_Swimming_ seems to have been, as would naturally be expected, an exceedingly common accomplishment in the maritime states of Hellas; even at inland Sparta the boys must have learnt it for their daily plunge in the Eurotas. According to tradition,[469] there was a law at Athens that every boy should be taught reading, writing, and swimming: the proverb for an utter dunce was “he knows neither his letters nor how to swim.”[470] Herodotos distinctly implies that all Hellenes knew how to swim. “The Hellenic loss at Salamis,” he says, “was small. For, as they knew how to swim (as opposed to the barbarians who did not), when their ships were destroyed, they swam over to the island.”[471] He takes it as a matter of course that every sailor could swim. The whole crew of a captured trireme during the Peloponnesian War as often as not jumped overboard and escaped by swimming.[472] In a story in Athenaeus the boys of Lasos, on coming out of the wrestling-school, go off together for a bathe and begin to dive. A friend of Aristippos used to boast to him of his diving.[473] During the blockade of Sphakteria by the Athenian fleet, numbers of Helots swam over from the mainland to the island under water.[474] Scanty and scrappy as they are, these details show that swimming must have been taught to most boys, at any rate if they were ever likely to serve in a fleet. Plato twice[475] uses a metaphor drawn from a man swimming on his back, showing that this method was known. When a young disputant is being severely handled in a discussion, Sokrates intervenes, “wishing to give the boy a rest, since he saw that he was getting a severe ducking and he feared that he might lose heart.”[476] The phrase suggests that the sight of boys learning to swim was familiar. They could learn either in the innumerable creeks and bays of the sea, or in the lakes and rivers, or in diving-pools.[477] There were also various “gymnastic games” which young people played in the water together;[478] but of their nature nothing is known.