For the cycle of piano compositions by Erik Satie, see Gymnopédies. The Gimnopedias were religious festivities and resistance exercises for young Spartans.
The Gimnopedias (Greek Γυμνοπαιδία, Gumnopaidía, literally "the celebration of the naked children") were religious celebrations celebrated in Sparta, in July-August, in honor of Leto and its children, Apolo Pitio and Artemisa. >
They consisted essentially of dances and exercises performed by the young Spartans, around statues representing the gods in question, located in a place of the agora called the χορός, khorós. Choruses of adolescents, ephebes and young adults who faced each other in dances that imitated the exercises of the lecture, entirely naked, before the other Lacedaemonians, foreigners and hilotas. Singles over 30 were excluded from attendance. The Spartan Megilo, in The Laws (Plato, I, 633), calls them a "fearful hardening ... of dreadful resistance exercises that must be endured with the violence of the heatwave"
Other Spartan holidays: Bibliography Namesake
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