been a process of accumulation in which later bards have added events
according to their fancy. Some of the later encounters are described
with much less vigour and skill than the earlier. It is, however,
important to notice that from the very first Greek athletics were part
of religion. They were undertaken in a serious, devotional spirit, to
honour some god or defunct hero. It was the same with poetry. Epic was,
of course, devoted to the gods and heroes. The early lyric was also in
the main devotional, whatever its subject might be. We have seen Hesiod
carrying his poetic talents to a contest in song arranged to honour the
funeral of
Amphidamas. Tragedy, it is now said, developed out of funeral choruses.
It appears also that the great games of Delphi--the Pythian
Games--developed from a musical contest. The histories of Herodotus are
said to have been declaimed at the Olympic Games, and orators would in
later times make them the occasion for Panhellenic orations. There was
no divorce between intellect and muscle among the Greeks. Each was a
necessary part of _areté_, the quality of the perfect man. Sport-loving
people as we are, there is nothing in all literature so hard for us to
comprehend as the work of Pindar, the Bœotian poet of the early fifth
century. His professional business was only the writing of the Epinikia,
songs and music in celebration of athletic contests at the great games,
Pythian, Nemean, Isthmian, and Olympic. But the spirit in which he
approaches his task is that of a man writing about the most solemn and
important achievements in the world. He assumes that success in a boys’
wrestling match or a mule-race is an episode in the history of the
successful athlete’s country, and does not find it inappropriate to
speak of the gods and heroes in the same breath. “Far and wide shineth
the glory of the Olympian Games, the glory that is won in the races of
Pelops, where swiftness of foot contends, and feats of strength, hardy
in labour. All his life long the victor shall bask in the glory of song
for his prize. Daily continued blessedness is the supreme good for every
man.” We cannot understand the devotional spirit of Pindar unless we
realise that the Greeks dedicated their bodily strength and grace to the
honour and service of heaven. The Hebrew praised Jehovah in dance and
song; the Greek honoured Zeus and Apollo with wrestling and races and
the beauty of trained bodies.
The Olympian Games[21] had originally belonged to the service of local
heroes, Œnomaus and Pelops, but as they gained in popularity Father Zeus
took them under his ægis. Apollo was said to have outrun Hermes in a
race there and to
[Illustration: Plate PLATE 18.--Head of Apollo, from the Western
Pediment, Olympia.
_English Photo Co._]
have beaten Ares in boxing. The traditional date for the founding of the
festival was 776 B.C., and that became the era from which all Greek
dates were subsequently settled. But the actual date has no special
significance: in origin the games were much older, and their great
importance begins a good deal later--begins, in fact, with the real
hegemony of Sparta. Though the games were not in Spartan territory it
was undoubtedly from Spartan support that their importance arises.
At first the only contest was a foot-race, but various events were added
until at last five days were necessary for the whole meeting. The most
important contests were the following: (1) Short foot-race; (2) double
course; (3) long foot-race; (4) wrestling; (5) pentathlon, consisting of
five feats, long jump, foot-race, quoit-throwing, javelin-throwing,
wrestling; (6) boxing; (7) four-horse chariot-race; (8) pancration, a
mixture of boxing and wrestling--in fact, a combat between two naked
unarmed men, with scarcely any rules; (9) horse-race; (10) hoplite-race
for soldiers in full armour. Besides these there were six special events
for boys and various other contests, such as mule-races and trotting
races, which did not become permanent fixtures. There was a regular
competition for heralds and trumpeters.
