The training and mode of life of the athletes just described was obviously not suitable for all kinds of gymnastic contests. Such diet would have been very pernicious for running and jumping; wrestling and boxing and the pancration were their chief domain, and it was in these that the more celebrated athletes of antiquity, whose names have come down to us--viz., Milo, Polydamas, Glaucus, and the rest--were specially distinguished. Their rewards were of various kinds. The victors in the Olympian games were allowed to set up a statue in the Grove of Altis, at Olympia, at their own expense or that of their relations, sometimes even of the state to which the victor belonged; and at home, too, they very frequently had the same honour of a public statue assigned to them. When they returned from the games, they held a solemn entry into their own town, dressed in purple, riding on a car drawn by four white horses, accompanied by their friends and relations and a rejoicing crowd; it was even an ancient custom to pull down a piece of the city wall, in order to show that a city which could produce such citizens required no walls for its defence. Then followed a banquet in honour of the victor, in which hymns were sung in his praise. Rewards were also given in coin. At Athens, after the time of Solon, the victor in the Olympian games received 500 drachmae, the victor in one of the three other great national contests a hundred drachmae; in later times they even had the right of dining every day at the public expense in the town-hall (πρυτανεῖον), and they also enjoyed the honour of sitting on the front benches of the theatre (προεδρία). Moreover, most of the professional athletes, if they lived carefully and abstained from all departures from their customary diet and mode of life, were able to continue their contests for a good many years, sometimes thirty or more, and were thus able to pile honour on honour and reward on reward. The unlimited admiration which the mass of the people, and especially the youth, who were easily won by exhibitions of strength, gave to these combatants, who seem to us at the present day to have been but rough prize-fighters, stands in strong contrast to the judgment pronounced on them by men of real intellectual development, especially by the philosophers. They rightly complained that this one-sided development of the body was perfectly useless to the State, since the athletes were only capable in their own domain, but were quite unable to endure fatigues and undertake military service; they pointed out that the mode of life which aimed merely at increasing the bodily strength tended to dwarf the intellect, and that, therefore, the athletes were absolutely useless for political as well as for all intellectual purposes. Wise educators, therefore, disapproved of athletic training, and, indeed, the greatest warriors and statesmen of Greece seem always to have despised it. CHAPTER IX. MUSIC AND DANCING.