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Updated: June 27, 2025
The Greek system of gymnastics originated as part of a religious ritual. The worshipper was to recommend himself to the gods by becoming fleet and fair, white and red, like them. The beauty of the palaestra, and the beauty of the artist's studio, reacted on each other. The youth tried to rival his gods; and his increased beauty passed back into them.
His healthy body, steeled in the palaestra, felt no fatigue after the sleepless night passed amid so many powerful excitements when he retired to his chamber and committed himself to the hands of his slave.
This wretched life seems to me contemptible, and I am weary of running after you like a calf after a cow. I am free-born, and of noble race, my father himself has told me so, and I am certainly no feebler in body than the citizens' sons in the town with whom I went from the baths to the wrestling-school." "Did you go to the Palaestra?" asked Paulus in surprise.
In their last fight my best cock had severely handled handsome Nikander's, and yet he wanted to dispute the stakes with me, but I would assert my rights! At least the quails should fight again, and if Nikander should refuse I would force him to fight me with his fists in the Palaestra, and give him a blue reminder of his debt on the eye.
It was sometimes termed the palaestra, though this name was afterwards restricted to the training-school of the athletes proper, who made gymnastics the business of their lives. It was also styled the sphaeristerium, or ball-ground, to which the nearest approach in modern times is the tennis-court.
The Greek philosophy, however, even its noblest Avatar, Plato, much less in the case of a Zeno or an Aristotle, was never able to achieve that which must be the practically proposed end of all higher philosophy that is in earnest; viz. the coming out of the narrow sphere of the school and the palaestra, uniting itself with actual life, and embodying itself completely in the shape of that which we call a CHURCH. This Platonism could not do.
But the robbers were to obtain no permanent success, either in the market-place or in Myrtilus's house, which was diagonally opposite to the palaestra; for General Satyrus, at the first tidings of their approach, had collected all the troops at his disposal and the crews of several war galleys, and imprisoned the division in the market-place as though in a mouse-trap.
Their finely-formed limbs, steeled by the training of the Palaestra, and the raven, chestnut, and golden locks floating around their well-shaped heads, were indeed beautiful. They were a band of the Ephebi, formerly commanded by Archibius, and to whose leadership more recently Dion had been elected.
"Rustics," said Commodus, smiling, even grinning, "who can fight as I am told your tenants can fight are always to my mind. Bring them here tomorrow, if you like. I'll see them in the Palaestra. I'm going there today after this function is finished. Bring your swordsman there. You know the door. I have given orders to admit you in my retinue."
He remembered the discus-throwing and thought to himself, "The Palaestra certainly sticks in his mind, and he has been bathing too; and yesterday, when he came up from the oasis, he strode in like a young athlete." That friendship only is indeed genuine when two friends, without speaking a word to each other, can nevertheless find happiness in being together.
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