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their collapse and the destruction of their stadia.
Meanwhile the Roman world of the Mediterranean had become
an urban world. The city of Rome itself housed between a million and
a quarter and two million people in the second century A.D. It was
there that physical fitness first became an acute problem in the western
world, and for several reasons. First the defence of the city and of the
empire rested with a professional army which had its own effective
methods of producing physical fitness in its soldiers through weight
training. The army was not immediately concerned with the physical
fitness of the people at large nor was it any longer an obvious truth,
as it had been in the Greek city states and in the Roman republic,
that military success and even personal survival might depend upon
personal fitness.
Secondly Rome was an affluent Society. A vast labour force of
slaves privately and publicly owned, ministered to the needs of citizens,
and performed the more exacting tasks. Government doles of corn
provided for the basic needs of the people. Entertainment too was
provided at public expense. For many Romans the incentives and the
opportunities for manual work were lacking and exercises ceased to be
a requirement for day to day living.
Thirdly, with affluence went leisure. Public holidays were so numerous
that in the first century A.D. the working population of citizens
enjoyed, in effect, a 3 1 / 2 day week. The leisure could not be occupied,
as it had been in the Greek city state, in essential physical training,
or political activity. The citizens of Rome had no military service or
athletic contest to demand his fitness, nor could he significantly affect
the political conduct of affairs in the city or the empire except by mob
violence. In this situation physical deterioration became a problem for
the individual and unoccupied leisure became a social and political
problem. An important part of the solution to these problems was
the provision of facilities for physical training and recreation at public
expense. The massive walls of the largest public baths still stand in
Rome. They provided facilities for running and jumping and throwing,
for ball games, gymnastics, weight training and physiotherapy as well
as for swimming. They also catered for refreshment and social intercourse.
About sixty thousand people could take exercise at the baths
at any one time. Many of the traditional athletic activities were carried
on there, but the evidence of the ruins and the writings of the philosopher
Seneca and of the great physician Galen suggest that the exercises
and even the games were therapeutic and palliative. Neither
dance nor sport as we know them or as the Greeks had known them,
excited the languid spleens of the Romans, but fitness became a pre-
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