The Iliad: The Benefits Of Swimming

Written testament to early swimming falls within the past 3,000 years. The Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey all contain references to swimming. Thucydides said the activity in scripts that are 2,400 years old. Murals of the Tepantila House at Teotihuacan near Mexico City show men taking the plunge into the waters of Tlalocan, the heavenly pool of Tlaloc, god of water. Many of the world's ancient civilisations swam, including the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, Persians, Romans and Greeks. Bathing was a tradition in the Byzantine Empire, with Constantinople at the helm, and among the Romans Julius Caesar was honored for his swimming abilities, once wading successfully from a stricken ship to the safety of shore for some 300m clutching important documents that had to be kept

A small legion of other generals, leaders and royalty, including Charlemagne and Louis XI, also swam and talked about the activity for its health, physical and psychological benefits. Literature is awash with swimming reference but the first substantial volume that dealt with the activity as a sport was De Arte Natandi, the Latin tome penned by Everard Digby in 1587. He claimed that swimming was an art, in the same sense that the term could be set to war, agriculture, navigation and medicine. Digby wrote of the natural predisposition of man in water being one in which the feet sank and the face stayed floating. People drowned because they thrashed about and used arms and legs in a “disorderly fashion”. Basic lifesaving instructors and swimming teachers taught, many years later, the veracity of the message: take a person who cannot swim, ask him or her to float simply by taking a deep breath and lying on water and, in the order of panic, inflated lungs will keep the body