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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.