VIPs among the visitors then may have been carried up by teams of slaves, but most people just scrambled up on foot to conquer the best seats. Today most of us avoid stairs, also for descending, if there is an elevator or escalator. Yet we pay the gym for working out on its Stairmaster or go on a mountaineering holiday. Walking too has become unpopular. Airports with their people movers save passengers the trouble of having to use their legs to get to the boarding gate.
City dwellers take the bus or grab a taxi to negotiate a few blocks.
Suburbanites hop into the car to buy a quart of milk at the convenience store down the road. Nineteenth-century novels tell us how strenuously people then used to walk, and the kind of discomfort they faced when they traveled by stage coach, possibly seated outside, wrapped in a greatcoat to brave wind and weather. The young Mozart composed while being rattled by the spring-less coach. Until 200 years ago muscle power produced by human beings and animals still supplied a considerable portion of humankind's energy needs. Today, in the world's poorest regions people still walk great distances to get reasonably clear water, till their fields with oxen and haul loads in carte drawn by mules or horses.