Sacrifice and ritual accompanied every stage of the proceedings. Before
the meeting, which took place every four years, ambassadors went from
city to city proclaiming a Sacred Truce. All people who could prove
Greek nationality were invited. From its situation Olympia naturally
attracted support from the flourishing communities of Sicily and South
Italy. Whether they sent competitors or not, most of the States would
send embassies to the festival, and a great point was made of their
lavish equipment. The judges were chosen by lot from the citizens of
Elis, who managed the contest; they received a ten months’ course of
instruction beforehand in the duties of their office. All the
competitors had to undergo a strict examination as to their
qualifications, and to take an oath on the altar of Zeus that they
would compete fairly and that they had been in training for the previous
ten months. The only prize was a crown of wild olive, cut from a certain
tree of special sanctity, but the victor’s name and country were
proclaimed to the assembled multitude and the highest honours awaited
him on his return. He was welcomed in procession, led in through a
breach specially made in the wall of his city, and granted immunities
from taxation, or, as at Athens, free meals in the Presidential House
for all his life. The chariot-races were especially the object of
ambition and the opportunity for display to the wealthy. Tyrants of
Syracuse competed in them, but the brilliant Athenian Alcibiades
outstripped all competitors by sending in no fewer than seven teams.
Although the prize was but a spiritual one, we cannot say that the
contests were always conducted in what we should call a spirit of pure
amateur sport. Perhaps the incentive to trickery was excessively great.
Anyhow, there stood at Olympia an ominous row of statues dedicated to
Zeus which had been set up as fines by athletes guilty of discreditable
practices, generally of the kind we associate with the “pulling” of
horses. But when it is considered that the Olympian Games continued in
an almost unbroken series for twelve centuries--that is, until the
Emperor Theodosius abolished them in A.D. 393--the list of such
irregularities is not unduly long.
In the very minute account of Olympia which we owe to the traveller
Pausanias there are some curious and interesting anecdotes of the games.
For example, he saw the statue of the boy Pisirodus, who was brought to
the Olympian Games by his mother disguised as a trainer, because no
women were allowed to be present. “They say that Diagoras came with his
sons Acusilaus and Damagetus to Olympia, and when the young men had won
their prizes they carried their father through the assembly, while the
people pelted him with flowers and called him happy in his children.”
Then there is Timanthes, the strong man, who won the pancration. “He
had ceased practising as an athlete, but still he continued to test his
strength by bending a mighty bow every day. Well, he went away from
home, and while he was away his practice with the bow was discontinued.
But when he came back and could no longer bend his bow he lit a fire and
flung himself on the flames.” There is the plough-boy Glaucus, whose
father noticed him one day fitting the ploughshare into his plough with
his fist instead of a hammer. His father thereupon took him to Olympia
to box, but as he had no skill in boxing he was badly punished and
almost beaten. Suddenly his father called out, “Give him the
plough-hammer, my boy!” Whereupon he knocked his adversary out, won the
prize, and became a famous pugilist. “The mare of the Corinthian
Phidolas was named Aura; at the start she happened to throw her rider,
but continuing, nevertheless, to race in due form, she rounded the
turning-post, and on hearing the trumpet quickened her pace, reached the
umpires first, knew that she had won, and stopped.”
That there was a good deal of extravagance in the cult of athletes was
not likely to escape the critical eye of a people who so detested
extravagance in any form. The outspoken Euripides had a violent tirade
against athletes in his satyric drama _Autolycus_. “It is folly,” he
says, “for the Greeks to make a great gathering to see useless creatures
like these, whose god is in their belly. What good does a man do to his
city by winning a prize for wrestling or speed or quoit-heaving or
jaw-smiting? Will they fight the enemy with quoits? Will they drive the
enemy out of their country without spears by kicking? No one plays
antics like these when he stands near the steel. Garlands of leaves
should be for the wise and good, for the just and sober statesman who
guides his city best, for the man who with his words averts evil deeds,
keeping battle and civil strife away. Those are the real boons for every
city and all the Greeks.” Twenty-three centuries stand between this and
“The flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf at the goal.” I
fear that Euripides got no more attention than Mr. Kipling.
As with us, professionalism grew upon them in later days. The old ideals
of bodily grace and all-round excellence were deserted. In their place
the boxing and pancration encouraged a coarse type of heavy-weight
bruiser. The training and meals of the athletes became a by-word in
vegetarian Greece, and romantic sporting reporters enlarged upon the
gastronomic feats of the famous athletes.
