CHAPTER II
ATHLETICS IN HOMER
Table of Contents 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 ta????a?a??a 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...
