In the most remote countries, in the midst of the barbarians of Gaul or of the Black Sea, a Greek city was recognized by its gymnasium.  There was a great square surrounded by porticoes or walks, usually near a spring, with baths and halls for exercise.  The citizens came hither to walk and chat:  it was a place of association.  All the young men entered the gymnasium; for two years or less they came here every day; they learned to leap, to run, to throw the disc and the javelin, to wrestle by seizing about the waist.  To harden the muscles and strengthen the skin they plunged into cold water, dispensed with oil for the body, and rubbed the flesh with a scraper (the strigil).

=Athletes.=—­Many continued these exercises all their lives as a point of honor and became Athletes.  Some became marvels of skill.  Milo of Croton in Italy, it was said, would carry a bull on his shoulders; he stopped a chariot in its course by seizing it from behind.  These athletes served sometimes in combats as soldiers, or as generals.  Gymnastics were the school of war.

=Role of the Spartiates.=—­The Spartans taught the other Greeks to exercise and to fight.  They always remained the most vigorous wrestlers and the best soldiers, and were recognized as such by the rest of Greece.  Everywhere they were respected.  When the rest of the Greeks had to fight together against the Persians, they unhesitatingly took the Spartans as chiefs—­and with justice, said an Athenian orator.

FOOTNOTES: 

[62] “Hellenica,” iii., 3, 6.

[63] See Thucydides, iv., 80.

[64] A collection by Plutarch is still preserved.

[65] A phrase of Xenophon.

CHAPTER XII

ATHENS

THE ATHENIAN PEOPLE

=Attica.=—­The Athenians boasted of having always lived in the same country; their ancestors, according to their story, originated from the soil itself.  The mountaineers who conquered the south land passed by the country without invading it; Attica was hardly a temptation to them.

Attica is composed of a mass of rocks which in the form of a triangle advances into the sea.  These rocks, renowned for their blocks of marble and for the honey of their bees,[66] are bare and sterile.  Between them and the sea are left three small plains with meagre soil, meanly watered (the streams are dry in summer) and incapable of supporting a numerous population.

=Athens.=—­In the largest of these plains, a league from the sea, rises a massive isolated rock:  Athens was built at its foot.  The old city, called the Acropolis, occupied the summit of the rock.

The inhabitants of Attica commenced, not by forming a single state, but by founding scattered villages, each of which had its own king and its own government.  Later all these villages united under one king,[67] the king of Athens, and established a single city.  This does not mean that all the people came to dwell in one town.  They continued to have their own villages and to cultivate their lands; but all adored one and the same protecting goddess, Athena, divinity of Athens, and all obeyed the same king.