Chapter II: Part 2

If a citizen were to play his part properly in the great war game, long and constant bodily training was necessary. At Sparta, the complete type of a militarist state, everything was made subservient to physical fitness, and even at Athens the claims of the body came before the claims of the mind, so that when Socrates wanted patients for his dialectic he had to go to the gymnasia to find them. And this was reasonable, for only a man in perfect condition could fight under the conditions imposed upon a Greek heavy-armed soldier. The mere weight of a hoplite’s accoutrement would astonish a modern infantryman. His defensive armour consisted of four pieces: helmet, cuirass, greaves, and shield; and even the first of these, especially if it were of the Corinthian type, was a considerable burden and involved a severe strain on the neck muscles. It was very heavy, twice as heavy as any of the mediæval helmets that we possess, was made usually of thick iron and completely covered the head and neck. Holes were left for eyes and mouth, the nose was protected by a vertical strip of metal, and a lining of felt or leather was sewn inside to save the skin from abrasion. After the fifth century, it is true, the Corinthian type began to go out of use, and the Attic shape became more common. This was considerably lighter and in appearance resembled a metal cap with extra pieces protecting neck, cheeks and nose, which could be detached at will. It was graceful both in its proportions and its adornment: a crest, and often a triple crest, was usually worn with it, the three plumes being carried in elaborately modelled supports.

The cuirass in its first form consisted of two bronze plates, roughly carved to fit the body and fastened on the sides and shoulders. The bottom edge was turned up to leave the hips free and the lower parts of the body were thus dangerously exposed. Moreover, the rigid metal seriously hampered all movement, and this type was generally superseded by the cuirass proper, a garment worn much in the fashion of a modern corset, but made of leather plated with bronze and buckled down upon the breast by means of shoulder straps. The bronze plating was mostly in the form of round scales sewn on to the leather with wire and overlapping so as to present three thicknesses of metal.

The greaves were thin sheets of bronze shaped to fit the leg, which they clasped and held by their own elasticity. They were often adorned with embossed work and the fittings were sometimes of tin or ivory. Their length varied; some went only to the knee, others covered part of the thigh and an ankle pad was worn to keep the bottom edge from chafing the foot. They were a protection against minor hurts, scratches, bruises, etc., rather than a defence against spear thrusts, but their general adoption is synchronous with the disappearance of the oblong covering shield in favour of the smaller oval, carried on the left arm.

The Homeric shield, ‘great as a tower,’ and large enough to cover a man from head to foot, had in the fifth century gone completely out of use. In art we have no representation that corresponds to the descriptions in the _Iliad_, and the heroes whose combats are pictured on the Attic vases are armed either with a round shield which protects their body only, or else with the oval shield about three feet long which after 500 B.C. had become the normal type in Greece. These shields bore usually the blazon of their owner and often served to identify his body: man and shield were inseparable and the fighter who threw his shield away revealed himself as destitute of knightly honour. The character of the blazonry varied as much as our heraldic designs. Sometimes it was decorative and depended on individual caprice; Capaneus, in Æschylus’ play, carries as his device a naked man with a torch; beneath, the words ‘I will burn your city’; Alcibiades had merely a little Cupid with a toy thunderbolt. In other cases it was the city or a god who supplied the design: for example, the Mantinean hoplites had on their shields a trident, the symbol of their state god, Poseidon; the Thebans, a sphinx in memory of Œdipus; while others were merely marked with an initial letter, the Argives with an A., the Sikyonians with the Doric San. These devices were on the outer surface: the inside of the shield was supplied with a leather or metal strap across its middle through which the left arm was passed, and one or two grips of cord or leather at the side and end to give a firm hold; for this shield was a heavy implement, very different from the light buckler, with which the cavalry and the skirmishers were armed, and it required strong and well-trained muscles to wield it effectively in the stress of battle.

The race in armour, therefore, often called simply ‘The Shield,’ was not only one of the most popular of gymnastic contests, but also had a very practical value; although as a concession to human weakness the runners were usually allowed to divest themselves of cuirass and greaves. The picturesqueness of the race appealed especially to the vase-painters, and we have many pictures of it, the best perhaps being those on a red figured cup in the Museum at Berlin. On one side is a group of three runners, the right-hand one bending ready to start, the left-hand one turning the half-way post, and the central one hastening back on the home stretch. On the other side are three runners one behind the other, while in the interior of the vase is a single figure looking back, in rather unsportsmanlike fashion, as he runs.

So far for a hoplite’s body armour; but he had also to carry his weapons of offence, his sword and his spear. The first was of many different shapes and has many different names in Greek, but all its varieties belong to three main types.

In the first, dating from the earliest age, the blades are short and heavy, made in one piece with the hilt. The guard is usually straight, the pommel a round knob, the space between being filled with bone or ivory to form a grip. This pattern, really a survival from the Bronze Age, was transferred to the iron sword and is occasionally found even in the classical period.

