Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 19, May, 1859 | Page 3

was connected with the baths, which followed next in order. These were the frigidarium, the caldarium, the sudatorium, and the tepidarium, for the cold, the hot, the sweating or vapor, and the warm baths. They did not possess the magnitude and ornament of the Roman thermae. They were used in connection with and after exercising, and were enough for all practical purposes. Bathing was not then the business of hours every day, as it was later in the Roman Empire, when the luxurious subjects of Caracalla indulged several times in the twenty-four hours in such a variety of ablutions as would have satisfied a Sandwich-Islander.
We have now arrived at a point nearly opposite our entrance at the east, and, continuing round the southwest, south, and southeast sides of the peristyle, find a large number of consecutive chambers devoted mainly to the philosophers, as lecture-rooms and auditories for their classes and followers. On the north side of the peristyle is a double portico containing the exedrae, or seats of the sophists, where each most cunning rhetorician delivered his opinions _ex cathedra_, and lay in wait for any passer whom he could insnare into an argument. The groves of the great western court were probably used by the lounger, the contemplative, and the studious, if we may judge by numerous seats and benches, at convenient intervals. On the south side of these was again a double portico; and on the north, outside the pillars, the xystus, or covered porch, where the athletes exercised in winter and in bad weather. The arena was twelve feet wide, and sunk a foot and a half below a marginal path of ten feet, where spectators could walk. On the north and south sides of the whole building were wings, of less width, extending nearly its entire length. That on the north contained the stadium, or foot-race course, which was, however, sometimes disconnected from the gymnasium. The south wing was of like dimensions, and adorned with plane-trees and walks, forming a more private retreat.
It will be readily conceived that this vast area was not devoted exclusively to physical exercises. Logic, rhetoric, and metaphysics claimed their place in this common focus of the city's life, and were the delight of the subtile Greeks. The Socratic reasoning and the syllogisms of Aristotle met here on common ground. The Stoics, with their stern fatalism, derived their name from the stoae, or porticos; the Peripatetics imparted their ambulatory instructions under the plane-trees of the Lyceum--and Plato reasoned in the Academy, which he held with his school, and into which no ungeometrical mind was to enter. And though some dog of a Cynic might despise the union of the ornamental with the useful, and claim austerity as the rule of life, yet to the great body of the social Greek people the gymnasium offered all those attractions which boulevards, _caf��s_, and _jardins-chantants_ do now to the Gallic nation. There is more than one point of resemblance between the two countries; but while the Athenian had the same mercurial qualities, which fitted him for outdoor life, he had even a less comfortable domestic establishment to retain him at home than the modern Parisian.
We must turn, however, rather to the physical view of the gymnasium. All the sports of the gymnasia were either games, or special exercises for the contests of the public festivals. And here a distinction must be made between amateur and professional gymnasts. The former were styled agonistae, and exercised in the public gymnasium; the latter athletae, and were trained fighters, whose school was the palaestra. At first frequenting the same, they afterwards became divided between two institutions. Some of the harsher sports of the prize-fighters were not thought genteel for well-nurtured youths to indulge in. Among the simpler games were the ball, played in various ways, and the top, which was as popular with juveniles then as now. The sport called skaperda can be seen in any gymnasium of to-day, and consisted in two boys drawing each other up and down by the ends of a rope passing over a pulley. Familiar still is also a game of dexterity played with five stones thrown from the upper part of the hand and caught in the palm. Various other gentle exercises might be mentioned.
The training for the public games was comprised in the pentathlon, or five exercises,--which were running, leaping, throwing the discus, wrestling, boxing. The first four were practised also by amateurs, and by most persons who frequented the gymnasium for health.
The race, run upon the foot-race course, was between fixed boundaries, about a stadium apart. The distances run were from one to twenty stadia, or from one-eighth of a mile to two and a half miles, and sometimes more. This exercise was much followed. Horses were sometimes introduced, but