I go to a gymnasium three times a week. Itโs in a basement. It smells faintly of sweat and bleach. It plays music fit for dogs. Most of the other users are old or fat or both. But it works. I lift. I grow. I leave looking and feeling like a better version of myself. My glutes are symmetrical. My abs are a joy. My back is a lesson in geometry. I enjoy the progress. And yet, I canโt help but think of the real gymnasiaโthe original ones. Not these corporate torture chambers that exist to extract monthly payments from people who never show up. I mean the Greek institution. The gumnasion. The place where boys stripped naked to train their bodies, yesโbut also to refine their speech, discuss philosophy, and take part in sacred rites. Weโve got weights. They had paideia.
Frank Daubnerโs Gymnasia: Aspects of a Greek Institution in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East captures what weโve lost. Itโs the best short academic account Iโve read on the subject, though, being academic, itโs mostly unreadable unless youโve already decided that this matters. It does. What he describes isnโt a gym but a civilisationโa world in which beauty, strength, intellect, and civic responsibility were integrated into a single institution, one so essential that cities without a gumnasion, said Pausanias, could not properly be called poleis.
There is an unforgettable passage from Poseidonios, preserved in Athenaeus (12.527 EโF), in which he complains of Syrian cities:
Because of the abundance that came from their land, the people in the cities were free from the bother of the necessities of life… their gymnasia were turned into baths, where even their unguents were expensive and perfumed.
Itโs meant as a complaint. For me, it reads like a prophecy. Gymnasia, once places of civic and moral training, became spas. The pursuit of virtue was replaced with lotion. And so it remains. My gym has posters warning me not to โjudgeโ others. The men donโt sweat; they moisturise.
The ancient gumnasion was not just about aesthetics. It was a civic institution. It trained you to be a manโnot just in biceps but in bearing. As Daubner notes, in the late Hellenistic period, gymnasia became a โsecond agora.โ It was where the youth were inducted into adulthood through ritual, religion, and hard labour. You didnโt just deadlift. You learned to chant hymns to Hecate in the bouleuterion, as at Stratonikeia. You debated Homer. You trained your tongue as well as your thighs.
Itโs worth quoting Platoโs Pausanias here:
There is a Common Love, and there is a Heavenly Love… The love of youths is the Heavenly one, for it is of the male, and the male is by nature more capable of intelligence and virtue. (Symposium, 180dโe)
This wasnโt about cheap thrills. It was about using physical attraction as the starting point for moral education. And if that makes you uncomfortable, the problem is yours. The gumnasion was the home of the ephebic class. It trained men to worship Heracles and Hermesโnot just as gods of strength and speed, but as exemplars of character. They werenโt just gym gods. They were cult figures. In many cities, the gumnasion doubled as a religious site.
Modern equivalents? None. The state school is a warehouse. The university is a debt trap. The leisure centre is a fat camp. The gym? The gym is a hall of mirrors. Sterile. Profit-driven. Stripped of memory.
And yet, even in antiquity, the decline had begun. The gymnasia, as Daubner shows, spread through the Near East not always as a sign of vitality but as a means of cultural control. Many were imposed by kings. Some, like the one in Jerusalem under Jason the high priest (2 Maccabees 4), marked the beginning of collapse rather than renaissance. When the wrong people build a gumnasion, it becomes a parody. Something like the PSHE curriculum, but with togas.
What survives today is a word, misspelled and misused. Gym. Three letters short of the glory it once meant. But the impulse lingers. When I train, I think not just of hypertrophy but of history. Iโm not here to be prettyโwell, not just. Iโm here to be capable; to become, in the Greek sense, kaloskagathosโbeautiful and good. I know the second isnโt possible. But some things are worth trying for even when success is denied.
Suggested Reading List (in descending order of sanity):
- Frank Daubner, Gymnasia: Aspects of a Greek Institution
- Jean Delorme, Gymnasion (Paris, 1960)
- Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Duckworth, 1978)
- Louis Robert, โLe gymnase devientโฆ une seconde agoraโ (REA, 1960)
- Xenophon, Symposium โ because someone needs to remind us that charm matters
- Plato, Laws, Book VIII โ for when charm fails and order must prevail
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Related posts:
Hoppeโs Lost Civilisation: A Review of A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline
How Social Darwinism Made China the Most Successful Country on Earthโand Why the West Canโt Keep Up
Hippocrates on Health and the Fat Boys at My School
Ears, Stones, and Ghosts: Ancient Greek Theatre as Acoustic Engineering
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Men and women have ~equal genetic IQ on average. Female IQ may be culturally enhanced due to the Flynn Effect, if women get more schooling. Colleges that discourage debate, but censor opposing views, and that discriminate against white males, tend to get more submission and participation from females than males. Increasingly, intelligent males are going to trade school or STEM courses, while women are predominant in liberal arts colleges.
The Bell Curve for males has more at the extremes, with more geniuses and thugs than women. As a general rule, thugs should be discouraged from breeding. Men tend to work at more dangerous occupations (such as the military or manufacturing), and do not live as long on average as women. These factors indicate there will be some degree of polygamy. In societies that encourage reason and thought, the reasonable and thoughtful will tend to accumulate more resources and have more offspring. In societies that are based on predominance of organized force, those controlling the force will tend to have a similar advantage in mating.
