Micky
Disaster area
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2010
- Messages
- 101
- Location
- No man's land.
The Pankration
One of the events in the ancient Olympic Games was the Pankration, which means “No holds barred fighting.” Actually two holds were barred - eye-gouging and ball-grabbing – but apart from those anything was permissible. All the moves of modern cage-fighting were employed, together with stamping, biting, throwing dust in your opponent’s eyes and so on. And men sometimes died competing in the Pankration, because choking and manual strangulation were also allowed, not merely as submission holds, but as a means of killing your opponent if he refused to submit.
The most famous Pankration fighter was Arrichion of Phigalia. He was overpowered and locked in a choke-hold, but rather than submit he grabbed his opponent’s foot and managed to break his toe. The pain of this was so intense that the man immediately signalled his submission. But when the referee stepped forward to raise Arrichion’s arm as victor it was found that he was dead. He was crowned with the laurel-wreath regardless, and his body was taken back to his city where he was proclaimed Phigalia’s greatest hero.
Contestants in the Pankration were usually recruited from the hoplites (foot-soldiers) of the Greek cities. They fought naked, with their bodies smeared in olive-oil. This ferocious and splendid martial art is thought to have finally died out in Mongolia, though in the nineteenth century something curiously similar was still being practised in the Lancashire town of Bolton. It was called “Up and down fighting” and it involved men with a score to settle fighting, sometimes to the death, in front of the assembled townsfolk. By 1850 the Victorian magistrates had managed to stamp the practice out.
The gallery of pics below gives a faint impression of what an awesome spectacle the Pankration must have been. If you like these images you will find thousands more by visiting “Michigan Grappler” and selecting the photos section.
(This post is not copied from anybody else’s work. I researched it and wrote it myself.)
One of the events in the ancient Olympic Games was the Pankration, which means “No holds barred fighting.” Actually two holds were barred - eye-gouging and ball-grabbing – but apart from those anything was permissible. All the moves of modern cage-fighting were employed, together with stamping, biting, throwing dust in your opponent’s eyes and so on. And men sometimes died competing in the Pankration, because choking and manual strangulation were also allowed, not merely as submission holds, but as a means of killing your opponent if he refused to submit.
The most famous Pankration fighter was Arrichion of Phigalia. He was overpowered and locked in a choke-hold, but rather than submit he grabbed his opponent’s foot and managed to break his toe. The pain of this was so intense that the man immediately signalled his submission. But when the referee stepped forward to raise Arrichion’s arm as victor it was found that he was dead. He was crowned with the laurel-wreath regardless, and his body was taken back to his city where he was proclaimed Phigalia’s greatest hero.
Contestants in the Pankration were usually recruited from the hoplites (foot-soldiers) of the Greek cities. They fought naked, with their bodies smeared in olive-oil. This ferocious and splendid martial art is thought to have finally died out in Mongolia, though in the nineteenth century something curiously similar was still being practised in the Lancashire town of Bolton. It was called “Up and down fighting” and it involved men with a score to settle fighting, sometimes to the death, in front of the assembled townsfolk. By 1850 the Victorian magistrates had managed to stamp the practice out.
The gallery of pics below gives a faint impression of what an awesome spectacle the Pankration must have been. If you like these images you will find thousands more by visiting “Michigan Grappler” and selecting the photos section.
(This post is not copied from anybody else’s work. I researched it and wrote it myself.)
I've heard its not uncommon for that to happen and youtube is full of these videos as proof! 
Forward to around 2:25 if you don't want to wait.
