Greek athletic sports and festivals (1910) (14747178256)

Identifier: greekathleticspo00gard (find matches)
Title: Greek athletic sports and festivals
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: Gardiner, E. Norman (Edward Norman), 1864-1930
Subjects: Athletics Sports Olympics Fasts and feasts
Publisher: London : Macmillan and Co.
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University



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se it; success may en-gender braggart insolence. ^ But aidos puts into menshearts valour and the joy of battle. ^ Aidos, mark, notpassion, aidos, the child of forethought, and therefore the trueman feels for his might aidos, which prevents him fromabusing it.^ Hence while the bully inspires terror andloathing, the warrior and the athlete win in the sight of citizensand strangers grace and honour (alSota xapis).^ In sport aidos is that scrupulous sense of honour and fairness,which is of the essence of that much abused word a sports-man. No sports demand so high a sense of honour as boxingand wrestling, the events which, with the pankration, were mostpopular in Greece, and no sports are therefore so liable to abuseand corruption. It is aidos which makes a man a straightfighter, ei^iyxaxas the epithet with which Pindar describes the 1 0. ix. 100. 2 Q I 5g^ xiii. 10 ; A^. i. 65 ; /. iii. 2. 2 0. vii. 44. 4 p, iv. 173. ^ 0. vii. 89 ; cp, vi. 76, where xapis is aldoia as the giver of aiSws.
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Fig. 18.—Charioteer. Delphi.(Greelc Smilpture, Fig. 138.) 113 114 GREEK ATHLETIC SPORTS AND FESTIVALS chap. boxer Diagoras of Rhodes, who walks in the straight paththat abhors insolence. ^ The commercial spirit is incompatiblewith this feeling. Aidos is stolen away by secret gains, ^says Pindar in his praise of Chromius of Aetna. Was hethinking of the scandal aroused a few years before by Astylusof Croton when for the sake of gain he proclaimed himself aSyracusan ? It is tempting to suppose so. The resentmentthat this conduct caused was at least a healthy sign. Further,aidos is akin to and includes the principle of self-control,aMcf)po(rvvy), which is implied in Pindars favourite doctrine ofthe mean,^ and which plays so important a part in the philosophyof the next century. The self-control of the athlete was acommonplace, but aidos is something more subtle, more indefin-able, more effective than any rule or principle; and the com-prehension of it helps us to understand how even spo