Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

GYMNASTICS

which was the ephebeion, the exercise ground of the ephebi, that is, young men declared of full age and independent citizens after they were entered in the register of their deme, which as a rule took place at Athens at the age of 18. At the sides baths, halls and other spaces were allotted, where philosophers, rhetoricians, poets, and all the numerous friends of manly beauty were accustomed to meet together. Further colonnades adjoined the peristyle, amongst them the xystus, which appears to have chiefly been used for the exercises of the men. With the gymnasium was generally combined the palaestra, the chief arena for bodily exercises and games of the boys. It need hardly be emphasized that all the spaces were adorned with works of art of every kind, with altars and statues of Hermes, Heracles, and especially of Eros, but also of the Muses and other divinities. ‘Thus to the beauty of the bodies of boys, youths, and men, most harmoniously developed by regular bodily exercises, was added the daily sight of numerous marvels of art; and it is easy to understand how and why the Greeks developed into the most beauty-loving people that ever walked on earth. One can also understand how it was that no gymnasium or palaestra of the Greeks was ever without an altar or statue of Eros: yet the daily sight of the highest manly beauty was bound to lead to the homosexual love that animated the entire people.

Goethe in his Italian Fourney once described a ball-game, which he had seen in the arena at Verona : “The most beautiful attitudes, worth imitation in marble, appear therein. As they are merely wellgrown, sturdy young people in short, scanty, white clothes, the sides are distinguished only by a coloured badge. Especially beautiful is the position into which the striker falls while he runs down from the slanting surface and lifts his arm to strike the ball.’ Now let anyone imagine an Athenian or

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