Before ~1200 BCE, human brains operated differently, with less bilateral communication. A voice from one side to the other was perceived as an external communication (according to Julian Jaynes). For instance, Themistes were heard as decrees from the goddess Themis, not internal voices. Henry Sumner Maine also wrote about this topic, particularly the first four chapters of his classic book Ancient Law.
Then the Bronze Age Collapse occurred, with several stressing factors, from droughts, volcanic eruptions, migrations, disruption of trade, and wars. This must have put a premium on intelligence and creativity, over submission to authority and tradition. The collapse triggered radical changes in consciousness. We became more dependent on the corpus callosum, anterior commissure, hippocampal commissure, and posterior commissure (which connected bilaterally), written records, and communication.
I’m not sure about these claims. I tend to believe that people, in all times and all places, have had broadly similar thought processes – allowing, that is, for the usual group differences
The earliest known fossils of homo sapiens date ~300,000 years ago. Our human cousins have likely been around longer. Nearly all non-African populations have on average 1-2% Neanderthal DNA. Some Asians have Denisovan DNA.
While Neanderthals brains were slightly larger on average, Sapien brains are more globular and this enables expansion of the parietal and cerebellar regions of the brain, greater neural connectivity (esp. in the prefrontal cortex), and better reasoning. This led to greater language development, symbolic thought, and cultural innovation.
So, evolution occurring in different environments can lead to different genetic changes in brain structure and this influences culture. In turn, culture is part of environment and influences genetics.
Jaynes posits that the Bronze Age Collapse was too swift and recent to have caused significant genetic evolution. Rather, he posits cultural evolution occurred because of radical changes in the environment (e.g. mass migrations, invasions, drought, collapse of trade and communication, and the rise of writing and literacy). (Yet there was genetic evolution starting long before the Bronze Age Collapse, leading to greater bilateral integration of the brain.)
For instance, in the Homeric legends, gods seemed to directly command humans; voices of the gods were actually commands from the right hemisphere interpreted by the left as external. While in the Hebrew and classical eras, religion shifted to distant mono theism or mono deism. This led to the agricultural, industrial, and scientific revolutions.
These radical changes occurred recently, relative to the time scale of humans on earth. A key to widespread adoption and permanence of these changes is communication within a widespread population, aided by written records.
To be human is to be a rational animal.
No person can be perfectly rational nor perfectly healthy.
Therefore, no person can be fully human.
Rather, human nature is an ideal toward which we should strive.
This requires changes in examples but not changes in the ideal.
There is no separation of the real and the ideal.
The real is the substance of nature, the ideal is based on the laws of nature.
So, human nature in one sense doesn’t change, but examples of humans indicate “human nature” in another sense change to come closer or more distant.
I asked an AI to critique your article. It replied:
The ancient Greek gumnasion wasnโt just a place to get strongerโit was where young men were shaped into kaloskagathoi (ฮบฮฑฮปฮฟแฝถ ฮบแผฮณฮฑฮธฮฟฮฏ), meaning โbeautiful and good.โ And central to that transformation? The Homeric epics.
๐๏ธ The Gumnasion: Not Just Muscles, but Meaning
In classical and Hellenistic Greece, the gumnasion served as both training ground and civic incubator. Young men (ephebes) were educated not just in athletics but in philosophy, poetry, and religious ritual. The aim was to cultivate aretรชโa harmonized excellence of body, mind, and character. The Iliad and Odyssey played a critical role here.
๐ How the Epics Were Used
1. Moral and Ethical Instruction
Homerโs heroes like Achilles, Odysseus, and Hector exemplified competing virtues: strength, cunning, loyalty, restraint, glory, and compassion.
Young men were encouraged to discuss their actions: Was Achillesโ rage admirable or destructive? Was Odysseusโ trickery a sign of intelligence or deceit?
These debates taught critical thinking, moral ambiguity, and the gravity of honor and shame in civic life.
2. Rhetorical Training
Recitation and debate over Homeric passages sharpened speech, timing, and persuasionโskills essential in the agora, the courtroom, and governance.
Debating why Homer portrayed certain gods or heroes in specific lights refined analytical reasoning and interpretive flexibility.
3. Embodying the Heroic Ideal
Homeric imagery guided physical training, too. Exercises often bore names or were framed as ways to emulate heroes like Heracles or Ajax.
Competitions were often infused with references to epics, linking physical prowess to legendary feats.
4. Religious and Civic Rites
The gumnasion was often a sacred space dedicated to gods like Hermes and Heraclesโfigures revered both in Homer and in local cults.
Training included ritual chants, recitations, and drama, drawing directly from epic language and stories to sanctify the development of character.
๐ง Why It Mattered
As highlighted in The Lost Gumnasion essay, the integration of Homeric epic into the gumnasion wasn’t nostalgicโit was pedagogical. Cities without a proper gumnasion, Pausanias said, weren’t true poleis at all. These institutions created citizens capable not just of fighting wars, but of reasoning, ruling, and remembering who they were as Greeks.
In many ways, it was cultural memory rendered into muscle, mind, and meaning. And todayโs gyms? They may echo with grunts, but not with the voice of Homer.