Over and above this, they are sent to a trainer, so that a good mind may have
a good body to serve it, and no one be forced by physical weakness to play the
coward in war and other ordeals.
(Plato, Protagoras, 326)The last sentence here is a reminder of the compelling interest of the state in the
physical well-being and development of its male citizens; they were to provide service
for the defence of the state in the hoplite army. In Athens, youths between 18 and 20,
epheboiunderwent special military training in two parts. The first year, they spent on
guard duty in the Piraeus and in the second year they had similar duties on the borders
of Attica. This was a kind of military service necessary in a state that was almost
permanently at war and constantly deploying military forces overseas.
At Sparta, naked exercises were institutionalised in a festival called the
Gymnopaediaeinvolving young boys and attended by the Spartan king (Herodotus,
Histories:6, 67). Here they were a prelude to more strenuous military training yet to
come, in a kind of rigour that the world has always associated with the Spartans.
At Athens, though, the gymnasium is also a place of relaxation. Socrates, well
into middle age at the time in which the Platonic dialogues are set, recounts that he
meets Euthydemus, the chief interlocutor of the dialogue that bears his name, in the
‘undressing room’ of what must be a gymnasium, though the place is not actually
specified:
I happened providentially to be sitting in the place where you saw me in the
undressing room, and had just thought it was time to get up; but as I was getting
up I had my usual divine presentiment.... the two men came in and walked round
in the cloisters.
(Plato, Euthydemus, 272e)The ‘cloister’ suggests a visual image of the later stoa, the colonnades that were
attached to temples that gave shade from the sun in the heat of the summer, and from
which the later Stoics derived their name, as the founder of the school, Zeno, did his
teaching there.
Gymnasia were municipally owned, marking the importance of their function in
the life of the polis, whereas the analogous institution of the palaestra(literally, a
‘wrestling floor’) was privately owned and is the scene of at least two other Platonic
dialogues. After his military service (for which men were liable until the age of sixty),
Socrates drops in on old haunts, not for exercise but for company and conversation
(Charmides, 153). There is a similar informality when Socrates meets Lysis.
If you will only go into the palaestrawith Ctesippus, and sit down and begin to
talk, I have little doubt that he [Lysis] will come to you of his own accord, for he is116 THE GREEKS