GREECE 



By J. GENNADIUS 



IT is not easy to give a connected or very clear account of sport 

 in Greece, since it is not practised in the systematic and methodi- 

 cal way which obtains in this country pre-eminendy, and also in 

 Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and elsewhere. There is, in Greece, 

 hardly any country life as understood in England ; but the townsman, 

 who gives himself a day's outing, with a gun and the inevitable game- 

 bao- sluno- across his shoulders, goes shooting in the somewhat pro- 

 miscuous manner of the French bourgeois who sets off a la chasse. 

 Of angling, also, there is hardly a trace, very few inland waters in 

 Greece lending themselves to this form of fishing. 



Yet sport had attained, among the ancient Greeks, to as high 

 a degree of perfection as athletics and the other arts of peace and 

 war : indeed, it may fairly be said that in their writings we discover 

 the fountain-head and starting-point of the sporting literature of later 

 times. I do not refer to the incidental, though vivid and vigorous, 

 accounts of the chase to be met with in Homer and Hesiod ; but 

 to the first special and complete treatises we possess on horsemanship 

 and on hunting from the pen of Xenophon. So complete and so perfect 

 of their kind are they, that William Blaine {Cynegetica. London, 1788) 

 is surprised "to observe one of the finest writers, the bravest 



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