“Amid the circle now each champion stands, And poises high in air his iron hands: With clashing gauntlets now they firmly close, Their crackling jaws re-echo to the blows, And painful sweat from all their members flows. At length Epeus dealt a weighty blow Full on the cheek of his unwary foe. Beneath that ponderous arm’s resistless sway Down dropped he powerless, and extended lay. As a large fish, when winds and waters roar, By some huge billow dashed against the shore, Lies panting, not less battered with his wound, The bleeding hero pants upon the ground. To rear his fallen foe the victor lends Scornful his hand, and gives him to his friends, Whose arms support him reeling through the throng, And dragging his disabled legs along. Nodding, his head hangs down his shoulders o’er, His mouth and nostrils pour the clotted gore. Wrapped round in mist he lies, and lost to thought, His friends receive the bowl too dearly bought.” Footnote 673: Theoc. Eidyll. xxii. 3. et 80. Mercurial. de Art. Gymnast. ii. 9. Virg. Æn. v. 401. sqq. Paus. viii. 40. 3. Poll. ii. 150. Scalig. Poet. i. 22. p. 92. Footnote 674: Il. ψ. 684. sqq. Among the exercises of the gymnasium which Hippocrates advises to be practised during winter[675] and bad weather, when it is necessary to remain under cover, is walking on the tight rope. This feat seems to have been so great a favourite among the youths of antiquity, that they applied themselves to it with constant assiduity, and arrived at length at a degree of skill little inferior to that of our mountebanks. It seems, in fact, to have been a common practice in the gymnasium to run upon the tight rope. The Romans, seeking in something to outdo the Greeks, taught an elephant to perform a similar exploit. Footnote 675: But Galen cautions youth against useless acquisitions, which he says are not arts at all: such as πεττευριπτεῖν, throwing the tali,—walking over a small tight rope,—whirling round without being giddy, like Myrmecides the Athenian and Callicrates the Spartan.—Protrept. § 9. p. 20. Kühn.—He then speaks very slightingly of gymnastic exercises. The studies he recommends are: medicine, rhetoric, music, geometry, arithmetic, dialectics, astronomy, grammar, and jurisprudence, to which may be added, modelling and painting.—§ 14. Cf. Foës. Œcon. Hip. p. 366.