Greek race; but the growth of the festival dates from the time when, after the Dorian invasion, the movements of the peoples ceased and the land became settled, and its greatness is largely due to the athletic ideal and the genius for organization which characterized that race. “It is not the least of the many debts which we owe to Heracles,” says Lysias in his Panegyric, “that by instituting the Olympic games he restored peace and goodwill to a land torn asunder by war and faction and wasted by pestilence.” Pausanias uses similar language of the restoration of the games by Iphitus and Lycurgus, whose action another tradition ascribes to the advice of the Delphic oracle. But though we can hardly credit the founders of the games, whoever they were, with this far-sighted Panhellenic policy at so early a date, the tradition is founded upon facts: the first Olympiad does mark the settlement of Greece, and the festival did promote the unity of Greece. Its growth, though not its origin, was due to the Dorians.

Fig. 5. Plan of Olympia.

Olympia lies about ten miles from the sea on the northern bank of the Alpheus, at the point where its valley spreads out into a wide and fertile plain. In an angle formed by this river with its tributary the Cladeus, which rushes down from the mountains of Elis between steep banks formerly shaded with plane-trees, at the foot of the pine-clad hill of Cronus, stood the grove of wild olive-trees, brought there according to tradition by Heracles from the land of the Hyperboreans, the sacred grove from which the Altis took its name. The slopes of the neighbouring hills were covered with a variety of trees, and in the rich undergrowth of flowering shrubs the wild boar, deer, and other game found cover. It was to Scillus, only a few miles distant, that the veteran Xenophon retired to spend his old age in literature and sport. In old days the vegetation was far more luxuriant than now; besides the olive groves, the white poplars, from which alone the wood for the sacrifice to Zeus and Pelops might be cut, and even the palm-tree flourished there. The rich well-watered plain was covered with vines and crops, while its meadows afforded abundant pasturage for horses and for cattle.[^[44]]

To the modern traveller Olympia seems too much out of the way to be the scene of a great national gathering; even to the Greek of the fifth century it must have seemed to stand outside the busy centres of Greek life, and perhaps it was this very remoteness, combined with its ancient sanctity, that saved Olympia, like Delphi, from being the battle-ground between the rival states of Greece. But it had not been so always. The flat, rich, alluvial plains of the western Peloponnese had not formerly lagged behind the rest of Greece. The long, almost unbroken curves of sandy shore offered little harbourage for the triremes of a later day. But the earlier mariner or trader from the East who coasted around Greece had no love for deep land-locked harbours; all he wanted was a sandy shore where he could beach his ships sheltered by some convenient headland as at Triphylian Pylos, or at the open mouth of some river like the Alpheus. Hence there is no reason to doubt the traditions that connect Cretans and Phoenicians with Olympia.[^[45]] The coastline has advanced considerably since those days, and the small boats of these ancient mariners could advance up the river with perfect safety through the flat open plain as far as Olympia. This accessibility of Olympia by sea had yet more important consequences at a later age when the festival attracted men from the great colonies of Italy and Sicily. Olympia may even have been associated with the founding of these colonies; for the coast road round Elis and the shores of the gulf of Corinth connected it with Sicyon, Corinth, and Megara. May we not suppose that, as the colonists sailed down the gulf of Corinth, many of them would turn aside before they bade farewell to their native shores to visit the venerable grove of Olympia and consult its ancient oracle?

Again, Olympia stood full in the way of the Achaean tribes as they pressed southwards from their first settlement at Dodona. In speaking of the Achaeans we are using the word provisionally for convenience’ sake to denote the pre-Dorian Greeks of the Peloponnese as opposed to the original inhabitants and the later Dorians. In the Odyssey they have spread over the islands, over Pleuron by the sea and rocky Calydon, over Elis and Messenia. So close was the connexion between the islands and Elis, then the land of the Epeans, that the princes of Ithaca used its broad plains for breeding cattle and horses. The narrow straits offered no obstacle to this adventurous people, and for centuries before the passage of Oxylus, the one-eyed Aetolian from Naupactus, the Achaeans and others had been crossing over in larger or smaller companies till they had spread over the whole Peloponnese. Hence for the Achaeans in the Peloponnese Olympia stood in the same position as Dodona in northern Greece. The Dorians, indeed, seem to have failed in their attempt to follow in the same course; but legend connected with the return of the Heracleidae the invasion of their Aetolian allies under Oxylus, who dispossessed the Epean lords of Elis. The quarrel between these newcomers and the earlier settlers for the possession of Olympia lasted for centuries, but through all the changes of population, though many fresh cults were added by the invaders, the superstition with which all newcomers in those days regarded the gods and sanctuaries of the earlier inhabitants preserved the old cults inviolate, so that in the buildings and altars of Olympia, and the ritual of its festival, all the various strata of its history are plainly visible.

Lastly, though remote from the struggles of later history, no place in the Peloponnese was more accessible to other parts. Besides the coast-route that connected it with Messenia and the gulf of Corinth, the valleys of the Alpheus and its tributaries afforded a natural means of communication with all parts of the interior, and it was to the athletic character of the inhabitants of the Peloponnese that the athletic fame of the festival in the first place was due. Without this native talent it could never have attracted competitions from northern Greece or from the colonies of the West, nor could it ever have acquired its peculiar sanctity but for the position it had held in the earlier migrations.

It is unnecessary here to discuss the various myths which Greek imagination wove about the beginnings of Olympia, and the perplexing problems which they raise. Two propositions may be regarded as fairly established. In the first place, Olympia was a holy place before the Achaeans came to the Peloponnese. In the second place, the beginning of the games was earlier than the Dorian invasion, but later probably than the coming of the Achaeans.

The antiquity of Olympia is proved by the presence there of those elements of primitive religion which preceded the worship of the Olympian deities. The altar of Cronus on the hill top which bore his name recalled a sovereignty earlier than that of Zeus. An ancient oracle of earth preceded the oracle of Zeus. Of the worship of the powers of the underworld there is abundant evidence at Olympia, as in the rest of the Peloponnese; the priestess of Demeter Chamyne, for example, was exempted from the rule that excluded women from Olympia, and had her place of honour in the stadium opposite the seats of the Hellanodicae. In Hera, whose worship at Olympia was earlier than that of Zeus, we may probably recognize a Hellenized form of the great Mother Goddess of the Aegean world. Lastly, that Pelops claimed precedence of Zeus is clear from the fact that the athletes sacrificed to Pelops first and then to Zeus. At his tomb within the Altis, originally a barrow, only afterwards enclosed in a shrine, he was worshipped with all the ceremonial due to the dead, and every year the youths of the Peloponnese lashed themselves upon his grave till the blood ran down.[^[46]] Yet it does not follow that the cult of Pelops was pre-Achaean. We cannot clearly draw the line between what belonged to the Achaeans and what to the original inhabitants. There was no violent breach, but rather a gradual fusion of the races, in the course of which the Achaeans made their own much of the earlier civilization. Certainly the cult of heroes continued all through Greek history; in later days even noted athletes were canonized.

The ancient writings of the Eleans, according to Pausanias, ascribed the institution of the games to the Idaean Heracles, one of the Cretan Curetes to whom the infant Zeus was entrusted. But to Pindar and Bacchylides the games are associated with the tomb of Pelops. Pelops, as the story goes, came to Olympia as a suitor for the hand of Hippodameia, whose father Oenomaus challenged all her suitors to a chariot-race, and slew with his spear all whom he defeated. Thirteen suitors had been slain when Pelops came and, by the aid of Myrtilus, the charioteer of Oenomaus, who removed the lynch-pins from his master’s chariot wheels, slew him and won his bride and kingdom. This story, afterwards represented on the chest of Cypselus and on the pediments of the temple of Zeus, was commemorated by the earliest monuments of the Altis. Besides the tomb of Pelops himself, there was an ancient wooden pillar said to be the only remnant of the house of Oenomaus, which was struck by lightning,[^[47]] and also the Hippodamium, apparently a funeral mound, surrounded afterwards by a wall, where the women of Elis every year offered sacrifice.

It was at the ancient tomb of Pelops, Pindar tells us, that Heracles the son of Zeus, returning from his victory over Augeas, founded the Olympian games. There “he measured a sacred grove for the Father, and having fenced round the Altis marked the bounds thereof. There he set apart the choicest of the spoil for an offering from the war and sacrificed and ordained the fifth year feast.” “In the foot-race down the straight course was Likymnius’ son Oeonus first, from Nidea had he led his host; in the wrestling was Tegea glorified by Echemus; Doryclus won the prize of boxing, a dweller in the city of Tiryns, and with the four-horse chariot Samos of Mantinea, Halirrhothius’ son; with the javelin Phrastor hit the mark; in distance Eniceus beyond all others hurled the stone with a circling sweep, and all the warrior company thundered a great applause.”[^[48]]

The poet has glorified into a Peloponnesian festival what can have been no more than a local gathering in which the neighbouring chieftains took part, and the introduction of Heracles may have been an invention of the Eleans; for, according to Pausanias, it was Iphitus who first induced the Eleans, or, as he should have said, the Pisatans, to sacrifice to Heracles whom they had before regarded as their enemy. Yet there is probably some truth in the connexion of the games with Pelops’ grave, a tradition which we find also in Pindar’s great rival Bacchylides. But who was Pelops? Was he god, man, or hero? Like the oracle of Delphi when asked a similar question about Lycurgus, we may well doubt. Yet in spite of certain modern authorities, who see local gods in most of the heroes of legend, it is perhaps safer to accept the universal belief of the Greeks that he was a man, some chieftain who after his death was worshipped as a hero. Moreover, the tradition of his Phrygian origin is a strong argument against the view that he was a native pre-Achaean god of the Peloponnese, though it is by no means incompatible with his connexion with the Achaeans in view of the original kinship of the latter with the Phrygians. At all events Pelops is pre-Dorian, and the victors in these games, according to Pindar, are pre-Dorians.

The existence of the games in pre-Dorian times agrees entirely with the athletic character of the Achaeans in the Peloponnese as described in Homer; and if we find in the poet no mention of Olympia, his silence is easily explained by the simple, local character of the festival at this time. It will be remembered that in the funeral games of the north-western Peloponnese chariot-racing played a prominent part. The antiquity of this sport at Olympia is confirmed by the discovery of a number of very early votive offerings, many of them models of horses or chariots, found in a layer that extends below the foundations of the Heraeum. This temple was founded, it is said, by the people of Scillus some eight years after the coming of Oxylus; and even if we cannot go so far as Dr. Dörpfeld, who assigns it to the tenth or eleventh centuries, there is no doubt of its great antiquity, and that the Scilluntines were of an Arcadian, not a Dorian stock.

Before the building of the Heraeum we must picture Olympia as a sacred grove surrounded by a hedge interspersed with open spaces where stood the barrow of Pelops and sundry earth altars, such as the great altar of Zeus, or the six double altars at which the competitors offered sacrifice. Thither the country-folk resorted to inquire of the future from the ancient earth oracle, or perhaps, as at Dodona, from the rustling of the leaves. These oracles were interpreted by certain hereditary families, the Iamidae and Clytidae, who maintained their privileges even when Dorian influence had prevailed. Thither at set times the neighbouring tribes flocked to take part in the games held at the tomb of Pelops. The sanctuary and festival of Olympia were in the territory of the Pisatae, a tribal group of village communities possibly nine in number situated on either side of the Alpheus valley, and loosely bound together by the common worship of the hero Pelops.[^[49]] They took their name from the village of Pisa, perhaps on account of its nearness to Olympia.

The Pisatae were one of many such tribal groups, or amphictyonies in the Peloponnese, in parts of which this form of life continued into the fifth century or later. Such were the groups of nine cities mentioned in the catalogue of the ships in the Iliad, the nine Arcadian cities grouped round the tomb of Aepytus, the nine Pylian cities of Nestor’s kingdom, the nine Argive cities under Diomed, the nine Lacedaemonian cities under Sparta. Such, too, were the Caucones, a wandering tribe whose hero Caucon was in later times supposed to be buried near Lepreum; such were the Epeans of Elis; while the Eleans who supplanted them retained this form of government till the founding of the city-state of Elis in the fifth century. Like all such clans these leagues were intensely aristocratic: the chieftains were regarded with superstitious reverence, and the tribal centre was often the tomb of some departed hero-chief. Of cities, properly speaking, there were none in the western Peloponnese. A few strong fortresses served as residences for powerful chieftains and as refuge for their followers in danger; but most of the people lived in unwalled villages like the Scotch Highlanders. Their wealth consisted largely in horses and cattle, which they bartered with the islanders or with Cretan or Phoenician traders who landed at Pylos or sailed up the Alpheus to Olympia. In search of pasturage they ranged in winter over the lowland plains, retiring in summer to the sheltered upland valleys. The constant pressure of newcomers kept them constantly on the move, southwards and eastwards. This shifting of the tribal centres may be traced in the places that bore the name of Pylos. Settling originally in Elean Pylos, the gateway of the netherworld, these Pylians, united by some netherworld cult, were forced to move first to Triphylian Pylos, probably the Pylos of Nestor, and at a later stage to Messenian Pylos. Of their raids and cattle-lifting, their feuds and their reprisals, we have a vivid picture in the Odyssey. Such, we may suppose, was the life of the Pisatae and their neighbours, the pre-Dorian inhabitants of Elis, Triphylia, Arcadia and Messenia. The Pisatae perhaps enjoyed a position more established than the rest, thanks to the superstitious reverence which alone saved the rich valley of Olympia from attack, but under these unsettled conditions the real development of the festival was impossible, though the prestige which it had already acquired is shown in the building of the Heraeum by the Scilluntines.

The coming of the Dorians brought order into the Peloponnese, but only after a long and bitter struggle. The settling of Oxylus and his Aetolians in Elis checked the stream of migration from the north-west, and the power of the Dorians prevented further aggression from other quarters. Meanwhile such of the earlier inhabitants as clung to their independence were driven into the mountains of Arcadia and Achaea, or into Messenia. In the south-west the civilization, of which we have a glorified picture in Nestor’s kingdom, lasted perhaps till the final conquest of the country by the Spartans; in the mountains the inhabitants developed into a race of hardy mountaineers and shepherds, fond of sport and war, clinging tenaciously to their ancient customs and manner of government, but playing no part in the history of Greece save as mercenaries in the pay of more progressive states.

In the long struggle that preceded the final settlement even Olympia was involved. The Eleans—as we may call the newcomers from Aetolia—strove hard to wrest from the Pisatans the control of the sanctuary; but the latter doggedly maintained their rights, which had been recently vindicated by the building of the Heraeum, and religious feeling was on their side. Still, the prestige of the festival suffered to such an extent that the games, it is said, were neglected and forgotten. At length, weary of incessant strife and a pestilence that followed it, the contending factions, on the advice, according to one story, of the Delphic oracle, resolved to re-establish the Olympic games as a means of restoring goodwill and unity to the land. This work was ascribed to Iphitus, king of Elis, a descendant of Oxylus, to Cleosthenes, king of Pisa, and to Lycurgus of Sparta. The ordinance regulating the festival was engraved on a diskos preserved in the temple of Hera down to the time of Pausanias, on which the names of Iphitus and Lycurgus were still legible in the days of Aristotle.[^[50]] The antiquity of the diskos is unquestionable, but it may well be doubted if it was contemporary with the event described. More probably it dated from the seventh century, when Sparta, as we shall see, took an active part in the games. The introduction of Sparta and Lycurgus at this early date is certainly suspicious. Be this as it may, the organization of the festival by Iphitus and Cleosthenes may be regarded as the first definite historical fact in its history.

From this date the festival was held every fourth year until its abolition by the emperor Theodosius at the close of the fourth century A.D. It took place at the time of the second or third full moon after the summer solstice in the Elean months Apollonios and Parthenios, which correspond approximately to August and September. For the sacred month (ἱερομηνία) in which the festival took place, a holy truce (ἐκεχειρία) was proclaimed beforehand by the truce-bearers of Zeus (σπονδοφόροι). During this truce there was to be peace throughout the land, no one was permitted to bear arms within the sacred territory, and all competitors, embassies, and spectators travelling to Olympia were regarded as under the protection of Zeus and sacrosanct. The effect of this truce, at first purely local, spread with the growth of the festival to all the states taking part in it till the whole Greek world felt its influence. Any violation of the truce, any wrong inflicted on the pilgrims of Zeus, was punished by a heavy fine to Olympian Zeus. The Spartans at the time of the Peloponnesian war, having entered the sacred territory during the truce under arms, were condemned to pay a fine of two minae for every hoplite; on their refusal to pay they were excommunicated. Even Alexander condescended to apologize and make restitution to the Athenian Phrynon, who had been seized and robbed by some of his mercenaries on his way to Olympia.[^[51]]

By the truce of Iphitus the control of the festival seems to have been divided between the Eleans and Pisatans, vested probably at an early date in a joint council representing the various village communities. The council certainly existed in later days as a final court of appeal, and the fact that the earliest building under the new régime was the council-house, part of which dates from the middle of the sixth century, points to the antiquity of such a body. The dual control was recognized in the appointment of two executive officials, the Hellanodicae. The royal robes of purple worn by these officials indicate that they were originally the kings of the respective tribes. One of them, according to Elean tradition the only one, was always a descendant of Oxylus; but the official position of the Pisatae survived in later times in the priestly families of the Iamidae and Clytidae. As was to be expected, the dual control did not work smoothly. The Pisatae, mindful of their ancient rights, and jealous of the interference of the Eleans, made repeated but futile efforts to regain the sole control. But the superior might of the Eleans, supported at first at all events by the Spartans, prevailed more and more, till shortly after the Persian wars the Eleans laid waste the revolting cities of Triphylia, destroyed Pisa itself, and remained henceforth sole masters of Olympia, save for a spasmodic effort of the Pisatans and Arcadians in Ol. 104 (364 B.C.).

The view of Olympian history taken above differs considerably from the orthodox view taken from Pausanias and Strabo, and based on “the ancient writings of the Eleans.” This priestly fiction may be summarized as follows. The games originally established by Oxylus were refounded by Iphitus and Lycurgus, and were under the management of the Eleans. In Ol. 8 the Pisatans called in Pheidon, king of Argos, and with his help dispossessed the Eleans, but lost their control in the next Olympiad. In Ol. 28 Elis, being at war with Dyme, allowed the Pisatans to celebrate the games. In Ol. 34 Pantaleon, king of Pisa, celebrated the games at the head of an army. According to one account the Pisatans had control of the festival for twenty-two successive Olympiads, from the 30th to the 51st. Finally, somewhere between Ols. 48 and 52, the Eleans defeated the rebellious Pisatans, destroyed Pisa, laid waste Triphylia, and henceforth held undisputed control of Olympia with the exception of Ol. 104, which was celebrated by the Arcadians and Pisatans. In consequence this Olympiad, together with the 8th and 34th, were expunged from the register and reckoned as Anolympiads. Till Ol. 50 there was only one Hellanodicas, a descendant of Oxylus; at this date a second was appointed, and both were chosen by lot from the whole number of the Eleans.

This story is obviously a pious fraud invented by the priests of Elis to justify their usurpation by asserting a prior claim, a claim contradicted by all the evidence, and expressly denied by Xenophon.[^[52]] For the same reason the part played by Cleosthenes in the truce of Iphitus is omitted by Pausanias, though fortunately preserved in another account. It is only possible to point out briefly some of the inconsistencies and absurdities in the priestly story. Elis is represented throughout as in control of Olympia, which is situated outside its boundaries in Pisatis, an independent state with a king of its own, and this independent state is represented as continually trying to usurp what is its own. The story of the Anolympiads is discredited by the fact that in the Olympic register, a document of at least equal value, these Olympiads were reckoned and the names of the victors were given. The part played by Pheidon is involved in all the obscurity that surrounds that most tantalizing character, but that the great tyrant, whenever he lived, did try to increase his prestige by seizing control of the Olympia, is rendered probable by the connexion of similar tyrants with Olympia and the other festivals. The story of the addition of the second Hellanodicas in Ol. 50, at the very time when Pisa is said to have been destroyed, is a manifest absurdity. The two Hellanodicai represent a dual monarchy, and a dual monarchy represents a union of races. Assuming, what is now generally admitted, the pre-Dorian origin of the festival, the original Hellanodicas must have been a Pisatan, the second must have been added when Elis secured a share in the government. Moreover, the selection of the two officials by lot, a thoroughly democratic institution, is unthinkable in Elis, at that time an oligarchy of oligarchies, though it may well have been introduced when the democrats of Elis obtained the mastery. Lastly, the date of the final destruction of Pisa, about which Pausanias is obviously confused, is contradicted by the direct statement of Herodotus, who speaks of the war in which it took place as “in my days” (ἐπ’ ἐμέο).[^[53]] The earlier date has been supported by reference to a sixth-century inscription at Olympia recording a treaty for mutual defence between Elis and Heraea, by the terms of which either party failing to help the other is liable in case of need to a fine of a talent of silver to Olympian Zeus.[^[54]] Too much, perhaps, has been made of this inscription, which is probably one of many such local treaties, the record of which has perished. Moreover, it seems highly probable that Heraea, so far from being opposed to Pisa, was a member of the early Pisatan league. The original claims of Pisa are admitted by all modern historians; all further difficulties vanish on the supposition of a subsequent dual control, in which Elis gradually became the predominant partner until, in the fifth century, she ousted Pisa completely.

The regulations for competitors may be traced back to the earliest times. No one in later days was allowed to compete who was not of pure Greek parentage on both sides, or who had neglected to pay any penalty incurred to Olympian Zeus, or who had incurred ceremonial pollution by manslaughter, committed, we may suppose, in the sacred territory. These restrictions had their origin in a religious festival that formed a bond of union between neighbouring communities, which was gradually extended through the sacred truce-bearers till it embraced the whole Greek race. That this local or tribal exclusiveness grew into a Panhellenic exclusiveness, was due partly to the influence of the Dorians, partly to the close connexion of the colonies with Olympia. In the fifth century Alexander, the son of Amyntas, was not allowed to compete at Olympia until he had first satisfied the Hellanodicae that he was of Greek descent.

