Firstly and above all the athlete must be born “with excellent gifts.” Strength and beauty are the gifts of Zeus, of the graces, of fate. They are bestowed especially on members of ancient and honourable families, and Pindar as a true aristocrat delights to enumerate the great deeds of the victor’s ancestors in war and sport. He has, too, to the full, the artist’s appreciation of physical beauty, and he never tires of describing it. But physical beauty must be matched by beautiful deeds; the athlete must not shame his beauty. Natural gifts imply the duty of developing them, and excellence can only be attained, God helping, by “cost and toil.”[119] Here, as Professor Gildersleeve has well said, Pindar gives a moral dignity to athletics; for the cost and toil are undertaken not by compulsion or for selfish motives but for fame. Even the desire for fame is not selfish. Victory is a delight and honour to the victor’s city, to his family, even to his dead ancestors. Moreover, the true sportsman “delights” in the toil and cost. [Illustration: Fig. 18. Charioteer. Delphi. (_Greek Sculpture_, Fig. 138.)] The expense of competing in the chariot and horse races was naturally far heavier than that of competing in athletic events; yet even the latter involved considerable sacrifice of time and money, and the services of the famous trainers mentioned by the poets must have been dearly bought. The toil, too, was not unaccompanied by risk. More than two-thirds of Pindar’s victors won their crowns in wrestling, boxing, or the pankration, events which involved no little danger to limb, if not to life. The chariot-race had been equally dangerous in days when the owners drove their own chariots. In Pindar’s time this was no longer the rule. We could hardly expect a Hieron or a Gelon to compete in person, any more than we could expect to find one of our own horse owners riding his own horse in the Derby. Yet we still find the owner occasionally acting as charioteer,[120] and more frequently still some son or younger member of his family.[121] Such, it seems likely, was the aristocratic youth whose bronze statue has been recently discovered by the French at Delphi[122] (Fig. 18). The element of risk must always add a zest to sport, and it certainly does in Pindar’s eyes. “Deeds of no risks,” he says, “are honourless whether done among men or among hollow ships.”[123] It follows then that the most necessary qualities for an athlete are courage and endurance. On the latter virtue Pindar, like his countrymen generally, insists even more than on courage, perhaps because the Greeks felt the need of it more. Heracles for example, Pindar’s ideal athletic hero, is a “man of unbending spirit.” Yet neither physical strength nor endurance is sufficient without skill, and skill can only be obtained by constant practice under skilful teachers.