by F. A. Wright London Jonathan Cape Ltd   FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXV MADE & PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BUTLER & TANNER LTD FROME AND LONDON      ...

I N a previous volume [A] an attempt was made to set out the principles followed by the Greeks in the three sister arts of acting, music, and painting; and to show how in some respects we have failed to improve upon their practice. It is perhaps doubtful whether the mass of our countrymen will ever take a very deep interest in the laws that govern the right use of colour, sound, and gesture; and even if our inferiority in art were proved, it is probable that the position would be regarded with e

A THLETICS, whether ancient or modern, is a wide term covering a large field of bodily activities, while the boundaries between sport and athletics are often hard to fix. But we may safely distinguish four main branches of physical energy. 1. Athletics proper, where the essential feature is the competition with its almost invariable concomitant the prize,—athlon; the two things going so closely together that, as in the ‘Grand Prix,’ the same word is used for race and reward. 2. Gymnastics, the t

T HE various athletic exercises, which are here for convenience classed together under the word ‘gymnastics,’ fall into three main classes, depending respectively on strength of body, of leg, and of arm. To the first class belong boxing and wrestling, to the second running and jumping, to the third throwing the diskos and the javelin. The last five of these six sports—boxing being excluded—formed the Pentathlon, a combined competition of five events arranged to suit the all-round military athlet

E DUCATION, mental and physical, falls into three sections, according as it deals with the training of the child, the boy, and the man; the word boy including girl, and the word man woman. Of these three stages the second seems to us so much the most definite that it has almost appropriated the word to itself. Education in common judgment does not begin until the boy goes to his school, while it ceases when he leaves his university. The Greeks, or rather the Athenians, looked at things different

F OR the attainment of the perfect health which is one of the highest goals of human endeavour, the Greeks of the fifth century b.c. in comparison with ourselves were placed under some disadvantages. Firstly, their racial stock, a difficult blend of the old Mediterranean people with central European immigrants, was not so good, for purposes of active strength, as our mixture of Saxon, Norman and Dane: the inhabitants of Attica claimed with some reason to be autochthonous, but in historical times

B ALL games, as we know from Homer, were from the earliest times popular among the Greeks, being especially esteemed for the grace of body which the act of throwing and catching gives. The central incident of the Odyssey is connected with such a game, for it was a lost ball that roused Odysseus from his sleep in the bush and led to his discovery by Nausicaa. At Athens in the fifth century they were, for men, rather overshadowed by the gymnastic exercises already described, but youths found in th

E. N. Gardiner : Greek Athletic Sports and Festivals. Macmillan, 1910. K. J. Freeman : Schools of Hellas. Macmillan, 1907. W. W. Hyde : Olympic Victor Monuments. Washington, U.S.A., 1921. Walter Pater : Greek Studies. Macmillan, 1895. J. B. Bury : The Nemean Odes of Pindar. Macmillan, 1891. E. Bruecke : The Human Figure. Grevel, 1900. D. Watts : The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal. Heinemann, 1914. E. Jaques-Dalcroze : Rhythm, Music and Education. Chatto and Windus, 1921. FOOTNOTES: [A] The Arts