The position of general superintendent of the gymnasium was one of great dignity. Other officials were charged with enforcing good order and decorous behavior, and there was a variety of trainers and servants who gave assistance in one way or another. Like the boys in the palæstra, those who were about to exercise stripped themselves entirely naked before commencing—a practice which must have stimulated each to make himself an object worth beholding, and gave to the sculptor unparalleled opportunities for study of the human body in action and repose. Among the favorite occupations were running, wrestling, the broad jump with stone or metal weights in the hands, throwing the heavy stone or metal discus for distance, and throwing the javelin by means of a leather thong wound about it near the center and ending in a loop for one or two fingers. The javelins commonly used in practice were blunt rods about a man’s height in length, and thrown for distance more often than at a mark. A combination of these five exercises, known as the _pentathlon_, or five-fold contest, furnished a popular form of gymnastic competition. Another exceedingly popular sport was boxing, with the knuckles protected by long, thin, leather thongs wrapped about the hand and wrist, and there was also the _pancratium_, a sort of rough-and-tumble fight reduced to orderly form. In this the hands were left bare, and the struggle was continued until one of the contestants acknowledged himself defeated. Besides answering the original purpose for which they were laid out, the gymnasia came to be more and more the centers of Greek social and intellectual life, a gathering place of citizens for conversation and amusement which combined some of the features of a modern clubhouse with those of a city park. Philosophers and rhetoricians found a general audience or met their special pupils there, and thus it happened that each of the three great gymnasia at Athens became associated with a particular school of philosophy—the _Academy_, on the banks of the river Cephissus about a mile to the northwest of the city walls, with Plato, whose followers assembled in a small garden which he owned within the enclosure, and were therefore dubbed the “Academic sect;” the _Lyceum_ with Aristotle, whose favorite walk was here, whence he and his disciples were known as “Peripatetics;” and the _Cynosarges_ with the school of the Cynics, or followers of Antisthenes, who frequented that spot. It is these later and secondary uses of the gymnasium that alone give significance to such modern words as the German _gymnasium_ and the French _lycée_ (secondary schools), and to our own “academy” and “lyceum.”