But the ordinary Greek sword of the fifth century is of quite a different shape. The hilt is round and the long thin blade swells from the hilt towards the point, showing that it was meant for cutting rather than thrusting. Flat scabbards, often highly ornamented with the precious metals, were used and occasionally the spear would be discarded for single combat and two swords employed, one in the hand, the other hanging ready in its sheath, as we see it in the well-known vase painting of the combat between Achilles and Memnon. This was the usual infantry sword, but there was another cutlass shape, the ‘machaira,’ which was especially suited to the cavalry soldier. Here the blade curved and the whole weapon was heavier, with knife-like cutting edges. The hilt was usually bent--often in the shape of a bird’s head--and gave a secure grip, so that it was possible to deal heavy blows from above.

The spear, however, rather than the sword, remained always the chief item in a Greek soldier’s equipment, for the Mediterranean peoples, unlike the northerners, have always preferred the thrust to the cut. In Greek poetry the word for spear is used indifferently for any weapon and includes sword, while on the drill-ground the commands--‘To the spear,’ ‘To the shield’--corresponded to our ‘Right’ and ‘Left Turn.’ In shape there seems to have been but little variation. The iron head was sometimes formed like a spike, with three or four blades tapering to a point, but more commonly it was of the flat dagger type, with a raised central rib and two cutting edges. The shaft, usually of stout ashen wood, was about six feet long and the weapon was chiefly used for thrusting at close quarters. Occasionally it was thrown from a distance, but for this purpose the light cavalry lance of cornel wood was more suitable. The spear, used like a pike, was too heavy for any but close fighting, and there was a constant tendency to increase its length and weight until the Macedonian sarissa reached an average of twelve feet and required both hands for its effective use.

Such was the accoutrement of the Greek citizen soldier, and the character of his arms fixed the character of his fighting. It was not stupidity and lack of judgment that led the Greeks to fight in the way that Mardonius the Persian thought so foolish, but rather the fact that a Greek fighting man was almost useless on rough ground. ‘These Greeks,’ the old general told his young master, ‘when they have declared war upon one another choose out the best and most level piece of ground they can find, and there go down and fight so that the winners get off with the maximum of loss: as to the beaten side I need not say anything; they are completely wiped out. Speaking all the same language they ought to settle their differences by any method rather than battle. But if in spite of everything war becomes inevitable, then each side ought to discover its strongest points and try to take advantage of them.’ The passage is interesting, for it shows that total inability to comprehend the psychology of any nation but one’s own, which is one of the most pathetic things in history. Mardonius was among the wisest of the Persians, but he could not understand that to the Greeks war was not merely a business, but also the highest form of sport, and that it may be carried on under rules of honourable conduct which rob it of most of its worst features. In the great age, from causes partly physical, partly moral, a Greek battle was fought on a system as formal and well defined as the precepts of mediæval chivalry. The herald was an important figure; due proclamation had to be made to the enemy; there was a definite acknowledgment of defeat; and an elaborate ceremonial of triumph and trophy. The battle once over, no bad blood was left: it was a fair fight with equal weapons on the plain, and no attempt was made to annihilate the enemy or to annex his territory. The losses in killed and wounded were by no means as heavy as Mardonius believed, for these were not big battalions directed by invisible generals, but citizen soldiers who were sensible enough to know when they were beaten. The procedure was fixed. The army marched out from the city at dawn until it found itself face to face with the enemy on the traditional battle ground, one of those alluvial plains, comparatively rare in Greece, upon which the city depended for its supply of corn, the prize of victory being indeed the ground on which the fighting took place. Then the generals on either side would address their men with some final words of exhortation (there was a special style of rhetoric held appropriate for such occasions) and the two armies would advance to the attack.

With waving plumes and glittering spears, the sun striking upon the gold ornaments of breastplate and sword-belt, the hoplites pushed forward, slowly at first but quickening their step as they approached the enemy, and at last the two lines, moving now at the double, would meet with a crash in the shock of battle. Then came the moment for which the Greek’s whole life was one long preparation: swaying, struggling, heaving, with every muscle tense and every limb engaged, the opposing masses strove to hurl one another back. All the tricks of the wrestling school and the boxing match were designed for use in this hour, and even courage was of little avail unless it was supported by that perfection of physical fitness which the ancient Greeks alone of all nations attained. Success in an ancient battle depended upon the quality of the men engaged, and the men derived little aid from external sources: cavalry, engineers and artillery played no part. The issue was decided by the final shock of two bodies of heavy armed infantry relying on solidity and weight, and momentum in the attack was all important, for the ranks once broken could seldom be reformed. Long training in the drill ground must have been necessary for the orderly advance of formations so dense as these (the average depth of men in the fifth century seems to have been about eight, but at Delium in 421 the Bœtians massed their men in files of twenty-five), and however good the marching there was a constant tendency for the front line to slant as each man edged under his right hand neighbour’s shield. A Greek hoplite like a modern Rugby forward depended upon his formation, and without a comrade on either side of him, and ranks of men behind or in front, he felt himself lost. His formation broken, the natural impulse was to retire, and a withdrawal to the city walls was the usual result of defeat. Once behind his ramparts the citizen soldier was safe, for in the fifth century sieges were costly, tedious, and usually indecisive. Open fighting was the cardinal rule: cunning surprises and unforeseen attacks were as difficult for an Athenian hoplite as they were for an English knight. Both, when encased in their armour, were conspicuous figures incapable of any very nimble movements, and needing an attendant squire to take charge of their war panoply. With both physical conditions led to a moral code of ‘noblesse oblige,’ and for a time war became almost a gentlemanly diversion. In neither case it is true did these conditions last long: the moral degeneration caused by the Peloponnesian War destroyed the one, and the physical changes brought about by the invention of gunpowder put an end to the other.

