Physical training for military and athletic purposes was a prominent feature of Greek education, and criticisms of excessive enthusiasm for it, and of an extreme admiration for athletes, are fairly frequent in Greek literature (see e.g. Xenophanes, frag. 2, J. M. Edmonds, Elegy and Iambus (Loeb Classical Library, 1931)). Aristotle links his own attack with a renewal of his oft-repeated criticism of Sparta for cultivating only one virtue, courage. His distinction between courage and mere ferocity is well taken, but we may wonder about his view that strenuous mental and strenuous physical exertion ought not to be combined in one and the same period of life (cf. Plato, Republic 537b): has it any real empirical or physiological basis? The critical and negative side of this chapter is stronger than the positive recommendations, which are very brief. His main point is that training should be kept within the natural capacity of the body: as a teleologist, he believes that the body has certain natural limits to its development and strength, and that attempts to exceed them can only harm it.
1338b9 In our own day some of those states which have the greatest reputation for looking after their youth aim at producing an athlete’s condition, to the detriment of both the appearance and the growth of the children’s bodies; while the Spartans, who have avoided that error, nevertheless by severity of exercise render them like wild animals, under the impression that this is particularly conducive to courage. But, as has often been pointed out,1 the care of the young must not be directed to producing one virtue only, nor this one more than the rest. And even if courage should be the aim, they do not manage to secure even that. For neither among animals nor among foreign races do we find courage to be a characteristic of the most fierce, but rather of the gentler and lion-like dispositions. And there are many foreign races that think nothing of slaughter and the consumption of human flesh, Achaeans and Heniochians among those around the Euxine Sea, and some other mainland races equally or in some cases even more prone to it. Raiders they may be, but they are not endowed with courage.
1338b24 And of the Lacedaemonians themselves too we know that so long as they alone went in for strenuous exercises, they were superior to the rest, but nowadays they fall short of others in the struggles of war and of athletics. For their former superiority was due not to their drilling of their young in this way, but to the fact that they alone trained and their opponents did not. The first place, therefore, must be taken not by any animal quality but by nobility.2 One cannot imagine a wolf or any other wild animal engaging in a struggle against noble2 danger; but that is what a good man will do. Those who permit their young to indulge in excessive physical training, leaving them without education in essentials, are effectively turning them into mechanics,3 making them useful for one function only4 of statesmanship, and even for that, as our argument shows, less useful than others. We should judge the Spartans by their present-day performance, not by what they used to do. They now have rivals in the field of education, which formerly they did not have.
1338b38 There is, then, general agreement about the need to employ gymnastic training, and about the methods to be used. Up to puberty the exercises prescribed should be on the light side; nothing should be done that would interfere with the body’s growth, no hard dieting or punishing exertion; for these clearly have just that ill-effect, as is shown by the fact that it is rare to find the same people successful in the Olympic games both as boys and as men: their severe gymnastic training as boys has caused them to lose their strength. But when for the three years after puberty they have been engaged in learning other things, then the subsequent period of life may properly be devoted to strenuous exercise and compulsory hard dieting. Vigorous exercise of intellect and body must not be combined; each naturally works in the opposite direction from the other, bodily toil interfering with the mind, intellectual toil with the body.