Similarly, the exclusion of women from Olympia was doubtless due to some religious taboo rather than to any sense of modesty or decorum. Such a feeling cannot have existed in these times. Certainly the Ionian women attended the festival of Delos, and Spartan girls took part in all athletic exercises with the boys. Pausanias in one passage tells us that the restriction did not extend to unmarried girls, but the truth of his statement is at least doubtful. We never hear of any unmarried women being present at the festival, and Olympia can have afforded little or no accommodation for them. The only certain exception is in the case of the priestess of Demeter, Chamyne, an exception that is quite consistent with the idea of an ancient taboo. Otherwise no woman was allowed to cross the Alpheus during a stated number of days. The penalty for so doing was death, the transgressor being thrown from the Typaean rock. Only one instance is recorded of this rule being broken. Pherenice, a member of the famous family of the Diagoridae, in her anxiety to see her son Peisirodus compete in the boys’ boxing, accompanied him to Olympia disguised as a trainer. In her delight at his victory she leapt over the barrier and so disclosed her sex. The Hellanodicae, however, pardoned her in consideration for her father and brothers and son, all of them Olympic victors, but they passed a decree that henceforth all trainers should appear naked.[^[55]]

Yet, though personally excluded from the games, women were allowed to enter their horses for the chariot-race, and even to set up statues for their victories. They had also their own festival at Olympia, the Heraea.[^[56]] Every four years a peplos was woven for Hera by sixteen women of Elis, and presented to the goddess. At the festival there were races for maidens of various ages. Their course was 500 feet, or one-sixth less than the men’s stadium. The maidens ran with their hair down their backs, a short tunic reaching just below the knee, and their right shoulder bare to the breast. The victors received crowns of olive and a share of the heifer sacrificed to Hera. They had, too, the right of setting up their statues in the Heraeum. There is in the Vatican a copy of a fifth-century statue of one of these girl victors, represented just as Pausanias describes them (Fig. [6]). She seems to be just on the point of starting. Unfortunately the arms of the statue are restored, and we cannot feel certain of the motive. The Heraea were said to have been instituted by Hippodameia in gratitude for her marriage with Pelops. Of their real origin and history we are unfortunately ignorant. According to Curtius the Heraea were the prototype of the Olympia, and races for maidens were earlier than those for men, but this is most improbable. The weaving of the peplos reminds us, of course, of the similar ceremony at the Panathenaea, while the races for maidens suggest Dorian influence. Certainly we can hardly make the Dorians responsible for the exclusion of women from Olympia, which may be safely referred to the earlier non-Greek race.

Fig. 6. Statue of Girl Runner. Vatican. Copy of fifth-century original. (From a photograph by Alinari).

In early days athletes wore the loin-cloth which Cretan excavations have shown to have been worn generally in the Mediterranean world. The Homeric Greeks girded themselves for sports, and on some of the earliest athletic vases the loin-cloth is depicted (Figs. [128], [142]). Generally, however, the Greek athletes were absolutely naked. This custom is ascribed to an accident. Orsippus of Megara, in Ol. 15, 720 B.C., accidentally or on purpose dropped his loin-cloth in the race. The advantage which he gained thereby produced such an impression that from this date all runners discarded the loin-cloth. This story was commemorated by an epigram, written possibly by Simonides, which was inscribed on his tomb. The practice does not seem to have been adopted by all athletes till a later date, for Thucydides states that the abandonment of the loin-cloth even at Olympia dated from shortly before his own time.[^[57]]

The prizes were originally tripods and other objects of value. It was in Ol. 7 that the crown of wild olive was first introduced on the advice of the Delphic oracle. The branches of which the crowns were made were cut from the sacred olive-trees with a golden sickle, by a boy whose parents were both living. This was henceforth the only prize given at Olympia. Of the rewards and honours bestowed by the victor’s countrymen, and of other details connected with the games, we shall speak in another chapter. Our knowledge is not sufficient for a description of the festival at this early period.

The athletic records of Olympia date from the year 776 B.C., the 28th Olympiad from the organization of the games by Iphitus. This Olympiad, in which Coroebus of Elis won the foot-race, is counted as the first Olympiad in the Olympic register,[^[58]] and from this date we have a complete list of winners in this race copied by Eusebius from the work of Julius Africanus, who brought the register down to the year 217 A.D. The register was originally compiled by Hippias of Elis at the close of the fifth century. It was revised and brought up to date by various writers from Aristotle and Philochorus down to Phlegon of Tralles in the time of Hadrian and Julius Africanus in the third century A.D. A list of victors was set up at Olympia by Paraballon, an Olympic victor, and the father of the boy victor Lastratidas, whose date is fixed by Hyde in the first half of the fourth century B.C.[^[59]] It was not till the third century B.C. that the Olympic register was used as a means of reckoning dates, the year being dated by the number of the Olympiad and the name of the winner of the stade-race. Hence the preservation by Eusebius of the names of the winners of this race. The earlier lists, as we know from fragments of Phlegon and a fragment recently found on an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, contained the names of winners in other events.

The value of the early portions of the register has been called in question by Mahaffy, Busolt, and Körte, who, starting from Plutarch’s sceptical remark that Hippias had no sure basis for his work, contend that no credit should be attached to the records previous to the sixth century. They have proved that the register was imperfect—it could hardly have been otherwise; that the task of compiling it was difficult—men like Hippias and Aristotle would not otherwise have devoted their time to it. But we can hardly believe that Hippias could have imposed a purely fictitious list of victors on the critical Greek world at the end of the fifth century, or that Aristotle would have revised it without some evidence for his work. What sort of record was kept by the priests of Olympia, and when it began, we cannot say. The use of writing at Olympia is proved for the seventh century by the diskos of Iphitus and the decrees or Ϝράτραι of the Eleans with regard to the sacred truce. The official register of Athenian archons dates from 683 B.C., if not earlier, and recent discoveries as to the antiquity of writing in Crete make us hesitate to deny the existence of written records for the eighth century. Besides official lists there must have been many local lists of victors, family records, genealogies, besides inscriptions on monuments. Of the first sixteen victors in the register four at least are connected by Pausanias with monuments or inscriptions, possibly not contemporary with the people commemorated but yet valuable as evidence. If you set up a monument to your great-grandfather, it may be of great importance to a future antiquarian in making out your genealogy. Most people in the present day have no knowledge of their great-grandfathers, or prefer to forget their existence; but in a tribal society with intense respect for birth it is very different, especially in a poetical race. Their only history is the history of the family and clan; family traditions and genealogies are remembered and handed down with a care and accuracy unknown to our cosmopolitan civilization. Such were the sources from which the sophist must have collected material for his register in his travels, and though his list may have been imperfect and often inaccurate, it is yet sufficiently accurate to afford valuable indications of the growth and development of the festival.

In two points we may certainly reject the evidence of the register, and of Elean tradition. During the period of war and confusion preceding Iphitus, they said, the games had been forgotten. For many Olympiads the only competition was the stade-race, but gradually, as the memory of the old games came back to them, one event after another was added. In Ol. 14 the double race (δίαυλος) was added, in Ol. 15 the long race (δολιχός), in Ol. 18 the pentathlon and wrestling, in Ol. 23 boxing, in Ol. 25 the four-horse chariot-race, in Ol. 33 the pankration and the horse-race, in Ol. 37 the first events for boys, the foot-race and wrestling, in Ol. 38 the pentathlon for boys, which, however, was not repeated, in Ol. 41 the boys’ boxing, in Ol. 65 the race in armour. After this date various events for horses and mules were introduced at different times, competitions for heralds and trumpeters, and in Ol. 145 the pankration for boys.

The first part of this account is obviously absurd in view of the evidence given above for funeral games. There can be no doubt that in the first Olympiad the programme included at least all the events described by Pindar, the foot-race, the diskos, the spear, boxing, wrestling, and the chariot-race. If the Olympic games did develop from a single event, it was probably not from the foot-race, but from the armed fight or the chariot-race. Probably the compiler dated the introduction of each new event from the first occasion on which he found a mention of it. This may explain the number of first events won by Sparta, a state particularly well known to Hippias, one, too, where we should expect athletic records to be kept with especial care. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the programme received many additions, variations of the foot-race such as the double race and the long race, complicated events such as the pentathlon and pankration, especially boys’ events, and there is no valid reason for doubting the date of such additions.

Connected with this story of the evolution of the games is the precedence given to the stade-race, the winner of which gave his name to the Olympiad. This custom, as we have seen, is not earlier than the third century, and arose not from the excessive importance of that event, but from the mere accident of its coming first on the programme and also on the list of victors. The Greek sportsman had doubtless long been in the habit of dating the years by reference to the victory of some famous athlete, especially if he were a fellow-countryman. Thucydides twice quotes in dates Olympic victories, each time victories in the pankration, an event very popular at Athens. In the earliest inscription that uses the Olympiads for chronology the pankration is also the event mentioned.[^[60]] Hence one is inclined to suspect the completeness of the list of winners in the stade-race. Possibly early records and traditions often stated the fact of a victory without mentioning the event in which it was won, and the compiler of the register, having adopted his theory of development, assumed that all such victories were won in the foot-race.

In 776 B.C. Olympia itself had as yet changed but little. The only building was the Heraeum, a long, low, narrow temple built originally of wood. One of the wooden pillars was still standing in the time of Pausanias. As the wooden pillars decayed they were replaced by stone pillars. Hence the pillars, many of which are still standing, differed in size, in material, in their fluting and their capitals, the earliest belonging in style to the seventh or sixth centuries, the latest to the Roman period. The temple was a treasure-house. There was kept the diskos of Iphitus, and at a later period the chest of Cypselus, and the table of ivory and gold on which the crowns for the victors were placed. Of the wealth of votive offerings and statues that once adorned this temple nearly all have perished; but there, at the exact spot described by Pausanias, the German excavators found the Hermes of Praxiteles, which represents the most perfect type of that physical beauty and harmonious development that Greek athletics produced.

The number of altars had no doubt grown. The altar of Zeus already rivalled, if it did not eclipse, the earlier altar of Hera and the tomb of Pelops. This altar stood on a double elliptical base of stone, the lower base 125 feet, the upper 32 feet in circumference. The altar itself was built up of the ashes of the victims which were brought once every year by the seers from the Prytaneum, kneaded with water from the Alpheus and deposited on the altar. In the time of Pausanias it had reached a height of 22 feet.

There was as yet no race-course at Olympia. The races and games must have taken place in the open space that stretched from the altar of Zeus and tomb of Pelops, below the slopes of the hill of Cronus, from which the spectators doubtless looked on. The races probably finished at the altar, and there, under the immediate protection of Zeus, the victors were crowned. The race, according to a tradition related by Philostratus,[^[61]] originated in a torch-race, in which the competitors, starting from the distance of a stade, raced with lighted torches to the altar, the one who arrived first and lighted the fire receiving the prize; similarly for the double race or diaulos, the runners raced from the altar to summon to the sacrifice the deputations from Greek states and then raced back to the altar; while the long race originated in the practice of the heralds whose office it was to carry declarations of war to different parts of Greece. Of such ceremonial races we shall find examples in many parts of Greece, but the tradition deriving from them the races at Olympia may be rejected as a late invention, which perhaps had its origin in the fact that before the stadium was constructed the races did finish at the altar. Certainly in Pindar’s time boxing and similar events still took place there, and it is doubtful whether they were ever transferred to the stadium.

For the first half-century Olympia remained the local festival of the Elean and pre-Dorian countryfolk of the West. The first victor was Coroebus of Elis,[^[62]] whose tomb appropriately marked the boundary between Elis and Heraea, a symbol of the truce between the two races. Yet the Eleans could not appeal to their athletic records in support of their claims. Of the first eleven victors only one other was an Elean, while the older race was represented by seven Messenians, one Achaean from Dyme, and one native of Dyspontium, a town near the mouth of the Alpheus that belonged to the Pisatan league. According to a scandalous tradition quoted by Athenaeus, Coroebus was a cook, but the scanty records which we possess of these earlier victors prove that the games still maintained their aristocratic character, and the tradition may be set aside as the invention of the enemies of Elis, or the anti-athletic party of a later age.

After Ol. 11 only one Messenian victory is chronicled till the restoration of Messenia in the fourth century. Hypenos, who won the double race on its introduction in Ol. 15, was a Pisatan, though Elis tried to claim him. With these exceptions the old stock disappears, and the Eleans are too supine, or too much occupied with feuds with Argos, to take their place. Yet the athletic vigour of the old race reappears afterwards from other quarters in families like the Diagoridae of Rhodes who were descended from a daughter of the Messenian patriot Aristomenes, in colonies like Achaean Croton, in the late successes of Arcadia at a time when athletics had become a sufficiently lucrative profession to tempt from their poor homes these hardy mountaineers and shepherds. Perhaps the long roll of Spartan successes owed something to the Messenians whom they had conquered. The records of their ancient successes were doubtless jealously treasured by those who had left their homes, and we may well suppose that from such records the early part of the Olympic register was compiled.

The eclipse of the “home counties,” as we may call them, was partly due to the growing importance of the festival, partly to the pressure of Argos and Sparta. Of the part played by Argos we know but little; what we do know is that Pheidon of Argos, whenever he lived, like other tyrants tried to exploit the festival for the extension of his own dominion, that he espoused the cause of the Pisatans, and that there was a feud between the Eleans and the Argives,[^[63]] which perhaps explains the complete absence of Argos in the list of early victors. Elis found a natural ally in Sparta. The valleys of the Eurotas and the Alpheus form a direct means of communication between Sparta and Olympia, and the control of this route by Sparta after the conquest of Messenia gave her a natural advantage over her rival.

The influence of Olympia spread first along the northern coast of the Peloponnese, secondly to Sparta. In the second half-century, Ol. 13-25, Corinth, Megara, Epidaurus, Sicyon, Hyperesia, Athens, Thebes, figure in the list of victors, and yet farther east, Smyrna. All these places communicate with Olympia by the Gulf of Corinth. It is significant that this extension of its influence eastwards coincides with the founding of the first Greek colonies in Italy and Sicily. The Corinthians, passing along the north coast of the gulf to Corcyra, crossed over and founded Syracuse 734 B.C. Six years later the Megarians founded a new Megara beside the hills of Hybla, and a century later the two Megaras combined to colonize Selinus. The Achaeans, making a stepping-stone of Zacynthos, founded the rich cities of Sybaris and Croton, and later Metapontum, and built on the Lacinian promontory south of Croton a temple of Hera, which became a centre of worship for the Greeks of Italy. Even the Eastern Greeks of the islands took part in this movement. Gela was colonized by settlers from Rhodes and Crete. All these colonies and many others played a great part in the history of Olympia, the importance of which we can see, not only in their list of victories, but in the remains of the so-called treasuries which they built there, and it is hardly fanciful to suppose that their connexion with Olympia dated from the time when the settlers were leaving the shores of Greece.

The victory of Onomastus of Smyrna in Ol. 23 is no less significant of the full communication existing between the mainland and the East at the commencement of the seventh century.[^[64]] Eastern despots sent offerings to Delphi; poets from the islands and Asia Minor brought into Greece the Phrygian and Aeolian modes of music; even the alphabet came from the East. At Olympia, when the victors’ friends held revel in their honour in the evening, they sang down to the time of Pindar the triumphal song of Heracles composed by Archilochus of Paros.[^[65]] Smyrna, at that time the foremost city of the Eastern coast, was closely connected with the Peloponnese. The poet Mimnermus tells us that his race had come from Neleian Pylos to Colophon first, and had then dispossessed the Aeolian inhabitants of Smyrna.[^[66]]

The first appearance of Thebes is on the occasion of the introduction of the chariot-race in Ol. 25. As we have seen, the chariot-race seems to have been one of the earliest, if not the earliest, event at the Olympia, and one is inclined to suspect that the innovation consisted in the substitution of the four-horse chariot for the older two-horse chariot, which was revived at Olympia in later times.

Thus we see that within a century of the first Olympiad, Olympia had become a centre to which competitors came not only from the Peloponnese, but from Athens, Thebes, and even from the East.

The long list of Spartan successes begins in Ol. 15 (720 B.C.), and continues till Ol. 50 (576 B.C.), from which date they cease almost entirely. During most of this period the superiority of Sparta is undisputed. This superiority may be partially explained by the careful records of athletic victories kept in that most methodical of states, whereas the records of other states were less careful and less accessible to the historian. Yet making full allowance for our imperfect knowledge of other states, the Spartan successes are sufficiently remarkable, and their sudden cessation hardly less so. Aristotle has given us the explanation of these facts.[^[67]] Sparta was the first Greek state to introduce a systematic physical and military training, which for a time made her unrivalled in sport and war; when other states followed her example, her superiority disappeared. Moreover, in the seventh century Sparta was still a progressive, enlightened state, fond of poetry and music, taking an energetic part in all the manifold activities of Greek life; only the good effects of her system were yet apparent; its iron rule had not yet produced that narrow spirit of exclusiveness which was fatal to progress.[^[68]] Hence Spartan participation in the Olympic festival not only raised the prestige of the festival, but gave a new importance and seriousness to athletics. Hitherto they had been a diversion of the nobles; henceforth they were to be part of the education of the people. The physical education of Greece was largely due to Spartan example. At the beginning of the sixth century we find Solon making laws for the palaestrae and gymnasia, and we may suspect that most important cities possessed these institutions.

Sparta is credited with no less than five victories in events said to be introduced for the first time—the long race in Ol. 15, wrestling and the pentathlon in Ol. 18, the boys’ wrestling in Ol. 37, and the boys’ pentathlon in Ol. 38. The latter event was abolished in the next Olympiad owing to Elean jealousy at the success of the Spartan boy Eutelidas. Perhaps the various events for boys were introduced for the benefit of the home counties which had been ousted by increased competition from without, and if so we can understand a certain feeling of soreness at the Spartan success, especially as Eutelidas won the boys’ wrestling in the same Olympiad. The statue in his honour at Olympia was the oldest of all the statues of athletes; it seems to have stood originally on the site occupied by the temple of Zeus, and on the building of the temple to have been moved to the south.[^[69]] Special notice is due to Hipposthenes, the victor in the boys’ wrestling in Ol. 37, who subsequently won five more victories in wrestling at Olympia, and who had a temple built in his honour at Sparta. His son almost equalled his father’s record, winning five victories in wrestling.[^[70]] Another equally famous athlete was Chionis, who won four victories in the stade-race and three in the double race, besides victories in other sports, Ols. 28-31. He is said to have taken part with Battus in the colonization of Cyrene, and his exploits were commemorated at a later date by his countrymen on stone pillars at Sparta and at Olympia, where they also set up in his honour a statue, the work of Myron.

Meanwhile, during the period of Spartan pre-eminence, the influence of Olympia had been steadily spreading, especially among the colonies of the West. In Ol. 33 two new events were added—the riding race, which was won by a Thessalian from Crannon, and the pankration, a combination of boxing and wrestling, which was won by Lygdamis of Syracuse, who was said to have had the proportions of Heracles, his foot, like that of the hero, being exactly an Olympic foot. The various events for boys were introduced between Ol. 37 and Ol. 41, and in the boys’ boxing the first winner came from Sybaris. Croton had already begun her victorious career. From Miletus in Ol. 46 came the boy runner Polymnestor, who, as a shepherd boy, was said to have captured hares by speed of foot; while from Samos came the effeminate-looking Pythagoras with his long hair and purple robes. Rejected from the boys’ boxing as a weakling, he entered for the men’s competition and won it. So rapid was the progress of the colonies, and so keen their participation in the Olympic festival, that from Ol. 50 they outstripped the mother country, and the following century may be described as the colonial period of Olympia. The first attempt made by any Greek state to secure for itself a local habitation at Olympia was the building of a treasury by the Geloans at the close of the seventh century. Before the close of the sixth their example had been followed by Metapontum, Selinus, Sybaris, Byzantium and Cyrene, the only representatives of the Peloponnese being the Megarians. Nothing indicates more clearly the predominance of the colonies than this line of treasuries, or rather communal houses,[^[71]] standing on a terrace at the foot of the hill of Cronus between the Heraeum and the entrance of the later stadium, and commanding a view of the Altis, of the altars, and the games. One wonders if the Spartans indulged in lamentations over the decay of Spartan athletics. I think not, for that reserved and silent people had too much pride and dourness; moreover athletics to them were but a means to an end, the training of soldier citizens. Certainly from this date they ceased to figure in the victors’ lists, engrossed perhaps in more serious contests and schemes of aggrandizement, or else estranged from the festival by the new democratic, Panhellenic spirit introduced there by the colonies, and unwilling to suffer defeat at the hands of upstarts.

The influence of the colonies was great. Their competition gave a fresh impulse to that wave of athleticism which reached its height in the sixth century. To Olympia they gave a Panhellenic character as a meeting-place for all the scattered members of the Greek race, and thereby tended to preserve and strengthen that feeling of unity which contact with other nations had already quickened into life. No foreigner could enter as a competitor at Olympia, no barbarous potentates sent offerings to its shrines or consulted its oracle. Olympia remained throughout its history purely and exclusively Hellenic. Again, the colonies brought Olympia into touch with the democratic spirit of the age, and broke down the barriers of Elean and Spartan exclusiveness. The colonial claimed admission purely by virtue of his Greek birth, and no distinctions of rank or caste or wealth were known in the Olympic games. Sport, especially national sport, is a great leveller of social distinctions.