Ancient as distinguished from modern warfare really ends with the fifth century B.C., for the next age brought a revolution to Greece. War ceased to be an art and became a science. The end of the Peloponnesian War coincided with the spread of the Sophistic spirit; warfare was subjected to the same sort of investigation and criticism as the other departments of life; and specialization, with all its advantages and disadvantages, began.

The later years of the Peloponnesian War had shown the importance of cavalry and its proper functions in the attack and support of infantry; but the first great change came when Iphicrates the Athenian discovered that a hoplite force was not invincible by light armed troops, if these latter were properly handled. His defeat of a detachment of Spartan heavy armed infantry was in itself an insignificant event, but it created a revolution in military tactics comparable to that brought about by the success of the English archers over the French knights at Creçy. Up till that time the hoplite in popular estimation held much the same position as a battleship does in modern sea warfare; it was considered as hopeless for peltasts to engage hoplites as it would be for a light cruiser to attack a Dreadnought.

With the fall of the citizen soldier came the rise of the mercenary and the professional fighting man. A Greek force ceased to be a homogeneous unit and split up into the component elements of a modern army. ‘The light armed men are the hands, the horse the feet, the infantry the breast, and the general the head’; such was the saying of Iphicrates; and the Theban tacticians, notably Epaminondas, followed him in combining cavalry and light infantry with the heavy armed phalanx. Philip of Macedon improved upon his Theban teacher’s example and soon a standing army was established which disregarded all the old traditions of chivalry. The Greeks had their first warning in the ruthless destruction of Olynthus and the two systems met in final conflict at Chæronea. The professional soldier won, and by the end of the fourth century the ancient ideals had disappeared.

But it is well still to remember them. The system of orderly combat in the open remains the best for developing the manly virtues; and any nation that relies over-much on the mechanical and the unseen in war will inevitably fall away from those standards of conduct which we in our half humorous, half depreciatory way call sportsmanlike, and to which the Greeks gave the truer name of ‘Aidôs,’ the quality alike of the sportsman and the gentleman. Aidôs is ‘ruth,’ and the man who has no aidôs in him will be ready to employ all means to achieve his aims, and in the end perhaps will even delight in ruthlessness for its own sake.

3

Physical Education

Education, mental and physical, falls into three sections, according as it deals with the training of the child, the boy, and the man; the word boy including girl, and the word man woman. Of these three stages the second seems to us so much the most definite that it has almost appropriated the word to itself. Education in common judgment does not begin until the boy goes to his school, while it ceases when he leaves his university.

The Greeks, or rather the Athenians, looked at things differently. They paid much less attention than we do to the training of young children, and in this respect were distinctly inferior to most modern nations. Even the second stage, that of boyhood, was not taken very seriously, and the word for youthful education, Paideia, by the slightest of changes gets the meaning of ‘a joke.’

Education at Athens began when the youth reached years of discretion, and the true Greek word for education is neither Paideia nor Didaskalia but rather Philosophia, love of knowledge. The real teacher was not the Grammatistes but the Sophistes, the ‘sophist’ whose business it was to train men in practical wisdom. Adult education in fact was the most, not the least, important of the three stages.

Furthermore, in the early stages of life the training of the body was regarded as more essential than the training of the mind. When his education was finished, the Athenian boy knew his elements, he could wrestle and box, he could recite Homer and play the lyre, he could swim and dance: but of ‘useful’ knowledge, so called, and especially of that horrid travesty that we call ‘technical education,’ he possessed nothing. In most of the qualities of discipline, as Plato complains, the Athenian system was lacking; but it had one great practical virtue: it kept the mean, and neither over-stimulated nor yet over-repressed a boy’s natural attitude towards imparted knowledge. An Athenian, when he emerged from boyhood and became a man, was neither a pedant nor a barbarian. In the fifth century B.C. it was realized that with growing animals the demands of the body must come before the demands of the spirit. Physical perfection, if it is to be won at all, must be secured in youth: the final training of the mind can be left to a later stage of life. The method had its obvious defects, but at least it did not create that distaste for all study which more perfect theories of education have often produced. An Athenian till the end of his life was always eager and ready to learn.

There were two systems of education known to the Greek world, that of Athens and that of Sparta; but in an Athenian, as in a Spartan, household, the first six or seven years of a child’s life were spent at home in the women’s quarter of the house. A Spartan mother, however, only received her child to rear after it had been carefully examined by the elders of the tribe to which the parents belonged: if its physical condition was unsatisfactory it was exposed on Mount Taygetus, there to die or be brought up by Helots. Consequently the Spartan women, who were famed all over Greece for their skill as nurses, had only the best material to work upon.

