In sport aidos is that scrupulous sense of honour and fairness, which is of the essence of that much abused word “a sportsman.” No sports demand so high a sense of honour as boxing and wrestling, the events which, with the pankration, were most popular in Greece, and no sports are therefore so liable to abuse and corruption. It is aidos which makes a man a “straight fighter,” εὐθυμάχας, the epithet with which Pindar describes the boxer Diagoras of Rhodes, “who walks in the straight path that abhors insolence.”[130] The commercial spirit is incompatible with this feeling. “Aidos is stolen away by secret gains,”[131] says Pindar in his praise of Chromius of Aetna. Was he thinking of the scandal aroused a few years before by Astylus of Croton when for the sake of gain he proclaimed himself a Syracusan? It is tempting to suppose so. The resentment that this conduct caused was at least a healthy sign. Further, aidos is akin to and includes the principle of self-control, σωφροσύνη, which is implied in Pindar’s favourite doctrine of the mean,[132] and which plays so important a part in the philosophy of the next century. The self-control of the athlete was a commonplace, but aidos is something more subtle, more indefinable, more effective than any rule or principle; and the comprehension of it helps us to understand how even sports which seem at first sight brutal are yet under the special patronage of those fair-haired graces who, in Professor Gildersleeve’s expressive phrase, “give and grace the victory,” “from whom come unto men all pleasant things and sweet, and the wisdom of man and his beauty and the splendour of his fame.”[133] Such an ideal could not fail to exercise a lasting influence on athletics. Literature and art increased the popularity of athletics by appealing not merely with new force to the old motives of patriotism and religion but also to the growing aesthetic feeling of the race. To this may be ascribed the importance which the Greeks ascribed to style and grace. It was not sufficient, for example, to throw an opponent in wrestling, it had to be done in style and with skill. The cult of style grew sometimes, it would seem, almost into affectation. Aelian tells a story of a trainer, Hippomachus, who hearing the crowd applaud a pupil of his for throwing his opponent, at once chastised him, saying that he must have done something wrong, for the people would never have cheered a scientific throw.[134] We do not know the date of Hippomachus, but the story undoubtedly illustrates a tendency which actually existed.