[Illustration: Myron’s “Discobolus,” showing the head turned the wrong
way]
Athleticism, however, gave one thing to the Greeks that we lack. It was
from the models in the palæstra and the stadium that the sculptors of
Greece drew their inspiration. It was of course an immense benefit to
that art to be able to see the stripped body at exercise in the
sunlight, and that, coupled with the natural Greek sense of form, is the
secret of the unchallenged supremacy of Greek sculpture. Perfect anatomy
of the body was achieved even before the face could be properly
rendered. The nude male figure was the favourite theme of fifth-century
art, and extraordinary perfection was reached by Myron and Polycleitus.
Myron’s “Discobolus” is, of course, one of the best known of ancient
statues. Myron, an Athenian artist, is an elder contemporary of
Pheidias, and therefore belongs to the earlier stages of the great
period. But he had already begun to feel the artist’s sense of mastery
over his material, and he delighted in rather strained poses, therein
starting a tendency for sculpture which would surely have led to a
premature
[Illustration:
_Anderson_
FIG. 1. THE “DISCOBOLUS” OF MYRON
_Mansell & Co._
FIG. 2. THE “DIADUMENUS” OF POLYCLEITUS
PLATE XIX]
decadence if it had not been for the extraordinary genius of the
inspired Pheidias. My illustration gives one of many modern examples of
this much-copied statue.[22] But it is leagues removed from the original
bronze. The “Discobolus” is an instantaneous photograph of an athlete
just poising the heavy disk and preparing to throw. In another moment he
will turn right-about on the pivot of his right foot. There are few
statues of the fifth century which thus select an instant out of a
series of movements. For athlete statues two types stand pre-eminent.
One is the athlete[23] just fastening the diadem upon his victorious
brow (“Diadumenus”), a type due to Polycleitus, whose examples of
figure-drawing were taken even by the Greeks as “classics”--that is, as
models of perfection in the direction attempted. His “Doryphorus”[24]
was known as “the Canon,” as being a model of proportion, on which
subject Polycleitus wrote a treatise. Unfortunately we are compelled
here again to rely upon inferior marble copies of an original in bronze,
copies which probably do injustice to their model in exaggerating its
heaviness and muscularity. The other fine athletic type is that of the
“Apoxyomenus,” the athlete engaged with the strigil in scraping off the
oil with which all athletes, and especially wrestlers, were
anointed.[25] Of all statues dealing with athletics one of the most
impressive is the bronze charioteer lately discovered by the French at
Delphi. There is a wonderful calm and dignity about the long-robed
figure.[26]
To be naked and unashamed was one of the glories of the cultivated
Greek. It astonished (and still shocks) the barbarian. When Agesilaus,
the Spartan king, was fighting on Persian soil he caused his Oriental
captives to be exhibited naked to his men, in order that they might have
no more terror of the great king’s myriads. Alone among civilised
peoples of the earth the ancient Greek dared to strip his body to the
sun, and this too, as Thucydides witnesseth, came from the manly city.
“The Lacedæmonians,” he says, “were the first to use simple raiment of
the present style, and in other respects were the first to adopt a
similar scale of living for rich and poor. They were the first to strip
and undress in public, for anointing with oil after exercise. Originally
the athletes used to wear loin-cloths about their middles even at the
Olympic Games, and that practice has not long been discontinued”
(actually in 720 B.C.). “Even now some of the barbarians, especially the
Asiatics, continue to wear clothes at contests of boxing and wrestling.
One might point to several other analogies between the customs of
ancient Greece and modern barbarism.” With female nudity the case is
different. Although the girls of Sparta used to strip for their
gymnastic exercises, that was a notorious Spartan idiosyncrasy. It is
only under foreign influence and in the later periods that feminine
nudity is exhibited in Greek art. Hear Plato on the subject: Socrates
has been led by the logic of his argument into the assertion that the
women of the Ideal Republic ought to be educated just like the men, to
go through the semi-military training of the wrestling school and the
gymnasium along with them. The only objection he can see to such a
course is that the public exercises of women would appear _ridiculous_
to the Athenians of his day. That objection he dismisses as follows:
“Well, then,” says Socrates, “as we have begun the argument we must take
the rough with the smooth, and we must beg the wits to leave their usual
trade and be serious. They must remember that it is not very long since
it seemed to the Greeks ugly and ridiculous that men should appear
naked, as it does now to most of the barbarians. And when the Cretans
first, and after them the Lacedæmonians, began their stripped exercises
the wits of the day had occasion to make fun of such things. Don’t you
suppose they did?”
