A guide to the history of physical education

The year 400 B.C. may be taken as marking roughly the close of the two or three centuries which witnessed the gradual development and culmination of physical training in Greece. Meanwhile a people differing widely from the cultured, reflective, beauty-loving Athenian in character and ideals had been establishing itself on the banks of the Tiber, and was already beginning to display a military prowess and a genius for organization that were to make Rome mistress of Italy within the next hundred and fifty years, extend its sway over the Mediterranean states in another century, and finally achieve world empire. The early Roman possessed some traits in common with the Spartan. He was first of all a man of affairs, intensely practical, and interested in things whose usefulness was apparent. A stranger to the Greek passion for beauty, he considered vague and worthless the notion of harmonious development as something desirable for its own sake. Education should fit a man for his work in the world. It was to make of him a good citizen and a capable soldier, ready to play his part in public life. Bodily exercise was desirable only as it gave robust health and prepared for military service. Music was an unprofitable art, and anything more than the rudiments of literary training was unnecessary. Until the time of the later emperors the state did not concern itself in any way with education, but left it altogether in the parents’ hands.

So long as Roman education was free from foreign influence, i.e., down to the middle of the third century B.C., it was given in the home and by the parents. Schools, if they existed at all, were few and relatively unimportant. In free intercourse with his father and mother the boy received moral and religious instruction and became acquainted with ancestral traditions, mastered the rudiments of reading, writing, and counting, and acquired experience in the care of the estate and the management of a household. Among his games, exercises with the ball were especially popular, but even his childish sports must have felt the influence of the military career that awaited him. As he approached the age when he must be enrolled among the citizens and assume a man’s obligations, both civil and military, companionship with his father on the streets and in the forum completed the necessary preparation for public life. Now, too, he met with other young men for military exercises on the Field of Mars, which lay between the Tiber and the foot of the city hills. They practised running, jumping, throwing, and the use of weapons, and learned to swim in the neighboring stream.

During the larger part of the period of conquest which terminated in universal empire, and until the Roman army was reorganized as a mercenary body of professional troops under Caius Marius, about a hundred years before the beginning of the Christian era, every citizen except those of the lowest class was liable to military service between the ages seventeen and sixty. The older men (forty-seven to sixty years) acted as home guards or did garrison duty only, except in times of emergency, but the younger legionary might be called out for from sixteen to twenty campaigns in the field, unless earlier disabled by honorable wounds. Army life, therefore, became an educational factor of the first rank. Under the earlier (Servian) plan of enrolment citizens above a certain minimum property rating were grouped in five classes according to wealth, beginning with the richest, and if chosen served without pay and also furnished their own equipment and rations. The first class was protected by helmet, cuirass, greaves, and shield, and fought with long lance and sword. The second and third were not so completely armed, but with the first constituted the heavy infantry, arranged in three parallel lines for battle. The fourth and fifth wore no defensive armor, but were supplied with lances and javelins, or other light weapons. Each “legion” contained twenty centuries of the first class, five each of the second, third and fourth, and seven of the fifth—a total of three thousand heavy and twelve hundred light infantry, to which three hundred horsemen were added. The latter, who rode without saddle or stirrups, played only a minor part in the wars of the Republic. Soldiers were called out in the spring, and disbanded at the close of the summer campaign.

Various modifications had been introduced before the conquest of Italy was completed. The state assumed the cost of field expenses, and age rather than wealth became the basis of division into groups. The youngest troops now formed the light-armed centuries, and the older and more experienced men were distributed among the three successive lines which were to withstand the heavy shock of battle. The short, two-edged sword for thrusting had become the favorite weapon. The enemy was first attacked with a shower of light javelins, which might easily transfix a shield and render it useless, and then the sword was used for personal combat at close quarters. The soldier’s clothing consisted of nothing but a woolen tunic which did not reach his knees, hob-nailed sandals, and a cloak or hooded cape. His ration was usually wheat, served out once a month or oftener at the rate of about a bushel a month per man, ground in hand mills as needed and made into cakes or porridge. Barley might be substituted, and meat was an accessory, if issued at all. The average day’s march was fifteen miles, preferably accomplished in the morning hours. Whatever the climate or the condition of the roads, the legionary carried, besides his clothing, armor and weapons, a supply of wheat sufficient for two weeks or more, a pot for cooking, several long stakes for the palisade about the nightly camp, and perhaps intrenching tools or other implements—a total estimated by Colonel Dodge at something more than eighty-five pounds, or considerably over half his own weight. The camp site must then be fortified by means of a ditch, mound, and palisade extending entirely around it.

For such a strenuous life the recruit was prepared and the veteran kept fit by a training to the severity of which the name of the army (exercitus) bears witness. There was steady drill in marching forward and to the rear, or by either flank, in wheeling, changing from line to column and back again, and taking open or close orders. Practice marches of twenty miles or so were executed under full equipment and at the regular rate of four miles an hour, or with forced marching at five miles an hour. They were made to run, jump, climb, swim, hurl the javelin, and fight with swords against posts set firmly in the ground, taking care through all the movements of attack and defense to keep the body covered with the shield. The operation of intrenching camp, and of attacking or defending it, was rehearsed. In peace times there might be employment on public works, such as roads, canals, bridges, fortifications, amphitheaters, or aqueducts.

