American Sports Institute
Integrating the Body with the Mind and Soul: Arete, and Plato as an Athlete
Ancient Greek Athletics
by Stephen Miller, Ph.D.
© 2004 Yale University Press, Pg.240
Mind, body, and soul must all be engaged, must all be conditioned to lead a life filled with arete. Athletics must be present, but not dominant, in the whole man. It is no coincidence that the Akademy of Plato was first and foremost a place of exercise for the body, and that the best-preserved portrait of Plato, whom we think of as a thinker, a philosopher, and a man of letters, appears on a herm from his gymnasion and that he wears the ribbon of an athletic victor.
