Acrobatic feats of various sorts were attractive to the later Greeks from the time of Homer down. We have already mentioned one passage from the Iliad in which a driver of four horses leaps from horse to horse in motion. On the shield of Achilles tumblers appeared among the dancers on the dancing-place.[21] Patroklos ironically remarks over the body of Kebriones, as the charioteer falls headlong like a diver from his chariot when hit by a missile, that there are tumblers also among the Trojans.[22] In later centuries the Athenians evinced a great attraction to acrobatic feats. The story told of Hippokleides[23] reveals that high-born Athenians did not disdain to practice them. They appear to have formed a sort of side-show attraction at the Panathenaic festival, as such scenes occur frequently on Attic vases. Thus on an early (imitation?) Panathenaic vase from Kameiros in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris,[24] there is represented behind the driver a man standing on the back of a horse, armed with a helmet and two shields, while in front another appears to be balancing himself on a pole. But such acrobatic scenes as those of Crete and later Greece can not properly be classed as athletic. They betoken more the love of excitement than of true sport. The only form of real athletics represented on Minoan monuments, one which was classed in later Greece as one of the national sports, was that of boxing, which seems to have been the favorite gymnastic contest of the Cretans, as it always was of the later Greeks. Boxing scenes appear on seals,[25] on a steatite fragment of a pyxis found in 1901 at Knossos and, in conjunction with a bull-grappling scene, on the so-called _Boxer Vase_ found by the Italians at Hagia Triada (Fig. 1). The vase is a cone-shaped rhyton of steatite, 18 inches high, originally overlaid with gold foil. It belongs to the best period of Cretan art, late Minoan I.[26] This vase alone, if no other monumental evidence were at hand, would suffice to show the physical prowess and love of sport of the Minoans. Because of its scenes of boxing and bull-grappling Mosso calls it “the most complete monument that we have of gymnastic exercise in the Mediterranean civilization.”[27] The later Greek tradition of the high degree of physical development attained by the Cretans is proved by this monument.[28] [Illustration: FIG. 1.—So-called _Boxer Vase_, from Hagia Triada (Cast). Museum of Candia.]