But the Greek was different. He belonged to a race of athletes. Games, to begin with, were part of his religion. All his great athletic festivals—the Olympic, the Nemean, the Isthmian, the Delphic, the Panathenaic—were festivals in honour of the gods. They began and closed with solemn sacrifices and religious rites, and through all the competitions ran the idea of offering the beauty and strength of perfectly trained bodies to the glory of God.

Moreover every Greek, whether he were competing in the great games or not, was more or less of an athlete himself, and rather more than less. For every Greek was a soldier, who had to be ready at a moment's notice to take the field in defence of his country and his home, and who had to keep himself always fit to bear his heavy armour, and to endure all kinds of physical strain. So athletics were a regular part, and no small part, of his education. Constant practice in running and jumping kept him sound and supple in wind and limb; throwing the diskos and the spear was the best of practice for the battlefield; wrestling and boxing kept him hard, and trained his hand and eye for the stern work of actual fighting. So, of the countless thousands who looked on at the games at Olympia or Delphi, each man was really a trained expert, who understood and appreciated each feat of skill or strength, and was a prompt and severe judge of every mean dodge or underhand trick.

Besides, there were two features about the Greek games which distinguished them honourably from a great deal that goes by the name of sport nowadays. There was no betting, and there was no pot-hunting, at least, at the great festivals, and in the best days of Greek athletics. Some of the smaller local festivals, indeed, offered handsome prizes in order to attract competitors; but this was looked upon as quite below the dignity of the great games. At Olympia the prize was a crown of wild olive leaves; at Delphi, a crown of bay leaves; at the Isthmian and the Nemean games, a wreath of wild celery or pine-leaves; while at the Panathenæa the victors were rewarded with painted jars of oil. To-day we count these Panathenaic painted amphoræ priceless treasures of art; but, as things went then, they were very humble rewards.

The great thing that the Greek strove for in his games was to bring credit and honour to his native city. Each competitor was regarded as the representative of his city; when the herald proclaimed the victor's name, he proclaimed also the name of the city to which he belonged, and the whole state shared in his success, and gloried in it. When he came home after his victory, his fellow-citizens came out in procession to meet him, led him in through a breach specially made in the walls, freed him from taxes for the rest of his life, or sometimes, as at Athens, granted him a free seat for all meals at the Prytaneum, along with the highest and best of the land, as long as he lived. On one occasion a famous athlete of Croton, named Astylus, who had won races for his town at two successive Olympiads, entered himself the third time as a Syracusan, in order to curry favour with the despot of the great Sicilian city. In their indignation at such meanness, the Crotoniats destroyed the statue which they had set up to the victorious athlete, and turned the house which they had given him into a common prison. Such an action shows how keenly the Greek felt that the glory of the victor belonged to his city even more than to himself.

In the days when Greek athletics were at their best, the greatest poets of the land did not think it beneath their dignity to sing their sweetest songs in honour of the victorious runner or wrestler, nor the greatest painter or sculptor to record the figure of the champion. Some of the noblest works of Greek art that have come down to us are the statues of athletes—the diskos-thrower at the top of his swing, the racing charioteer standing stiff and stark in his long straight robe, the runner scraping the dust and oil from his limbs after the race, or binding upon his head the garland of victory. And the wisest of the Greeks held that nothing taught better than athletic sports the virtue that they held in greatest reverence. I can't find a single word to translate it to you; but it meant respect to the gods, to your fellow-men, to yourself, reverence, modesty, courtesy, the sense of honour and fairness which distinguishes the true soldier and sportsman from the bully and the cheat. Some of the Greek games—boxing, wrestling, and the that they called the "pankration"—demanded a very high sense of honour and self-restraint, if they were not to end in sheer brutality; and the Greeks held, perhaps rightly, that the man who trained himself to take part honourably in such sports was likely to be honourable in other things also.

Altogether, I fancy that there never was a nation of better sportsmen than the Greeks at their best, and that no people ever had a higher idea of what true sport could do for a man or of what it required of him. Unfortunately, like the rest of us, the Greeks were not always at their best. Even in the palmy days of the games, there were cheats who bought and sold some of the competitions, and at the entrance to the Stadium at Olympia there stood an ominous row of bronze statues of Zeus, paid for by the heavy fines exacted from those who had tried to cheat in the games, and bearing the warning inscription that "not with money, but with speed of foot and strength of body must prizes be won at Olympia."

Bit by bit professionalism, too, began to creep in, and in Greece, as everywhere else, it was the death of all true sport. Gradually, the Greeks degenerated from a nation of athletes into a nation who looked on at the feats of professional racers, boxers, and wrestlers, and made heroes out of the paid strong men. In our own days we have heard Mr. Kipling telling us bitter things about "the flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf at the goal." It is strange to hear a greater poet of twenty-three centuries before saying much the same kind of thing to the Athenians of his day. Listen to Euripides, the great Greek dramatist: "Of all the countless evils throughout Hellas, there is none worse than the race of athletes. In youth they strut about in splendour, the pride of their city, but when bitter old age comes upon them they are cast aside like threadbare garments. It is folly for the Greeks to make a great gathering to see useless creatures like these, whose god is in their belly. What good does a man do to his city by winning a prize for wrestling, or speed, or quoit-heaving, or jaw-smiting? Will they fight the enemy with quoits? Will they drive the enemy out of their country without spears by kicking? No one plays antics like these when he stands near the steel. Crowns should be given to the good and wise, to him who guides his city best—a temperate man and just." I am afraid that Euripides got few to listen to his warning, and Greek athletics and Greek freedom decayed and went down together to destruction.

And now, after all this long story about the sportsmanship of the Greeks, I must try to tell you something of what their games were really like. Suppose that we travel away to the western side of the Peloponnese, where, in the territory of the little town of Elis, by the side of the river Alpheus, the greatest of all the Greek athletic festivals was held, at a quiet, out-of-the-way spot called Olympia, with neither town nor village near it. So famous and so sacred was the Olympic Festival, that the Greeks reckoned all their dates from the year (776 when it was first properly organized, and the First Olympiad was counted the beginning of Greek history.

We make our journey in the late summer of a year about the middle of the fifth century for the festival takes place at the second full moon after the summer solstice. Olympia has now reached the height of its fame and splendour. Libon, the great architect of Elis, has completed the magnificent temple of Zeus, which is the glory of the Altis, the sacred enclosure; and the new Stadium for the foot-races and the Hippodrome for the horse and the chariot races have been laid out. If we have luck, we may hear Pindar singing one of his odes in honour of the victors, and see some of the bronze statues that Myron and Polykleitus have made to celebrate the champions of the arena.

Several weeks before the festival is due, three truce-bearers of Zeus set out from Elis, crowned with olive and bearing herald's staves. They have journeyed to all the states and cities of Greece proclaiming the holy truce, and inviting all the Greeks to the festival. For three months, from the day on which they set out, no Greek dares to lift a finger against anyone, whether competitor or visitor, journeying to or from Olympia, no matter though he be his bitterest enemy, and within the sacred territory of Elis itself none may bear arms on any pretext.

The competitors have gradually been drifting into Elis for the thirty days' final training under the eyes of the judges, which is compulsory on all. The judges themselves have been trained for ten months in their sacred duties, and only those competitors who come up to their standard will be allowed to compete. Now that training is over and the games are about to begin, they call together all the competitors who have entered for the events, and speak thus to them. "If you have exercised yourself in a manner worthy of the Olympic festival, if you have been guilty of no slothful or ignoble act, go on with a good courage. You, who have not so practised, go whither you will."