In both states such education as the children received at this period of life was almost entirely physical. They were taught how to stand, how to sit, and how to walk correctly: on a vase painting in the British Museum, for example, we see a small child moving unsteadily towards its mother, who waits with open arms to receive it, while an instructor with long wand stands in the background. Athenian mothers usually were inclined to delegate the care of their children to a hired nurse, and there is an implied reproof to their indifference in the elaborate precepts that Plato gives in the _Republic_ for the proper management of infants. For example, he combats the idea that a good child should be quiet, and insists upon the importance of constant motion for the young baby, who in an Athenian nursery was often closely bandaged in swaddling clothes and then left to its own resources.

‘The first principle,’ he says, ‘in relation both to the body and the soul of very young creatures is that nursing and moving about by day and night is good for them all, and that the younger they are the more they will need it. Infants should live, if it were possible, as if they were always rocking at sea. Exercise and motion in the earliest years greatly contribute to create a part of virtue in the soul: the child’s virtue is cheerfulness, and good nursing makes a gentle and a cheerful child.’

Greek ears were very sensitive to sounds, and the noise of the uncheerful infant protesting against life was doubtless very trying to the father in the few hours that he spent at home. We have no information of Plato’s practical experience of children, for, as far as we know, he never married, but both he and Aristotle love to criticize the customs of their native city. In the _Politics_, for example, as in the _Republic_, the importance of the child is emphasized.

‘Young children,’ says Aristotle, ‘should be kept healthy by exposure: to accustom children to the cold is an excellent practice which greatly conduces to health and hardens them for military service. Children should be amused till they are five years old, but the amusement should not be vulgar or tiring or riotous. Their sports should be imitations of the occupations which they will hereafter pursue in earnest. Crying and screaming should not be checked, for they contribute to growth, and in a manner, exercise the body. The Directors of Education must keep a careful eye even upon young children, who will stay at home until they are seven; and they must see that they are left as little as possible with slaves. Formal education will begin after seven years; it will be the same for all, given in public, and directed to promote the good of all. Nature requires that we should be able not only to work well but to use leisure well. Work and leisure are both necessary, but the latter is the more important; and it is the chief function of education to teach us how to use our leisure rightly. Gymnastics and music are the chief branches of education; but for children gymnastic exercises should be of a light kind. Children should not be brutalized, as they are at Sparta, by laborious toil. Music should be studied both for its intellectual and its ethical virtue. Children should be encouraged to sing and play, for it will keep them out of mischief; but the flute should be forbidden as over-exciting, and musical studies should cease at manhood.’

It will be seen that Aristotle recognizes the necessity of amusement, and Greek children seem to have had most of the toys familiar to our nurseries. Little girls played with their terra-cotta dolls, boys with their hoops and balls, and with the knuckle bones that took the place of our marbles. An Alexandrian epigram (_Anth. Pal._ VI, 309) records the dedication to Hermes of one such playbox.

‘This noiseless ball and top so round,
This rattle with its lively sound,
These bones with which he loved to play,
Companions of his childhood’s day;
To Hermes, if the god they please,
An offering from Philocles.’

Of dance games too, which give exercise both to mind and body, they had an abundant variety; some simple like ‘The Wine-skin and Hatchet,’ which could be played upon the stomach of a complaisant guest, others more elaborate in their dramatic ritual, such as ‘The Swallow’ procession, of which our ‘Jack in the Green’ is a reminiscence.

At the beginning of their lives then children were treated in much the same way at Sparta and at Athens; but in the next stage of education, after the period of early childhood was past, there was a sharp divergence between Spartan and Athenian practice. At Sparta boys and girls alike, over the age of seven years, were taken in hand by the state, and given the most thorough of physical trainings. The girls were allowed their meals at home, but otherwise were subjected to the same discipline as the boys. They had to harden their bodies, so that they might bear strong children, and among their sports were wrestling, running, and swimming. They learned to throw the diskos and the javelin; and wearing only the short Doric chiton engaged in contests of speed with youths. The result we may see in the statue of the girl runner, a copy of a fifth-century original, which is now in the Vatican at Rome, and in the description of the Spartan woman envoy in Aristophanes’ play _Lysistrata_, who looked ‘as though she could throttle a bull.’ The boys, for their part, were organized in the strictest fashion into ‘packs’ of sixty-four and into divisions. Each pack fed together, slept together on bundles of reeds for bedding, and played together. They had to go barefoot always, wore only a single garment summer and winter, and provided for their own wants.

One boy in the pack was appointed as ‘Bouagor,’ or ‘Herd-leader,’ and could give orders and inflict punishment. Over him was a young man, above twenty years of age, of tried character and courage, the ‘Eiren’ who was in charge of the pack’s organization and lived always with the boys. In control of the whole system was the ‘Paidonomos,’ the minister of education, an elderly citizen of rank and repute who had the ultimate powers of discipline over boys and eirens alike. In the three ranks we see something resembling the prefects, assistant masters, and Heads of our schools: in manner of life there was a close approximation to the boy-scout movement.

