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. Doubtless Grecian Art owed its superiority, in some degree, to the gymnasium. Living models of manliness, grace, and beauty were daily before the artist's eye. The _stadium_ furnished its fleet runners, nimble as the wing-footed Mercury,--fit types for his light and airy conceptions; while the arena of the athletes offered marvellous opportunities for the study of muscle and posture, to show its results in the burly limbs of Hercules or the starting sinews of Laocooen. Many of the most lifelike groups of marble which remain to us from that time are but copies of the living statues who wrestled or threw the quoit in the public gymnasium. It is worthy of remark, in corroboration of this view, that the department of the fine arts which depended on outline surpassed that which derived its power from coloring and perspective. The sculptors far excelled the painters. The statue was the natural result of the imitative faculty surveying the nude human figure in every posture of activity or repose. Pictures came later, from more educated senses, and from minds which had first learned outward nature through the medium of the simpler arts. The ancient gymnasium, apart from its baths and philosophic groves, was far from being, as with us, a mere appendage of the school. Modern instructors advertise, that, in addition to teachers of every tongue and art, "a gymnasium is attached" to their educational institutions. In old times, the gymnasium was the school,--the public games and festivals its "annual exhibitions." The word _gymnasium_ has reference in its derivation to the nude or semi-nude condition of those who exercised there. But in their proper classical interpretation the public gymnasia were, to a great extent, places set apart for physical education and training. Gymnastics, indeed, in the broadest sense of the word, have been cultivated in all ages. The spontaneous exercises and mimic contests of the boys of all countries, the friendly emulation of robust youth in trials of speed and strength, and the discipline and training of the military recruit have in them much of the true gymnastic element. In Attica and Ionia they were first adapted to their noblest ends. The hardy Spartans, who valued most the qualities of bravery, endurance, and self-denial, used the gymnasia only as schools of training for the more sanguinary contests of war. So, too, the martial Roman despised those who practised gymnastics with any
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