babes.” Such is the picture which Galen draws of the professional athletes of his day, most of whom, as we have seen, were boxers and wrestlers; and we can judge of the truth of the picture from the mosaics in the baths of Caracalla, where we see represented, in all their brutality and coarseness, the portraits of those professional prize-fighters and athletes whom the degraded and unathletic mob and court of Rome delighted to honour (Fig. 23).[280] There they stand with their clumsy, ill-proportioned bodies, their scarred and mutilated faces, their small and brainless heads rendered yet more hideous by the top-knot (cirrus) in which their scanty hair is tied. It is the last stage in the decline of athletics, which had begun centuries earlier in the exaggerated honours paid to mere bodily strength, to that lower nature which man shares with the animals, and in which man must remain the inferior of the animals. Galen ends his argument by pressing home this lesson in a parable, in which he imagines an Olympia to which the heralds have summoned all the animals to compete. There man would not win a single event. The horse would win the long race, the hare the short race, the deer the diaulos. None of the successors of Heracles could compete with the lion or the elephant. And I expect, says he, that the bull will win the crown for boxing, and the donkey in a kicking match will carry off the crown. Yes, and in an elaborate history, donkey will record that “once he defeated man in the pankration, and that it was the twenty-and-first Olympiad when Brayer was victorious.” [Illustration: Fig. 23. Professional boxer, from mosaic in Thermae of Caracalla. Lateran.]