If only Charger fans...if only...
Posted on 06/11/2007 3:58:10 PM PDT by blam
Tablets tell all: ancient athletes flogged for sins
Allan Hall, Berlin
June 7, 2007
AN ANCIENT training manual for Roman athletes — carved in marble almost 2000 years ago — prescribes far worse punishments than a sending off or a week's docked pay if they performed badly in the Colosseum.
The manual recommends a flogging to get them to perform better. And the same went if they drank too much mead or behaved disgracefully with the local maidens.
The marble tablet was found in 2003 in the town of Alexandria Troas in Turkey, and deciphered only recently by academics at the University of Muenster in Germany. Applied to professional football players today, the whip would undoubtedly replace the half-time talk as the favoured discipline of choice.
The 1.8-metre-high, 90-centimetre-wide tablet was inscribed with the name of Hadrian, the emperor who built a wall in northern England. He sought to get the best out of his athletes.
The tablet, according to research leader Professor Elmar Schwertheim, also listed entry fees to games such as discus and javelin throwing.
"This find is a sensation," Professor Schwertheim said. "The Roman athletes were the best in the world and this gives an idea of how they came to be the best. It was intended for Olympic games of antiquity."
The experts, who deciphered the 1800-year-old marble plate with the rules set out by Hadrian, said athletes caught living the high life by "drinking too much or womanising" instead of practising were whipped for being "undisciplined".
The plate also revealed sanctions for any cities that embezzled prizemoney.
The professor is leading a team back to the site this year to search for new treasures.
GGG Ping.
Bloodletting ping
And which former collegiate among us wouldn't have been flogged regularly in those days?
And which former collegiate among us wouldn't have been flogged regularly in those days?
I wouldn't have. It wasn't mead...and they weren't maidens!
When they say flogging, do they mean scourging? or is that different?
If only Charger fans...if only...
Barry Bonds ping
You said it.
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Me! (of course I am a. Not an athlete, and b. Still in college Not to mention no longer a teen or twenty-something. Not even a thirty-something.)
"It’s amazing how often mature wisdom resembles being too tired..."
My old football coach did a pretty good job of discipline with lots of wind sprints and laps without water in the Texas sun.
I’ve often wondered why no one died of heatstroke although some collapsed. His favorite quip over the prostrate body was: “What you doing down there, boy? Looking down an ant hole?”
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