This Spartan type of education in some respects was not unlike the English public school system, as we owe it to Dr. Arnold, before it was affected by the spread of competitive examinations and the demand for utilitarian knowledge. The qualities that the Spartans wished to cultivate were not intellectual acuteness or literary taste, but the moral virtues of obedience, discipline, and endurance. To obtain these the lads were kept under constant supervision by grown men, and the weakness of the system was that individual initiative was not sufficiently encouraged, and that the claims of the mind were too persistently disregarded. Of book study there was practically none. Hunting, scouting, and foraging for food took up most of the boys’ time. Fighting, both in play and in earnest, was encouraged, together with gymnastics of an unspecialized sort, especially the musical drill which the Spartans called gymnopædia. Competitions between individuals and divisions were very frequent, and in many of them girls met boys on equal terms. Above all things, the idea of military efficiency was kept before the children’s eyes, and a strict military discipline was enforced. In fact, the Spartan system had all the strength and weakness of an exclusively military regime. The young Spartans were brave, healthy, modest, hardy and obedient: on the other hand, they were stupid, quarrelsome, brutal, lacking in self-restraint, and inclined to a gross immorality when once they were free from the close restraint of Spartan law. As long as a Spartan lived in his own country he behaved well, but the vices that the system produced showed themselves unpleasantly in any dealings with others. To the rest of Greece the vices seemed more than to counterbalance the virtues, and the Athenian ideal of education became the model for most of the other Greek States.

At Athens, everything was left to the individual parent and to the private schoolmaster. The State recognized its responsibility for the maintenance of children, and if a man died in battle his orphans were reared at the public expense; but it did not recognize its responsibility for their education. Some ancient laws, attributed to Solon, did indeed enact that all free-born children should be sent to school and there taught ‘letters and how to swim.’ Other regulations fixed the school hours, and in the interests of morality forbade boys to come home from school in the dark. But as regards the methods and the subjects of education given to boys, the Athenian Government was indifferent. The keeping of a school was a private speculation, and the State required no evidence of moral or intellectual qualifications from the schoolmaster. Accordingly, schools and the fees charged varied very greatly. Poor folk sent their children to establishments where only the elements of reading and writing were taught χαχὰ χαχῶς as the sausage-seller in Aristophanes says. Richer parents not only gave their children a better training in the early stages, but kept them at school for a longer period.

The schoolmaster himself was regarded with extreme contempt. The father of Æschines belonged to the despised class, and Demosthenes draws a scornful picture of his youthful rival helping to mix the ink, scrub the forms, and sweep the schoolroom. The fees were due on the last day of the month; but they were grudgingly paid and mean parents would keep their children away from school in those months of the year when the State festivals gave the schoolmaster an opportunity of granting his pupils a holiday. Of long intervals from work, such as our summer and winter vacations, we have no trace in Athens, and the precept of the Roman poet ‘æstate pueri si valent satis discunt’ apparently went unregarded.

The school hours were arranged to suit the time of meals in the boys’ homes. After the early breakfast, taken at sunrise, the boy sets off to his teacher, with whom he remained till noon. Then came the midday meal, followed by a siesta, and then afternoon school. Discipline was lax. The schoolmaster certainly had a rod to assist him in maintaining order, but his social inferiority deprived him of any real authority. Children would bring their pet dogs to school and play with them under the master’s chair. The master usually was sitting, a position which an Athenian despised as unworthy of a free-born man, and we have the typical schoolmaster pictured for us on a vase by Euphronios. He is a small, ill-developed man, with a bald head and a prominent nose. His body twisted, he leans forward with a threatening gesture, his forefinger raised in warning. In his left hand there is a stylus, for a writing-lesson is in progress; his stick with crooked handle and formidable knobs lies convenient to his right. He is drawn by a malicious hand with something of the caricaturist’s touch, but he is thoroughly alive and evidently closely resembles a real original. We may imagine that not unlike him even in bodily form was the schoolmaster in the third mime of Herondas who beats his idle pupil with his bull’s tail strap until he is ‘black and blue like a spotted snake.’

The ordinary system of elementary education at Athens, as followed by boys from seven to fourteen, consisted of three parts: letters, music and gymnastics, presided over by the grammatiste, kithariste, and pædotribe respectively. The grammatiste taught reading, writing and simple arithmetic, and his methods, on the evidence of the papyri and ostraka which have recently been discovered in Egypt, were not very much unlike those of a modern school. We have long lists of alphabets, and of simple and difficult combinations of letters; passages for dictation and recitation, the conjugation of verbs, and elementary grammatical rules. The kithariste taught ‘music’; i.e. the words of the lyric poets and the simple lyre accompaniment which went with the words. In general estimation he ranked a little higher than the grammatiste, but they both taught under the same conditions, and usually in the same building. The pædotribe was a much more important person than the other two, and his teaching, which directed the boy’s physical development upon scientific lines, lasted usually till manhood. He taught the rules of health, ‘dancing’ in the Greek sense of the word, and especially the five exercises of the pentathlon, which aimed at producing a perfect, all-round athlete. The palæstra was his school-room, and he was always sure of eager pupils and interested spectators.

