The Greek national festivals, too, were in the last stages of decline. The better class of citizens no longer appeared as contestants, for the religious character of the celebrations had largely disappeared, boxing and the pancratium had become the favorite exercises, prizes more valuable than the wreath had been substituted, trickery and falsehood were less uncommon, and a class of professional athletes had been developed, whose members were usually of low birth and looked upon with little favor. They submitted themselves to an irksome and exacting routine which set them apart from the rest of mankind, left no time for other occupations, and made them virtual slaves of their trainers. Numerous attempts by Roman emperors to revive the glory of the ancient games, and to imitate them on Italian soil, met with no enduring success.[3] A structure quite as typical of its time and habitat as the Greek gymnasium of the Periclean age was the public bath, or _therma_, found in Rome and in every important provincial town in the days of the Empire. Both made provision for exercise, and contained a system of baths; though in the thermæ the baths occupied a greater part of the space, and the rooms and courts for exercise were fewer and smaller. Both added seats and walks and places of meeting and conversation for visitors, were lavishly decorated with objects of art, and were frequented by rhetoricians, poets, and philosophers, as well as by the common populace. Although the various forms of Greek gymnastics were introduced and occasionally practised at the baths, that which seems to have been most popular, and which gave the name to one of the halls or courts (the _sphæristerium_) was play with various sorts of ball, filled with air, feathers, or hair. Other exercises were movements of the arms with dumb-bells in the hands, and fencing with wooden swords against a post, as practised by the soldiers. Besides the large public baths, such as those of Caracalla and Diocletian, almost every private house of any size possessed its own sphæristerium, where light exercises, and especially games with the ball, were engaged in as a preliminary to the bath. All such exercises were taken at the whim of the bather, and only as a means of recreation or to heighten the enjoyment of the bath and meal which followed it. The resemblance to the Greek gymnasium, though at first striking, is therefore much less real than apparent, and the effect of the institution on Roman life was to favor its decay.