The political importance of such a festival, which drew competitors and spectators from all quarters of the Greek world, could not escape the notice of the clear-sighted and ambitious tyrants and nobles of the seventh century. But the sanctity of the place and the new democratic spirit of the festival were too strong for them. Pheidon of Argos had tried to make himself master of Olympia by force of arms. Other tyrants tried more peaceful means, seeking to win popularity among the assembled crowds and influence with the powers of Olympia by victories in the chariot-race, or by sumptuous offerings to Olympian Zeus. In the middle of the seventh century Myron of Sicyon won a victory in the chariot-race and commemorated his success by dedicating two treasure-chests of solid bronze, one of which weighed 500 talents. These treasure-chests were afterwards placed in the treasure-house of the Sicyonians, built in the fifth century possibly in the place of some more ancient structure. The excavations of Olympia have revealed the solid floor intended to bear the weight of these treasure-chests. His grandson Cleisthenes, himself a victor, took advantage of the festival to proclaim the famous competition for the hand of his daughter Agariste, which Herodotus describes. Cypselus of Corinth, too, dedicated at Olympia a golden statue of Zeus made in the style of the early metal-workers, of beaten gold plates riveted together. His son Periander was victor in the chariot-race, and gave to Olympia the famous chest of Cypselus in which, according to the story, the infant Cypselus had been hidden by his mother from the assassins sent by the oligarchs of Corinth to murder him. From Athens came the would-be tyrant Cylon, who won the diaulos race in Ol. 35; and in the next generation the chariot-race was won by Alcmaeon, the son of that Megacles who was responsible as archon for the death of Cylon and the consequent pollution of the Alcmaeonidae, and the father of Megacles, the successful suitor of Agariste. Yet, in spite of their victories and their offerings, no tyrant secured influence at Olympia, no building there bore a tyrant’s name. The so-called treasuries were the communal houses of states, that of the Megarians, which dates about this time, being set up probably not by the tyrant Theagenes but by the people after his fall, and before their power was weakened by the successes of Athens.

Thus at the beginning of the sixth century Olympia had acquired a unique position as the national festival of Hellas. Competitors and spectators of all classes gathered there from every part of Greece. The sacred truce-bearers proclaimed the month of peace throughout the Greek world, and in response, cities of Asia and of Sicily vied with one another in the splendour of the official embassies (θεωρίαι) sent to represent them at the festival. The old aristocratic character survived in the chariot-race and horse-race, which afforded to tyrants and nobles an opportunity of displaying their riches and their power. The athletic programme was now practically complete, the only important innovation of later times being the race in full armour introduced 520 B.C., and this programme was truly democratic. In athletic events noble and peasant met on equal terms. The aristocratic prejudice against these popular contests did not yet exist; and though the honour of the Olympic crown was open to the poorest citizen of Greek birth, such was the prestige of the festival that it was coveted even by the highest. The representative character of Olympia was due to a variety of causes. The geographical position of the place, its ancient sanctity, the athletic vigour of the pre-Dorian Greeks, the discipline and training of the Spartans, the enthusiastic patriotism of the colonies, the ambition of tyrants, the new spirit of democracy,—these and other causes contributed to the result, and the importance of the result was recognized by the founding within the next half-century of three other Panhellenic festivals at Delphi, at Nemea, and at the Isthmus, and of many another festival which, like the Panathenaea, aspired to but never attained Panhellenic dignity.

Yet, despite the growth of the festival and the development of athletics, there was little change in the appearance of the Altis or the organization of the games. Some of the wooden pillars of the Heraeum were perhaps replaced by stone, but no fresh building appeared till the treasuries, the earliest of which date from the close of the seventh century. The games still took place near the altar, where a course could be easily measured and marked out before each meeting. The new events added were merely variations of those which we find in Homer. Popularity and competition had no doubt improved the standard of performance, but athletic training did not yet exist. In the towns, indeed, gymnasia and palaestrae were already springing up; but these were educational rather than athletic, intended to train and discipline the young as useful soldiers rather than to produce champion athletes. The bulk of the population living an open-air country life in which war, hunting, and games played a considerable part, had no need of training. Thus, though athletics had become popular, they still maintained the spontaneity and joy of the Homeric age: they were still pure recreation.

CHAPTER IV
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC FESTIVALS, SIXTH CENTURY B.C.

The sixth century is the age of organized athletics. The rise of Sparta and her success in sport and war gave to the Greek world an object lesson on the value of systematic training, and henceforth the training of the body was an essential part of Greek education. Palaestrae and gymnasia were established everywhere, and Solon found it necessary to lay down laws for their conduct. These institutions were originally intended for the training of the young, but the growth of athletic competition soon called into being a new and specialized form of training, the training of competitors for the great games. An art of training sprung up, and in the time of Pindar the professors of the new art, besides reaping a rich harvest from their pupils, received honour scarcely inferior to that of the victors themselves. The rapid development of the Olympic festival had shown the value of athletics as a bond of union between Greeks throughout the world, and the general yearning after a unity which was destined never to be realized found expression in the establishment of other festivals for which Olympia served as a model.

At Delphi, the Isthmus, and Nemea, local festivals and competitions had long existed.[^[72]] The oracle of Delphi had already acquired a Panhellenic, almost a cosmopolitan importance, rivalling that of Olympia. The Pythian festival was said to have been founded to commemorate Apollo’s victory over the Python. To expiate the death of the dragon, Apollo had been condemned to nine years of exile, and the festival was therefore held every ninth year, or, according to our reckoning, once in eight years. Later legend asserted that there had been athletic games at Delphi, and various heroes were named as victors in these sports. But it seems probable that the original competitions at Delphi were purely musical, and in the hymn for Apollo Delphusa expressly commends Delphi as the home for the god on the ground that there his altar will be undisturbed by the “whirling of fair chariots or the sound of swift-footed steeds.” The innate ambition of the Greek and his desire to outshine his fellows found vent in competitions of every sort. Musical competitions were specially connected with the worship of Apollo at Delos and at Sparta; at Delphi a prize was given for a hymn to Apollo chanted to the accompaniment of the cithara.

Such the festival remained till the outbreak of the first Sacred war. The war was due to the impious conduct of the Crisaeans, who, having command of the plain and the harbour of Cirrha, had enriched themselves at the expense of the Delphians and Apollo, by levying exorbitant tolls on the pilgrims who landed at Cirrha on their way to the oracle. The Delphians appealed to their natural protectors, the Amphictyonic League at Thermopylae, who straightway proclaimed a sacred war. The command of the expedition was given to the Thessalian Eurylochus; the Athenians, on the advice of Solon, sent a contingent under Alcmaeon, while Cleisthenes, the ambitious tyrant of Sicyon, eagerly embraced the opportunity of posing as a champion of Greek religion. The festival was restored and reorganized in 590 B.C. New musical events were added, a solo on the flute and a song accompanied by the flute; athletic and equestrian competitions also were introduced on the model of those at Olympia; but since Delphi as yet had no stadium, the games were held in the plain of Crisa below. The chariot-race for some reason or other was omitted, but two additional athletic events found a place, a long race and a diaulos race for boys.

The war, however, broke out afresh and lasted for six years, at the end of which, in 582, the festival was finally reorganized out of the spoil of Crisa as a pentaëteris, and placed under the control of the Amphictyons. The year 582 dates as the first Pythiad, and from this time the festival was held every fourth year, in the August of the third year of each Olympiad. The valuable prizes which had been offered of old were abolished, and in their place was substituted a crown of bay leaves plucked from the Vale of Tempe. The somewhat scanty details which we possess as to the festival and its history will be discussed in a later chapter. For the present it is sufficient to note one significant fact: the chariot-race which had been omitted in 590 was introduced in 582, and the first victor was Cleisthenes of Sicyon himself. The plains of Sicyon were admirably adapted for breeding horses, a pursuit which afforded its tyrants a ready means of increasing and displaying their wealth. Myron had already gained a victory in the chariot-race at Olympia, and his grandson Cleisthenes, shortly after his Pythian success, secured the same honour on the occasion when he issued his invitation to the suitors for the hand of Agariste. At Sicyon itself he commemorated the part which he had played in the Sacred war by a splendid colonnade built out of the spoils of Cirrha, and at the same time he reorganized as a local Pythia an ancient festival connected with the Argive hero Adrastus, whose memory he delighted to insult.[^[73]] We may therefore safely regard the introduction of the chariot-race at Delphi as due to the tyrant’s influence, and the remodelling of the festival as part of his pushing Panhellenic policy.

Almost at the same time, perhaps in the same year, 582 B.C., the Isthmian festival was reorganized. This festival, which claimed an antiquity greater even than that of Olympia, was celebrated at the sanctuary of Poseidon, which stood in a grove of pine-trees at the south-east of the Isthmus, a little to the south of the eastern end of the present Corinth canal. The various legends of its origin are all connected directly or indirectly with the worship of Poseidon. The wreath of dry celery leaves, which in the time of Pindar was the prize, recalled the story that the games were first founded in honour of the luckless Melicertes at the spot to which his dead body was carried by a dolphin. According to another legend they were instituted by the Attic hero Theseus, when he had freed the land from the terror of the robber Sinis. This story points to the close connexion of the Isthmia with Athens. The Athenian envoys enjoyed the privilege of precedence (προεδρία) at this festival, and a space was reserved for them, as much as could be covered by the sail of the ship which brought them to the Isthmus. No other festival was so conveniently situated for the Athenians. Athens and Corinth had much in common, and were on most friendly terms before the relations between them were embittered by commercial rivalry, and their friendship was especially close in the period following the fall of the Cypselidae. Another version of the Theseus legend represents him as founding the Isthmia in rivalry of Heracles, who had founded the Olympic games; and here we may trace a certain jealousy existing between the two festivals.[^[74]] We know on good authority that the Eleans were not allowed to compete at the Isthmia. This ban, which Elean tradition represented as a self-denying ordinance imposed by the curse of Molione, may well have originated in this rivalry. We can imagine that the Elean authorities regarded with no favour the rise of a rival festival on a site so central, the meeting-place of the trade of East and West. Yet, after all, Olympia had no reason to fear its rival. The central position of Corinth involving her in all the feuds and wars of Greek history, prevented the Isthmia from ever acquiring that unique independence which characterized the more remote Olympia. There can be little doubt, too, that from the first the festival reflected the luxurious commercial character of Corinth. There the joyous life of the Ionian race found vent in a sort of cosmopolitan carnival which contrasted strangely with the more strenuous Dorian festival of remote Olympia.

The remodelled festival was a trieteris, held in the spring of the second and fourth years of each Olympiad. The programme was a varied one, including, besides athletics and horse-races, musical competitions, and possibly a regatta. The presidency of the festival belonged to the Corinthians. Whether its establishment as a Panhellenic festival was due to the tyrant Periander or expressed the joy of the people at their liberation from his rule, the evidence does not allow us to determine. The latter seems to me more probable. The great tyrant, laid by his victory in the chariot-race at Olympia, and by costly offerings to Olympia and Delphi, tried to win the support of the authorities at these places, and it may well be that the founding of a rival festival marked the popular reaction against his policy. Be this as it may, the establishment of the Isthmia is another sign of the great national movement towards unity. Tyrants recognized and tried to utilize the movement for their own advantage. But Panhellenism was independent of tyrants; it was a spontaneous movement of the people, and it need cause no surprise that one Panhellenic festival should owe its origin to a tyrant, another to the people.

A similar doubt attaches to the last of the Greek festivals, the Nemea. The cypress grove of Nemea, where stood the temple of the Nemean Zeus, lay in a secluded valley among the hills, half-way between Phlius and Cleonae. Here under the presidency of the latter state local games had long been celebrated. They were said to have been founded by Adrastus as funeral games in honour of the child Opheltes, who, having been left by his nurse in the grove, had been devoured by a serpent. According to another story, they were founded by Heracles after his slaying of the Nemean lion, and by him dedicated to Zeus. They were reorganized in the year 573 B.C. as a trieteris, and took place like the Isthmia in the second and fourth year of each Olympiad, probably at the very beginning of the Olympic year in July. The prize was a wreath of fresh celery, but was said to have been originally a wreath of olive. As at Olympia, the managers of the games bore the title of Hellanodicae. As at Olympia, the contests were until later times purely athletic and equestrian. The striking resemblances to Olympia are clearly due to Dorian influence, and may perhaps help us to understand how it was that, within a few years of the founding of the Isthmia, a second Panhellenic festival was established in its immediate neighbourhood.

The little town of Cleonae, which held the presidency of the Nemea down to the time of Pindar, could certainly never have raised its festival unaided to Panhellenic dignity. Cleonae seems to have been for a time under the dominion of Cleisthenes of Sicyon; yet it seems hardly likely that the tyrant, who had already helped in establishing the Pythia at Delphi, besides a local Pythia at Sicyon, and whose policy was so markedly anti-Dorian, should have founded a second Panhellenic festival of so purely Dorian a type. Moreover, it seems that Cleonae had already thrown off the yoke of Cleisthenes, whose power was on the decline. Argos, too, was on the decline, and though Argos in the year 460 B.C. usurped the presidency of the games, we find similar claims put forward by Corinth and by Mycenae. The fact that so many states claimed the presidency of the festival suggests that its re-establishment was not the work of any one state but of the Dorians of the north-eastern Peloponnese generally. If we are right about the jealousy felt by the authorities of Olympia towards the newly-founded Isthmia, and the character of the latter festival, we may perhaps see in the founding of the Nemea the protest of Dorian puritanism against innovations which seemed to degrade the serious business of athletics. Scandalized by the laxness of the new festival, with its traffic and its pleasures and its multitude of entertainments, the Dorians of Argolis conceived the idea of founding at Cleonae an eastern counterpart of Olympia. The strenuousness of athletics in Argolis is surely indicated in the strength and severity characterizing the athletic school of sculpture which had its origin in Sicyon and Argos, half-way between which places appropriately lay Cleonae. The view suggested above is of course hypothetical, but it accords with what we know of the Isthmia and the Nemea, and satisfactorily explains the Panhellenic character of the latter.

Thus by the year 570 the four Panhellenic festivals were established. They were distinctively the sacred meetings (ἱεροὶ ἀγῶνες) and the games of the crown (στεφανῖται), so called to distinguish them from the numerous games where prizes of value were given (θεματικοί). It is no little proof of the true athletic feeling of the Greeks that in their four greatest festivals no prize was given but the simple crown of leaves. The cycle of these festivals will be best understood by a glance at the following table, which shows the order of the festivals during a single Olympiad.[^[75]] It must be remembered that the Greek year began with the summer solstice, and consequently belongs half to one, half to the next year, according to our reckoning.

Thus we see that in the even years there were two Panhellenic festivals, in the odd years one.

The competition of other Panhellenic festivals threatened the supremacy of Olympia, and forced the easy-going conservative authorities of that place into activity. Hitherto they had allowed the festival to develop from without; they had allowed Gela and Megara to build treasuries overlooking the Altis, and so to establish some sort of claim to a share in the management; content with their traditional customs they had made no attempt to provide adequate organization for an athletic meeting of such importance. Now they saw that if they were to maintain their position they must set their house in order. A significant story is told by Herodotus.[^[76]] In the reign of Psammetichus II. (594-589 B.C.) some Elean ambassadors visited Egypt to see if the Egyptians could suggest any improvement in the rules for the Olympic games, which they boasted were the fairest and best that could be devised. The Egyptians, after considering a while, asked if they allowed their own citizens to compete. The Eleans replied that the games were open to all Greeks, whether they belonged to Elis or any other state. To this the Egyptians, with true commercial instinct, answered that the rules were far from just, for that it was impossible but that they would favour their own countrymen and deal unfairly with foreigners; if, therefore, they wished to manage the games with fairness they must confine the games to strangers and allow no native of Elis to compete. It is to the credit of the Greeks that no such self-denying ordinance was introduced or found to be necessary, and that the Greeks themselves never raised any such objection till a much later date. It is only when sport becomes too competitive and too lucrative and the professional and commercial spirit enters in that elaborate safeguards are required against unfairness.

This story is valuable evidence that the Eleans were at this time seeking to improve their arrangements. What the improvements were we do not know, but that some sort of reorganization took place is rendered probable by the tradition recorded above, that in Ol. 50 a second Hellanodicas was first appointed. Possibly the Olympic Council was remodelled. We find this Council in the fourth century acting as a court of appeal, and in Imperial times it is mentioned in inscriptions as authorizing the setting up of honorific statues.[^[77]] The Hellanodicae were its executive officers, and from their history and numbers it seems probable that the Council represented the various tribes which formed a sort of amphictyony originally controlling the festival. Their existence in the sixth century is proved by the remains of their Council-house. This building lay below the south wall of the Altis. It consists of two long buildings, terminated at the west end by an apse, parallel to each other, and united by a square chamber between them. The northern wing of the building dates from the middle of the sixth century at the latest. The apsidal chamber at the end was divided by a partition, and served probably for the storage of archives and treasure, while the rest of the building formed the business quarters of the Council and the Hellanodicae. There the competitors had to appear and take an oath before the altar of Zeus Horkios that they had observed, and would observe the conditions of the festival. Another building connected with the permanent management of the festival was the Prytaneum, also built about the same time. In it was the altar of Hestia, on which the sacred fire was kept always burning. The ashes from this altar, collected and mixed with the water of the Alpheus, were used to build up the great altar of Zeus. Here, when the games were ended, distinguished guests and victors were feasted, and songs of victory were chanted in their honour.

The Council must have exercised a control over all new buildings erected at Olympia. In the second half of the sixth century fresh treasuries were built by the states of Selinus, Sybaris, Byzantium, and Cyrene, a list which sufficiently illustrates the widespread influence of the festival. The planning and alignment of these buildings clearly implies the supervision of some local authority.

Significant of the new energy of these authorities and of their desire to render Olympia itself worthy of the festival, was a practice, which began in this century, of allowing victors to commemorate their victories by votive statues. The earliest of these statues, according to Pausanias, were those of Praxidamas of Aegina, who won the boxing in Ol. 59, and of Rhexibius of Opus who won the pankration two Olympiads later. These statues were of wood, and we may, therefore, suspect that those seen by Pausanias were not really the first but only the oldest which had survived. Certainly there were statues of earlier victors. Some of these, like that of the Lacedaemonian Chionis, or that of the famous pankratiast Arrhichion, at his native home Phigalia, were set up by their countrymen many years after their death. Others, like that of the Spartan boy Eutelidas, who won the boys’ wrestling and the boys’ pentathlon, may have been contemporary. The first sculptors of athletic statues, whose names we know, are Chrysothemis and Eutelidas of Argos, who made the statues for the Heraean Damaretus, who won the race in armour in Ols. 65, 66, and for his son Theopompus, who won two victories in the pentathlon. On the inscriptions beneath these statues the artists claimed to have learnt their art from former artists. Argos and Sicyon, the homes of the earliest athletic sculpture, were, as we have seen, closely connected with the newly organized Panhellenic festivals, in addition to which there were a number of minor local festivals throughout that district. We may, therefore, safely connect the rise of the athletic school of art with the athletic movement that produced these festivals. These early statues were, of course, not portrait statues. We learn from Pliny that the right of setting up a portrait statue was confined to winners of a triple victory. The accuracy of this statement is open to doubt; certainly it cannot have been true before the fourth century, previous to which portrait statues were practically unknown. The early artists must have contented themselves with type statues, representing the various events in which victory had been gained.

Towards the close of the century certain additions were made to the programme. In Ol. 65 (520 B.C.) the race in heavy armour was introduced at Olympia, and in 498 B.C. at Delphi. This innovation was clearly due to the growing importance of the heavy-armed infantry in Greek warfare. Greek sports were, as we have seen, in their origin practical and military, but with changed conditions of warfare they had lost their military character and become purely athletic. The chieftain no longer went to war in his chariot; his men no longer threw stones or light javelins. Individual warfare was giving place to the manœuvring of masses of heavy-armed troops. The introduction of the race in armour was an attempt to restore to athletics their practical character. The race was a diaulos, i.e. up the stadium and back to the starting-point, a distance of about four hundred yards. The men wore helmets, greaves, and round shields. At a later time the greaves were discarded, perhaps as a concession to athletes who regarded such a race as a spurious sort of athletics. Certainly the race never attained to the same prestige as the other events.

In Ol. 70 (500 B.C.) a mule chariot-race (ἀπήνη) was introduced, and in the next Olympiad a riding race for mares (κάλπη), in which the riders dismounted in the last lap and ran with their steeds. In both these events, which were discontinued after a short trial in Ol. 84, we may see the influence of the Elean nobility, whose wealth and power were derived largely from their horses and cattle. The introduction of mule chariot-races may have been partly due to the influence of the Lords of Sicily; the victory of Anaxilas is commemorated on the coins of Rhegium and Messana (Fig. [168]). The κάλπη is of especial interest. Helbig has shown that the Hippeis of Athens and other Greek states in the sixth century were not cavalry soldiers in the strict sense of the word, but mounted infantry, the true successors of the Homeric chieftains.[^[78]] Just as the latter went to war in their chariots, but dismounted in order to fight, leaving the chariot in charge of the charioteer, and remounting for flight or for pursuit, so the Hippeis of the sixth century merely used their horses for advance or for retreat, dismounting when they came into close contact with the foe, and leaving their horses with their squires, who accompanied them, either mounted behind them en croupe, or on horses of their own. The Homeric custom survived only in sports, in the ἀποβατής, whom we see represented on the frieze of the Parthenon in the act of dismounting; the later custom was represented for a brief time only by the κάλπη. As we have seen in discussing the race in armour, the system of individual warfare was passing away. Sparta had shown the superiority of masses of armed infantry. Previous to the Persian wars, Thessalian cavalry had already been employed by Peisistratus, and these served in the fifth century as the model on which corps of cavalry proper were organized in Athens and other states. But in 500 B.C. there were no cavalry in the Peloponnese, and the conservative nobles may well have regarded with jealousy a change which threatened to put them on a level with the ordinary foot-soldier. The introduction of the κάλπη then was an attempt to stimulate and encourage the older style of fighting. But the attempt was doomed to failure; the progress of military tactics was not to be checked by the Eleans, and while the hoplite race survived as long as the festival itself, the κάλπη was ignominiously abandoned in 444 B.C.

