GREAT MEN'S BODIES
his style; or of his forehead.… That he wrestled well."—Encyclopædia Britannica.
"Besides the ordinary training in the gymnasium, grammar and music; he was a pupil of Socrates during the last eight or nine years of that great reformer's life."—Ibid.
"Endowed with a robust physical frame, and exercised in gymnastics not merely in one of the Palæstræ of Athens (which he describes graphically in the Charmides), but also under an Argeian trainer, he attained such force and skill as to contend (if we may credit Dikæarchus) for the prize wrestling among the boys at the Isthmian festival."—Grote's Plato and Other Companions of Socrates, p. 115.
"A robust young citizen like Plato."—Ibid., p. 117.
So this mighty mind was no cripple; but lived in a fit house—an educated body. Such a man could hardly help taking sensible care of his body. Gladstone, axeman and long-distance walker, has partially developed his body and limbs. But Plato—the wrestler—and one of the best boy wrestlers in all athletic Greece—that tells the story. There never was a great wrestler yet who was not an unusually strong man. It could not take this grand mind long to see that, of all the tests of the palæstra, wrestling called for—and made—the strongest man—and, as in everything else, he never spared himself till he was at the head. What a treat to have known such a man! Sandwiched in as he was between two of the greatest minds the world has ever seen—Socrates his teacher, and Aristotle his pupil. And he the equal of either. And with such a native outfit as his, what a chance he had! And how he improved it!
253
