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

FESTIVALS

to which travellers of all kinds, and girls and boys who were ready to make friends, rushed in vast numbers. There all dialects of the Greek language were to be heard; friends foregathered who had not met for years; acquaintance was made with the great men of the age ; new friendships, business and family relations were formed. After the middle of the fifth century, lectures by rhetoricians, sophists, historians, and poets were also heard at Olympia, and, as time went on, the hold of the sensational on Olympia may have been firmer. Thus in AD. 165 the half-mad itinerant philosopher, Peregrinus Proteus, in order to increase his fame, proclaimed that he would publicly burn himself to death at the Olympian festival. He actually carried out his intention, under the pressure of the multitude, however greatly he may have repented of his over-hasty resolution.

In connection with our description, the costume worn by the contestants at Olympia is also interesting. On this point we learn from an important, but certainly much disputed passage in the historical work of Thucydides (i, 6; cf. Herodotus, i, 10) that in the oldest times the competitors entered the arena naked, except for an apron round their hips. This is quite probable, but we must be careful not to attribute this covering of the private parts to moral scruples in accordance with our modern code, regarding it rather as a relic of Oriental opinion, by which the older spirit of the Greeks was very strongly influenced. The Asiatics, as before mentioned, considered it disgraceful to bare the body, and if we connect this dread of the sight of the naked with the very old belief in spirits we shall not be far wrong. Anyhow, it is a fact that the Greek athletes at Olympia, at least the runners after the fifteenth olympiad, that is, after 720 B.C., gave up wearing this apron, and from that time entered the arena completely naked.

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