With this introduction, we may turn to some details as to the education of Greek boys in their palæstra. § 16. In one point, certainly, the Greeks agreed more with the modern English than with any other civilized nation. They regarded sport as a really serious thing. And unless it is so regarded, it will never be brought to the national perfection to which the English have brought it, or to which the Greeks are supposed to have brought it. And yet even in this point the Greeks regarded their sports differently from us, and from all nations who have adopted Semitic ideas in religion. Seriousness of the religious kind is with us quite distinct from the seriousness of sport. With the Greeks it was not, or rather seriousness was not with them an attribute of religion in any sense more than it was of ordinary life. They harmonized religion and sports, not by the seriousness of their sports so much as by the cheerfulness--a Semite, ancient or modern, would say by the levity--of their deities; _for the gods, too, love sport_ (φιλοπαίγμονες γὰρ καὶ οἱ θεοί), says Plato in his “Cratylus,” a remarkable and thoroughly Greek utterance. The greatest feasts of the gods were celebrated by intensifying human pleasures--not merely those of the palate, according to the grosser notion of the Christian Middle Ages, but æsthetical pleasures, and that of excitement--pleasures, not of idleness, but of keen enjoyment. § 17. The names applied to the exercising-places indicate their principal uses. _Palæstra_ means a wrestling-place; _gymnasium_ originally a place for naked exercise, but the verb early lost this connotation and came to mean mere physical training. We hear that a short race-course (δρόμος) was often attached to the palæstra, and short it must have been, for it was sometimes covered in (called ξυστός), probably with a shed roof along the wall of the main enclosure. There is no evidence to decide the point whether the boys went to this establishment at the same age that they went to school, and at a different hour of the day, or at a different age, taking their physical and mental education separately. And even in this latter case we are left in doubt which side obtained the priority. The best authorities among the Germans decide on separate ages for palæstra and school, and put the palæstra first. But in the face of many uncertainties, and some evidence the other way, the common-sense view is preferable that both kinds of instruction were given together, though we know nothing about the distribution of the day, save that both are asserted to have begun very early. Even the theoretical schemes of Plato and Aristotle do not help us here, and it is one of those many points which are now lost on account of their being once so perfectly obvious and familiar.