The Gymnasium and Baths
As you first enter along the marble pavements, you feel the elegant colonnaded courtyard must have been the forum, the market place and heart of the city, rather than simply an outbuilding devoted to education and the culture of the body, the ancient Greek version of a school and heath centre. It is now thought there were originally three gymnasia, two for boys and one for girls. The open forecourt was where the boy athletes would exercise and train. Afterwards they would plunge in the cool water of the two pools, watched by the naked white marble statues of their gymnasiarchs or headmasters. These were wealthy citizens who were elected for a one-year term to help with the school’s finances, and also provided the expensive olive oil for body massage for those boys who had won free attendance by scholarship. Today these gymnasiarch statuas have been replaced by women draped in robes, headless to a woman, decapitated by early Christian zealots, the Muslim fundamentalists of their day, who took the statues to be relics of the pagan religion. Nudity offended them, and all bare statues were broken up or tossed into drains. Clothed statues were just tolerable if their faces were removed. Today the most striking statue is the handless and faceless black marble Persephone.
The columns of the porticoes were re-erected many times in the 1950s by the excavators, and on close examination, the apparent harmony of the whole reveals its mixed origins, for it was destroyed and re-erected many times in its history. In the east portico, for example, the Corinthian capitals are too small for their columns, which are taller and larger than this on the other three sides, presumably brought from somewhere else in the city by the later
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