But upon the smaller boys no very arduous tasks were imposed. Deportment, how to sit, stand, and walk gracefully, the correct manner of salutation, a decorous and becoming carriage of the body; these with some easy gymnastic exercises, together with a multitude of games and an occasional cockfight, occupied most of a boy’s day. He spent much more time at the palæstra than he did anywhere else, but the border-line there between instruction and amusement was not very rigidly drawn. This was the sort of education that seemed to Aristophanes ideal, and nowhere is a better picture given of it than in the _Clouds_:

‘To hear then prepare of the Discipline rare which flourished in
Athens of yore,
When Honour and Truth were in fashion with youth and Sobriety bloomed
on our shore;
First of all, the old rule was preserved in our school that “boys should
be seen and not heard”:
And then to the home of the harpist would come, decorous in action
and word,
All the lads of one town, though the snow peppered down, in spite of
all wind and all weather;
And they sung an old song as they paced it along, not shambling with
thighs glued together...
But now must the lad from his boyhood be clad in a man’s all
enveloping cloke;
So that, oft as the Panathenæa returns, I feel myself ready to choke,
When the dancers go by with their shields to their thigh, not
caring for Pallas a jot.
You therefore, young man, choose me while you can; cast in with
my method your lot;
And then you shall learn the forum to spurn and from dissolute
baths to abstain,
And fashions impure and shameful abjure, and scorners repel
with disdain,
And rise from your chair if an elder be there, and respectfully
give him your place.
And with love and with fear your parents revere, and shrink
from the brand of disgrace...
Not learning to prate, as your idlers debate, with marvellous
prickly dispute,
Nor dragged into court day by day to make sport in some small
disagreeable suit:
But you will below to the Academe go, and under the olives
contend
With your chaplet of reed, in a contest of speed, with some
excellent rival and friend;
All fragrant with woodbine and peaceful content and the leaf
which the lime blossoms fling,
When the plane whispers love to the elm in the grove in the
beautiful season of spring.’
(_Clouds_, 961-1008, Rogers’ translation.)

Boyhood at Athens was a time of preparation; the real education of an Athenian, in physical and in mental studies, began when ours too often ceases, in the year when he reached manhood. Then, and not till then, did the State step in and accept responsibility for his training. The ephebe of eighteen enrolled, in his deme register, had first to take the oath:

‘I will not disgrace my sacred weapons nor desert the comrade who is placed by my side. I will fight for things holy and things profane, whether I am alone or with others. I will hand on my fatherland greater and better than I found it. I will hearken to the magistrates, and obey the existing laws and those hereafter established by the people. I will not consent unto any that destroys or disobeys the constitution, but will prevent him, whether I am alone or with others. I will honour the temples and the religion which my forefathers established. So help me Aglauros, Enyalios, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, Hegemone.’

Then under the direction of specially appointed magistrates, the ‘Sophronistai’ or ‘Moderators,’ a definite and thorough course of gymnastics and military training began. The young recruits were first taken round the temples and afterwards put into garrison at Munychia and Piræus. They had masters and undermasters to teach them the use of the hoplite’s accoutrement, and pædotribes for their gymnastic exercises. Discipline was fairly strict, but there were plenty of amusements, and many festivals in which the ephebes played a special part. When they were not engaged in military drill they were usually to be found in the gymnasia and palæstræ, and at the end of their first year of training they were reviewed in the theatre during the celebration of the greater Dionysia. After the ceremony they received a spear and shield as a gift from the State and marched out of Athens, spending most of their final year patrolling the country and garrisoning the outlying forts. Then, this first initiation into the science of physical fitness achieved, they returned to the city, and during the rest of their lives devoted a large proportion of their time to perfecting their knowledge of the laws of health and developing the strength of their body.

The academies, where these studies in a Greek city were pursued by young and old together, were of two kinds, and were called either ‘gymnasia’ or ‘palæstræ.’ A gymnasium was an open space, with trees for shelter from the sun and, if possible, near a stream of running water; and there went on those sports that required plenty of room. The two chief gymnasia at Athens were both outside the town walls, the Academy in the sacred grove of the hero Academus and the Lyceum in the precinct of the hero Lycus. They corresponded fairly closely to the playing fields about our public schools, except that they belonged to the whole community and were used by all classes and ages alike. If we could imagine Hyde Park thronged every day and all day with men and boys running, jumping, hurling quoits, and throwing javelins,

we should get some idea, although of course on a very much larger scale, of the appearance of the Lyceum in the time of Socrates.

