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occupation, even an obsession. The works of Galen who devised and
classified exercises and activities to produce specific and foreseeable
effects upon the body were an important contribution to physical
education. He was probably the first to write or to find it necessary
to write that enjoyment was a necessary ingredient in physical training.
Such a thought would not have occured to Plato or to Aristotle for whom
the pill of training needed no sugar.
The Roman Empire finally broke up, corrupted from within and
beset from without by tribal invaders more virile in body and spirit
than the soldiers and citizens of Roman towns and cities. Niether the
concern of physicians nor an extensive government programme or physical
recreation and fitness were sufficient to prevent the collapse of
an effete political and social organisation.
There is a brief postscript to this thumb nail sketch of the interest
in fitness in the Graeco Roman world. The word for physical training
used by Plato and Aristotle was ascesis. The words ascètes and athletes,
ascetic and athletic, were almost interchangeable. This training, was
hard and even painful, and was not merely manifested in athletic prowess
but enabled man as a whole to reach and fulfil his highest functions
as individual and citizen. As competitive athletics became specialised
and commercialised the ascetic and the athletic ideal drifted apart.
The early Christians took the Platonic idea of physical training (ascesis)
and directed it away from competitive sport towards training of the
body for service to the Kingdom of God. Later still in the Christian community
of the fourth century A.D. asceticism became identified, not
with general preparation for service, but with a particular form of religious
life, monasticism. In this particular sense asceticism has generally
been inimical to sport and to dancing. But at a time when the practice of
sport was debased and training for sport lost its ennobling function,
fitness for service to fellow men and to a religious community offered,
an ideal and a motive for physical training which outlived the Roman
Empire.
The downfall of Rome was the downfall of large scale urban civilization
with its water supplies and its sewers, its great public buildings,
its facilities for physical recreation and training, and its welfare
services. After many centuries of rural and small town life we are once
more living in a large scale urban civilisation. Even those who live in
the country tend more and more to take their entertainment, their
sport and recreation and their cultural pattern from the towns.
In some respects history is repeating itself. There are striking similarities
in the present day trends in physical recreation and training
with those of ancient Rome, but there are also significant differences.
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