Besides the four great festivals of the Crown there were countless local festivals where competitions of various sorts were held.[^[79]] The prizes offered were often tripods, and bowls of silver or of bronze; sometimes articles of local manufacture, such as a cloak at Pellene, a shield at Argos, vases of olive-oil at Athens; sometimes a portion of the victim sacrificed, or the victim to be sacrificed. The British Museum possesses a bronze caldron[^[80]] of about the sixth century, which was found at Cyme in Italy, and was given as a prize at some local games founded by, or held in honour of, a certain Onomastus. It bears the inscription, “I was a prize at the games of Onomastus.” Many of these festivals were connected with the cults of local heroes, and had existed for generations. Sometimes the competitions themselves bore a distinctly ritual character; thus the torch-race, which we meet with in many parts of Greece, was connected with the primitive custom of periodically distributing new and holy fire from the sacred hearth where it had been kindled. Sometimes the competitions were musical, as at the Spartan Carnea; more frequently they were purely athletic. The athletic competitions acquired fresh life from the stimulus given to athletics by the growth of the Panhellenic festivals. At first purely local, even these minor gatherings in Pindar’s time drew competitors from various parts of Greece. Many fresh festivals were added, and old ones reorganized during the sixth century, especially in the eastern parts of Greece, but of most of these we know little besides the names. The greatest of all was the Panathenaic Festival.

Athenian nobles had won distinction at Olympia in the seventh century. Four Athenian victories are chronicled in the stade-race. Cylon, as already mentioned, won a victory in the diaulos in Ol. 35 (640 B.C.), a victory which perhaps cost him dear. Having consulted the Delphic oracle as to the success of his plot to make himself master of Athens, he was advised to carry out his plan at the greatest festival of Zeus. The former Olympic victor naturally concluded that the oracle meant the Olympia, and not the Athenian Diasia, and this mistake is said to have led to his failure and his death. Another prominent Athenian victor was Phrynon, who in the Olympiad after Cylon’s victory won the pankration, an event in which the Athenians seem to have excelled. He was general in the Athenian expedition to Sigeum, where he fell in single combat against Pittacus of Mitylene, who, according to later tradition, arraying himself as a fisherman, entangled Phrynon in his net and then ran him through with his trident in true gladiatorial style. Early in the sixth century we find Hippocrates, the father of Peisistratus, present as one of the Athenian envoys to Olympia. It was on this occasion, says Herodotus,[^[81]] that he had a dream respecting the birth of Peisistratus, which dream was explained to him by the Spartan Ephor Chilon. Chilon, who was reckoned among the seven wise men of Greece, is said to have died some years later at Olympia from joy at the victory of his son Damagetus in boxing.[^[82]] During the sixth century we have no record of Athenian successes in athletic contests, but many of the rival nobles won victories in the chariot-race. Peisistratus himself was proclaimed victor under strange circumstances. Cimon, the half-brother of Miltiades, the tyrant of the Chersonnese, himself a victor, had been banished from Athens by Peisistratus. This Cimon had a remarkable record. He won the chariot-race with the same team of mares at three successive Olympiads. At the second he agreed with Peisistratus that if he proclaimed the tyrant winner, he should be recalled from exile.[^[83]] In spite of this he was put to death by the thankless sons of Peisistratus shortly after his last victory. Curtius ascribes to Peisistratus an inscription on the altar of the twelve gods at Athens recording the distance from Athens to Olympia.[^[84]]

The value of athletics and their political importance had been realised by Solon. Besides making rules for the conduct of gymnasia he offered a public reward of 500 drachmae to each Olympian victor, 100 to each Isthmian victor, and so on to the victors in other games. This measure is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt on the part of Solon to check the extravagant rewards lavished on athletes. Such a view is utterly false. There is no evidence that athletes did receive extravagant rewards in Solon’s time: and 500 drachmae, though perhaps a trivial sum to the professional athletes of a later and degenerate age, was then a considerable amount.[^[85]] Rather we may see in this measure an attempt to encourage athletics among the people, and perhaps to counteract the growing love of chariot-racing among the aristocracy.

It is tempting to ascribe to Solon’s influence and policy the founding of the Panathenaea, or rather the remodelling of the old Athenaea, under this name. This event is assigned to the year 566 B.C., about the time when Athens, by the efforts of Solon and Peisistratus, finally made herself mistress of Salamis, and thus, by securing the control of the bay of Eleusis, was at last enabled to develop, unchecked, her maritime and commercial policy. The founding of the Panathenaea is attributed to Peisistratus, who certainly encouraged athletics and developed the festival; but, if the date 566 B.C. is correct, the festival was founded six years before he became tyrant, and while he was still the trusted friend of Solon, and, owing to his success in war, the hero of the people. The name Panathenaea seems significant, both of that unity of the Athenian people, which Solon tried with somewhat chequered success to promote, and also of that dream of expansion which Athens, freed from the rivalry of Megara, was now beginning to cherish. At the same time we can see in the name why the Panathenaea could never become truly Panhellenic. Olympia, Delphi, Nemea were fitted to become Panhellenic by virtue of the political insignificance of the states that controlled them; even the Isthmia, though held under the presidency of Corinth, was by its name dissociated from that power, and Corinth herself was in her own way a Panhellenic centre where politics were as yet subordinate to commerce. In such places the national desire for unity found a natural expression. But the Panathenaic festival was in the first place the festival of the union of Attica in the worship of Athene, and the only unity which it could offer to the rest of Greece was unity beneath the Aegis of Athene. Thus, while at the Panhellenic festivals all events were open to the whole of Greece, at Athens, besides such open events, we find others confined to her own citizens.

The Panathenaea were said to have been founded, or perhaps refounded, by Theseus, who, according to legend, united into one state the village communities of Attica. Certainly there existed an ancient yearly festival in honour of Athene, though we cannot say if it bore the name Panathenaea. This festival continued to be celebrated every year after the founding of the greater festival, and was called the Little Panathenaea.[^[86]] The Great Panathenaea were a pentaëteris, and were held in the third year of each Olympiad in the month of Hekatombaion or about the end of July. The programme of the festival was even more varied than that of the Isthmia. The great event of the festival, the procession that bore the peplos to the temple of Athene on the Acropolis, afforded an opportunity for the display of all the forces of Athens. The competitions included, besides athletics and horse-races, musical contests, recitations, torch-races, Pyrrhic dances, a regatta, and even a competition for good looks. For most of the events the prizes consisted in jars of Attic oil. Olive-oil was the most valuable product of Attica: the olive trees were under the control of the state, and the export of olive-oil was a state monopoly. As many as 1300 amphorae of oil were distributed as prizes, the winner in the chariot-race receiving as many as 140 amphorae. As even at a later period an amphora of oil was worth 12 drachmae, it is clear that the prizes had a considerable commercial value. Some of the jars containing the oil were ornamented with scenes representing the various competitions. It is probable that only one such painted vase was given for each victory. The manufacture and painting of vases was already an important industry at Athens, and the prize vase full of oil represented, therefore, the chief natural product and the chief industry of early Attica. These prize vases must have been greatly cherished. Numbers of them have been found in Italian tombs and elsewhere, and the variety of the subjects depicted throws no little light on the events of the festival. But details must be reserved for another chapter.

The multiplication of athletic festivals and the valuable prizes offered at them must have been a source of no small profit to the successful athlete. The victor at the Panhellenic games, it is true, received no other reward from the authorities than the wreath of leaves;[^[87]] but at the lesser festivals, where he would be a welcome and an honoured guest, he was sure of a rich harvest of prizes. Moreover, he received substantial rewards at the hands of his grateful fellow-citizens. For in these games the individual was regarded as the representative of his state: the herald who proclaimed his victory proclaimed, too, the name of his state, and in his success the whole state shared and rejoiced. Hence we can understand the righteous indignation of the people of Croton in Ol. 75, when their famous fellow-countryman, Astylus, who had already won the stade-race and the diaulos in two successive Olympiads, on the third occasion entered himself as a Syracusan in order to ingratiate himself with the tyrant Hieron. Such an act was felt to be almost a sacrilege, and the Crotoniats in their wrath destroyed the statue of Astylus, which they had erected in the precinct of Lacinian Hera, and converted his house, perhaps the house which they had given him, into a common prison.[^[88]]

The representative character of the Panhellenic athlete and the connexion of the games with the national religion explain the honours paid to him by his fellow-citizens.[^[89]] His homecoming was an occasion of public rejoicing. The whole city turned out to welcome him and escort him in triumph to his home and to the chief temples of the city, where he offered thanksgiving and paid his vows to the gods and heroes to whom he owed his victory. Songs were composed expressly for the occasion by the greatest poets of the age, and sung by choirs of youths and maidens before the temples or before his house. His exploits were recorded on pillars of stone, and his statue was set up in some public place, or even in the sanctuary of the gods, to serve as an incentive to posterity. He received, too, more substantial rewards. We have seen how Solon granted considerable sums of money to the victors in the great games, and we may be sure that the example of Athens was followed by other states. At Athens and elsewhere the victor had the privilege of a front seat at all public festivals, and sometimes, too, the right of free meals in the Prytaneum. At a later time he was exempted from taxation. At Sparta, which seems to have stood somewhat aloof from the athletic movement, he was rewarded characteristically with the right of fighting in battle next to the king and defending his person. In the rich cities of the West the adulation of the victor, at a somewhat later date, took the most extravagant forms. Exaenetus of Agrigentum, who won the foot-race at Olympia in Ol. 92, was drawn into the city in a four-horse chariot, attended by three hundred of the chief citizens, each riding in a chariot drawn by a pair of white horses. Sometimes, it seems, a breach in the city walls was made for the victor’s entry. It is in Italy that we first hear of the worship of the athlete as a hero. Philippus of Croton, an Olympic victor, renowned as the handsomest man in Greece, was worshipped as a hero after his death.[^[90]] Euthymus of Locri Epizephyrii, who won three Olympic victories in boxing in Ols. 74, 76, 77, was even said to have been so worshipped during his lifetime. It was perhaps a righteous retribution for such impiety that his statues at Locri and Olympia were, according to the story, struck by lightning on the same day.[^[91]] Theagenes of Thasos and Polydamas of Scotussa were also worshipped as heroes, and the statue of Theagenes was credited with the power of healing fevers.[^[92]] But these extravagances, if true, belong to a later period, and must have been repugnant to the religious feeling and sound sense of the Peloponnese before the Persian wars.

Of all these honours the most significant are the hymn of victory and the statue. It was not merely that the greatest artists and poets were employed to immortalise the victor, and that they demanded a high price for their services. The statue and the hymn were honours confined originally to gods and heroes, and, bestowed on mortal athletes, did literally lift these “lords of earth to the gods.” “Not even the mighty Polydeuces nor the iron son of Alcmene could hold up their hands against him.” So wrote Simonides of Ceos, the earliest writer of epinikia, of the famous boxer Glaucus of Carystus, language which, as the late Sir Richard Jebb remarks, would have sounded very like an impiety to Alcman. The words are significant of the changed attitude towards athletics, and the hero-worship founded by the artist and the poet was perhaps largely responsible for the extravagances of a later age. But the influence of athletics on art and literature, and that of art and literature on athletics, are subjects that belong chiefly to the fifth century, and will be dealt with in the next chapter.

The growing popularity of athletics and the excessive honours showered upon physical excellence could hardly escape criticism. In that age of intense intellectual activity there must have been many far-sighted observers who resented the predominance of athletics, though perhaps they feared to express their feelings. One at least there was who knew no such fear, and fortunately his protest has survived. The bold and original thinker, Xenophanes of Colophon, was exactly contemporary with the movement which we have been describing. Born at Colophon about the year 576 B.C. he was forced to leave his native place at the age of twenty-five, and for sixty-five years travelled about the cities of Greece and Sicily, finally settling at Elea in Italy, where he became the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, and died in the year 480 B.C. A fearless critic of the current ideas about the gods, denying that the godhead could be like unto man, he may well have been scandalized at the representation of gods and heroes as athletes, and at the offering of divine honours to victors in the games; and his wide experience of men and cities showed him clearly the danger of the growing worship of athletics. After enumerating the honours shown to the athlete he continues: “Yet is he not so worthy as I, and my wisdom is better than the strength of men and horses. Nay, this is a foolish custom, nor is it right to honour strength more than excellent wisdom. Not though there were among the people a man good at boxing, or in the pentathlon, or in wrestling, nay, nor one with swiftness of foot which is most honoured in all contests of human strength—not for his presence would the city be better governed. And small joy would there be for a city should one in contests win a victory by the banks of Pisa. These things do not make fat the dark corners of the city.”

Less than a century later the words of Xenophanes are echoed by Euripides, but the object of the protest is no longer the same. The class of professional athletes whom Euripides denounces did not exist in the days of the older poet. It is against the excessive importance attached to athletics, the false and one-sided ideal, that Xenophanes protests. In his wanderings through the cities of Greece he has learnt by bitter experience the evils that exist, evils of tyranny and party strife, extremes of luxury and poverty, and he feels that the energies of his countrymen are being misdirected. It is not a little curious that foreign writers, deceived by the glamour of Olympia, are wont to treat the protest of Xenophanes as the captious utterance of a soured and peevish cynic. Yet the fragments of his writings which exist show him to have been a man of wide experience and sympathies; and in England, where we have witnessed a similar wave of athleticism, his wisdom is generally recognized. Let us pause to consider what was the state of athletics in the time of Xenophanes.

The popularity of athletics, the growth of competition, and the rewards lavished on successful athletes completely changed the character of athletics in the sixth century. The actual events remained the same, but a change came over the attitude of performers and spectators. It was a change which will be readily understood by any one familiar with the history of our own sports and games during the last century, the change from spontaneous to organized sport. The change brought with it both good and evil; the standard of performance was greatly improved, but athletics ceased to be pure recreation, and something of the old Homeric joy was lost; and though the spirit of sport survived for a century more, even in the sixth century we can trace signs of the evils which over-competition inevitably brings in its train.

In every Greek state all boys, whatever their station, received a thorough physical training. Sometimes, as in Sparta, this training was extended to girls. This training consisted partly in the traditional exercises of the public games, partly in dances which corresponded to our musical drill in which the performers went through the various movements of the palaestra or of actual war to the accompaniment of music. Thus every boy was trained to take his part in athletic competitions. Local festivals provided the promising athlete with an opportunity of testing his strength and skill from early boyhood. At Olympia there had been only two classes of competition, for boys and for men. In the festivals of the sixth century we find a third class added for those betwixt the age of boy and man, the beardless (ἀγένειοι). In local festivals of a later date we find three or even four classes for boys only, sometimes confined to local competitors; and perhaps, if we had details of the local festivals of the sixth century, we should find the same. These boys’ events were clearly intended to foster local talent. The youth who won success in his home festival would try his luck in the neighbouring competitions, and if still successful would go farther afield and perhaps enter for the Panhellenic games. Hence the competitors, especially at the Olympia, represented the picked athletes of all the states. The prizes offered at the various festivals enabled many to compete, who in a previous age could not have afforded the necessary time or money; and we may be sure that the emulation of the various states would not have allowed any citizen to lose his chance of the crown for lack of funds. The popular character of athletics is illustrated by a fragment of an epigram ascribed to Simonides on an Olympic victor “who once carried fish from Argos to Tegea.”[^[93]] At the same time the noble families which had for generations been famed in athletics exerted themselves to their utmost to maintain their hereditary prestige. All classes caught the athletic mania. It was at the close of the century that Alexander, the son of Amyntas, king of Macedon, competed in the foot-race at Olympia.

Competition naturally raised the standard of athletics. Natural ability and ordinary exercise were no longer sufficient to secure success without long and careful training. Hence there arose a class of professional trainers. These men, who were often old athletes, acquired considerable repute, and doubtless were handsomely rewarded by the rich individuals or states that employed them. In their hands athletics became scientific; instead of being regarded as a recreation and a training for war they became an end in themselves. One state alone, Sparta, held aloof from the new athletics and competitions. At Sparta the one object was to produce a race of hardy soldiers, and the new science, which aimed at producing athletes, could find no place there. No Spartan was allowed to employ a trainer in wrestling. Boxing was said to have been introduced by the Spartans, but though they recognized the value of boxing as a sport, they realized the dangers of it as a competition, and forbade their citizens to take part in competitions for boxing or the pankration, on the ground that it was disgraceful for a Spartan to acknowledge defeat. Hence the disappearance of Sparta from the list of the Olympic victors which has already been noticed. Sparta in athletics fell behind the rest of Greece, and Philostratus, comparing them with the more scientific athletics, describes them as somewhat boorish.[^[94]] Yet perhaps the Spartans and Xenophanes were right.

The new training required no little expenditure of time and money. The would-be victor at Olympia must have lived in a constant state of training and competition, which left time for little else. Theagenes of Thasos, who lived at the time of the Persian wars, is said to have won no less than fourteen hundred crowns.[^[95]] To such men athletics were no longer a recreation, but an absorbing occupation. The professional amateur is but a short step removed from the true professional. For a time wealth and leisure gave a great advantage to the wealthy individual, and the wealthy city. In the sixth century the most successful states are the rich cities of Sicily and Italy. The sons of noble families still figure prominently in the epinikia of Pindar and Bacchylides. But the increase of rich prizes was soon to put the poor man on a level with the rich. Before the close of the fifth century we shall find athletics left to the professional, while princes and nobles compete only in the chariot-races and horse-races. For this result states like Sybaris and Croton were hugely responsible. They thought to encourage athletics by offering large money prizes; in reality they killed the spirit of sport. Sybaris indeed—or, according to another account, Croton—endeavoured to outshine Olympia by holding a festival of her own at the same time as the Olympia, and attracting away the pick of the athletes by the magnificence of the prizes.[^[96]] When such an attempt was possible, professionalism was near at hand.

These evils, however, did not yet exist in the sixth century, though implied already in that excessive love of athletics which aroused the indignation of Xenophanes. The nation had become a nation of athletes, and not the least important characteristic which distinguished the Greek from the barbarian was henceforth his athletic training. The result was a standard of athletic excellence never again perhaps equalled. Most of the athletes whose names were household words for centuries, belong to the sixth and the first half of the fifth centuries. Such were Milo of Croton, Glaucus of Carystus, Theagenes of Thasos. Though we occasionally find distinguished runners, such as Phanas of Pellene, who, by winning three races at Olympia in one day, won the title of triple victor (τριαστής), or a little later Astylus of Croton, of whom we have heard already, the typical athlete of the sixth century was the strong man—the boxer, the wrestler, or the pankratiast. The object of the old gymnastic was to produce strength only, says Philostratus,[^[97]] contrasting the ancient athletes with their degenerate successors, and the success of the old training was shown in the fact that these old athletes maintained their strength for eight or even nine Olympiads. There was nothing artificial or unnatural about their training: the careful dieting, the elaborate massage, the rules for exercise and sleep introduced by later trainers were unknown. The trainers of those days confined themselves to actual athletics, to the art of boxing or wrestling especially, and the athletes owed their strength to a healthy, vigorous, out-of-door life.

This fact is illustrated by the legends that sprang up about the famous athletes of this age, which, amid much invention and exaggeration, probably contain some substratum of truth. The father of Glaucus discovered his son’s strength from seeing him one day hammer a ploughshare into the plough with his naked fist. Theagenes first displayed his strength at the age of nine in a youthful escapade. Taking a fancy to a certain bronze statue in the market-place, he one day shouldered it and carried it off. The exploits of Samson with wild beasts find many parallels in the stories of Greek athletes; but the most characteristic exercise of the sixth century was weight-lifting. Milo practised weight-lifting on most scientific principles with a young bull calf, which he lifted and carried every day till it was fully grown. A still more famous weight-lifter was Titormus, a gigantic shepherd who lived in Aetolia, and did not, as far as we know, compete in any competitions. Challenged by Milo to show his strength, he took him down to the river Euenus, threw off his mantle, and seized a huge boulder which Milo could hardly move. He first raised it to his knees, then on to his shoulders, and after carrying it sixteen yards, threw it.[^[98]] He next showed his strength and courage by seizing and holding fast by the heels two wild bulls.

These stories of weight-lifting have been strangely confirmed by discoveries in Greece. At Olympia a block of red sandstone was found, bearing a sixth-century inscription to the effect that one Bybon with one hand threw it over his head.[^[99]] The stone weighs 143-1/2 kilos (315 lbs.), and measures 68 × 33 × 38 cms. A one-handed lift of such an object is clearly impossible, and I can only suggest that Bybon lifted the weight with both hands in the manner described above, then balanced it on one hand and threw it. At Santorin another such block has been found, a mass of black volcanic rock, weighing 480 kilos. The inscription on it, which belongs to the close of the sixth century, runs as follows: “Eumastas the son of Critobulus lifted me from the ground.” To lift such a weight from the ground, though possible, is quite a good performance.

Swimming, too, was a favourite exercise, and Philostratus tells us that Tisander, a boxer of Naxos, who lived, on a promontory of the island, kept himself in training by swimming out to sea. These old athletes, says the same author, hardened themselves by bathing in the rivers, and sleeping in the open air on skins or heaps of fodder. Living such a life they had healthy appetites, and were not particular about their food, living on porridge and unleavened bread, and such meat as they could get. The strong man is naturally a large eater, and all sorts of tales were current as to the voracity of these athletes. Milo, according to an epigram, after carrying a four-year-old heifer around the Altis, ate it all on the same day; and a similar feat is ascribed to Titormus and Theagenes.[^[100]] These tales are clearly the invention of a later age, when the strong man trained on vast quantities of meat; and as Milo excelled all men in strength, it followed that he must also have excelled them in voracity. But whatever the truth of these stories, it is certain that the athletes of those times were healthy and free from disease, preserved their strength, and lived long. If athletic training did occupy an undue share of their time, it did not unfit them for the duties of ordinary life and military service. Many of them won distinction as soldiers and generals, while the effects of athletic training on the nation were shown in the Persian wars.

When we turn to the records of art we still find strength the predominant characteristic of the period. We see this in those early nude statues, so widely distributed throughout Greece and the islands, which are generally classed under the name of Apollo. In all we see the same attempt to render the muscles of the body, whether we regard the tall spare type of the Apollo of Tenea, or the shorter heavier type of the Argive statues. It is in the muscles of the trunk rather than of the limbs that real strength lies, and it is the careful marking of these muscles that distinguishes early Greek sculpture from all other early art, and the sculpture of the Peloponnese in particular from the softer school of Ionia. Perhaps the most characteristic figure of the sixth century is that of the bearded Heracles, not the clumsy giant of later days, but the personification of endurance and trained strength, a man, as Pindar says, short of stature, but of unbending soul. So we see him on many a black-figured vase of the sixth century, and the type survives in the pediments of Aegina or the Metopes of Olympia in the next century. Matched against giants and monsters he represents the triumph of training and endurance over mere brute force. If we compare the figures of athletes on these vases with those on the red-figured vases of the next century, we find the same result; the ideal of the fifth century is the grace of athletic youth, that of the sixth is the strength of fully developed manhood; the hero of the former is Theseus, of the latter Heracles. Finally, if we would realise the true greatness of sixth-century athletics, let us remember that it was this century which rendered possible and inspired the athletic ideal of Pindar in the next.