“I do indeed.”
“But when experience showed that it was better to strip than to cover
the body, what the eye thought ridiculous was
[Illustration: FIG. 1. THE “DORYPHORUS” OF POLYCLEITUS
_Alinari_
FIG. 2. THE “APOXYOMENUS”
PLATE XX]
overwhelmed by what logic declared to be best, and it became apparent
that it is only a fool who thinks anything ridiculous, except what is
evil.”
SPARTA
We turn naturally from Apollo and his Dorians to the headquarters of the
Dorian race, where all the strength and weakness of the Dorian character
is revealed at its highest and lowest. As the most important part of
Greek history consists of the long duel between Sparta and Athens, and
all our literature comes from Athens, posterity naturally tends to take
sides against Sparta. And yet all those writers, from Herodotus to
Aristotle, had a very real admiration for Sparta. Liberals, on the other
hand--and we are all Liberals nowadays--dislike Sparta, as representing
oligarchy against democracy and as having sold the liberty of Greece to
the Persians. And yet the Spartans practised equality, which the
Athenians praised, as no people on earth have ever practised it, and in
selling Greece to Persia they were only bidding against Athens. Other
people despise Sparta as the one Greek people which contributed hardly
anything to literature and art. And yet she is the most typically Greek
of all Greek states. The fact is that she is a paradox. One of the chief
interests of Greek history is the extraordinary psychological contrast
between the two chief actors. Sparta is the antithesis of Athens, and
yet, if any one would know Greece, he must realise that both are
essentially and characteristically Greek. Each is the complement of the
other. Without Sparta Greece would lack its most remarkable figure in
the realm of politics, as well as its chief bulwark in land warfare.
These are the two sides of Sparta on which we ought to fix our
attention--the political system which gave her the best, or at any rate
the most stable, government in Greek history, and the military education
and discipline which gave her the finest army.
Politically, all the Greek states, whether democracies or oligarchies,
rest upon a double structure of council and assembly. In democracies
the assembly is based on a very wide franchise, and possesses the actual
control of the state, the council being limited to subordinate
functions, executive and deliberative. At Athens, as we shall see, the
council is more like a committee to prepare business for the assembly.
In oligarchies, on the other hand, the assembly consists of a
comparatively small and select body of richer or nobler citizens, while
the actual government is in the hands of the council. Sparta contained
both these elements: an assembly of all the warriors, or Spartiates,
with full rights, though these were comparatively a small proportion of
the population of Laconia, and a _Gerousia_, or Senate, of thirty
elders. But Sparta, though ranked as an oligarchy by the general opinion
of Greece, was not, as Aristotle saw, a true or typical oligarchy. In
the first place, the ruling council of regular oligarchies generally
consisted of a close corporation co-opting its members, while the
Spartan _gerontes_ were elected by the whole body of the full citizens.
In the second place, Sparta had developed an executive magistracy, which
had far more real share in the direction of the state than either the
Senate or the Assembly. This perhaps was the secret of their efficient
and stable government, for most Greek states had such a dread of
personal ascendancy that they sacrificed unity and efficiency of
administration by placing their executive magistracies in a position
wholly subordinate. It was not so at Sparta. There they had retained a
kingship from the early times of the Dorian invasion right through their
history, as no other really Greek State was able to do. They had two
kings descending in parallel dynasties from prehistoric times, or, as
they put it, from two Heracleid families. The origin of this double
kingship is really lost in antiquity, though there are many theories
about it, both ancient and modern. The most probable is that of two
separate bands of Dorian invaders, each under its own king, uniting to
conquer the valley of the Eurotas, and combining to form the state. In
reviewing the kingship of Greek history Aristotle places this Spartan
system [Illustration: PLATE XXI. CHARIOTEER: BRONZE
_Mansell & Co._]
in a class by itself, calling it a “permanent hereditary generalship.”
