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Updated: June 23, 2025
Are you aware that in Rome itself, millionaire after millionaire, emperor after emperor, from Menenius Agrippa and Nero down to Diocletian and Constantine, built baths, and yet more baths; and connected with them gymnasia for exercise, lecture-rooms, libraries, and porticoes, wherein the people might have shade, and shelter, and rest?
The gymnasia were universally frequented; and the great prizes of the games, bestowed for feats of strength and agility, were regarded as the highest honors which men could receive, the subject of the poet's ode and the people's admiration. Statues of the victors perpetuated their fame and improved the sculptor's art.
In the baths and gymnasia where all young men of free birth spent part of their mornings in running, leaping, wrestling, or swimming, he could daily watch the beautiful bodies of athletes in every variety of pose and action. He knew them as a trainer knows horses, or a fancier knows dogs.
Their reward consisted altogether in what they got from their scholars; and a citizen, who had learnt his exercises in the public gymnasia, had no sort of legal advantage over one who had learnt them privately, provided the latter had learned them equally well.
Mercury should be in the forum, or, like Isis and Serapis, in the emporium: Apollo and Father Bacchus near the theatre: Hercules at the circus in communities which have no gymnasia nor amphitheatres; Mars outside the city but at the training ground, and so Venus, but at the harbour.
The emperors built magnificent bath-houses, which included gymnasia, and sometimes libraries. What is now called the Turkish bath was very much in vogue. Dinner, or the cena, the principal meal, was about midway between noon and sunset. The fork was not used at the table, but only in carving; but spoons, and sometimes, it would appear, knives, were used by the host and his guests.
In the streets, in the market, in the gymnasia, at meetings grave and gay, in season or out of season, he raised his points of definition. The city was in a ferment around him. Young men and boys followed and hung on his lips wherever he went.
A large proportion of the boys at the 'Gymnasia, perhaps the majority of them, pass on to the Universities, some to qualify for the learned professions, others because it is the fashion in Holland as in other countries for young men who have no intention of following any profession to spend a few years at a University in search of pleasure and experience; but the experience in this case is peculiar and unique.
Wide windows already admit the light freely, and gymnasia with spacious halls and a variety of complex and costly apparatus were established.
It should be built in the form of a parallelogram and contain co-operative kitchens, dining-rooms, libraries, art-galleries and gymnasia. It should be, in fact, a great University, not unlike the great collection of schools at Oxford or Cambridge. All would be workers all would be students.
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