The Pankration and Wrestling. III

Abstract

The combination of boxing and wrestling known as the pankration was a development of the primitive rough and tumble. To get his opponent down and by throttling, pummelling, biting, kicking, to reduce him to submission is the natural instinct of the savage or the child. But this rough and tumble is not suitable for an athletic competition: it is too dangerous and too undisciplined. To the early Greeks, athletics were the recreation of a warrior class, they were not the serious business of life or even a profession, and in an age of real warfare the warrior's life was too valuable to be endangered for sport. Moreover, without some form of law athletic competitions are impossible, and in the growth of law the simpler precedes the more complex Hence it was only natural that particular forms of fighting, such as boxing and wrestling, should be systematized first, and so made suitable for competitions before any attempt was made to reduce to law the more complicated rough and tumble of which they both formed parts. Wrestling and boxing were known to Homer, but not the pankration, and Greek tradition was following the natural order of evolution in assigning the introduction at Olympia of wrestling to the 18th, of boxing to the 23rd, and of the pankration to the 33rd Olympiad.