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

THE Human FIGURE

Spartan palaestra, full of the joyous, boyish laughter of the youths bustling about in the naked splendour of their supple limbs, the whole beneath the delightful blue of the Greek sky, and he will at least admit that it was there that earthly beauty celebrated its highest triumphs.

Thus the Greek gymnasium and _palestra, originally the places where young men hardened themselves in bodily exercises of every kind and developed their bodies to a condition of perfect harmony, became places which were sought for to linger in for many hours of the day and to gossip within sight of the highest beauty; the extensive colonnaded halls were regularly used for walks where philosophers and itinerant teachers gathered their hosts of pupils and hearers round them. It was not until later, in the second century B.c., that the institution of the ephebi in Athens was reorganized and the bodily and intellectual education of youths was combined in the Diogeneum and Ptolenzeum which, by the side of numerous schoolrooms, also contained an extensive library ; and it is not until the fifth century A.D. that we hear of a gymnasium—and that in Carthage—which is expressly called a linguistic institute and a place of education (Salvianus, De gubernatione dei, vii, 275 ; vel linguarum gymnasia vel morum).

According to the consistent testimony of all the authorities, the Greeks kept their gymnasia free from women; that is, no female creature might ever set her foot in any of these places intended for the education of the male—even at the popular festivals of the great national games women were excluded as spectators. Pausanias (v, 6, 7) says expressly, in mentioning the rock Typaeum at Olympia, that it was the custom to throw those women down from it who were caught in the act of stealing in as spectators at the Olympic games, or even those who, on the days forbidden them (consequently during the festal time), had crossed

g2