“For if a man rejoice to suffer cost and toil, and achieve god-builded excellence, and therewithal fate plant for him fair renown, already at the farthest bonds of bliss hath such an one cast anchor.”

CHAPTER V
THE AGE OF THE ATHLETIC IDEAL, 500-440 B.C.

Though the Greeks of the sixth and fifth centuries attained a remarkable standard of athletic excellence, it is probable that in individual performance the modern athlete could at least have held his own with them. Yet despite our modern athleticism it is certain that no other nation has ever produced so high an average of physical development as the Greeks did in this period. This result was due largely to the athletic ideal which found its highest expression in the athletic poetry and art of the fifth century. The ideal is unique in the history of the world, nor are the circumstances which produced it ever likely to occur again. Due, in the first place, to the early connexion of athletics with religion, it owed its development in the fifth century to two causes, firstly, to the growth of athletic art and poetry, secondly, to the intense feeling of Panhellenic unity produced by the struggle with Persia. It was this ideal that checked the growth of those evils which inevitably result from the excessive popularity of athletics, and maintained their purity till the short-lived unity of Greece was shattered by the Peloponnesian war. To understand this ideal we must briefly trace the history of athletic art and literature, and then note how the national feeling found expression in the Panhellenic and especially in the Olympic games.

Fig. 7. Apollo, found at Tenea. Munich.

Without athletics, says the late Professor Furtwängler,[^[101]] Greek art cannot be conceived. The skill of the Greek artist in representing the forms of the naked body is due in the first instance to the habit of complete nudity in athletic exercises, a habit which, even if it were, as Thucydides says, not introduced into all athletic competitions at Olympia till shortly before his own time, must certainly, if we may judge from the evidence of the black-figured vases, have been almost universal in the palaestra of the sixth century. Besides the unrivalled opportunities that this habit afforded the sculptor of studying the naked body in every position of activity, it must have served as a valuable incentive to the youths of Greece to keep themselves in good condition. The Greek, with his keen eye for physical beauty, regarded flabbiness, want of condition, imperfect development as a disgrace, a sign of neglected education, and the ill-trained youth was the laughing-stock of his companions. Hence every Greek learnt to take a pride in his physical fitness and beauty. This love of physical beauty is strikingly illustrated in one of the war-songs of Tyrtaeus:[^[102]] “It is a shame,” he says, “for an old man to lie slain in the front of the battle, his body stripped and exposed.” Why? Because an old man’s body cannot be beautiful. “But to the young,” he continues, “all things are seemly as long as the goodly bloom of lovely youth is on him. A sight for men to marvel at, for women to love while he lives, beautiful, too, when fallen in the front of the battle.”

Fig. 8. Statue by an Argive Sculptor. Delphi. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 134.)

We have seen how there arose in the sixth century a demand for athletic statues, and how the early artists endeavoured to express trained strength by the careful treatment of the muscles of the body, especially those of the chest and abdomen. The early athletic statues must have been of the type of those archaic figures which are rightly or wrongly classed under the name of Apollo, and which, whether they represent a god or a man, are certainly inspired by athletics. Though we see in all the same evident desire to express strength yet we find considerable variety of physical type, far more so, in fact, than we find in the fifth century, which was dominated by a more or less definite ideal of physical beauty and proportion. In the sixth century the artists were experimenting, and therefore we may suppose were influenced more by local or individual characteristics. Thus the slim, long-limbed Apollo of Tenea (Fig. [7]), with his well-formed chest, spare flanks, and powerful legs is the very type of the long-distance runner. These long, lean, wiry runners are often depicted on Panathenaic vases, and suggest inevitably these day-runners (ἡμεροδρόμοι), who acted as scouts or couriers in the Persian wars. Quite different is the type of the early Argive statues found at Delphi (Fig. [8]). Square and thickset, with powerful limbs and massive heads, they seem naturally to lead up to the type of the Ligourio bronze and of Polycleitus, and suggest that such a build was characteristic of Argolis. Between the two extremes comes an extensive series of statues from Boeotia, one of which shows strong signs of Aeginetan influence.[^[103]] In the fifth century we look in vain for such divergences of type, and the reason is that Greek art was tending more and more towards an ideal, and neither the typical runner nor the typical strong man quite fulfils the artist’s ideal. Vase paintings afford an interesting illustration of this change. The wrestling groups on the black-figured vases show far greater variety and originality, a more realistic imitation of the manifold positions of wrestling than we find on the red-figured vases of the fifth century, where only such types are preserved as commended themselves to the more highly-trained artistic sense of the later craftsmen.

Fig. 9. Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo. British Museum.

Fig. 10. Figure from E. pediment at Aegina. Munich. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 41.)

Fig. 11. Bronze Statuette from Ligourio. Berlin. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 39.)

In the early part of the fifth century we still find a variety of physical type. On the one hand we have the Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo (Fig. [9]) with his broad square shoulders, powerful chest and back—essentially a big man, and therefore identified by Dr. Waldstein with the boxer Euthymus, though recent evidence tends to show that the statue really represents the god and no mortal athlete. At the other extreme we have the neat, small, sinewy forms of the warriors on the Aeginetan pediments (Fig. [10]). Between the two come a number of types. Unfortunately we have no extant examples of the great Argive school. The bronze in which the Argive sculptor worked was too valuable to escape the ravages of the plunderer, and a certain monotony, which must have characterized purely athletic sculpture, prevented the later copyist from reproducing these works. But if we may argue from the Ligourio bronze (Fig. [11]), the Argive type was short like the Aeginetan but heavier and more fleshy. On the other hand, the statues which are recognized as copies of the famous group of Critias and Nesiotes[^[104]] representing Harmodius and Aristogeiton show a taller, larger-boned type, more approaching that of the Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo, which may perhaps be recognized as Athenian.[^[105]] But in all this diversity of physical type we ask ourselves in vain what class of athlete is represented in any particular statue, whether a boxer, a wrestler, a pentathlete, or a runner. The reason seems to be that in all these statues the ideal element is strong; there is a difference of build, but each build is shown with the fullest all-round development of which it is capable. Certainly there is not in this period a single figure that represents a typical runner so clearly as does the Apollo of Tenea. Perhaps the nearest type to that of the runner is the Aeginetan; but unfortunately we know that the events in which Aegina won most distinction were wrestling and the pankration, winners in which we should expect to find characterized by a heavier build. The fact is that the real specialization of the athlete was only just beginning, and the universal athletic training had produced in the first half of the fifth century so uniform a standard of development that, runners perhaps excepted, it must have been difficult to distinguish between the representatives of other events, in all of which strength was more important than pace. Hence the earlier sculptors, in order to indicate an athlete’s victory, were forced to attach to his statue some special attribute, a diskos, or a pair of jumping weights for a pentathlete, a boxing thong for a boxer.[^[106]] As their technical skill increased they began to represent the athlete in some characteristic position. Glaucias of Aegina showed the famous boxer Glaucus of Carystos sparring with an imaginary opponent.[^[107]] At Athens Pausanias saw a statue of Epicharinus by Critius in the attitude of one practising for the hoplite race, perhaps in the attitude of the well-known Tübingen bronze, which represents a hoplitodromos practising starts[^[108]] (Fig. [12]).

Fig. 12. Bronze Statuette of Hoplitodromos. Tübingen.

Fig. 13. Myron’s Diskobolos (from a bronzed cast made in Munich, combining the Vatican body and the Massimi head).

The last-named statues at once suggest the Diskobolos of Myron (Fig. [13]). This statue marks a new departure in athletic art. It is not, as far as we know, a statue in honour of any particular victor, but a study in athletic genre. To the same class belong the Doryphoros and Diadumenos of Polycleitus.[^[109]] The earlier statues had been ideal in as far as they were not portrait statues, but statues of athletic types connected with the name of some victor, and many such statues are assigned to Myron and Polycleitus. But the statues of which we are speaking were avowedly and professedly ideal studies in athletic art. Myron undertook to represent the athlete in motion. He chose that most difficult, yet most characteristic moment in the swing of the diskobolos, which alone combines the idea of rest and that of motion, when the diskos has been swung back to its full extent, and the momentary pause suggests stability, while the insecurity of the delicate balance implies the strong movement which has preceded it, and the more violent movement which is to follow. No other moment could give the same idea of force and swiftness. If we look at the countless representations of the diskobolos on vases and in bronzes, we see that the fixing of any other moment in the swing destroys at once all idea of motion. The movement is checked at an unnatural point, and the result is lifeless. Only at the close of the swing backward does the brief pause give the artist an excuse for fixing it in bronze. It is a magnificent conception, and in spite of minor defects magnificently executed. Unfortunately we know the statue only through more or less late and inaccurate marble copies. Perhaps the truest idea of the grace of the original bronze can be obtained from the bronzed cast in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, from which our illustration is taken. The diskobolos is, as has been said, a study of athletic action, and it is therefore difficult to form a true idea of his proportions, nor was the artist concerned so much with proportions as with movement. Yet if we can imagine the diskobolos standing at rest, he might well take his place besides the glorious youths of the Parthenon frieze, tall like the Tyrannicides, yet of somewhat lighter build, taller and lighter likewise than the type of Polycleitus.

Fig. 14. Doryphoros, after Polycleitus. Naples. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 74.)

Fig. 15. Diadumenos from Vaison, after Polycleitus. British Museum. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 75.)

In the Doryphoros (Fig. [14]), and Diadumenos (Fig. [15]), we have another type of athletic genre. These statues are studies of the athlete at rest, studies in proportion. The Doryphoros indeed was called the canon, because in it the artist was said to have embodied his ideal of the proportions of the human body. If we consider what such a canon implies, we shall understand why the old diversity of type tended to disappear. The artist of this period was seeking an ideal of human proportion. Such an ideal is not to be found in any extremes of type, in strength or beauty by itself, but only in a combination of the two, in the golden mean, that avoidance of all excess which dominated Greek life and thought. The influence of athletic training had impressed upon him the value of physical strength systematically trained and developed; his artistic sense taught him that no subject was fitting for his art which did not present beauty of outline and proportion. Hence that union of strength and beauty which characterizes the athletic art of this period.

Other circumstances contributed to produce uniformity of type. The three great sculptors of the age, Myron, Pheidias and Polycleitus, whom we now know to have been almost contemporaries, and in the full activity of their art in the middle of the century, were all, according to traditions, pupils of the Argive sculptor Ageladas. In the stern, manly discipline of the Argive school they acquired their consummate knowledge of the human body. The influence of these artists was increased by the concentration at this period of all art at Athens. Polycleitus indeed remained at Argos; but Myron and Pheidias worked at Athens, and through Pheidias the art of Athens spread over the Greek world. The school in which these artists had been trained had devoted itself to the study of athletic proportion, and it was therefore only natural that a similar athletic ideal should prevail generally,—a similar but not quite the same ideal. Polycleitus remained true to the Argive tradition of a somewhat thick-set, massive type, with square-jawed, powerful head. At Athens the influence of the softer Ionian art, perhaps, too, the prevalence of other characteristics in the population, produced a slighter, taller, more graceful type. Both schools combined strength and beauty. In both it is impossible to decide in what event any particular athlete had excelled; but while strength continued to be the prevalent idea of Polycleitus, Athenian art was rather dominated by the idea of beauty.

This union of strength and beauty belongs especially to the time of full-grown youth and opening manhood. It is the age when the Greek youth began to undertake some of the duties of citizenship, and when the state took upon itself his training. In most Greek cities somewhere between the ages of sixteen and eighteen the youths were enrolled in corps, and for two years were subject to a strict military discipline under officers appointed by the state. They learnt to use their weapons and to ride; they hardened their bodies by athletic exercises and hunting; they gained practical experience in war by acting as police patrols on the frontiers. This time of life was especially devoted to athletics and physical training. At many of the games there were special competitions for youths of this age—the beardless or ἀγένειοι. To the same age belong these romantic boy friendships which figure so largely in Greek life, from the time of Harmodius and Aristogeiton or earlier. That these friendships did at times lead to serious abuse cannot, unfortunately, be denied. But the charge of immorality brought against them seems to me greatly exaggerated,[^[110]] at least as far as regards the fifth century and the most enlightened states. These friendships arose on the one side from the natural hero-worship of youth, on the other from an intense appreciation of bodily beauty.

This strong artistic feeling is illustrated by the practice which arose among the vase painters of inscribing on their cups the name of some popular youth with the word καλός, or sometimes the more general inscription καλὸς ὁ παῖς, “the boy is fair.” The term “love names” applied to these inscriptions is somewhat unfortunate. The word καλός implies none of that modern maudlin sentimentality so often mistaken for love, but rather the artist’s sense of the beautiful, sometimes his admiration for some popular youth, sometimes, perhaps, merely his satisfaction in the form he has himself created. The point, however, which interests us here is that the beauty which appealed to the Greek of the latter half of the fifth century was not the beauty of woman, nor even of the mature man, but the beauty of manly youth, and the art of the Periclean age has been well described as the glorification of the ephebos.

The growing preference for the younger type can be traced in the lists of athletic statues at Olympia recorded by Pausanias. There is a steady increase during the fifth century of the proportion of boy victors as compared with men, and the increase is more than maintained during the fourth century. The change is perhaps connected with a change in the character of athletics. There can be no doubt that athletics were already becoming more specialized, and the specialized athlete did not appeal to the artist of the fifth century. In the following age we find an increasing diversity of type, but in the Periclean age the ideal of athletic youth dominates all treatment of the human figure. We can see it in the figures of children and young boys which, despite their small stature, have the proportions and muscular development of men, or in the figures of women which, whether undraped or, as was more usual, draped, differ little in framework and proportion from the figures of graceful youths. In the Periclean age, we cannot distinguish between the athlete and the ephebos. Every educated youth is an athlete, and every athlete is an educated youth and a citizen of a free state. Of the strictly athletic statues unfortunately we possess only marble copies, which in the transference from bronze have lost much of the grace of the originals. But the ephebos is known to us from many a grave relief, and above all from the sculptures of the Parthenon. The grave reliefs are at least originals, though we do not know the artists’ names, while the Parthenon sculptures were executed under the direction of Pheidias. A truer idea of the athletic youth of this age can be formed from the Theseus of the pediment, or the epheboi of the frieze, than from late copies of Polycleitus.

In all these figures the prevailing impression is one of a perfect harmony, an absence of all exaggeration. Beauty of line is not exaggerated into softness, nor strength into coarseness. There is, too, a graceful ease of movement and of action which tells of an education in which music goes hand in hand with gymnastic. Musical drill and dances formed an important part of Greek education; even at the great festivals the competitors in the pentathlon performed to the accompaniment of the flute. The influence of music is especially suggested by the rhythmic movement and poise of the Diadumenos. Hence these harmonious shapes produce an effect deeper than that of mere physical beauty, they seem to be the outward expression of the spirit within. καλὸς καὶ ἀγαθός—beauty and goodness—are inseparable to the Greek. The heads, too, are in perfect harmony with the body; somewhat passionless perhaps, they seem to denote a mind well ordered as the body. They are not the heads of students or philosophers, much less of mere athletes, but the heads of healthy, vigorous youths, to whom all activity whether of mind or body is a joy. In the clear-cut, strong features we read courage and resolution, endurance and self-control. The expression is calm and dignified, yet without a trace of arrogance or pride. The face is often turned slightly downwards, and the downcast eyes produce an impression of modesty which is most marked in those statues which, like the Diadumenos binding the victor’s fillet round his head, expressly represent victory. Such is the beautiful bronze head of the ephebos shown in Fig. [16]. This combination of dignity and modesty is part of what the Greeks called αἰδώς,[^[111]] a word which we shall see is the keynote of Pindar’s athletic ideal, and which expresses more than any other the spirit of these statues.

Fig. 16. Bronze head of ephebos. Munich, Glyptothek, 457. (From a photograph by Bruckmann.)

The influence of athletics is equally plain in the lesser arts. On coins and gems it is seen chiefly in the nude figures of gods and heroes. Sometimes, however, we find a purely athletic type. On the coins of Aspendus in Pamphylia we have a long series of wrestling groups (Fig. [109]), and on the other side a naked slinger, a punning allusion it seems to the name Aspendus. On the coins of Cos occurs a most interesting figure of the diskobolos, a crude attempt to represent the very moment selected by Myron (Fig. [86]). Both series date from the early fifth century. On gems of a later date we have frequent copies of the actual work of Myron. In Sicily we find no representations of the athlete proper, but the close connexion of Sicily with Olympia, and the successes of its cities and tyrants in the chariot and horse races are commemorated by numerous coins bearing a horseman or a chariot.[^[112]]

These, however, are but isolated examples; the art which above all other was influenced by athletics was that of the vase painter. Athletic scenes are among the earliest on the vases. This may be partly due to the connexion of games with funeral rites, for which many of the painted vases were made. But there is another and more general reason for the vase painter’s preference. Athletic scenes were especially adapted for the spaces which he wished to fill, whether it were a long band running round the whole vase, or an oblong panel. In the former case, the foot-race or the horse-race, or a series of athletes engaged in various sports, offered an effective variation of the procession of men or animals so common on early vases, while nothing could be better adapted for a panel than a boxing or a wrestling match with umpires or friends looking on. So effective was the latter scheme found that it was applied to mythological subjects. The contests of Heracles with giants or with monsters become a wrestling match or pankration in which gods and goddesses take the place of umpires. So in the fifth century, on the red-figured cups the exploits of Theseus in ridding the world of monsters and bullies are depicted as events in the palaestra. To Theseus was ascribed the invention of scientific wrestling: he appears on the vases as a graceful youth triumphing by trained skill over the brute force of his opponents.

The story of athletic types follows the same course on the vases as in sculpture, though, as the development of the simpler art was more rapid, the changes took place earlier. The bearded athletes of the black-figure vases disappear at the beginning of the fifth century, and on the red-figure vases, from the time of the Persian wars, the ephebos is ubiquitous. Moreover, it is not so much the actual competitions that we see as the daily life and training of the palaestra. Strigils, oil-flasks, and jumping-weights hang upon the walls; picks and javelins are planted in the ground. Trainers in their long mantles and naked assistants stand about and watch the practice of the youths. Sometimes with outstretched hands they instruct them; sometimes they correct them with their long forked rods. The youths themselves run, leap, wrestle, throw the diskos or the javelin; some look on and chat, others prepare for exercise, anointing their bodies with oil, binding on the boxing thongs, or fitting the cord to the javelin; others having finished their work scrape themselves with strigils, or standing round a basin empty vessels of water over each other. All the varied life of the palaestra is before us.

The vases on which these scenes abound belong chiefly to the middle of the century, the period of the “fine style,” as it is called. But, as I have noted before, the actual athletic types have already become somewhat conventional, and we feel that the artist’s interest in them has become secondary. It is rather the variety of the life, with its possibilities of grouping and composition, that appeals to him. At Athens, at least, a change is beginning in the attitude of the people towards athletics. The fine period of vase painting ends about the year 440 B.C., and in the vases of the decline this change is more marked. We still see the palaestra; but it is indicated sketchily by an occasional pair of halteres on the wall; and the youths stand about idly gossiping and arguing, but take no part in manly exercise. This disappearance of athletics from the vases is significant: the sculptor could still work out his own ideals, but the vase painter was dependent for his trade on the popular taste, and the vases are therefore a true index of the feeling of the time. If we compare one of these later vases with such a vase as the Panaetius kylix in Munich (Fig. [17]), we cannot help being reminded of the contrast drawn by Aristophanes in the Clouds between the old education of the men who fought at Marathon and the education of his day. The vases enable us to date the change about the year 440, and we shall find other indications that confirm this date.

Fig. 17. R.-f. kylix. Munich, 795.

There is, however, in this athletic art something more than mere beauty or mere strength. The outward harmony is but the expression of that harmonious development of mind and body which it was the aim of Greek education to produce by means of music and gymnastic. For the interpretation of this spirit we can turn to the living word—a surer guide than merely subjective impressions. Athletic poetry arose like athletic sculpture in the sixth century, but while the athletic ideal continued to influence Greek art during the whole of its history, the hymn of victory, like the athletic painting on the vase, disappears abruptly before the Peloponnesian wars. The earliest writer of the epinikion, Simonides of Ceos, was born in the year 556 B.C.; his nephew Bacchylides, born at Iulis in the same island, lived till the year 428 B.C.[^[113]] His great Theban rival, Pindar, born a few years earlier, had died in 443 B.C. With Pindar and Bacchylides the epinikion almost ceased to exist. We have indeed a fragment of a hymn written some years later by Euripides to celebrate the triumphs of Alcibiades in the chariot-race at Olympia. But this is a mere accident, and it is, we may mark, in honour not of an athletic event but of a chariot-race. Euripides, we shall see, was little inclined to hymn the athletes of his day. The last of Pindar’s Odes, the 8th Pythian, was written in honour of a victory in wrestling won by Aristomenes of Aegina in 446 B.C., and the latest odes of Bacchylides which we can date are six years earlier. The agreement of these dates with the evidence of the vase paintings can hardly be an accidental coincidence.

