The ancients valued gymnastics highly as curative agents in disease.  Some of the gymnasia were dedicated to Apollo, god of physicians.  The officers of these establishments passed for doctors, and were so called, on account of the skill which long experience had given them.  The directors regulated the diet of the youth, the gymnastae prescribed for their diseases, and the inferiors dressed wounds and fractures.  Not only was the general idea entertained that bodily exercise is good for the health, but different kinds of exertion were selected as adapted to particular maladies.  Upright wrestling was thought most beneficial to the upper portion of the body, and the cure of dropsy was believed to be peculiarly promoted by gymnastic sports.  Hippocrates had some faith in the “motor cure.”  In some cases he advises common wrestling; in others, wrestling with the hands only.  The practice with the corycus, or hanging-bag of sand, and a regular motion of the upper limbs, resembling the manual exercise of the soldier, were also esteemed by him.  Galen inveighs against the more violent exercises, but recommends moderate ones as part of the physician’s art.  Asclepiades, in the time of Pompey the Great, called exercises the common aids of physic, and got great glory—­and money, it is to be hoped—­by various mechanical contrivances for the sick.

The ancients probably esteemed gymnastics too much, as the moderns do too little, for medical or sanative purposes.  The Greeks, with a very limited knowledge of physiology and pathology, would be more apt to treat symptoms than to trace the causes of disease; and no doubt they sometimes prescribed exercises which were injudicious or positively injurious.  We still trust too much, perhaps, to medication, and do not keep in view the great helps which Nature spreads around us.  Truth lies between the two extremes; and we are beginning to recognize the fact, which experience daily teaches us, that light, air, and motion are more potent than drugs,—­and that iron will not redden the cheeks, nor bark restring the nerves, so safely and so surely as moderate daily exercise out of doors.

In the flourishing days of Attica, the gymnasium was in its perfection.  It degenerated with the license of later times.  It was absorbed and sunk in the fashions and vices of imperial Rome.  Though Nero built a public gymnasium, and Roman gentlemen attached private ones to their country-seats, it gradually fell into disuse, or existed only for ignoble purposes.  The gladiator succeeded naturally to the athlete, the circus to the stadium, and the sanguinary scenes of the amphitheatre brutalized the pure tastes of earlier years.  Then came the barbarians, and the rough, graceless strength of Goths and Vandals supplanted the supple vigor of the gymnast.  The rude, migratory life of the Dark Ages needed not the gymnasium as a means of physical culture, and was too changeable and evanescent to establish permanent institutions.