| WHEN we were at school we were taught that Greek national history began with the date — if our memory still serves — 776, b.c. That, as every schoolboy knows, was the first Olympiad, the first recording of Greek athletes in the plain of Elis. Every schoolboy also knows how great was the glory of the victor, and with what enthusiasm his success was acclaimed by the people of the city, honouring him with a statue in the market-place. No wonder the Greek athlete kept his body under, and submitted to the most rigorous discipline, knowing as he did that he was contending not so much for his own, as for the honour and glory of his fellow townsmen. The public schoolboy of our own age and country, for all that he has learnt in his Classics of the Olympic Games, has, it is to be feared, greatly failed to catch the Greek spirit. Those salad-bowls, and kit-bags, and gimcracks of every description which are lavished upon him as prizes at his school athletics would have seemed ridiculous to a Greek athlete, who was more than content with a crown of wild olive and the approval of his own people. And what the ancient Greeks would have thought of the revival, after fourteen centuries of disuse, of their national games upon cosmopolitan lines, where Greek no longer meets only Greek, but athletes of every nation, it is impossible to say. At all events, here we are now, living in the fourth Olympiad (new style), celebrating the games under the auspices of a King, with whose subjects and the peoples who speak their tongue the cultus of sport is well-nigh a superstition. Perhaps — who knows? — this friendly rivalry among competing athletes may bear fruit in the promotion of international peace. |
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