These things kept alive the athletic meetings in Greece, and even preserved for them some celebrity. The sacred truce proclaimed during the national games was of inestimable convenience in times of long and bitter hostilities, and doubtless enabled friends to meet who had else been separated for life.(122) But the Panathenaic festivals were better exponents of fourth century taste in Greece. There music and the drama predominated. Professional displays became equally admired as a pastime and despised as a profession; and I have no doubt that the athlete who spent his life going about from one contest to another in search of gymnastic triumphs was held in like contempt by Brasidas and by Cleon, by Xenophon and by Agesilaus. In the days of Solon things had been very different. He appointed a reward of 500 drachmas, then a very large sum, for victors at Olympia, 100 for those at the Isthmus, and for the others in proportion. Pindar sings as if, to the aristocrats of Ægina, or the tyrants of Sicily, no higher earthly prizes were attainable. But we must not transfer these evidences—the habit or the echo of the sixth century B. C.—to the days of political and educated Greece, when public opinion altered very considerably on the advantage and value of physical competition. This being once understood, I will proceed to a short analysis of the sports, and will attempt to criticise the methods adopted by the old Greeks to obtain the highest physical condition, the nature of the competitions they established, and the results which they appear to have attained. The Greeks of Europe seem always to have been aware that physical exercise was of the greatest importance for health, and consequently for mental vigor, and the earliest notices we have of education include careful bodily training. Apart from the games of children, which were much the same as ours, there was not only _orchestic_ or rhythmical dancing in graceful figures, in which girls took part, and which corresponded to what are now vulgarly called _callisthenics_, but also gymnastics, in which boys were trained to those exercises which they afterward practised as men. In addition to the _palæstras_, which were kept for the benefit of boys as a matter of private speculation in Athens, and probably in other towns, regular _gymnasia_ were established by the civic authorities, and put under strict supervision as state institutions to prevent either idleness or immorality.(123) In these gymnasia, where young men came in the afternoon, stripped, oiled themselves, and then got a coat of dust or fine sand over the skin, running, wrestling, boxing, jumping, and throwing with the dart were commonly practised.