Reddit reviews Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture (Sports and History Series)

We actually know a fair bit about ancient boxing. I apologize, my book on ancient sports is on campus. However, we do have several accounts and lots of images of ancient boxing.

There are boxing matches in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The account in the Iliad is more impressionistic, but in the Odyssey (and I have read this in Greek), it sounds like a pretty technical description:
> Irus hurled a fist
at Odysseus' right shoulder as he himself came through with a hook below the ear, pounding Irus' neck, smashing the bones inside (here's the Greek - the hook could be Fagles' embellishment δὴ τότ᾽ ἀνασχομένω ὁ μὲν ἤλασε δεξιὸν ὦμον
Ἶρος, ὁ δ᾽ αὐχέν᾽ ἔλασσεν ὑπ᾽ οὔατος, ὀστέα δ᾽ εἴσω
ἔθλασεν).

Boxing remained a topic of poetry, occurring in Theocritus, The Argonautica, and the Aeneid.

As for pictures: we have [sculptures] (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Thermae_boxer_Massimo_Inv1055.jpg) (there are little Roman models that I couldn't find tonight EDIT: Found one!), and vase paintings ([1]http://ancientolympics.arts.kuleuven.be/picEN/slides/P0011.jpg) , 2), and wall paintings.

To my mind, the images don't seem completely foreign. I think I know what I'm looking at, same for the literary descriptions. We do know the rules were different - They seem to have been much more constrained; the ref would push the fighters together rather than apart, and there's at least one story of a fight going into "overtime" in which each fighter traded one punch at a time in a "sudden death" mode.

I'm sorry my book is on campus. I've given a link if you want to look it up yourself or I can follow up some unspecified time in the future.

I am gonna be that guy...Thom took some poetic license here. He was writing fiction.


Theogenes was a real athlete but he boxed and practiced pankration in Greece. Pankration was kind of less structured. More like MMA. And this statue is from Rome. Greek Rome, but still.

The version where the boxers are strapped down and fight with spiked caestus came from legend, iirc. Most contemporary depictions show them standing. There were no rings, weight classes or anything like that, no rounds. Just surrender or incapacitation. They usually just hit the face and head though.


It is not at all clear that this statue is meant to be Theogenes either. He lived centuries before in Greece. This is a statue from Hellenistic Rome under Greek rule. Quirinal is one of the seven hills in Rome. Its where the modern Italian version of the white house is.

https://youtu.be/FvsSPJoJB3k

Khan Academy has a good video of this.


If you want a more in depth read on these guys, there's a book by Michael Poliakoff worth a look.

https://www.amazon.com/Combat-Sports-Ancient-World-Competition/dp/0300063121

If you think pankration is interesting, I recommend this excellent book. It's a work on combat sports in the ancient world, including pankration.

There's also an interesting series of articles that came out recently that discuss 'interpretive' systems like pankration and their place in the martial arts community. Worth a read if you wonder about how and where these 'dead' arts come from.

Yeah I took it this morning. It's a page from this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Combat-Sports-Ancient-World-Competition/dp/0300063121

It's a good read if you're interested in both martial arts and history.