>>45660962hey i just read something about this the other day
>There was a gymnasium near Athens for those who were not of pure Athenianblood. A gymnasium in ancient Greece wasn’t exactly the same thing as a gymnasium
today. For starters, it was an open-air affair. It was more of a leafy glade than a building
filled with parallel bars and rubber mats. People did do their physical training at the
gymnasium, in fact they did it naked. The word gymnasium comes from the Greek
gymnazein, meaning to train in the nude, which itself comes from gymnos, meaning
naked. But if you could take your mind off the naked boys (which many Greek
philosophers found difficult), gymnasiums were also places for socialising and debating
and teaching philosophy. Diogenes’ gymnasium was known as the Gymnasium of the
White Dog or Cynosarge, because a white dog had once defiled a sacrifice there by
running away with a bit of meat.
Diogenes, not being a native Athenian, was forced to teach in the Dog’s
Gymnasium, which is how one hungry and ownerless canine gave his name to a whole
philosophical movement. A fun little result of this is that any cynical female is,
etymologically speaking, a bitch.
