Some Motives in Pagan Education Author:McCarthy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III GEEEK ATHLETICS IN HOMERIC AND EARLY HISTORIC TIMES The Homeric poems bear repeated evidence of the Greek love of competition. There is mention... more » of games celebrated on various occasions such as the entertainment of a guest, the death of a hero, etc. And it would seem that the perfection and skill portrayed in the descriptions of the athletic contests in the Iliad and the Odyssey could not belong to a people beginning an athletic life. "The descriptions of the games in the Iliad could only have been written by a poet living among an athletic people with a long tradition of athletics, and such are the Achaeans."24 There is a marked diversity of contests. The wooers make pastime for themselves with casting quoits and spears.25 Then we have descriptions of foot-races, wrestling, boxing, throwing weights,26 besides chariot races.27 Euryalius, the Phaeacian, offends Odysseus by taking him for one unskilled in contests, a merchant perhaps. Odysseus resents the implication in the following words: "0 stranger, basely thou speakest; as the fool of men art thou."28 Odysseus entered the contests and outstripped all. Besides, he further shames the boastful Phaeacian by telling of the prowess of his youth and of his having contended with the gods themselves. He, moreover, speaks of a more remote past when men were more valiant and when men and gods commonly contended.29 This would point to the tradition at least of a well-developed athletic life even before the grey-dawn of the Homeric age. 24 Gardiner, Gk. Athl. Sports and Pest. Lond., 1910, p. 11. 25 Od. IV, 626. 2 Od. VIII, 160 ff. 2711. II, 697; XXIII, 630; etc. 2 Cf. Od. VIII, 166. 2 VIII, 220 ff. A detailed description of one of these contests is given in the eighteenth book of the Odyssey but the ...« less