Читать книгу Old Greek Education онлайн

24 страница из 35

With this introduction, we may turn to some details as to the education of Greek boys in their palæstra.

§ 16. In one point, certainly, the Greeks agreed more with the modern English than with any other civilized nation. They regarded sport as a really serious thing. And unless it is so regarded, it will never be brought to the national perfection to which the English have brought it, or to which the Greeks are supposed to have brought it. And yet even in this point the Greeks regarded their sports differently from us, and from all nations who have adopted Semitic ideas in religion. Seriousness of the religious kind is with us quite distinct from the seriousness of sport. With the Greeks it was not, or rather seriousness was not with them an attribute of religion in any sense more than it was of ordinary life. They harmonized religion and sports, not by the seriousness of their sports so much as by the cheerfulness—a Semite, ancient or modern, would say by the levity—of their deities; for the gods, too, love sport (φιλοπαίγμονες γὰρ καὶ οἱ θεοί), says Plato in his “Cratylus,” a remarkable and thoroughly Greek utterance. The greatest feasts of the gods were celebrated by intensifying human pleasures—not merely those of the palate, according to the grosser notion of the Christian Middle Ages, but æsthetical pleasures, and that of excitement—pleasures, not of idleness, but of keen enjoyment.