Greek Athletic Sports and Festivals
PREFACE
It is my hope that the present volume may prove of interestto the general reader as well as to the student of the past. Forthough its subject may seem at first sight purely archaeological,many of the problems with which it deals are as real to usto-day as they were to the Greeks. The place of physicaltraining and of games in education, the place of athletics inour daily life and in our national life, are questions of presentimportance to us all, and in considering these questions wecannot fail to learn something from the athletic history of anation which for a time at least succeeded in reconciling therival claims of body and of mind, and immortalized this resultin its art.
This is my first and perhaps my chief justification for thelength of this volume. My second is that there is no existingwork in English on the subject, nor even in the extensiveliterature which Germany has produced is there any workof quite the same scope. The Gymnastik u. Agonistik of J. H.Krause is a masterpiece of erudition, accuracy and judgment.But this work was published in 1841, and since that dateexcavation and the progress of archaeology have brought tolight such a mass of new material as to change entirely ouroutlook on the past. The excavations at Olympia have for thefirst time enabled us to trace the whole history of the festivaland to treat Greek athletics historically.
viiiIn the first part of this work I have endeavoured to writea continuous history of Greek athletics. The attempt isan ambitious one, perhaps too ambitious for one whose occupationhas left him little time for continuous study. The longperiod covered involves a multitude of difficult and disputedproblems, which it is impossible within the limits of thiswork to discuss fully. In all these cases I have endeavouredto sift the evidence for myself, and to form an independentjudgment. Many of the details may be obscure, and manyof my conclusions are doubtless open to criticism. Yet thegeneral outline of the story is clear, and I venture to thinkthat it has a more than passing interest and importance.
The second part is more technical, though it may perhapsappeal to those who are actively interested in athletics. Itconsists of a number of chapters, each complete in itself, dealingwith the details of Greek athletics. Many of the chapters aretaken from articles published by me in the Journal of HellenicStudies. The chapters on