Da Vinci's Bicycle, Guy Davenport [best motivational books to read TXT] 📗

probably a misunderstanding of some rite now lost, some drama perhaps with masks, or some disguise of the goddess far more serious than a device to avert the lust of a river, and who knows what allegory, what sacred poem, lies behind that?

Elis as we approached it on its mountain plain was all honey, white, and green along the Peneus, which flashed crystal in its crooked course. The squares and oblongs of houses and temples were scattered without order among trees. The Greeks, who have such an eye for symmetry, like to dispose their buildings at odd angles, to show that geometry may please but not tyrannize. I saw instantly that I was coming to an extraordinary country town. All the grandeur of the Olympic games was at Olympia itself, which in its monumentality and profusion of statuary seemed more Egyptian than Hellenic. Elis, where the athletes trained and qualified for the games, and where the judges resided for most of each year, was elegant and relaxed. The sun had bleached and mellowed it. Athletes, trainers, and officials from all over the civilized world gave it a cosmopolitan touch, and yet as soon as we were in its streets, among poultry, dogs, farmers, old women with baskets of squash, and scholarly men with books under their arms, I saw that its identity was inviolate, peculiar to itself, rich of tone.

Our innkeeper cocked his ear, as if he were going to hear Scythian. We had come from Olympia, yes? His rho was more liquid than Pyttalos’s and his use of the dative smacked of Athens. A chicken and a dog watched us unpack the mule, in hope of something dropped.

Asses brayed throughout the night, as in every part of Greece, the bronze trumpet of the Fury Megaira. Crickets chirred, the nightingale trilled, two owls called to each other from distant trees. In the false dawn all the cocks of Elis crowed.

We rose late, the privilege of travelers, dipped fresh bread in hot wine, fought the bees from our honey, and sampled a plate of figs which the innkeeper’s wife, a provincial Hera, brought us as a token of esteem. I was, she had heard, writing the picture of Elis for the Romaioi. I looked at Pyttalos without catching his eye. Would I mention the inn, its moderate prices, its desire to accommodate the better sort of traveler? I do. It is the Xenodokheion Hermes on the Hodos Marathonos. The straw is clean, the wine salubrious, the bread excellent.

Lykas had put on a fresh tunic, Pyttalos had appeared with his staff, and we set off to see Elis.

The old gymnasium was the principal object of my visit, and we went there first. It is here that the athletes train before they go to Olympia. There is much about it that reminds me of all schools. Like my Lydian grammar school, it has a sweet quietness and intimacy which I missed at the Academy. It has the spiritual clarity of beginnings.

Tall plane trees line the tracks inside the wall that rings the Xystos, where Herakles himself once pulled up thistles. These are the training tracks. The races for the competitions are run on the Sacred Course, which is also within the walls.

Inside the gymnasium is the Plethrion, or wrestling floor, a hundred feet square. Here the Hellanodikai match the wrestlers by age, weight, and ability. A group of boys stood gravely around a trainer near a door at the far end of the gymnasium. Along a wall stand altars with statues. First there is Herakles Parastatos of Ida, before which the boys take the military oath of comradeship. Then there is a statue of Eros and beside it the god Anteros, or Love Returned, the principle by which boys in love with each other do not act like boy and girl, but sustain decency and chastity in their friendship. Beyond Anteros are statues of the Barley Mother and her daughter whom we may not name.

There is no statue here of Akhilleus, or altar. An oracle forbade it, but there is a cenotaph outside where on the equal day and night at the end of summer the Elean women cover their heads with their shawls, bare their breasts, and wail for the son of Peleus and Thetis.

A smaller gymnasium near the larger one is called the Cube, for its shape. It has a wrestling floor and a boxing ring. We saw the soft gloves hanging on pegs, and the strapped pouches with which the boxers were girded. Opposite the door stood a Zeus bought, as was inscribed on its pedestal, with fines paid by Sosandros of Smyrna and Polyktor of Elis.

There is a third gymnasium, for beginners, called the Moltho, or soft floor. Here we found a head and shoulders of Herakles in bronze, and a relief built into the wall showing Eros as an athlete holding a palm branch which Anteros, also an athlete, is trying to take from him, illustrating the balance and tension of comradely love, as they both wish to be the giver. The bow and the string cannot pull the same way.

On each side of the door to this third gymnasium there is a statue of the boxer Sarapion, who was born in the Alexandria which faces Pharos in Egypt. He brought wagons of wheat to Elis in the time of the famine, and one of the statues honors him for that. The other honors him for winning the crown of wild olive at the two-hundred-and-seventeenth Olympiad. The third gymnasium is also used for the recitation of poetry and oratory. The room set aside for this is called the Lalikhmion, after the man who had it built. Round shields painted with the signs of tribes hang around the walls.

The way from the gymnasium to the baths, cobblestoned and strewn with leaves, is called the Silent Road, and here we came to the sanctuary of Artemis Friend of Adolescents, Philomeirax, whether from her being the neighbor of the gymnasium or