Particularly noticeable are the number and importance of those odes which belong to the years immediately following the Persian wars. The writer of epinikia, like the sculptor of athletic statues, was by the very nature of his art Panhellenic. His muse, as Pindar tells us, was a hireling. He wrote for those who could pay him best, for the wealthy nobles of Thessaly or Aegina, or the princes of Sicily. Neither in Ceos nor in Thebes could a poet find sufficient scope for his genius. The little island of Ceos, famed for its athletes and its music, lay somewhat outside the main currents of Greek life. Thebes had fallen from her legendary greatness, and played but an inglorious part in the Persian wars. Hence, though the poets turned with special tenderness and pride to sing of the victors of their native cities, they spent much of their lives at the courts of powerful patrons, and found their highest inspiration in that burst of Panhellenic feeling that the Persian wars produced, and which for the moment united in the service of Hellas tyrant and oligarch and people. If Theban Pindar could not, like Simonides, sing of those who fell at Thermopylae or Salamis, his patriotism found vent in no less than six odes in honour of the victors in the great national celebration at Olympia in 476 B.C.

The defeat of Persia not only gave a fresh impulse to the Panhellenic festivals: it raised athletic training into a national duty. The consciousness of a great danger safely past arouses a nation to a sense of its military and physical needs. We can remember only a few years ago the growth of rifle clubs, the cry for military and physical training that followed the Boer war. The danger, it is felt at such times, may occur again, and it behoves every citizen to be ready to play his part. Among the Greeks this feeling gathered force not from any consciousness of their own shortcomings, but from a consciousness of their superiority. At Marathon the Greeks of the mainland had for the first time found themselves face to face with the Orientals, and for the first time realized the gulf that separated them from themselves. Their triumph was the triumph of freedom and law over slavery and despotism. A handful of free citizens had defeated a horde of slaves, and this result was due in no small degree to their athletic training. Witness the famous charge of Marathon. Critics may throw doubt on its truth: it is sufficient that Herodotus supposed it possible. An army charging a distance of eight furlongs over ground that would try any cross-country runner! No wonder the Persians regarded the Greeks as madmen. The mere existence of such a story is proof enough of the athletic training of the nation. Moreover, the sight of the long-haired, effeminate Persians, whose bodies were not hardened by exercise and tanned by exposure to the air, seems to have impressed itself indelibly on the national imagination. Hence the extraordinary popularity during the years that followed of all those military and athletic exercises which we see so constantly depicted on the red-figured vases. We must remember that at Athens this training was for the most part voluntary. It was only during the two years’ training of the epheboi that the state undertook the education of its members. Yet from this time the palaestra and gymnasium became the resort of all classes and all ages. And what was true of Athens, was true, we may feel sure, of the rest of Greece. For a time Athenian influence prevailed everywhere. The old Spartan pre-eminence had passed away, and even in athletics Athens had become the school of Greece. If Athens produced few victors in the games, she at least set an example in physical training. “Meet is it that from Athens a fashioner of athletes come,” says Pindar of the Athenian Menander who trained Pytheas of Aegina for a Nemean victory, won probably in 481 or 479 B.C.[^[114]] The effect of this national athletic movement is seen in the great games. The lists of the victors at Olympia, or the lists of those for whom Bacchylides and Pindar sang, are representative of the length and breadth of Greece from Rhodes to Agrigentum, from Cyrene to Thasos.[^[115]] Finally, the national rejoicing over the victory of Plataea could find no fitter expression than the founding, at that city, of a new athletic festival, the Eleutheria.

Before we consider the individual writers of epinikia two points may be noticed which are common to all poems of this class. In the first place, the epinikion was essentially Panhellenic in its theme and also in its structure. The hymn itself consisted of three parts—an allusion to the victory, a legend suggested by the victor’s home or lineage, or by the locality of the festival, and some moral reflections or advice. The heroes and gods of the legends had for the most part lost their local character and become the common property of the race, and the poet, by coupling the present with the past, thereby proclaimed the continuity and unity of Hellas. Secondly, the epinikion was aristocratic. The victors whom the poet praised were princes and nobles, who competed for pure love of sport, and for whom athletics were in no sense a profession, nor even the chief occupation of their lives. Life was not all sport in Greece at this period, and these men did not shirk their duties, but played their part with honour in the more serious contests of war and politics.

Of the epinikia of Simonides only a few fragments survive. To these we may add several epigrams of somewhat doubtful authenticity. Little more was known of Bacchylides till a few years ago the discovery of an Egyptian papyrus by Drs. Grenfell and Hunt restored to us, besides other poems, large portions of thirteen of his epinikia. Bacchylides came from an island of athletes: his own family seems to have been athletic, his grandfather is said to have been distinguished as an athlete, and his uncle was the poet Simonides. He dwells with intense delight on the details of the games, the light foot and strong hands of the victor, the whirlwind rush of the chariots, the cheers of the spectators, the triumphal rejoicings at the victor’s home. But of the deeper meaning, the spirit of the games, we learn little from him.

With Pindar it is different. He is a prophet with a theory of life which he applies to everything of which he sings, to the stories of gods and heroes, or to the deeds of men. He has, too, a high conception of the poet’s office, which is to give to all excellence that immortal fame which should be the chief incentive to all noble deeds. It has been said that to be an athlete and the father of athletes is for Pindar the highest reach of human ambition. The criticism is unfair for two reasons. In the first place, it takes account only of a portion of Pindar’s work. He is said to have written poems of ten different classes, most of them connected with the worship of the gods. Of nine of these classes we possess but a few fragments; only the epinikia have survived. In the epinikia the poet’s theme is necessarily the praise of winners at the games, in other words the praise of youth, and early manhood. But Pindar himself recognizes clearly that every age has its own excellence. The virtues of the old are good counsel and prudence, those of youth are courage and endurance. “By trial is the issue manifest,”[^[116]] and the virtues of youth are proved in battle,[^[117]] or in the peaceful contests of the games, which are, as we have seen, the training of the citizen for the sterner contests of war. Secondly, the word “athlete” is ambiguous. It suggests too much the professional athlete of a later age, the man who, from selfish and mercenary motives, devoted his whole life to athletics and who, as Euripides tells us, was after his prime “useless as a worn-out coat.” But the well-born youths and princes for whom Pindar sang were actuated by no mercenary motives, but by that pure love of physical effort and of competition which is natural to all healthy youth. “The shepherd, and the ploughman, the fowler, and he whom the sea feedeth, strive but to keep fierce famine from their bellies; but whoso in the games or in war hath won delightful fame, receiveth the highest of rewards in fair words of citizens and of strangers.”[^[118]]

What then are the qualities of Pindar’s athlete? They are summed up in that most typical of all his athletic odes, the 11th Olympian, in honour of Agesidamus of Epizephyrian Locri, the winner of the boys’ boxing match in the great Ol. 76. “If one be born with excellent gifts, then may another who sharpeneth his natural edge, speed him, God helping, to an exceeding weight of glory. Without toil there have triumphed a very few.”

Firstly and above all the athlete must be born “with excellent gifts.” Strength and beauty are the gifts of Zeus, of the graces, of fate. They are bestowed especially on members of ancient and honourable families, and Pindar as a true aristocrat delights to enumerate the great deeds of the victor’s ancestors in war and sport. He has, too, to the full, the artist’s appreciation of physical beauty, and he never tires of describing it. But physical beauty must be matched by beautiful deeds; the athlete must not shame his beauty. Natural gifts imply the duty of developing them, and excellence can only be attained, God helping, by “cost and toil.”[^[119]] Here, as Professor Gildersleeve has well said, Pindar gives a moral dignity to athletics; for the cost and toil are undertaken not by compulsion or for selfish motives but for fame. Even the desire for fame is not selfish. Victory is a delight and honour to the victor’s city, to his family, even to his dead ancestors. Moreover, the true sportsman “delights” in the toil and cost.

Fig. 18. Charioteer. Delphi. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 138.)

The expense of competing in the chariot and horse races was naturally far heavier than that of competing in athletic events; yet even the latter involved considerable sacrifice of time and money, and the services of the famous trainers mentioned by the poets must have been dearly bought. The toil, too, was not unaccompanied by risk. More than two-thirds of Pindar’s victors won their crowns in wrestling, boxing, or the pankration, events which involved no little danger to limb, if not to life. The chariot-race had been equally dangerous in days when the owners drove their own chariots. In Pindar’s time this was no longer the rule. We could hardly expect a Hieron or a Gelon to compete in person, any more than we could expect to find one of our own horse owners riding his own horse in the Derby. Yet we still find the owner occasionally acting as charioteer,[^[120]] and more frequently still some son or younger member of his family.[^[121]] Such, it seems likely, was the aristocratic youth whose bronze statue has been recently discovered by the French at Delphi[^[122]] (Fig. [18]). The element of risk must always add a zest to sport, and it certainly does in Pindar’s eyes. “Deeds of no risks,” he says, “are honourless whether done among men or among hollow ships.”[^[123]] It follows then that the most necessary qualities for an athlete are courage and endurance. On the latter virtue Pindar, like his countrymen generally, insists even more than on courage, perhaps because the Greeks felt the need of it more. Heracles for example, Pindar’s ideal athletic hero, is a “man of unbending spirit.” Yet neither physical strength nor endurance is sufficient without skill, and skill can only be obtained by constant practice under skilful teachers.

In the old days athletic skill had been handed down in noble families from father to son; such families still existed. Lampon of Aegina, the father of two athletes, Phylacidas and Pytheas,[^[124]] is described as a “whetstone among athletes,” bestowing practice on all that he does, and exhorting his sons to follow the precept of Hesiod, “Practice perfects the deed.” His son Phylacidas, too, is commended for his training of his younger brother Pytheas. More often, however, the services of a professional trainer were called in. Thus Pytheas owed his victory largely to the Athenian trainer Menander. But though training can help to develop natural gifts, without natural gifts it can do little. “The natural,” says Pindar, “is ever best.”[^[125]]

But when athlete and trainer have done their best, the issue still rests in the hands of the gods. Pindar, like Aeschylus, is deeply religious, and regards the gods as the moral rulers of the world. Every good gift of mind or body, every excellence comes from the gods, and victory is bestowed on those who are pleasing to them. Man wins their favour partly by piety, by observance of their festivals and offerings at their altars, but still more by such conduct as averts their jealousy. Their jealousy is excited by all excess, by pride and insolence; it is appeased by that attitude of mind which is expressed by that untranslatable and indefinable word αἰδώς. Aidos is the direct opposite of ὕβρις or insolence; it is the feeling of respect for what is due to the gods, to one’s fellowmen, to oneself, a feeling that begets a like feeling towards oneself in others. It is the spirit of reverence, of modesty, of courtesy. Above all it is the sense of honour, and as such inspires the athlete and the soldier, distinguishing them from the bully and the oppressor. Strength may tempt its owner to abuse it; success may engender “braggart insolence.”[^[126]] But aidos puts into men’s hearts “valour and the joy of battle.”[^[127]] Aidos, mark, not passion, aidos, the child of forethought, and therefore the true man feels for his might “aidos,” which prevents him from abusing it.[^[128]] Hence while the bully inspires terror and loathing, the warrior and the athlete win in the sight of citizens and strangers grace and honour (αἰδοία χάρις).[^[129]]

In sport aidos is that scrupulous sense of honour and fairness, which is of the essence of that much abused word “a sportsman.” No sports demand so high a sense of honour as boxing and wrestling, the events which, with the pankration, were most popular in Greece, and no sports are therefore so liable to abuse and corruption. It is aidos which makes a man a “straight fighter,” εὐθυμάχας, the epithet with which Pindar describes the boxer Diagoras of Rhodes, “who walks in the straight path that abhors insolence.”[^[130]] The commercial spirit is incompatible with this feeling. “Aidos is stolen away by secret gains,”[^[131]] says Pindar in his praise of Chromius of Aetna. Was he thinking of the scandal aroused a few years before by Astylus of Croton when for the sake of gain he proclaimed himself a Syracusan? It is tempting to suppose so. The resentment that this conduct caused was at least a healthy sign. Further, aidos is akin to and includes the principle of self-control, σωφροσύνη, which is implied in Pindar’s favourite doctrine of the mean,[^[132]] and which plays so important a part in the philosophy of the next century. The self-control of the athlete was a commonplace, but aidos is something more subtle, more indefinable, more effective than any rule or principle; and the comprehension of it helps us to understand how even sports which seem at first sight brutal are yet under the special patronage of those fair-haired graces who, in Professor Gildersleeve’s expressive phrase, “give and grace the victory,” “from whom come unto men all pleasant things and sweet, and the wisdom of man and his beauty and the splendour of his fame.”[^[133]]

Such an ideal could not fail to exercise a lasting influence on athletics. Literature and art increased the popularity of athletics by appealing not merely with new force to the old motives of patriotism and religion but also to the growing aesthetic feeling of the race. To this may be ascribed the importance which the Greeks ascribed to style and grace. It was not sufficient, for example, to throw an opponent in wrestling, it had to be done in style and with skill. The cult of style grew sometimes, it would seem, almost into affectation. Aelian tells a story of a trainer, Hippomachus, who hearing the crowd applaud a pupil of his for throwing his opponent, at once chastised him, saying that he must have done something wrong, for the people would never have cheered a scientific throw.[^[134]] We do not know the date of Hippomachus, but the story undoubtedly illustrates a tendency which actually existed.

The same love of beauty must have helped to check the growth of specialization with its exaggerated and one-sided development, and also to preserve the purity of sport against the influence of professionalism. Thanks largely to this ideal Olympia maintained her prestige, and to a great extent her high standard of athletic honour, long after the liberty of Greece had become a memory, and her gods a laughing-stock of the satirist. An inscription of the reign of Hadrian, discovered at Olympia, is a striking illustration of this vitality. It records a decree in honour of T. Claudius Rufus, a pankratiast of Smyrna, who, though matched in the final heat of the pankration with an opponent who had drawn a bye in the preceding heat, fought on till nightfall, and left the contest drawn.[^[135]] The decree relates how he had resided at Olympia for the necessary course of training so that his σωφροσύνη was recognized by all men, how he had trained according to the traditional customs of the games, and had in the stadium given an exhibition worthy of Olympian Zeus, and of his own training and reputation, in recognition of which the Eleans had voted him the right of erecting his statue in the Altis. The decree is perhaps somewhat fulsome, and suggests that such examples of σωφροσύνη must have been exceptional at the time. Yet it shows that the memory at least of the old ideal survived even under the empire and was still cherished at Olympia.

We have already seen what an impulse was given to athletics and to the Panhellenic festivals by the Persian wars. No festival was more Panhellenic than that of Olympia, and no place felt more keenly than Elis the invigorating effects of the new spirit of unity and of freedom. Elis had played an inglorious part in the national struggle. The narrow and unprogressive oligarchy showed the same lack of energy and initiative which they had shown in the management of the Olympic festival during the sixth century. The Elean contingent arrived at Plataea too late to take part in the battle. Returning home full of bitter self-reproach they at once determined to put an end to the old régime, and banished the leaders who had been responsible for the fiasco. This was the beginning of the Synoecism of Elis which was not finally completed till 471 B.C., when the government of the scattered, unwalled villages was for the first time centred in the newly founded city state of Elis. The change was facilitated by the eclipse of Spartan prestige in the Peloponnese, while the growing influence of Athens was clearly shown both in these political changes and in the outburst of artistic activity at Olympia which followed the founding of Elis. But the new order could not fail to excite violent opposition, especially among the conservative folk of Pisatis and Triphylia, and their opposition culminated in a civil war which only ended about the year 470 or 469 with the devastation of the whole district by the Eleans.

The opposition of Pisatis was due partly to the transference of the political centre to Elis, perhaps in a greater degree to the new régime inaugurated at Olympia. The old dual control of the festival by Elis and Pisatis was, as we have seen already, passing away; possibly its death-blow was given by the banishment of the aristocrats, some of whom may have had hereditary connexion with the festival. At all events, from the time of Plataea the two Hellanodicae who represented the dual control were replaced by a board of nine,[^[136]] and permanent quarters were provided for the new administration by the enlargement of the Bouleuterion, the south wing of which was added about this time. The increase in the number of officials may have been rendered desirable by the increasing strenuousness of the competitions. The nine were divided into three groups of three each, in charge respectively of the horse-races, the pentathlon, and the other athletic events, an excellent arrangement which at once commends itself to the modern athletic mind. Yet it seems more likely that the number nine was dictated by political considerations, and the fact that there were nine tribes of the Eleans. It was a change to a sort of popular representation, and its popular character is further marked by the fact that these officials were elected by lot, a democratic institution which can hardly have belonged to the earlier régime.

This change first took effect in Ol. 76, and possibly was introduced in view of that great national Olympiad. It was on this occasion, according to a popular story, that Themistocles himself appeared and received such an ovation from the crowd that the athletes themselves were neglected. The national character of this Olympiad assured the success of the new order. In the following festival the competition was so great that the pankration could not be decided before nightfall, and it was decided from this date to extend and rearrange the festival. In the 77th Olympiad, too, a tenth Hellanodicas was added apparently to represent the newly conquered district of Triphylia. This number remained unchanged till Ol. 103, when, the number of tribes having been raised to twelve in consequence of a still further extension of territory southwards, a corresponding change was made in the number of the Hellanodicae. The war with Arcadia which ensued reduced the number for a time to eight, but in Ol. 108 the number was restored to ten and no further change was made. These Hellanodicae must be regarded as the executive officers of the Elean Council, to whom in case of doubt or dissatisfaction there was a right of appeal.

The intimate connexion between the political changes in Elis and the Olympic festival can be best realized from Pausanias’ account of the new city.[^[137]] Everything in Elis seems to have been planned purely and simply with a view to the festival. The agora was nothing more or less than a training-ground for horses, it was a large open square or oblong surrounded by colonnades with no other ornaments than a few altars to Zeus and other gods, and even these so constructed as to be easily removable. Close to this agora, appropriately called the hippodrome, were no less than three gymnasia with running tracks, and rings for boxing or wrestling, and conveniently connected with agora and gymnasium was the Hellanodiceon, or headquarters of the Hellanodicae. Here the latter had to reside for ten months before the festival, receiving instruction in all the ancient usages of the games from the Guardians of the Lavs (Nomophylakes). During the last month before the games they themselves were engaged in superintending the practice of the athletes, who spent the last thirty days of their training at Elis, and in classifying men and horses according to age, a matter of no little difficulty when no registers of births were kept. The principal buildings of Elis city were all connected with the games, and though we cannot tell the date of those which Pausanias saw, there can be little doubt that they truly indicate the character of the city from the start. The agora was typical of the rest, and Pausanias pointedly contrasts it with the cheerful market-places of Ionian towns. Certainly it cannot have been an attractive place to live in, and the Eleans never took kindly to it; indeed many an old-fashioned country gentleman lived and died without even setting foot in his chief city.[^[138]]

Meanwhile great changes were taking place at Olympia. Its national character was recognized by the dedication in the Altis, from the spoil of Plataea, of a colossal bronze statue of Zeus, on the base of which were inscribed the names of all states which had taken part in the battles. But the new feeling of national unity found a yet worthier monument in the whole series of buildings which the new administration undertook, to render the sacred precinct worthy of its Panhellenic dignity. Hitherto, as we have seen, various states had been allowed to secure for themselves points of vantage at the festival by building, along the foot of the hill of Cronus, treasuries, or communal houses. Three more of these buildings—the last of them—were added shortly after Plataea. All these were at the western end of the terrace. One of them was dedicated by the Syracusans in commemoration of their victory over the Carthaginians at Himera; another was built by the Sicyonians, possibly on the site of an older foundation, containing the great bronze treasure-chests dedicated by Myron; the builders of the third are unknown, but it has been plausibly suggested that they were the Samians. Sicyon had played an important part in the war with Persia both by land and sea, Samos was closely connected with the victory at Mycale, and it is tempting to imagine that both these treasuries were memorials of the national victory. This, however, is mere conjecture; what is certain is, that these treasuries were built shortly after Plataea and that from this date the building of such treasuries ceases abruptly. Henceforth the Eleans took into their own hands the embellishment of the Altis, and their first work was in connexion with the treasuries.[^[139]]

The loose nature of the soil had rendered the building of the westernmost treasuries a matter of considerable difficulty. Accordingly, the Eleans constructed nine rows of stone steps extending continuously from the western end of the Heraeum along the whole length of the treasury terrace. These steps not only served as a retaining wall to the treasuries but furnished a capacious stand from which thousands of spectators could view the games and sacrifices, which still centred round the altar of Zeus. Shortly afterwards was built the additional wing of the Bouleuterion mentioned above.

The next move of the Eleans was to provide a temple worthy of Olympian Zeus, and the money for this work was provided from the plunder gained in Triphylia and Pisatis. The new temple was begun about the year 468 B.C., and perhaps its buildings suggested to Pindar the opening lines of his 6th Olympian Ode in which he compares the prelude of his song to the façade of a stately fane. The temple must have been completed about the time of the defeat of the Athenians and Argives by Sparta at Tanagra in 457; for the Spartans commemorated their victory by a golden shield which was placed on the summit of the temple. It would be out of place here to attempt any description of the temple: we may notice, however, that while the architect Libon was an Elean, the great chryselephantine statue of Zeus afterwards erected in it was the masterpiece of Pheidias, and Pausanias ascribes some of the sculptural decorations to the Athenian sculptors Paeonius and Alcamenes, though modern authorities generally discredit the statement. And just as Pheidias in his Zeus tried to represent the highest ideal of Greek manhood, so in the lesser works, the mythological scenes of the pediments and metopes, the chariot-race of Pelops and Oenomaus, the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, the labours of Heracles, we have in reality various renderings of the theme which inspires all the art of this period, the triumph of the Greek over the barbarian, of trained skill over undisciplined force. Thus the temple of Zeus was truly a national memorial of the Persian wars.

The new temple was built on the site of the ancient grove, and its building had no doubt interfered with anything in the nature of fence or hedge which may have bounded the sacred grove. Perhaps we may assign to this period the idea of marking out the Altis in the rough quadrilateral shape which has been revealed by later ruins. This plan seems to be implied in the building of the first colonnade at the eastern end of and at right angles, to the treasury terrace. This colonnade was built about the middle of the fifth century, and was obviously intended for the convenience of spectators at the festival, commanding, as it did, a full view of the ancient altar and of the east end of the newly built temple of Zeus. Its building necessitated a change in the athletic arrangements.

