The popularity of the armed race in the fifth century is partly due to that spirit of military enthusiasm which animated athletics after the Persian wars, and partly to its attractiveness as a spectacle. There is something amusing in the sight of a body of men racing at full speed in incongruous costume, and the comic element in the armed race is brought out in the _Birds_ of Aristophanes,[518] where Peisthetaerus as he watches the chorus of birds advancing on the stage with their quaint plumage and crests aptly compares them to the hoplites assembling to run the diaulos. Amusing incidents must have been frequent, especially in the crowding at the turning post. On vases, for example, we often see a runner who has dropt his shield, or stoops to pick it up.[519] A race of this kind naturally lends itself to variations, and of these we have evidence on the vases. A red-figured kylix at Munich shows two armed runners racing to the left, holding their shields in front of them in a decidedly quaint style (Fig. 59). Three others race in the opposite direction, two of them with helmets only, the third unarmed. The sponge and other implements hanging on the walls indicate that the scene is placed in the gymnasium where athletes are practising; but the idea suggested is undoubtedly that of a race in which the runners at the end of the lap put down their shields and ran the next lap without them, and then, perhaps, doffed their helmets also. No certainty is attainable as to details, but the vases establish the general fact that such variations did exist at different places.[520] [Illustration: Fig. 59. R.-f. kylix. Munich, 1240.] The comic element is still more apparent in the Lampadadromia and in the Oschophoria described above.[521] These old ritual races hardly come within the sphere of true athletics, although connected with the gymnasia and the training of the epheboi. They are of the type of events which we find in the modern gymkhana, and it is therefore unnecessary to describe them here at length.