in Antiquity, the name given to any place set apart for healthful or invigorating physical exercises. The gymnasium took its name from the fact that such as frequented it exercised either naked (γυμνός) or clad only in a light tunic. The Greeks and Romans both attached much importance to the gymnasia, which formed an integral part of their systems of education; and the Greeks bestowed more time and attention on the gymnastic training of their youth than on all the other departments put together. There was no such thing as a Greek city of any size or importance which did not boast at least one gymnasiun. Athens had three great public gymnasia—the Academia, Lyceum, and Cynosarges, besides numerous private ones on a smaller scale. Solon considered these institutions of so much importance as to draw up a special code of laws for their management. Their administration was entrusted to a gymnasiarch, whose duties were to watch and control the youth, place them under proper teachers, conduct the periodical games and festivals, and pay the athletes whom he trained for them. In Athens the number of gymnasiarchs appears to have been ten, but it is not known how they took duty, whether in rotation or otherwise. Inferior in station, but not in real importance to the gymnasiarchs, were the "Sophronistes," or teachers of wisdom, who seem, however, to have watched over the moral rather than the physical development of the youth during their attendance at the gymnasium. Their number, like that of the gymnasiarchs, seems to have been also ten. Next in rank to them came the gymnaste and pedotribes, who had all the practical part of the teaching to do, and who assigned to the youth kinds of exercise adapted to the physical capabilities of each, which it was part of their business to study and know. The officers whose duty it was to prepare the youth for the day's exercise by anointing them with oil and then besprinkling them with dust, were called "aliptes," or anointers. The exercises taught appear to have been pretty much the same over the whole of Greece, though they seem to have been carried out with somewhat different views. Thus the Spartans looked on them rather as a sort of initiation into the sterner realities of warfare, while the Athenians not only made them subservient this end, but also used them as a means for imparting grace to the action and movement of the limbs. The chief games of the gymnasium were foot races, jumping, leaping, quoits, wrestling, boxing, dancing, the pancratium, &c., while the younger pupils practised also with balls, tops, and a variety of other games similar to those in vogue among the youth of modern times.

Remains of gymnasia have been unearthed at Naples, Ephesus, and many other cities. From these, Vitruvius reconstructed his plan of the gymnasium, of which an engraving will be found in Newton's translation of that writer's works.

From these descriptions we learn that the Gymnasia were not single edifices, but a group of buildings capacious enough to contain many thousands of people, and consisting of twelve different parts, viz.—1. The exterior porticoes, where the philosophers, rhetoricians, mathematicians, physicians, and other virtuosi, read public lectures, and where they also disputed and rehearsed their performances; 2. The ephèbeum, where the youth assembled very early, to learn their exercises in private, without any spectators; 3. The corycium, odyterion, or gymnasterion, a kind of ante-chamber, where they stripped, either to bathe or exercise; 4. The eleotherium, alipterion, or unctuarium, appointed for the anointings, which either preceded or followed the use of the bath, wrestling, pancratia, &c.; 5. The comisterium, or convista, in which they covered themselves with sand or dust to dry up the oil or sweat; 6. The palæstra, properly so called, where they practised wrestling, boxing, pancratia, and other exercises; 7. The sphaeristerion or tennis-court, reserved for exercises in which balls were used; 8. Large unpaved alleys, which comprehended the space between the porticoes and the walls with which the edifice was surrounded; 9. The styli, or porticoes for the wrestlers in winter or bad weather; 10. Other styli or open alleys, allotted for summer and fine weather, some of which were quite open, and others planted with trees; 11. The baths, consisting of several different apartments; and, 12. The stadium, a large space of a semicircular form, covered with sand, and surrounded with seats for the spectators.

in its modern use, sometimes signifies a school for gymnastic exercises; but on the Continent, particularly in Prussia, the higher schools, intended to give immediate preparation for the universities, are called gymnasia.