The foot-races could no longer take place near the altar, and a new permanent “dromos,” or race-course, was provided to the east of the colonnade. This may have been partly a concession to the growing demands of professional athletes, but the new race-course was still of the simplest. The ground was approximately levelled, the course was measured and perhaps marked by a permanent line of stone slabs at either end, and water-channels were provided to carry the water from the west of the Altis to the race-course, for the convenience of spectators and athletes alike. Perhaps permanent seats were provided for the Hellanodicae, and for the priestess of Demeter Chamyne, who had a place of honour opposite them. The rest of the spectators had no seats, but reclined or stood on the slopes of the hill of Cronus, or else on the flat plain that stretched between the stadium and the Alpheus.

Whether all the athletic events or only the races were transferred to the new course is uncertain. The only evidence on the point is contained in a passage of Xenophon, describing the battle which took place at Olympia in 364 B.C. In this year the wrestling of the pentathlon undoubtedly took place near the altar as it had done in Pindar’s time; but it is not quite clear whether this was the usual thing or exceptional. In the dearth of evidence it is a matter for individual judgment, and my own opinion is that only the foot-races and throwing the diskos and javelin were transferred to the new dromos, and that boxing, wrestling, and the pankration continued to take place in the triangular space commanded by the treasury terrace and the colonnade. The treasury terrace and colonnade formed the theatre of which Xenophon speaks, and certainly offered far better accommodation for spectators of such events than was possible in the stadium proper, at least until it was improved and banked up after the battle of Chaeronea.[^[140]]

About the same time improvements were made in the hippodrome. Hitherto the arrangements for the equestrian events must have been as simple as for the athletics. But now a permanent hippodrome was provided south of the stadium, and an elaborate starting-gate for the chariots was constructed by the artist Cleoetas.[^[141]] The chariots were arranged in pairs opposite each other along the sides of a triangle, the apex of which pointed down the course. In the centre of this triangle was an altar of Poseidon, on which stood a bronze eagle. At the apex was a brazen dolphin. At the moment of starting this dolphin fell to the ground and the eagle rose, thus announcing the start to the spectators. At the same time the ropes in front of the pair of chariots nearest to the base were withdrawn. As they drew level with the next pair, the next ropes were withdrawn, and so on till the whole field were fairly started.

We may notice here a work which, though perhaps of somewhat later date, illustrates the Panhellenic character of Olympia. The old tripod on which the branches of sacred olive tree for the prizes were placed, was replaced by an ivory and gold table, the work of Colotes of Heraclea,[^[142]] a disciple of Pheidias, who assisted the latter in constructing the chryselephantine statue of Zeus. The table was kept in the Heraeum and at the time of the festival was placed beside the seat of the Hellanodicae in the stadium. On one side were representations of Hera and Zeus, of the Mother of the Gods, Hermes, Apollo, and Artemis. On the other side were figures of Pluto and Persephone, recalling those ancient Chthonic cults which had existed at Olympia from time immemorial, and of which many traces survive, especially to the east of the Altis.

The activity of the Eleans had, as we have seen, put an end to architectural dedications by other states; but the piety of the Greek world found expression in the dedication of statues and votive offerings. During the nine Olympiads which followed the Persian wars 476-444 B.C., no less than thirty-five statues of victors were set up on the Altis, while in the next nine Olympiads the number drops to twenty.[^[143]] These statistics bear out the date of the change in Greek athletics which will be discussed in the next chapter.

CHAPTER VI
PROFESSIONALISM AND SPECIALIZATION, 440-338 B.C.

Literature and art purified and refined athletics for a while, but at the same time by encouraging competition intensified these very evils which result from excessive competition, and when the Panhellenic movement had spent its force, and strife and faction once more resumed their sway in the Greek world, the decline of athletics was rapid. Nowhere is excess more dangerous than in athletics, and the charm of poetry and art must not blind us to that element of exaggeration which existed in the hero-worship of the athlete. The nemesis of excess in athletics is specialization, specialization begets professionalism, and professionalism is the death of all true sport.

We have seen how even before the time of Pindar the growth of competition had developed athletics beyond their legitimate sphere of exercise and recreation till they became an end in themselves, and how success in the great games demanded an undue expenditure of time and of money. During the fifth century specialization made rapid progress in the hands of professional trainers, whose business it was to train competitors for the great games.[^[144]]

The earliest trainers were boxers and wrestlers, who probably confined themselves to giving instruction in these exercises. Such training was of course necessary and useful, but shortly after the Persian wars it was discovered that excellence in any particular event could be secured by special training and special diet, and the trainer began to take upon himself the whole direction of his pupil’s life. This specialized artificial training was good neither for the athlete nor for the nation.

Fig. 19. Apoxyomenos. Rome, Vatican.

The aim of the earlier training had been to produce a harmonious development of the whole body. The new training, by prescribing concentration on some particular exercise, produced a one-sided development. “The runner,” says Socrates, “has over-developed his legs, and the boxer the upper part of his body,”[^[145]] and he humorously suggests that he finds dancing a better form of exercise than athletics. In another passage of the Memorabilia, Socrates compliments a sculptor, whom under the name of Cleiton we may perhaps recognize as Polycleitus,[^[146]] on his power of representing the different physical types produced by different forms of sport. Unfortunately we have not sufficient material to enable us to verify this statement for the sculpture of the end of the fifth century. But some idea of the diversity of type produced may be obtained by comparing two somewhat later works, the Apoxyomenos, formerly ascribed to Lysippus (Fig. [19]), and the Agias, a genuine work of Lysippus, recently discovered at Delphi[^[147]] (Fig. [20]). In the former we see the thoroughbred type of the runner with his length of limb and fine ankles, in the latter the sturdier, heavier type of the pankratiast. Neither of these two statues, however, is open to the charge of one-sided development which Socrates brings against the athletes of his time, and which would probably be more noticeable in inferior works of art. For this we must turn to the vases. A Panathenaic vase in the British Museum, dated 336 B.C., shows us the typical boxer of the period, with his clumsy, bulky body and small coarse head[^[148]] (Fig. [135]). A comparison of these boxers with the athletes on the red-figured vases affords convincing proof of the change which had come over athletics.

Fig. 20. Statue of Agias by Lysippus. Delphi. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 141.)

The old athlete had lived a simple, natural, open-air life. Training in the strict sense of the word he had none. His diet had been mainly vegetarian. Like the diet of the country-folk in Greece at all times, it consisted mainly of figs and cheese from the baskets, of porridge and meal-cakes with only such meat as occasion offered.[^[149]] It has been often stated that a diet of figs and cheese was prescribed by the law of the Olympic festival, and various fanciful interpretations of this custom have been suggested. It is possible that certain forms of food were forbidden to competitors at particular festivals; thus at Delphi we know that the introduction of wine into the stadium was forbidden, and that any breach of this rule was punished by a fine, half of which was paid to the god, the other half to the informer.[^[150]] But such prohibitions were of the nature of a religious taboo, and there is no reason for supposing that the diet of athletes was otherwise regulated by any law. Indeed we have direct evidence to the contrary, for the introduction of a meat diet in the fifth century is ascribed to two private individuals—to Dromeus of Stymphalus, a runner who twice won the long race at Olympia in Ols. 80 and 81, and to Pythagoras of Samos, who trained Eurymenes, the winner of the boxing in Ol. 77.[^[151]]

The introduction of a meat diet was a momentous change: it created an artificial distinction between the life of an athlete and the life of the ordinary man, who ate meat but sparingly and only as a relish. Its object, of course, was to produce the bulk of body and weight which are important considerations in boxing and wrestling, and which were especially so in Greece inasmuch as classification by weight was unknown in those competitions. Boxing, wrestling, and the pankration were, as I have stated, the most popular and most honoured of all the events in Greek sport, and it is in these events that specialization and professionalism first made their appearance, and that their results were most fatal. To produce the necessary bulk of body the trainer prescribed for his pupils vast quantities of meat, which had to be counteracted by violent exercise. Eating, sleeping, and exercise occupied the athlete’s whole time, and left little time or leisure for any other pursuits.[^[152]] “Socrates,” says Xenophon, “disapproved of such a life as incompatible with the cultivation of the soul.” Even from a physical point of view this system of training was vicious and unscientific. It might produce weight and strength, but it did so at the sacrifice of activity and health. In the case of the young it tended to stunt the growth and destroy all beauty of form; and Aristotle, speaking no doubt of his own time, remarks on the fact that the boy victors at Olympia rarely repeated their successes as men.[^[153]] Moreover, the athlete’s strength was useless for practical purposes. Epaminondas, we are told, when he came of age and began to frequent the palaestra, devoted himself to such exercises as produced activity rather than great strength, considering that the latter was of little use for war. So he exercised himself in running, and in wrestling “only so far as he could stand on his feet,” but he spent most of his time in the practice of arms.[^[154]] Equally unsuitable for war was the habit of life produced by athletic training. “The athlete’s nature,” says Plato, “is sleepy, and the least variation from his routine is liable to cause him serious illness.”[^[155]] Such a man is incapable of standing the various vicissitudes of a campaign, and therefore we find athletics condemned not only by philosophers like Plato and Aristotle but by generals such as Epaminondas, Alexander, and Philopoemen.[^[156]] “The athlete,” says Euripides, “is the slave of his jaw and of his belly.”

Medical science confirmed the verdict of the philosopher and the soldier. Hippocrates of Cos, “the father of medicine,” and a contemporary of Herodicus and Gorgias, condemned the high state of training produced by athletics as a dangerous and unstable condition of body.[^[157]] To live in a constant state of training is bad for any man, and especially under a system so unscientific as that of the Greeks.

There was another reason for the condemnation of athletics by military authorities. The old Homeric sports had been practical and military: the system of physical education which had grown out of them had produced that all-round development which made a man fit for all the duties of life in peace or war; but the new specialized education produced only a one-sided development, and at the same time was so exacting as to leave no time for the practice of military exercises. Plato was an ardent advocate of physical training. Trained by his father Ariston, who was a distinguished athlete, he had won victories in wrestling at Delphi, Nemea, and the Isthmus, and is even stated, though with less probability, to have won the Olympic crown. But the philosopher could find no place for the athletics of his day in his ideal state, and he therefore, in the Laws,[^[158]] proposes a new and more practical gymnastic based on the requirements of war. From the age of six, boys, and girls too, are to learn to ride, to learn the use of the bow, the javelin, and the sling, and to learn to use the left hand as well as the right. In wrestling and boxing all tricks invented “out of a vain spirit of competition” are to be eschewed and only such forms practised as are likely to be of service for war. The dances, too, must be military in character, marches and processions in armour and on horseback, or mimic contests like the dances of Crete and Sparta. In another passage[^[159]] he describes the competitions suitable for his ideal state. All foot-races are to be run in armour, there is to be a long-distance race of sixty stades in heavy armour, and a still longer race of 100 stades over mountains and across every sort of country for the light-armed archer. Instead of wrestling and the pankration there are to be conflicts in armour, and for the light-armed troops combats with bows, and javelins, and slings under a code of laws drawn up by military experts. The military character of Plato’s scheme indicates the philosopher’s opinion on the unpractical character of the existing athletics.

An interesting development of athletic training which has its parallel in our own day was the rise of “medical gymnastics.” The valetudinarian school of gymnastic originated with Herodicus of Selymbria, a contemporary of Socrates whom Plato ridicules for corrupting the arts of gymnastic and medicine.[^[160]] “By a combination of training and doctoring he found out a way of torturing, first and chiefly, himself, and, secondly, the rest of the world, by the invention of a lingering death. Having a mortal disease, which he perpetually tended, he passed his whole life as a valetudinarian.” By the introduction of elaborate rules for eating and drinking he corrupted athletics, and is justly described by Plato as a gymnastic sophist, a name that might well be applied to many of the advertizing quacks of our own day. In this respect he is coupled by Plato with the somewhat earlier trainer, Iccus of Tarentum, who won the pentathlon at Olympia in Ol. 76, and who was famed for his temperance and self-restraint.[^[161]] These trainers are credited with the invention of medical massage (ἰατραλειπτική), a development of the massage applied to athletes before and after training by the ἀλειπτής. Alexander had in his suite an Athenian Athenophanes, whose duty it was to attend his master in the bath and anoint him with oil.[^[162]]

Of the rich rewards lavished upon successful athletes we have spoken in a previous chapter. In the Plutus of Aristophanes Hermes, having deserted the gods, takes service with Plutus as the “presider over contests.” “For,” says he, “there is no service more profitable to Plutus than holding contests in music and athletics.”[^[163]] Plato knows no life more blessed from a material point of view than that of an Olympic victor, and in the myth of Er he describes the soul of Atalanta choosing the body of an athlete on seeing “the great rewards bestowed on the athlete.” Still more significant is the story of the Rhodian Dorieus, one of the famous Diagoridae. Banished from Rhodes by the Athenians he went to Thurii, and, as a commander of a Thurian ship, took part in the war against Athens. Taken prisoner by the Athenians in 407 B.C. he was set free without ransom in consideration of the fame which he and his family had won at Olympia.[^[164]]

The result of specialization is professionalism. There is a point in any sport or game where it becomes over-developed, and competition too severe, for it to serve its true purpose of providing exercise or recreation for the many. It becomes the monopoly of the few who can afford the time or money to acquire excellence, while the rest, despairing of any measure of success, prefer the role of spectators. When the rewards of success are sufficient there arises a professional class, and when professionalism is once established the amateur can no longer compete with the professional.

Before the close of the fifth century the word ἀθλητής had already come to denote the professional athlete as opposed to the amateur or ἰδιωτής. Xenophon relates a conversation between Socrates and an ill-developed youth, in which the philosopher taunts the latter with his very “unprofessional” condition of body.[^[165]] Athletics were out of fashion at that time among the smart young men of Athens, who, like Alcibiades, disdained to compete with their inferiors. “Of course,” replies the youth indignantly, “for I am not a professional, I am an amateur.” Whereupon the philosopher reads him a lecture on the duty of developing the body to its utmost. “No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training: it is part of his profession as a citizen to keep himself in good condition, ready to serve his state at a moment’s notice. The instinct of self-preservation demands it likewise: for how helpless is the state of the ill-trained youth in war or danger! Finally what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable!” The ideal of Socrates is the earlier ideal which was already passing away, while the reply of Epigenes illustrates the change which had taken place in the character of the athlete and in the popular attitude towards athletics.

At the time of the Persian wars the Greeks had been a nation of athletes. At the time of the Peloponnesian wars the mass of the people were no longer athletic. Aristophanes bitterly deplores the change.[^[166]] At Athens the young men had deserted the palaestra and gymnasium for the luxurious baths and the market-place; pale-faced and narrow-chested, they had not even sufficient training to run the torch-race. The labour of training was distasteful to the Athenians, who, as Thucydides tells us, preferred to be spectators of the deeds of others rather than doers. Sparta had long taken little part in athletic competitions, with the exception of the foot-race, but her rigorous system of education, brutalizing as it was, saved her at least from the evils of specialized athletics. Of other parts of Greece we know little; in the richer and more progressive cities it is probable that life was much the same as at Athens, while the records of Olympia show that the victors were drawn more and more from the poorer and less progressive country districts, from Thessaly, and particularly from the mountains of Arcadia.[^[167]] It was only when athletics became a profitable profession that the poor but healthy countryman could afford to compete at the great festivals. The large number of competitions for boys and youths offered the promising boxer or wrestler a source of profit from an early age, and at Olympia these competitions were almost monopolized by the youth of Elis and Arcadia.

The severest indictment of professionalism occurs in the well-known fragment of Euripides’ lost play, the Autolycus. Euripides was no enemy of sport. His parents had wished to train him as an athlete, and he had won prizes as a boy at the Eleusinian and the Thesean games. He is said to have offered himself as a candidate at Olympia, but to have been disqualified owing to some doubt about his age. Countless allusions in his writings show his appreciation of all manly sports. But athletic success could not satisfy his restless and ambitious spirit, and, like Xenophanes two generations before, he could not be blind to the unreality of the worship of athletics, and to the evils which it was producing. “Of all the countless evils throughout Hellas,” he cries, “there is none worse than the race of athletes.” The evil is not confined to Athens; it is widespread throughout Hellas. “In youth they strut about in splendour, the pride of their city, but when bitter old age comes upon them they are cast aside like threadbare garments.” It is not the athletes themselves but the nation that is to blame for such results. “I blame the custom of the Hellenes who gather together to watch these men, honouring a useless pleasure.” And then, echoing the words of Xenophanes, he proceeds: “Who ever helped his fatherland by winning a crown for wrestling or for speed of foot, or hurling the diskos, or striking a good blow on the jaw? Will they fight the foe with diskoi in their hands or, driving their fists through the foemen’s shields, cast them out of their land? Crowns should be given to the good and wise, to him who guides his city best, a temperate man and just, or who by his words drives away evil deeds, putting away war and faction.” How did the Athenians in the theatre receive this daring denunciation of their idols? Many, at least, with sympathy, and among the number, I believe, would have been the poet’s inveterate foe, Aristophanes.

While athletics were passing into the hands of professionals and losing their hold upon the people, the richer classes devoted themselves more and more to chariot and horse races. These had long been the sport of tyrants and nobles; especially brilliant were the victories of the tyrants of Sicily and Italy at Olympia. But the Persian wars gave a fresh impulse to horse-breeding and riding in Greece. Cavalry and light-armed troops played a more and more important part in war. Themistocles, we are told, himself taught his sons to ride, to throw javelins standing on horseback, and perform other equestrian feats.[^[168]] At the Panathenaea, besides a variety of races for chariots and horses, there were parades, processions, and military manœuvres on horseback. The frieze of the Parthenon bears witness to the grace and skill of the Athenian horsemen. The horsiness of the fashionable young Athenian is ridiculed by Aristophanes.[^[169]] He spent large sums on horses, affected horsy names, and talked of horses all the day long. Alcibiades entered no less than seven chariots at Olympia in 416 B.C., and obtained first, second, and fourth places in the race.[^[170]] He celebrated his success by entertaining the whole assembly at a sumptuous banquet.

At Sparta chariot-racing had long been popular; one Euagoras in the sixth century had won the chariot-race in three successive Olympiads with the same team, and King Damaratus himself had won a victory there. After the Persian wars the Spartans gave increased attention to horse-breeding; their victories were frequent, and their enthusiasm for the sport is shown by the story of Lichas. Their victories at the Panathenaea are proved by the recent discovery at Sparta of a number of Panathenaic vases representing the chariot-race,[^[171]] and an inscription detailing the victories of one Damonon in chariot and horse racing records the fact that his horses were got by his own stallion out of his own mares.[^[172]] The addiction of the Spartans to chariot-racing did not meet with the approval of Agesilaus, if we may believe Plutarch’s story about his sister Cynisca, who won the chariot-race in Ol. 96, 97.

Chariot-racing was, of course, merely a fashionable amusement, and except so far as it encouraged horse-breeding, of no service for war. Poorer states could not compete in it at all unless, like Argos, they entered public chariots or horses.[^[173]] But the chariot-race was a great attraction to the spectators, and its growing popularity is evidenced by the introduction of two new races at Olympia and at Delphi. A two-horse chariot-race was introduced at Olympia in 408 B.C., at Delphi in 398 B.C., a four-horse chariot-race for colts at Olympia in 384 B.C., and at Delphi in 378 B.C. The introduction of colt-races was of course dictated by the wish to encourage horse-breeding, in which the country gentlemen of Elis were greatly interested.

The evil results of professionalism were not long in showing themselves. When money enters into sport, corruption is sure to follow. It will be remembered how Astylus of Croton had sold his victory for the favour of a Sicilian tyrant. In Ol. 97 or 98 the boys’ boxing match was won by Antipater of Miletus, the first Ionian to have his statue erected at Olympia as he recorded in the inscription.[^[174]] Some emissaries of Dionysius of Syracuse had bribed his father to let his son be proclaimed a Syracusan; but Antipater despised the tyrant’s bribe and proclaimed himself of Miletus. Not so Sotades of Crete,[^[175]] who, having won the long race in Ol. 99, in the next Olympiad accepted a bribe from the Ephesians to proclaim himself an Ephesian, for which offence he was deservedly banished by his countrymen. Worse, however, than this transfer of victories was their actual sale. The first instance of such bribing occurred in Ol. 98 (388 B.C.) when Eupolus of Thessaly[^[176]] bribed his opponents in boxing to let him win the prize. These were Agenor of Arcadia, Prytanis of Cyzicus, and Phormio of Halicarnassus, who had won the boxing in the previous Olympiad. The offence was discovered, and Eupolus and those who had been bribed by him were heavily fined by the Eleans. From the fines were made six bronze statues of Zeus, called Zanes, which were set up at the entrance to the Stadium, with inscriptions commending the justice of the Eleans, and warning competitors that “not with money but with speed of foot and strength of body must prizes be won at Olympia.” The warning apparently had its effect for a time. It was not till 332 B.C. that another case of bribing occurred. On this occasion the Athenian Callippus bribed his opponents in the pentathlon.[^[177]] The guilty parties were fined, but the Athenians despatched the orator Hyperides to beg the Eleans to remit the fine. His mission failed, and the Athenians thereupon, with a high hand, refused to pay, and absented themselves from Olympia till they were compelled to give in by the Delphic god, who declined to give them any answers until the fines were paid. Six more Zanes were made out of the money, with inscriptions similar to the first. It is a high testimonial to the sanctity of Olympia and the prestige of its authority that cases of corruption were so rare. Yet the Eleans themselves did not escape without reproach. In Ol. 96 (396 B.C.) there was a scandal in connection with the foot-race.[^[178]] Two of the Hellanodicae decided in favour of Eupolemus of Elis, and the third in favour of Leon of Ambracia. The latter appealed to the council, who upheld his appeal and punished the two officials. It seems, however, that an award once given could not be reversed, and Eupolemus therefore retained his victory, and even commemorated it by a statue. A few years later, in Ol. 102, there was a similar scandal with regard to the horse-race which was won by another Elean Troilus, who owed his victory, says Pausanias, partly to the fact that he was a Hellanodicas.[^[179]] In consequence of this incident a regulation was introduced forbidding the Hellanodicae to compete in the chariot or horse races.

