“For if a man rejoice to suffer cost and toil, and achieve god-builded excellence, and therewithal fate plant for him fair renown, already at the farthest bonds of bliss hath such an one cast anchor.”
CHAPTER V
THE AGE OF THE ATHLETIC IDEAL, 500–440 B.C.
Though the Greeks of the sixth and fifth centuries attained a remarkable standard of athletic excellence, it is probable that in individual performance the modern athlete could at least have held his own with them. Yet despite our modern athleticism it is certain that no other nation has ever produced so high an average of physical development as the Greeks did in this period. This result was due largely to the athletic ideal which found its highest expression in the athletic poetry and art of the fifth century. The ideal is unique in the history of the world, nor are the circumstances which produced it ever likely to occur again. Due, in the first place, to the early connexion of athletics with religion, it owed its development in the fifth century to two causes, firstly, to the growth of athletic art and poetry, secondly, to the intense feeling of Panhellenic unity produced by the struggle with Persia. It was this ideal that checked the growth of those evils which inevitably result from the excessive popularity of athletics, and maintained their purity till the short-lived unity of Greece was shattered by the Peloponnesian war. To understand this ideal we must briefly trace the history of athletic art and literature, and then note how the national feeling found expression in the Panhellenic and especially in the Olympic games.
Fig. 7. Apollo, found at Tenea. Munich.
Without athletics, says the late Professor Furtwängler,[101] Greek art cannot be conceived. The skill of the Greek artist in representing the forms of the naked body is due in the first instance to the habit of complete nudity in athletic exercises, a habit which, even if it were, as Thucydides says, not introduced into all athletic competitions at Olympia till shortly before his own time, must certainly, if we may judge from the evidence of the black-figured vases, have been almost universal in the palaestra of the sixth century. Besides the unrivalled opportunities that this habit afforded the sculptor of studying the naked body in every position of activity, it must have served as a valuable incentive to the youths of Greece to keep themselves in good condition. The Greek, with his keen eye for physical beauty, regarded flabbiness, want of condition, imperfect development as a disgrace, a sign of neglected education, and the ill-trained youth was the laughing-stock of his companions. Hence every Greek learnt to take a pride in his physical fitness and beauty. This love of physical beauty is strikingly illustrated in one of the war-songs of Tyrtaeus:[102] “It is a shame,” he says, “for an old man to lie slain in the front of the battle, his body stripped and exposed.” Why? Because an old man’s body cannot be beautiful. “But to the young,” he continues, “all things are seemly as long as the goodly bloom of lovely youth is on him. A sight for men to marvel at, for women to love while he lives, beautiful, too, when fallen in the front of the battle.”
Fig. 8. Statue by an Argive Sculptor. Delphi. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 134.)
We have seen how there arose in the sixth century a demand for athletic statues, and how the early artists endeavoured to express trained strength by the careful treatment of the muscles of the body, especially those of the chest and abdomen. The early athletic statues must have been of the type of those archaic figures which are rightly or wrongly classed under the name of Apollo, and which, whether they represent a god or a man, are certainly inspired by athletics. Though we see in all the same evident desire to express strength yet we find considerable variety of physical type, far more so, in fact, than we find in the fifth century, which was dominated by a more or less definite ideal of physical beauty and proportion. In the sixth century the artists were experimenting, and therefore we may suppose were influenced more by local or individual characteristics. Thus the slim, long-limbed Apollo of Tenea (Fig. 7), with his well-formed chest, spare flanks, and powerful legs is the very type of the long-distance runner. These long, lean, wiry runners are often depicted on Panathenaic vases, and suggest inevitably these day-runners (ἡμεροδρόμοι), who acted as scouts or couriers in the Persian wars. Quite different is the type of the early Argive statues found at Delphi (Fig. 8). Square and thickset, with powerful limbs and massive heads, they seem naturally to lead up to the type of the Ligourio bronze and of Polycleitus, and suggest that such a build was characteristic of Argolis. Between the two extremes comes an extensive series of statues from Boeotia, one of which shows strong signs of Aeginetan influence.[103] In the fifth century we look in vain for such divergences of type, and the reason is that Greek art was tending more and more towards an ideal, and neither the typical runner nor the typical strong man quite fulfils the artist’s ideal. Vase paintings afford an interesting illustration of this change. The wrestling groups on the black-figured vases show far greater variety and originality, a more realistic imitation of the manifold positions of wrestling than we find on the red-figured vases of the fifth century, where only such types are preserved as commended themselves to the more highly-trained artistic sense of the later craftsmen.
Fig. 9. Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo. British Museum.
Fig. 10. Figure from E. pediment at Aegina. Munich. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 41.)
Fig. 11. Bronze Statuette from Ligourio. Berlin. (Greek Sculpture, Fig. 39.)
In the early part of the fifth century we still find a variety of physical type. On the one hand we have the Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo (Fig. 9) with his broad square shoulders, powerful chest and back—essentially a big man, and therefore identified by Dr. Waldstein with the boxer Euthymus, though recent evidence tends to show that the statue really represents the god and no mortal athlete. At the other extreme we have the neat, small, sinewy forms of the warriors on the Aeginetan pediments (Fig. 10). Between the two come a number of types. Unfortunately we have no extant examples of the great Argive school. The bronze in which the Argive sculptor worked was too valuable to escape the ravages of the plunderer, and a certain monotony, which must have characterized purely athletic sculpture, prevented the later copyist from reproducing these works. But if we may argue from the Ligourio bronze (Fig. 11), the Argive type was short like the Aeginetan but heavier and more fleshy. On the other hand, the statues which are recognized as copies of the famous group of Critias and Nesiotes[104] representing Harmodius and Aristogeiton show a taller, larger-boned type, more approaching that of the Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo, which may perhaps be recognized as Athenian.[105] But in all this diversity of physical type we ask ourselves in vain what class of athlete is represented in any particular statue, whether a boxer, a wrestler, a pentathlete, or a runner. The reason seems to be that in all these statues the ideal element is strong; there is a difference of build, but each build is shown with the fullest all-round development of which it is capable. Certainly there is not in this period a single figure that represents a typical runner so clearly as does the Apollo of Tenea. Perhaps the nearest type to that of the runner is the Aeginetan; but unfortunately we know that the events in which Aegina won most distinction were wrestling and the pankration, winners in which we should expect to find characterized by a heavier build. The fact is that the real specialization of the