It was not until the third century before Christ that the influence of Greek literature, philosophy, and art began to be felt in Rome, introduced through contact with Greek colonies in Italy and Sicily, by Greek slaves, and by Romans who had sojourned in Greece. But the new culture awakened such interest and spread with such rapidity that by the time Greece had become a Roman province, soon after the middle of the succeeding century, it had profoundly modified the scheme of Roman education, except on the side of physical training. The boy’s earliest instruction, received at home or in a private school, still included reading, writing, and reckoning. He was afterwards sent to a secondary school, where the chief subject of study was the writings of favorite Greek and Latin poets, and the practical end sought was accuracy and facility in the use of the two languages. To these a little music and applied geometry might be added. Young men who were looking forward to public life received further preparation in schools of rhetoric. These taught the art of effective speaking, as needed in the law courts, before a popular assembly, or in the senate. The home life of the boy had thus lost its earlier place as chief factor in education, and the old training for domestic, political, and religious duties had been replaced by one essentially grammatical and oratorical.

Military service, meanwhile, had ceased to perform its part in national discipline, for during the last century of the Republic it was committed to mercenary troops, and these developed into a standing army under the Empire. While the Greek gymnastics was introduced to some extent among the Romans of the upper class, it never acquired a hold upon the popular mind or entered as an important factor into education in the fosterland. Its pedagogical aim had become obscured, and the great national games which once exhibited its most perfect product had fallen into ill repute. The Roman nature lacked that intense love of competition which was so characteristic of the Greek. The exercises of the palæstra and the gymnasium, an inexhaustible mine of subjects for the painters of red-figured Greek vases in the latter half of the fifth century B.C., were nothing more than idle amusements to a people bent upon world conquest. They were disgusted at the nakedness of the performers, which had been the inspiration of sculptors like Myron, Phidias, Polycletus, Praxiteles, and Lysippus; and the sight of young athletes contending in generous rivalry in such events as made up the pentathlon could have aroused little interest in a generation accustomed to the thrills of the circus and the amphitheater.

The Greek national festivals, too, were in the last stages of decline. The better class of citizens no longer appeared as contestants, for the religious character of the celebrations had largely disappeared, boxing and the pancratium had become the favorite exercises, prizes more valuable than the wreath had been substituted, trickery and falsehood were less uncommon, and a class of professional athletes had been developed, whose members were usually of low birth and looked upon with little favor. They submitted themselves to an irksome and exacting routine which set them apart from the rest of mankind, left no time for other occupations, and made them virtual slaves of their trainers. Numerous attempts by Roman emperors to revive the glory of the ancient games, and to imitate them on Italian soil, met with no enduring success.⁠[3]

A structure quite as typical of its time and habitat as the Greek gymnasium of the Periclean age was the public bath, or therma, found in Rome and in every important provincial town in the days of the Empire. Both made provision for exercise, and contained a system of baths; though in the thermæ the baths occupied a greater part of the space, and the rooms and courts for exercise were fewer and smaller. Both added seats and walks and places of meeting and conversation for visitors, were lavishly decorated with objects of art, and were frequented by rhetoricians, poets, and philosophers, as well as by the common populace. Although the various forms of Greek gymnastics were introduced and occasionally practised at the baths, that which seems to have been most popular, and which gave the name to one of the halls or courts (the sphæristerium) was play with various sorts of ball, filled with air, feathers, or hair. Other exercises were movements of the arms with dumb-bells in the hands, and fencing with wooden swords against a post, as practised by the soldiers. Besides the large public baths, such as those of Caracalla and Diocletian, almost every private house of any size possessed its own sphæristerium, where light exercises, and especially games with the ball, were engaged in as a preliminary to the bath. All such exercises were taken at the whim of the bather, and only as a means of recreation or to heighten the enjoyment of the bath and meal which followed it. The resemblance to the Greek gymnasium, though at first striking, is therefore much less real than apparent, and the effect of the institution on Roman life was to favor its decay.

Between the pan-Hellenic festivals celebrated in the stadium and hippodrome at Olympia in the time of Pericles, and those public spectacles which crowded the amphitheater and circus of the degenerate Roman world during the first centuries of the Christian era, a greater contrast can be drawn. The chariot races of the Circus Maximus and the gladiatorial combats, the contests of men with beasts, or those of beasts with one another in the Coliseum, reveal the changed type of civilization, and also mark the last stages of athletic professionalism. The charioteer and the gladiator were either prisoners of war, slaves, condemned criminals, or freedmen who adopted the calling from choice. They were trained in special schools, and unless the property of private citizens, were commonly let out by their owners to any person who desired their services.