Modern Athletics 1868

ANCIENT ATHLETICS. 3 (SIO-KOsSp)ear-hurlmg {aKovriov), wrestling (Tra'Xi;). In tlieir entirety, intheir performance onthe same day and in a certain order by the same athletes, they belong to the time in which the great national games of Greece were insti­ tuted, though differentparts of the course arementioned in early times as beingpractised bythe old heroes. How these acted, how they felt, what they said, how they amused themselves, their publicand private life, all tins andmuch more is pictured inthe marvellous verse of nim whom the epigrammatist well calls— avOpwv ripubJv Ko(Tfj.{]Topa, Otlov"O /xripov. We have in later writersdry disconnected facts on which staticians feed, but for life portraits of character and manners, for the thing itselpfroducing in us the emotions w * Cl1 1 produced in those that didand saw it, we must go back to the "sweetest of bards, the blind old man who dwelt m craggy Chios." He, we may be sure, reproduces to us the fashion ofhis own age. No matter whatpersons or places he describes, the names are nothing. Pha;acia may be Utopia, Odysseus may be Utis, which "Form 3 of things unkuown, the poet's pen Turns into shape." Homelike Shalcspeare, drewhis materials—whatever tricks strong imagination"played with them—from what passed around him ;and though hisheroes may bear old irojan or Argiye titles, yethe had associated with them all, had sung hishymns m the hall ofAlcinous, and, blind though he was, had witnessed the Phteacian games. Regarding, then,his poetry as cotemporaryhistory,we find . oi tiie pentathlon, boxing, wrestling, leaping, and ™ nmg ttttt * 16 , foucrlasses enumerated by Alcinous (Odyssey VIII., 103), as practisedby the Phjeacians II«|Oiy(yvo/i£0' a\\u)v TlvZ rs, TraXaifffiotrvvy n, /cat uXfiaqaSikv,iroStaaiv. Boxing, wrestling, running, archery, and spear-throwing were the challenges which Odysseus gave the Phaeacians, and which weredeclined by them, after they had proof of his disc-hurlmg powers. (Odyssey YIIL, 206&, c.) Leaping was oneof the most prominent parts of the pentathlon, as itis one of the chief events in ourmodern ®i m f ^ seems l iave been practised then in a some­ what dineront manner. We do not know that there are b 2