CHAPTER VII THE DECLINE OF ATHLETICS, 338-146 B.C.
From this time onward there is little change to record in the history of athletics. Competitions became more and more the monopoly of professionals and all the evils attendant on professionalism became rampant. The training of the athlete became more artificial and more irrational, rendering him still more unfit for practical life. The degeneration of the physical type and of the artistic ideal is evident in the statue known as the Farnese Heracles, a copy of a Lysippean original exaggerated by the copyist to suit the taste of a later and more decadent age. Those huge bulging muscles,[213] which even repose cannot relax, are a type of clumsy, useless strength, utterly foreign to the ideal of the fifth century, or to that of Lysippus himself as we know it from the Agias. Perhaps it was the type of those professional strong men who called themselves successors of Heracles as having, like Heracles, won the wrestling and pankration at Olympia on the same day.[214] The first of these was Caprus of Elis, who in the year 212 defeated, in the pankration, the redoubtable Cleitomachus of Thebes, who is sometimes supposed to be the original of the boxer of the Terme (Fig. 136).
[Illustration: Fig. 21. Farnese Heracles, by Glycon. Naples. (_Greek Sculpture_, Fig. 125.)]
A tale told by Polybius about the latter throws a curious light on the state of sport at the time.[215] He had, it appears, incurred the displeasure of King Ptolemy—presumably Ptolemy IV.—who went to the trouble and expense of training and sending to Olympia a rival boxer, Aristonicus, to compete with him. The contest excited great public interest, and the fickle crowd favoured the new man until Cleitomachus, exasperated at their attitude, taunted them with backing one who was fighting not for the glory of Greece but for King Ptolemy. This appeal caused such a revulsion of feeling that Aristonicus was vanquished, not, says our author, so much by Cleitomachus as by the crowd. With such hired prize-fighters it was only natural that methods became more brutal, and science deteriorated. The increasing weight of the caestus rendered boxing a contest of brute strength and fit to take its place in the Roman gladiatorial shows. The science of wrestling had also suffered. As early as 364 B.C. we read of one Sostratus of Sicyon who won the wrestling at Olympia not by skill in wrestling but by breaking his opponent’s fingers.