From this detailed account it is evident that the Homeric athletes practiced what has been styled the standing wrestling, as distinguished from wrestling on the ground. In the former variety the antagonists struggled until they fell, whereupon they rose and struggled again. When an antagonist had been thrown three times the contest was decided in favor of the other. In the latter variety the contestants continued the struggle on the ground, after they had fallen. At a later period standing wrestling was practiced at all the great games. Plato, who was always alive to the value of these contests, as a preparation for war, greatly preferred standing wrestling, because it exercised the muscles of the upper part of the body as those of the arms, sides, shoulders, and neck. Wrestling insures not only health and strength, but also a fine carriage, and is an exercise well adapted to draw out all the resources of the athlete. Plutarch then rightly calls wrestling the most artistic and cunning of athletic exercises. In heroic times, it should be noted that athletes did not wrestle entirely naked. The oil which the Homeric heroes employed after the bath and in anointing the dead, was never used in their gymnastic exercises. The poet, who often minutely describes minor and unimportant things, does not mention oil in this connection. He certainly would not have passed over in complete silence, the use of oil in these contests had he been familiar with the custom. After the wrestling-match had been concluded, the foot-race was ordained, and prizes for it were offered by Achilles. The competitors were three,--Odysseus, Aias, son of Oileus, and Antilochos, son of Nestor. Odysseus was the victor in the race. That portion of the twenty-third book of the Iliad, that describes the duel with spears, between Diomedes and Telamonian Aias, the contest with the iron diskos, and the contest of archery, has been pronounced, on good internal evidence, to be a late interpolation. It should accordingly be considered as data for an account of the athletics of later times. The final contest at the funeral games for Patroklos was that of javelin-throwing. When Agamemnon and Meriones rose to compete, Achilles at once adjudged Agamemnon victor because of his well-known excellence in this feat. The scenes of the Iliad are too serious to allow the poet to dwell upon the amusements of the common soldiery. Only at the close of the poem, after a lull in the tumultuous succession of events, is a thought given to sport. But even here, excepting the chariot race, the descriptions are made with a certain careless brevity, as if the poet would dispose of them as quickly as possible, and as if he would say: “This is not my theme.” Achilles superintends the games with a lofty indifference, and even cuts some of them short, as if other things were on his mind.