174 SPORT IN EUROPE 



soldiers, the ablest politicians, the wisest philosophers, and the most 

 virtuous citizens of antiquity, so intimately acquainted with all the 

 niceties (of coursing, etc.), and describing them with a precision that 

 would not disgrace the oldest sportsman of Great Britain, who never 

 had any other idea interfere to perplex his researches." As a matter 

 of fact, Xenophon, in the peaceful retirement of his country house, 

 busying himself with his horses and his hounds, after having led the 

 heroic march of The Ten Thousand, presents to us the very beait, iddal 

 of an English country gentleman. And as the true English sports- 

 man firmly believes that fox-hunting and deer-stalking are the best 

 school for the British army, so Xenophon records his conviction that 

 horsemanship and the chase train men to be good soldiers. 



So deep and lasting was the impression of Xenophon's Cynegetictts, 

 by reason both of its intrinsic excellence and of its fascinating style, 

 that his admirer and imitator — Arrian, surnamed Xenophon the 

 Younger — essayed to bring it up to date by writing, some four and a 

 half centuries later, a corollary and supplement to the treatise of the 

 great Athenian. Two other Greeks, both, like Arrian, natives of 

 Asia Minor, and both named Oppian, have left us two iambic poems, 

 the one on "Hunting" {Cynegeticd), the other on "Fishing" [Hali- 

 euticd) ; and we also possess a prose paraphrase of a treatise on 

 " Hawking" ('I^efrt/ca) by the former of the two. 



The fifth book of the Ononiasticon of Julius Pollux, an Alexandrine 

 grammarian of the second century of our era (about which time the 

 two Oppians also flourished), enumerates the technicalities of ancient 

 venation. And to Athenaus, that inestimable and inexhaustible 

 chatterbox, we are indebted for the extant fraoments of Archestratus's 