The apparent breakdown in the machinery of Olympia during the early years of the fourth century is partly due to political circumstances with which we shall deal shortly. The struggle between Athens and Sparta, involving the whole Greek world in strife, contributed in no small degree to the decay of athletics. But when corruption was possible at Olympia we may be sure that it was rife elsewhere. A class of useless athletes, an unathletic nation of spectators, a corrupt and degraded sport, such were the results which we find in Greece within a century of the glorious 76th Olympiad that celebrated the freedom of Greece. Yet such was the strength and persistency of the old ideal that it was destined to survive for centuries after all freedom had been lost.

The character of the competitions themselves underwent little change during this period. Such changes as took place were due to changes in the conditions of war and to the increased importance of light-armed troops and cavalry.[^[180]] Not only were equestrian events multiplied, but separate competitions were introduced in javelin-throwing and in archery. The javelin had hitherto been confined to the pentathlon. Now we find separate prizes offered for javelin-throwing, both on foot and on horseback, at a target as well as for distance. But such innovations seem to have been confined to local festivals like the Panathenaea, and found no place in the programme of the great festivals. The brutalising effects of professionalism may be traced in the change of the caestus. The soft leather thongs which alone appear on the fifth-century vases were, by the addition of bands of hard leather round the knuckles, developed into the formidable weapon called the σφαῖρα, which we see depicted on the Panathenaic vase in Fig. [135]. It is curious to find Plato commending the use of the σφαῖρα on account of its brutality as more closely reproducing the conditions of warfare, and so more suitable for training soldiers than the “soft thongs.” We are less surprised at the approval with which he and Aristotle regard the pentathlon, the one competition which required the all-round development of the older athletics. But it is to be feared that this event was not really popular. Of the victors in the pentathlon at Olympia during this period we know only three, and of these, two, Stomius and Hysmon, were Eleans, the third the Athenian Callippus, who owed his victory to corruption. Of the statues erected at Olympia the vast majority were in honour of boxing, wrestling, and the pankration.[^[181]]

Despite the decline of athletics there was no diminution of the influence and popularity of the athletic festivals. Wealth had increased, means of communication had improved, and with the growing attractions of the festivals and the growing love of sight-seeing among the people the crowds that flocked to the games showed no falling off. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of these gatherings. In an age distracted by civil war and faction they served to remind the Greeks of their common brotherhood and to promote a spirit of good-will.[^[182]] Especially was this true of Olympia, which, under the rigorous administration of the Eleans, had become the chief centre of Panhellenism. The sacred month, jealously guarded by the Eleans, afforded a brief respite from arms and security for all who wished to attend the festival, whether in a public or private capacity. All through the Peloponnesian war the representatives of Athens could travel unmolested to the festival.[^[183]] There all states, unless under the ban of the Eleans, sent embassies, composed of wealthy and prominent citizens, who vied with one another in displaying the wealth and power and culture of their cities.[^[184]] At Olympia the representatives of states at war with one another laid aside their animosities for a time, and opportunity was afforded for the discussion and settlement of many a grievance and dispute.

To these meetings we may partly attribute the growing tendency to the formation of leagues. There, too, the terms of treaties could be proclaimed and made known to the whole Greek world. The terms of the thirty years’ truce between Athens and Sparta were recorded on a stele at Olympia;[^[185]] so too was the 100 years’ treaty made in 420 B.C. between Athens, Argos, Mantinea, and Elis, and it was ordered that the treaty should be periodically renewed at the Olympia and the Panathenaea.[^[186]] It was to Olympia that the envoys of Mytilene came at the commencement of the Peloponnesian war[^[187]] to protest against the tyranny of Athens and plead for their autonomy before the assembled Greeks. Finally, when Athens and Sparta, false to the cause of Hellenism, were treacherously intriguing with Persia, it was at Olympia that on three occasions a noble appeal for unity was made. In 408 B.C. Gorgias of Leontini, addressing the assembled crowds from the steps of the temple of Zeus, appealed to them to forget their rivalries and unite together in the crusade of Hellenism against Persia.[^[188]] His voice was unheeded at the time, but a later generation appropriately commemorated his appeal by erecting his statue in the Altis.[^[189]] Twenty-four years later Sparta, in alliance with Artaxerxes and the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius, was once more trampling on the liberties of Greece. Dionysius had sent to Olympia a magnificent embassy headed by his brother Thearion; his tents of gold and purple were pitched within the sacred precincts, splendid chariots were entered in his name for the four-horse chariots, while hired rhapsodists recited continually the praises of their master. By a curious chance the winner of the foot-race was Dicon, proclaimed of Syracuse, but in reality a citizen of Caulonia, a city that Dionysius had recently destroyed, transferring its citizens to Syracuse.[^[190]] Such were the circumstances in which the Athenian Lysias, in graceful but vigorous language, warned the Greeks that Artaxerxes and Dionysius were the real enemies of Hellas, and, bidding them lay aside their differences, called on them to unite and show their patriotism by an attack on the tyrant’s tents.[^[191]] The appeal was only partially successful, and one cannot but rejoice that the peace of the festival was not broken by such an outrage upon hospitality. Lastly, at the next Olympiad of 380 B.C. Isocrates distributed at the festival copies of his famous Panegyric, a work to which he is said to have devoted ten years’ work, in which he once more advocated a Panhellenic crusade against Persia, under the united command of Athens and Sparta.[^[192]]

It was one of the fictions of a later time that no memorial might be set up in the Altis to commemorate the triumph of one Greek state over another. But though Olympia did undoubtedly work for unity, the monuments prove that the ideal was often disregarded, and the Altis bore witness to the divisions as well as to the unity of Greece. Apart from votive offerings of helmets, spears, and shields[^[193]] Pausanias saw at Olympia a statue of Zeus twelve feet high, set up by the Spartans to commemorate the repression of the Messenian revolt.[^[194]] It is doubtful whether this refers to the revolt of 464 B.C. or to an earlier war in the sixth century, but certainly this statue, and probably other statues, mentioned by Pausanias were offerings for wars in which Greeks fought against Greeks.[^[195]] In 424 the Messenians had their revenge, and they commemorated the part which they had played at Pylos by erecting a statue of victory with an inscription stating that it was dedicated by the Messenians and Naupactians from the spoil of their enemy. The statue was the work of the sculptor Paeonius, who is said to have made the sculptures of the eastern pediment of the temple of Zeus.[^[196]] Raised on a lofty triangular pedestal, it must have been the most conspicuous monument in the Altis. The Messenians, says Pausanias, omitted to insert the name of their enemies from fear of the Spartans, but no such fear deterred the Eleans, who celebrated a victory won at Olympia itself in the war at the beginning of the fourth century by setting up a trophy in the Altis with an inscription on the shield that it was dedicated out of the spoils of the Lacedaemonians, and their final triumph over the Arcadians after the 104th Olympiad was commemorated by a colossal monument that rivalled the Victory of the Messenians.[^[197]]

Interest at Olympia was no longer confined to religious ceremonies and sports. It is true that there were no musical or dramatic competitions such as were held at other festivals. The contests for heralds and trumpeters introduced in 396 B.C. had certainly no such character.[^[198]] But the gathering together of crowds from all parts of the Greek world afforded a unique opportunity for profit and advertisement which appealed to many classes, not only to the huckster and pedlar, who provided for the material wants of the people,[^[199]] to the acrobat and mountebank, who catered for their amusement, but to the man of science, of literature, and of art. The artist, the writer, or the inventor had little means of making himself known outside his own city except by travelling from place to place. All such flocked to Olympia, where all would find an appreciative and critical audience. Lucian[^[200]] tells us that Herodotus was the first to realise the unique possibilities of Olympia for purposes of advertisement, and read his history to the people in the Opisthodome of the temple of Zeus; and another account adds that the youthful Thucydides, who happened to be present, was moved to tears by his recitation. He is also said to have recited his work at Athens, Thebes, and Corinth. Whatever the truth of these stories, it is certain that the practice of public recitation was widely spread in the fifth century, and nowhere could such an audience be found as at Olympia. Moreover, the demand for hymns of victory and athletic statues must have brought thither poets and artists before the day of Herodotus. The practice commended itself especially to the sophists and rhetoricians who travelled about amassing large sums of money by their learning, real or pretended. Some of these have been already mentioned.

Olympia was a meeting-place for all. There one might have seen Socrates listening with polite amusement to the encyclopaedic Hippias of Elis as he proclaimed to an admiring audience his varied knowledge and accomplishments, and told them that everything he had about his person was the work of his own hands, from the shoes on his feet to the girdle of his tunic, fine as the most costly fabric of Persia. There, too, one might have seen many another whose person is familiar to us in Plato’s dialogues, the great Gorgias himself, with his pupil, Polus, “impetuous as a runaway colt”; or Prodicus of Ceos declaiming in that fine bass voice of his on subtleties of language or of grammar. Or one might have listened to the mathematician, Oenopides, explaining to a select few the mysteries of the great year, a diagram of which, engraved on a bronze tablet, he had set up in the Altis. There one might have gazed on Zeuxis as he strutted about in his peacock clothes, displaying to the world his vanity and wealth. Every one who had anything to sell, to exhibit, or make known came to Olympia, which thus became a centre from which Hellenic culture was diffused throughout the world.

This expansion of interests is evident in the list of honorary statues which cease in this period to be confined to victors in the games. Thus the Samians commemorated the freedom which they thought they had gained by the victory of Aegospotami by setting up in the Altis a statue of Lysander.[^[201]] The statue of Gorgias has been already mentioned. In Macedonian times the custom spread, while the number of athletic statues steadily declined. Besides kings and princes, the historian Anaximenes of Lampsacus and the philosopher Aristotle received this honour.[^[202]]

Neutrality was the natural and obvious policy of the Eleans. Removed by their geographical situation from the main stress and turmoil of Greek politics, they appreciated to the full the advantages of the position which they had usurped as sole guardians of the Olympian precinct, and lost no opportunity of enforcing and extending the privilege attaching to that position. Thus they claimed for the whole of Elis the sanctity belonging to the sacred plain; their lives were consecrated and their territory immune from war.[^[203]] Elis city was the official headquarters of Olympia, with which it was connected by a sacred road, and there all competitors were forced to assemble to undergo a month’s training before the games. Yet the scanty records of history show that the immunity enjoyed by the Eleans was due more to the accident of their position than to a general recognition of their sanctity. Religious scruples, though often convenient as an excuse, were seldom allowed to stand in the way of more practical considerations. Hence the Eleans, however anxious to preserve their neutrality, could not avoid being involved in the complications caused by the Peloponnesian war. Sparta must have regarded with jealousy and suspicion the influence possessed by Athens and the growth of democracy in the new state. In Triphylia and Arcadia the cause of the Pisatans was still popular, and the control of Elis was regarded as an act of usurpation. It was in connection with Lepreum, one of the cities of the old Pisatan league, that difficulties arose.

Sparta had interfered in a quarrel between Elis and Lepreum, which from the commencement of the Peloponnesian war had refused to pay its tribute of a talent to Olympian Zeus, and a Spartan force of 1000 men was despatched in the summer of 424 B.C. to the help of the Lepreates. The Eleans complained that this act was a violation of the Olympic truce which had just been proclaimed, and imposed a fine of 2000 minae—2 minae per head—payable half to Olympian Zeus, half to themselves. The Spartans refused to pay, and after fruitless negotiations the Eleans, unable to obtain satisfaction, excommunicated Sparta, and forbade her to take any part in the forthcoming festival. So, says Thucydides,[^[204]] while all other states were represented the Spartans and Lepreates had no representatives, and offered their sacrifices at home. Alarmed at their own bold action, the Eleans had so little confidence in the protection of sanctity that they put their whole force under arms and summoned assistance from Argos, Mantinea, and Athens. The alarm of the assembly was increased by another insult inflicted on Sparta in the course of the games. Lichas, the son of Arcesilaus, a member of the Spartan royal family, unable to compete in his own name, had entered his team for the chariot-race under the name of the Boeotian commonwealth. When his chariot won, he advanced boldly into the course to bind the fillet of victory on the charioteer’s head, but was publicly driven off by the officials and beaten with their rods. Yet in spite of this fresh insult Sparta, deeming the occasion inexpedient to excite the religious susceptibilities of Greece, did nothing, but bided her time, and Elis, three years afterwards, joined the Argive alliance.

Sparta never forgot and never forgave. In 399 Agis led an army against Elis, nominally to force Elis to acknowledge the independence of the Arcadian and Triphylian towns, in reality to wreak vengeance for her conduct during the Peloponnesian war. Agis had also a recent and more personal grievance. Having gone to Olympia to consult the oracle, he had been refused an answer by the Eleans, who invoked an ancient canon forbidding oracles to be given to Greeks engaged in war against Greeks. This time their sanctity could not save them. Frightened away the first year by a providential earthquake,[^[205]] Agis returned in the following summer, and, reinforced by the Triphylian towns, advanced to Olympia, where he offered the sacrifice which had been forbidden before. He then marched through the rich plains of Elis, the plunder of which attracted to his standard numerous Arcadian and Achaean volunteers. In spite of assistance from Xenias and the oligarchical party he failed to take the city, but finally, by occupying a fortified post on the border and ravaging the country, he reduced the Eleans to complete submission. They were forced to raze their fortifications, surrender their harbour, and acknowledge the independence of all the towns of Arcadia and Triphylia. Only the presidency of the Olympic festival was left to them, for, though the Pisatans claimed it as having belonged to them originally, the Spartans refused to acknowledge their claim, considering, says Xenophon, that they were country bumpkins, and incapable of exercising the presidency, a remarkable testimony to the efficiency of the Elean administration.[^[206]]

The effects of this humiliation were seen in the scandals which disgraced the following Olympiads. The prestige of the festival itself must have suffered. In the next Olympiad, 396 B.C., the competition was so reduced that no less than six events were won by Eleans.[^[207]]

The Spartans had refused to deprive the Eleans of the presidency from no respect for their sanctity, but from disinclination to increase the importance of the country districts of Arcadia and Triphylia. How little real respect they had for religious tradition may be judged from the conduct of Agesilaus at the Isthmia in 390 B.C., when, at the head of an army, he interrupted the games, and, in conjunction with the Corinthian exiles, himself presided at them.[^[208]] The rise of Thebes once more raised the hopes of the disappointed Triphylians.[^[209]] In 371 B.C. Arcadia was consolidated into the Pan-Arcadian league, with its headquarters at the newly founded Megalopolis. The Messenians, who had been so prominent at Olympia in its early days, recovered their liberty. The Messenian exiles from every part flocked to the rising city of Messene, founded by Epaminondas, at the foot of Mount Ithome, and they celebrated their return by winning a victory at Olympia in the boys’ foot-race—the first victory, says Pausanias, that they had won since their exile.[^[210]] Everything seemed favourable to the Triphylians. Unfortunately a breach occurred between Thebes and Arcadia, and when Thebes, following the example of Sparta and Athens, sent Pelopidas to Persia to secure the sanction of the great king for her authority, the terms of the imperial rescript reaffirmed the rights of Elis in Triphylia. The Arcadian ambassador, the pankratiast Antiochus, returned home in dudgeon, without even deigning to receive the royal gifts.

The Arcadians refused to accept the king’s rescript. When in 365 the Eleans attempted to assert their authority over Lasion, on the Arcadian border, they were driven off by the Arcadians, who followed up their success by overrunning Elis, and occupied Olympia itself, fortifying and garrisoning the hill of Cronus. The next year, under the protection of the whole armed force of Arcadia, the Pisatans at last found themselves presiding over the games. But the festival was not to pass off undisturbed. The Eleans, with some Achaean allies, arrived on the west bank of the Cladeus while the pentathlon was in progress. There was general alarm among the spectators, who had just left the Stadium and were congregated on the steps of the Treasuries and in the Colonnades watching the progress of the wrestling match which took place in the open space between the buildings and the great altar. The Arcadian troops advanced to the Cladeus and fell in opposite to the Eleans. But the latter, having crossed the river, charged them with unexpected courage, and drove them back into the Altis, where a desperate fight took place in the space “between the Council House, the shrine of Hestia, and the Theatre adjoining these buildings.”[^[211]] There, however, they were exposed to a shower of missiles from the roofs of the Council House, the Colonnades, and the Temple of Zeus. And though they maintained the combat and bore their opponents back towards the altar, their losses were heavy, and Stratolas, their captain, being slain, they drew off to their encampment. During the night the Arcadians, fearful of a renewed attack, occupied themselves in pulling to pieces their elaborately constructed quarters between the Altis and the Cladeus and making a stockade of the material; and in the morning the Eleans, seeing the strength of the fortifications, returned home, leaving the Pisatans to celebrate the festival. Their triumph was only short-lived. The religious feeling of Greece, outraged by the sacrilege at Olympia, was still further scandalized by the appropriation of the sacred treasures of Zeus for the use of the Arcadian league. There was disunion in the league itself, and when, two years later, the Peloponnese was once more threatened by a Theban invasion, the Arcadians made peace with Elis and acknowledged her rights over Olympia.

This was the last attempt of the Pisatans. The Eleans rapidly recovered their power. The 104th Olympiad was expunged from the records and declared an Anolympiad. And the triumph of the Eleans was commemorated by a colossal statue of Zeus, with an inscription truly appropriate to the part which Olympia had played in Greek history—“The Eleans for concord” (Ϝαλείων περὶ ὁμονοίαρ).[^[212]]

CHAPTER VII
THE DECLINE OF ATHLETICS, 338-146 B.C.

From this time onward there is little change to record in the history of athletics. Competitions became more and more the monopoly of professionals and all the evils attendant on professionalism became rampant. The training of the athlete became more artificial and more irrational, rendering him still more unfit for practical life. The degeneration of the physical type and of the artistic ideal is evident in the statue known as the Farnese Heracles, a copy of a Lysippean original exaggerated by the copyist to suit the taste of a later and more decadent age. Those huge bulging muscles,[^[213]] which even repose cannot relax, are a type of clumsy, useless strength, utterly foreign to the ideal of the fifth century, or to that of Lysippus himself as we know it from the Agias. Perhaps it was the type of those professional strong men who called themselves successors of Heracles as having, like Heracles, won the wrestling and pankration at Olympia on the same day.[^[214]] The first of these was Caprus of Elis, who in the year 212 defeated, in the pankration, the redoubtable Cleitomachus of Thebes, who is sometimes supposed to be the original of the boxer of the Terme (Fig. [136]).

Fig. 21. Farnese Heracles, by Glycon. Naples. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 125.)

A tale told by Polybius about the latter throws a curious light on the state of sport at the time.[^[215]] He had, it appears, incurred the displeasure of King Ptolemy—presumably Ptolemy IV.—who went to the trouble and expense of training and sending to Olympia a rival boxer, Aristonicus, to compete with him. The contest excited great public interest, and the fickle crowd favoured the new man until Cleitomachus, exasperated at their attitude, taunted them with backing one who was fighting not for the glory of Greece but for King Ptolemy. This appeal caused such a revulsion of feeling that Aristonicus was vanquished, not, says our author, so much by Cleitomachus as by the crowd. With such hired prize-fighters it was only natural that methods became more brutal, and science deteriorated. The increasing weight of the caestus rendered boxing a contest of brute strength and fit to take its place in the Roman gladiatorial shows. The science of wrestling had also suffered. As early as 364 B.C. we read of one Sostratus of Sicyon who won the wrestling at Olympia not by skill in wrestling but by breaking his opponent’s fingers.

Corruption naturally throve under such conditions.[^[216]] Only Olympia, thanks to its ancient prestige and sanctity, maintained the purity of sport, and though even there all sport was professional, cases of corruption were rare.

The decay of athletics was accompanied by an increased activity in the construction and improvement of gymnasia and stadia, which continued all through Hellenistic and Roman times. The stadia at Olympia and Delphi were reconstructed during the fourth century; the Panathenaic stadium at Athens was the work of the Athenian administrator Lycurgus, who also rebuilt the Lyceum Gymnasium, planted it with trees, and built a new palaestra or wrestling-school in it. But this building activity did not denote any improvement of the national athletics. The people took little interest in the games, save as a spectacle, and the improvements made in the stadia were connected solely with the accommodation and comfort of spectators. Some of these buildings were the work of a sort of athletic revival, a temporary demand for physical and military training. Such a movement occurred at Athens in the time of Alexander, under the wise leadership of Lycurgus, who, among the numerous services which he rendered to Athens, reorganized the Athenian epheboi. More often these buildings were the monuments of the generosity or vanity of wealthy princes or ambitious citizens.

But the palaestra and gymnasium, even in the fourth century were no longer devoted principally to gymnastics. The colonnades of the palaestra, the shady walks of the gymnasium were popular resorts and lounging-places. There the Athenian gentleman would betake himself in the afternoon to get an appetite for his evening meal; and a whole series of rooms was provided for his accommodation—dressing-rooms, oiling-rooms, dusting-rooms, bath-rooms, cloisters where he could take his exercise in wet weather, rooms for ball-play, and, for the more active, wrestling-rings and running tracks. Many of the rooms and the walks were provided with benches and seats for the convenience of visitors and spectators. Sophists especially resorted there in the hope of attracting pupils; some of them attached themselves to particular gymnasia. Plato delivered his discourses in the Academy; Aristotle took his morning and evening walks in the Lyceum. Gradually the social and educational side of the gymnasium became more important than the athletic. The gymnasium of Cynosarges in the fourth century was the meeting-place of a celebrated club known as the Sixty Wits. The earlier gymnasia of Athens had been outside the walls. The first gymnasium inside the walls was the gift of the versatile Ptolemaeus Philadelphia (285-247 B.C.), the founder of the museum and library of Alexandria. The gymnasium at Athens bore witness to the culture of its founder: it contained a library formed and increased by contributions from the students who attended it. Lectures continued to be given in it by philosophers and men of science down to the time of Cicero, who listened there to the lectures of Antiochus. These gymnasia were intimately connected with the life of the epheboi in whose training philosophy and literature were rapidly taking the place formerly occupied by athletics and military science. From this ephebic training grew up what has been aptly called the University of Athens, to which the young Romans of the time of Cicero resorted to study philosophy.