The palæstra, on the other hand, bore more resemblance to our school gymnasium. It was a covered building used especially for the indoor sports of boxing and wrestling. Built round a central court which in fine weather was normally the scene of these competitions, it had also a large hall opening on to the court and a number of smaller rooms used for bathing, rubbing down and undressing. In the large hall the spectators gathered, and a vivid picture of the impression made upon a foreigner by the sight is given in Lucian’s dialogue _Anacharsis_. The young Scythian speaks:

‘Why do your young men behave like this, Solon? Some of them grappling and tripping each other, some throttling, struggling, intertwining in the clay like so many pigs wallowing. And yet their first proceeding, after they have stripped--I noticed that--is to oil and scrape each other quite amicably; but then I do not know what comes over them--they put down their heads and begin to push, and crash their foreheads together like a pair of rival rams. There, look! that one has lifted the other right off his legs, and dropped him on the ground; now he has fallen on top, and will not let him get his head up, but presses it down into the clay; and to finish him off he twines his legs tight round his belly, thrusts his elbow hard against his throat, and throttles the wretched victim, who meanwhile is patting his shoulder; that will be a form of supplication; he is asking not to be quite choked to death.’

(Lucian, _Anacharsis_, I, Fowler’s translation.)

There were only three gymnasia in all Athens, but there was a very large number of palæstræ, some public, some private, some frequented by men, some by boys, the majority used indifferently by men and boys together. In the public establishments the instructors were provided and paid by the State, and were probably at the head of their profession, for as the oligarch who wrote the treatise on the Athenian Republic bitterly says:

‘As for gymnasia and baths, some rich people have their own, but the people also have built palæstræ for their own use, and the mob now has far more advantages in this respect than the fortunate few.’

The popularity of a private palæstra, especially if it were intended chiefly for the instruction of boys, depended largely on the personality of the pædotribe who there gave instruction, and Athenian fathers were as fond of expounding the merits of their own favourite teacher as Englishmen are of singing the praises of their old school. The pædotribe was usually assisted by subordinates--_gymnastæ_, who coached pupils in special exercises and prepared them for competitions, and _aleiptæ_ who undertook for boys the actual rubbing down and massaging which men and youths performed for themselves; but he alone was the directing spirit of the place. He required to have considerable medical knowledge, and held a rank in popular estimation of equal importance with a physician. His business was to prevent, the doctor’s only to cure, disease. He had to know what exercises would suit what constitutions; he was called on frequently to prescribe in matters of diet and sometimes must advise a strengthening and sometimes a lowering regime. Besides giving his pupils health, he was expected also to increase their beauty and their strength. Finally, according to Plato, a good pædotribe was able to produce by his teaching firmness of character and strength of will: therefore he must know exactly how much training to administer to each boy, for too much of these qualities is as bad as too little. It will be seen that a successful pædotribe combined in his person most of the capacities and duties which in our educational institutions are shared among the headmaster, the games master, the school doctor, the drill sergeant and the cricket professional; with the additional responsibility of having frequently to teach both parents and children.

But the larger palæstræ, as we have said, were usually public and free, and it may be useful to give here a brief account of their arrangements. On entering from the street the visitor passed down a short passage into the _‘Apodyterion_,’ the undressing room, a large hall with one side opening directly on to the cloisters which surrounded the central court. His first business was to strip; for all the exercises of the palæstra were performed naked; and then to anoint himself all over, and carefully rub the oil into his skin. As Lucian says again in the _Anacharsis_, speaking now through the mouth of the great law-giver, Solon:

‘When their first pithless tenderness is past, we strip our youths and aim at hardening them to the temperature of the various seasons till heat does not incommode them nor frost paralyse them. Then we anoint them with oil by way of softening them into suppleness. It would be absurd that leather, dead stuff as it is, should be made tougher and more lasting by being softened with oil, and the living body get no advantage from the same process.’

Another room, the ‘_Konisterion_,’ was set apart for athletes to powder themselves with dust before exercise. The effects on the body of powder were regarded as no less beneficial than those of oil. It closed the pores of the skin, checked excessive perspiration, and kept the body cool, thus protecting it from chills and rendering it less susceptible to fatigue. Special sorts of powders were supposed to have special virtues; those of a clayey nature were particularly cleansing, those that were gritty stimulated perspiration if the skin was inclined to be over-dry, the yellow earthy kind made the body supple and sleek, and gave that glossy appearance which was the sign of good condition and training.

Yet another apartment was the ‘_Korykeion_,’ where the punch-balls hung; some of them large skins filled with sand hanging about waist-level and used by wrestlers who would try and check their rebound, others smaller and lighter filled with fig seeds or meal, hanging as high as the athlete’s head and used by boxers as a mark for their blows.

And, lastly, there was the bathroom, a severely simple place with a large stone basin on a stand as its chief feature. Bathing establishments with hot and vapour baths existed in Athens, but they were discouraged by manly folk as corrupting athletic vigour and considered only truly suitable for the old and feeble. In the palæstra cold water was used alone, and the bath was either taken direct from the basin or else the athlete stood while a friend swilled him down from a bucket. Before the actual washing a flesh scraper was used to remove the dust and dirt from the skin, and a sort of lye obtained from wood ashes took the place of soap.

All this at Athens, as befits a true democracy, was open without restriction and without payment to every citizen. In the palæstra rich and poor met on equal terms without regard for rank or position. A strigil and an oil flask were the only implements that were needed, and on occasions the State even supplied the oil. We have scarcely anything like it in modern days; perhaps a racecourse, in its mingling together of all classes for sport, is the nearest equivalent. But our racecourses have some peculiar features that need not now be specified, from which the Greek palæstra was free.

