It was an age of record-breaking. We see it in the expenditure on magnificent buildings and entertainments, in which each new public benefactor aimed at surpassing the work of his predecessors, and it is no wonder that the same spirit affected athletics. The inscription set up by the itinerant synod of the Alexandrines in honour of Flavius Archibius,[271] and recording his long list of victories, is punctuated by the incessant refrain, “first of mankind.” For example, in the Pythian festival he won the pankration at one Pythiad, the pankration and wrestling in the next, the pankration again in the next, “first of mankind.” Similarly, Marcus Tullius of Apamea in Bithynia describes himself as “the first boxer from all time”[272] to win a certain series of victories. Such phrases are of constant occurrence. A passage in Pliny’s _Natural History_[273] suggests that at Rome records were kept in long-distance running, and that running against time was a popular amusement. After describing various feats of strength, he notes how records in distance-running had been frequently broken. The record of Pheidippides, he says, long held the field until Philonides, and Anystis in Alexander’s time ran from Sicyon to Elis and back, a distance of 1300 stades, in a single day. “In the circus,” he adds, “we know that some athletes have run 160 miles in a day; and recently in the Consulship of Fonteius and Vipsanius, a youth of eight (surely a mistake for eighteen) ran 75 miles between mid-day and sunset.” The accuracy of Pliny’s statements on athletics is not beyond question, but the passage is good evidence as to the practice of the times. The second century was an age of antiquarianism. Conscious of their own inferiority, men thought to make up for their want of originality by studying and reproducing the forms of the past, regardless of the fact that these forms had lost their meaning. The writings of this period abound in allusions to the great athletes of earlier times. Lucian of Samosata sets forth at length the old athletic ideal in his dialogue entitled “Anacharsis,” in which he makes Solon defend Greek athletics against the criticism of the barbarian. The gist of his argument is that athletics make a man a better and more useful citizen, and fit him to serve his city in peace and war. But alas! the cosmopolitan Greek of his day had no longer any city to defend, and the appeal to civic patriotism can have carried little weight with men who claimed the citizenship of half-a-dozen cities at the same time. Philostratus, an equally enthusiastic admirer of the old athletes, seeks to find a cure for the athletic degeneracy of his own time by a return to the simpler and more rational methods of training of the past. But his appeal likewise fell on deaf ears. Athletics had become the monopoly of professional trainers and quacks, who regarded them merely as a source of selfish profit.