eternal adolescence of the world, best illustrates what this
enthusiasm means for youth. Jaeger and Guildersleeve, and yet better
Grasberger, would have us believe that the Panhellenic and especially
the Olympic games combined many of the best features of a modern prize
exhibition, a camp-meeting, fair, Derby day, a Wagner festival, a
meeting of the British Association, a country cattle show,
intercollegiate games, and medieval tournament; that they were the
"acme of festive life" and drew all who loved gold and glory, and that
night and death never seemed so black as by contrast with their
splendor. The deeds of the young athletes were ascribed to the
inspiration of the gods, whose abodes they lit up with glory; and in
doing them honor these discordant states found a bond of unity. The
victor was crowned with a simple spray of laurel; cities vied with
each other for the honor of having given him birth, their walls were
taken down for his entry and immediately rebuilt; sculptors, for whom
the five ancient games were schools of posture, competed in the
representation of his form; poets gave him a pedigree reaching back to
the gods, and Pindar, who sang that only he is great who is great with
his hands and feet, raised his victory to symbolize the eternal
prevalence of good over evil. The best body implied the best mind; and
even Plato, to whom tradition gives not only one of the fairest souls,
but a body remarkable for both strength and beauty, and for whom
weakness was perilously near to wickedness, and ugliness to sin,
argues that education must be so conducted that the body can be safely
entrusted to the care of the soul and suggests, what later became a
slogan of a more degenerate gladiatorial athleticism, that to be well
and strong is to be a philosopher--_valare est philosophari_. The
Greeks could hardly conceive bodily apart from psychic education, and
physical was for the sake of mental training. A sane, whole mind could
hardly reside in an unsound body upon the integrity of which it was