4

Health and Bodily Exercise

For the attainment of the perfect health which is one of the highest goals of human endeavour, the Greeks of the fifth century B.C. in comparison with ourselves were placed under some disadvantages. Firstly, their racial stock, a difficult blend of the old Mediterranean people with central European immigrants, was not so good, for purposes of active strength, as our mixture of Saxon, Norman and Dane: the inhabitants of Attica claimed with some reason to be autochthonous, but in historical times they were already showing plain signs of race decay. Secondly, their climate on the whole was inferior to ours, the summer too hot and enervating, the winter dank and depressing rather than sharp and bracing: Attica in this respect also was more favoured than many states, and Athenian authors are very fond of contrasting the clear brilliance of their native air with the heavy dullness of the Bœotian plain. Thirdly, they lacked most of those sanitary appliances without which life in our cities now would seem almost impossible, and their doctors and surgeons had not that wealth of drugs and instruments which we possess.

On the other hand the Greeks, or at least the Athenians, had some points in their favour. Of all the people that we know the citizens of Attica did the highest thinking on the lowest feeding. They were naturally temperate both in food and drink, and a very great contrast both to the Romans and such other Greeks as the Bœotians and Thessalians. In this, at any rate, they were feminists; like most women they did not pay much regard to their stomachs, and made their meals not the most important but the least important thing in their lives, so that a Greek banquet was a very simple affair, compared with an English or a Roman repast, and its chief attraction was the music and conversation which followed the mere eating and drinking. The ordinary diet of the Athenians consisted almost entirely of cereals; porridge and bread were the staples, and although sometimes a little salt fish, cheese, honey or olives might serve as a relish, yet porridge in various forms was the staff of life. Their drink was usually water; a good supply was brought in to the city by pipes dating apparently from the time of Pisistratus, and the big fountain of the nine springs is mentioned by Thucydides. They realized all the benefits that come from a copious use of nature’s chief medicine: ‘best of all things is water’--such is the motto on the entrance portal to the great temple of Pindar’s poems, and the Athenians, knowing the truth, acted on their knowledge. Wine, of course, they drank and enjoyed--there were teetotalers amongst them, Demosthenes, for example, and they were regarded as crabbed, unpleasant fellows--but they enjoyed in moderation, and always diluted their wine copiously with water. To drink wine neat was to be a barbarian, and the story of the Spartan king who was driven mad by his unmixed potations was often repeated at Athens. The typical citizen was a thin wiry person, active and restless, and the highest praise you could give to an Athenian was to call him εὐτράπελος, ready to turn his hand to anything. As Aristophanes says, the Athenians were wasplike, thin-waisted and ready to sting--while one of commonest terms of political approbrium was παχύς--‘fat’--the word applied by the democrats to the idle rich.

Again, as we have said, the Athenians were autochthonous--such was their favourite boast--sprung from the land, born from the actual womb of mother Attica. Without examining too closely the exact truth of their claim, or accepting the origin of their grasshopper king, we may regard it as an historical fact that the Athenian stock remained undisturbed and without admixture for a very long period in Attica. They had therefore all the advantages which are derived from a pure and an old race; they were thoroughly suited to their environment, and had developed strong special characteristics. They were fully conscious of this themselves, never admitted aliens to Athenian citizenship, and took the most careful precautions to see that all citizens on the roll should be of pure Athenian parentage. In its relation to general health this steady continuity of race and domicile is more important than is often recognized. Only long centuries of undisturbed habitation can bring man into real harmony with nature, and this is one reason why the English peasant is so much finer a man, physically and intellectually, than the mixed breed of a great town. Half the diseases of our time are of nervous origin, caused ultimately by a feverish attempt to adapt oneself too rapidly to a new environment.

Moreover, the chief means whereby we stave off for the moment the results of this strain, drugs and stimulants of every kind, were unknown to the Greeks, and they were all the better for their ignorance. Tea, coffee, tobacco, opium; all these poisons are among the blessings of modern civilization, and in the fifth century B.C. were as unfamiliar to the Greeks as the countries from which they come. Here again the Greeks were closer to nature than we are. When they needed a stimulant--and stimulants are on occasion a real necessity--they took wine, the natural product of their own country, not something only to be found among totally different conditions. They knew nothing of the poisons of tropical countries, and nothing of the diseases which we have imported from the tropics. Asiatic fever, smallpox, cholera, syphilis, typhus were diseases of which the Greeks had neither knowledge nor experience, and even from our milder infectious complaints, such as measles and scarlatina, they were immune. Until the advent of malaria during the Peloponnesian War their most common malady seems to have been ophthalmia in its various forms, and consumption was their only serious scourge.

This would seem to be a fair statement of our respective advantages and disadvantages; and on the whole perhaps the balance of the account is in our favour. But all these considerations are counterbalanced and more than counterbalanced by one fact: an ancient Greek took a lively and intelligent interest in his own physical condition, and devoted most of his time, not to making money, or reading books or playing cards, but to what is a more remunerative investment than any of these, to the care of his health.