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Excerpt from The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 26 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 arid too undisciplined. To the early Greeks, athletics were the recreation of a wan 10r class, they were not the serious business of life or even a profession, and m 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 compe titions 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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