E-text prepared by Joshua Hutchinson, Tonya Allen, and Project Gutenberg
Distributed Proofreaders
Two distinct yet harmonious branches of study claimed the earlyattention of the youth of ancient Greece. Education was comprised inthe two words, Music and Gymnastics. Plato includes it all under thesedivisions:—"That having reference to the body is gymnastics, but to thecultivation of the mind, music."
Grammar was sometimes distinguished from the other branches classedunder the term, Music; and comprehended, besides a knowledge oflanguage, something of poetry, eloquence, and history. Music embracedall the arts and sciences over which the Muses presided.
Grammar, Music, and Gymnastics, then, comprised the whole curriculumof study which was prescribed to the Athenian boy. There were notseparate and distinct learned professions, or faculties, to so greatan extent as in modern times. The compass of knowledge was far lessdefined, and the studies and attainments of the individual moremiscellaneous. Some of the arts rose to an unparalleled perfection.Architecture and sculpture attained an excellence which no subsequentcivilization has reached. But the practical application of the sciencesto daily use was almost entirely neglected; and inventions and mechanicslanguished until the far later uprising of the Saxon mind.
Yet the whole system of education among the Greeks was peculiarlycalculated for the development of the powers of the mind and of the bodyin common. And it is from this point of view that we wish to considerit, and to show the nature and preeminence of gymnastics in their timesas compared with our own.
Doubtless Grecian Art owed its superiority, in some degree, to thegymnasium. Living models of manliness, grace, and beauty were dailybefore the artist's eye. The stadium furnished its fleet runners,nimble as the wing-footed Mercury,—fit types for his light and airyconceptions; while the arena of the athletes offered marvellousopportunities for the study of muscle and posture, to show its resultsin the burly limbs of Hercules or the starting sinews of Laocoön. Manyof the most lifelike groups of marble which remain to us from that timeare but copies of the living statues who wrestled or threw the quoit inthe public gymnasium.
It is worthy of remark, in corroboration of this view, that thedepartment of the fine arts which depended on outline surpassedthat which derived its power from coloring and perspective. Thesculptors far excelled the painters. The statue was the natural resultof the imitative faculty surveying the nude human figure in everyposture of activity or repose. Pictures came later, from more educatedsenses, and from minds which had first learned outward nature throughthe medium of the simpler arts.
The ancient gymnasium, apart from its baths and philosophic groves,was far from being, as with us, a mere appendage of the school. Moderninstructors advertise, that, in addition to teachers of every tongue andart, "a gymnasium is attached" to their educational institutions. In oldtimes, the gymnasium was the school,—the public games and festivals its"annual exhibitions."
The word gymnasium has reference in its derivation to the nude orsemi-nude condition of those who exercised there. But in their properclassical interpretation the public gymnasia were, to a great extent,places set apart for phys