Ancient Olympic Games

For the Greeks, athletics had religious and cultural as well as practical significance, which helps explain why the poetry and philosophy of ancient Greece includes references to sports. The evidence of ancient discourses on the education of the future ruling classes is that training in physical development was just as essential as training in rhetoric, ethics, politics, and philosophy. The fact that participation in the Olympic Games and other athletic contests was restricted to freeborn males--women were not even admitted to the Games as spectators--further points up how much intellectual weight was invested in physical education.

Athletic training was considered an important feature of Greek culture and identity throughout the classical period. Herodotus makes much of the distinction betw

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rges that "common meals and gymnastic exercises have been excellently devised for the promotion both of temperance and courage" (Plato, Laws I), which in turn are elements of the development of individual and collective virtue, the highest virtue in Plato always being wisdom because of what its possession implies. Knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are essential for those who would use them in their highest application, which is governance. Virtue that is so accounted resides in the realm of philosophy, and in the Republic the progression moves toward the concept of the philosopher-king, who would embody the virtues associated with wise governance. While Plato sets wisdom above all the other virtues, saying that it "contains a divine element," he also explains that virtues of the soul that are not innate can be learned, or, more specifically, "can be implanted later by habit and exercise," which are features of physical activity (Plato, Republic 403). Plato explains that gymnastic, his word for physical education, "preside[s] over the growth and decay of the body, and may therefore be regarded as having to do with generation and corruption" (407). The fact that gymnastic entails concepts of change and decay, in Plato's scheme of thoug
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Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)