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Excerpt from Lucian, Vol. 4 of 8: With an English Translation
Taking us back to the early sixth century, Lucian lets na listen to a conversation about Greek athletics between Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, and that legendary figure, the Scythian Anacharsis, who came to Greece in the quest of wisdom just as Solon himself had gone to Egypt and Lycurgus of Sparta to Crete.
K. G. Jacob, who tried to make out that Lucian was an ardent reformer, laid great stress on this dialogue as a tract designed to restore the importance of athletics in Greek educa tion by recalling how much they meant in the good old days But Lucian, who in any case was no laudator tcmporis acti, says nothing of any significance elsewhere to indicate either that he thought athletics especially in need of reform or that he felt any particular interest in them; and if the Anacharsz's had been written for any such purpose, surely it would have ended with the conversion of the Scythian to the standpoint of the Greek.
Let us say rather that Lucian, who was especially interested in Anacharsis and Solon, as we see from his Scythian, wished, perhaps for the edification of an Athenian audience, to present them in conversation, and shrewdly picks athletics for their theme as that feature of Greek civilization which would be most striking and least intel ligible to the foreigner, the child of N ature.'
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