By his time the office had lost, indeed, much of its political
significance, and was notoriously subordinate to the Ephorate. The
military leadership was by far the most conspicuous duty attached to the
office. This is curious, for political experience commonly shows the
opposite case; one of the first duties to be taken from a hereditary
office is the military leadership, because of the peculiar need for
personal capacity in that department. But Sparta was a singularly
conservative and religious, not to say superstitious, city, devoted to
ritual, and firmly believing in the general’s luck. Such a people does
not feel confidence under the leadership of mere talent; it much prefers
to fight under the orders of a descendant of Heracles. And as Spartan
warfare was always a very simple business, requiring no strategic skill
in its direction, the Spartans were not likely to find out the weakness
of a hereditary system in generalship. Beyond the leading of armies, the
Spartan kings had few rights or duties. They had ex-officio titles to
two of the thirty seats in the _Gerousia_, they had legal jurisdiction
in some unimportant cases connected with religion, and they represented
the state in certain festivals and sacrifices.
But the political executive passed over in the fifth and fourth
centuries to the five Ephors, who controlled and sometimes even
oppressed the kings. The origin of this peculiar and distinctive office
is also lost in antiquity. Spartan tradition certainly believed in a
time when the Ephorate was not; and on the whole the most probable
theory is that the Ephorate was originally created by the kings as a
subordinate office. Judging from actual history, it is too much to say
that the Ephors were always supreme over the kings in practice; nearly
all the great men of Spartan history--Leonidas, Cleomenes, Agesilaus,
Agis, Cleombrotus--are its kings, and we scarcely know the name of a
single Ephor. It was, in fact, a long fight between kings and Ephors for
pre-eminence. As a general rule the board of Ephors no doubt directed
the state’s policy, but kings like Agesilaus seem to have had far more
than a mere executive duty. What struck all observers was that Ephors
sometimes summoned kings before them for trial, sometimes condemned them
to death, and in ceremonial remained seated in the presence of the
kings. The fact is that at Sparta sovereignty belonged in a very real
sense to the warrior body, and the Ephors expressed that sovereignty, as
being directly elected by it. Especially in judicial matters they were
supreme, and in a state which moved by clockwork under the control of a
rigid discipline and fixed customs, though all the laws were unwritten,
the heads of the judicial system naturally held the reins of government.
The fact that the Ephors held their position by popular election is held
to constitute a democratic element in the constitution. This gives rise
to the theory, evolved by the successors of Aristotle in political
philosophy, that the stability of the Spartan constitution depended on
its nice adjustment of the three elements of polity--monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy. Sparta was thus considered to be the type of
a Mixed Constitution. From Sparta the Greek historian Polybius applied
the same theory to the government of Rome. Thence it was transferred by
Montesquieu to the British Constitution, and thus has played, and is
playing, an important part in the history of political science. So far
as Sparta is concerned, the theory rests upon a false basis. Aristotle
was undoubtedly right in terming Sparta an aristocracy, for the
Spartiate body itself was a minority and a jealously guarded close
corporation. Both the democratic and the monarchical elements in the
state were largely an illusion. Moreover, Aristotle did not admit the
propriety of applying the term democracy to a state which merely had
some choice in the persons by whom it should be governed. “To govern and
be governed in turn” was the essence of democracy to Aristotle, and he
would certainly have called both the other examples of the Mixed
Constitution, ancient Rome and modern England, aristocracies. To him,
however, aristocracy was the best kind of rule. Did it not
[Illustration: PLATE XXII. VIEW OF MODERN SPARTA, WITH MOUNT TAYGETUS
_English Photo Co., Athens_]
mean etymologically “government by the best”? Besides, there was the
practical proof of excellence that Sparta alone was free from the ever
endemic Greek disease of “stasis” or civil strife, and that Sparta alone
of Greek States had never witnessed a successful revolution.