both freed from the abuses which took away in time from their merits,
could be adopted at the present day and encouraged by physicians with
great advantage to their patients. There is a strong tendency at present
in that direction.

Belonging to a different class were the contests of the athletes, who,
except in very early times in Greece, were people of the baser sort
whose bodies were developed to the neglect of their minds. Those who
underwent the severest training ate enormous quantities of meat, and
tried to cultivate bulk and weight rather than strength. They did not
compete, as a rule, after the age of thirty-five years. Euripides
considered these athletes an encumbrance on the State. Plato said they
were very subject to disease, without grace of manner, violent, and
brutal. Aristotle declared that the athletes had not the active vigour
that good citizens ought to possess.

The athletes and gladiators of Rome were mostly Greeks. Both Plutarch
and Galen deride them. The former condemned the whole business, and
Galen wrote six chapters to warn young men against becoming athletes. He
said that man is linked to the divine and also to the lower animals,
that the link with animals was developed by athletics, and that athletes
were immoderate in eating, sleeping, and exertion, and were therefore
unhealthy, and more liable than other people to disease and sudden
death. Their brutal strength was of use only on rare occasions and
unsuited for war, or for useful work.

In the time of St. Paul, the athletes were evidently abstemious, for he
wrote "every man who striveth in the games is temperate in all things,"
but in Rome, at most periods of their history this class of men was
notorious for grossness and brutality.

BATHS (_Balneae_).

_Greek Baths._--In Greece from very early times inability to read and to
swim were considered the marks of the ignorant. In Homer's time
over-indulgence in warm baths was considered effeminate.[41] The system
of bathing was never so complete in Greece as in Rome, but in the former
country there were both public and private baths, and ancient Greek
vases display pictures of swimming-baths and shower-baths, and also of
large basins for men and for women round which they stood to bathe. The
Greek baths were near the gymnasia. After the bath, the bathers were
anointed with oil and took refreshments. Sometimes a material consisting
of a lye made of lime or wood-ashes, of nitrum and of fulle