Among the sports and pastimes of the Greeks, which may be considered as a kind of supplement to gymnastics, we must class first the chase, which Xenophon vainly hoped might be made to operate as a check on the luxurious and effeminate habits of his contemporaries.[679] But each age having its own distinctive characteristic, it profits very little to aim at engrafting the customs of one period of civilisation upon another. The world will go its own gait. Chuckfarthing and Pricking the Loop might as well be recommended to young gentlemen and ladies dying for love, as hunting to the population of a vain and foppish city, to whom wild boars and wolves must seem certain death. However, the country gentlemen, and the agricultural population generally, long in their own defence continued the practice of the chase, though in Attica the absence of wild animals, consequent upon a high and careful cultivation, had reduced it at a very early period to a matter of mere amusement. Footnote 679: In the early ages of the world, hunting we are assured led to the establishment of monarchy by accustoming youth whose brains were in their sinews to pay implicit obedience to their leaders in the chase.—Bochart, Geog. Sac. t. i. p. 258. But in remoter times, and in those parts of the country where game always continued to abound, there were never wanting persons who delighted in the excitement of the chase. Herdsmen, particularly, and shepherds, considered it part of their occupation.[680] Thus we find Anchises a young Trojan chief, who inhabited the hill country, making his lair of bears and lion-skins, the spoils of his own lance.[681] Sport, of course, it would furnish to bold and reckless young men, as lion and tiger hunting still does to our countrymen in Northern India; but from this recreation proceeded in some measure their safety, since where wild beasts are numerous they not only devastate the country,[682] trampling down the corn-fields and devouring herds and flocks, but occasionally, if they chance to find them unarmed, dine also upon their hunters. Thus the chase of the Calydonian boar, the tally-ho’s and view-halloes of which still sound fresh in song, was undertaken by the Ætolians and Curetes, for the purpose of delivering the rustic population from a pest;[683] and precisely the same motive urged Alcmena’s boy into the famous conflict with the Nemean lion,[684] which he brought down with his invincible bow and finished with his wild olive club. In like manner Theseus, his rival in glory, slew the Marathonian bull; and delivered the Cretans from another monster of the same kind.[685] He engaged, too, with a sow of great size at Crommyon on the confines of Corinthia, and slaughtered the pig, an achievement of much utility and no little glory. Footnote 680: Iliad, λ. 547. Footnote 681: Hom. Hymn in Vener. 160. seq. Footnote 682: Paus. i. 27. 9. Footnote 683: Iliad, ι. 547. sqq. Footnote 684: Theocrit. xxv. 211. sqq.