1

The Classical Golden Age

Looking back nostalgically from the third century AD to the glorious athletic past of Classical Greece, Philostratus claimed that the Spartans invented boxing.1 In fact, activities resembling boxing and wrestling were recorded much earlier, in third millennium BC Egypt and Mesopotamia. By the late Bronze Age (1600–1200 BC) images of pugilists could be found across the Eastern Mediterranean – some, like the figures on a Mycenean pot from Cyprus, are fairly sketchy (illus. 2); others, like the fresco of the young Boxing Boys from Thera (illus. 43), are striking and detailed.² In both cases, the boxers adopt an attitude similar to that found in Greek vase paintings 1,000 years later. The earliest of Greek literary works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, written in the eighth century BC, describe athletic games held at the time of the Trojan war, traditionally dated around 1200 BC.

The funeral games for Patroclus in the Iliad (c. 750 BC) include the ‘first report of a prize fight’ in literature.³ The games come late in the war, and in the penultimate book of the poem. Anthropologists and classical scholars have long debated the role of sports on such occasions. While some suggest that the funeral games simply served to celebrate the courage of the dead warrior, others argue that they were religious festivals and that sport was linked to ritual sacrifice.⁴ Discussions of the symbolic role of boxing and other forms of violent combat sport often draw on Clifford Geertz’s essay on Balinese cockfighting, and Réne Girard’s Violence and the Sacred. Geertz argues that the cockfight should not be seen merely as a form of popular entertainment, but as a blood sacrifice to the forces threatening social order. ‘Deep play’, a term that Geertz adopts from Bentham, is a game whose stakes are so high that, from a utilitarian point of view, it is irrational to play; this does not make the game unplayable, however, but elevates it. Instead of merely demanding the calculation of odds, the game works symbolically to represent the uncertain gamble that is life itself.⁵ The competitors involved in such contests are simultaneously derided and honoured, acting, as Girard put it, as ‘substitutes for all the members of the community’, while ‘offered up by the community itself.’⁶ ‘The winner symbolically “lives” by winning the ritual contest, the losers “die”’, and the spectators are vaccinated ‘with the evil of violence against the evil of violence’.⁷

2 Two boxers on a fragment of a Mycenaean pot from Cyprus, c. 1300–1200 BC.

The games described in the penultimate book of the Iliad certainly do more than simply provide more entertaining fight scenes. Most commentators read the funeral games for Patroclus as one of the poem’s ‘representative moments’; that is, they encapsulate the issues of honour and reward that the poem usually dramatizes on the battlefield.⁸ For some commentators, their function is to ‘purify’ combat – that is, to imitate it but conceal its true deadly character.⁹ For others, though, the real point is that, to the watching gods, the horrors of war (involving such dramatic moments as Achilles’ pursuit of Hector) is itself like an athletic spectacle.¹⁰ Prize-giving – the nature and function of reward – forms the topic of much debate. The boxing contest is preceded by Achilles giving Nestor a two-handled bowl ‘simply as a gift’, for now ‘old age has its cruel hold’ upon him. He accepts it, acknowledging that ‘now it is for younger men to face these trials’. The prizes for the boxing match are then set forth: the winner will receive ‘a hard-working mule’, signifying endurance, the loser a two-handled cup. Prefiguring the boasts of Muhammad Ali, Epeios claims the prize before any competitor has even stepped forward:

I say I am the greatest . . . It will certainly be done as I say – I will smash right through the man’s skin and shatter his bones. And his friends had better gather here ready for his funeral, to carry him away when my fists have broken him.¹¹

Finally someone steps forward, Euryalos, another ‘godlike man’ of noble lineage, though we hear little about him. It seems to be an even match, but Homer presents it in very general terms – a ‘flurry of heavy hands meeting’, a ‘fearful crunching of jaws’, followed by a knockout blow to Euryalos’s collarbone. All that matters is that Epeios’s boasts are justified – he is the greatest (after all, he is also the man who designed the wooden horse). ‘Godlike’, he is also described as ‘great-hearted’ because, despite his threats, he does not kill his opponent, but lifts him to his feet. Symbolic conflict acts as the transition between combat with consequences and combat with none, between narrative complication and closure. It quarantines real violence (the crunching of jaws) by enfolding it between two layers of symbolic violence (the bloodthirsty boast, the raising of the vanquished). Boxing, here, is the ultimate deep play.

Justified boastfulness also features in the Odyssey (c. 725 BC). In book eight, the Phaeacians seek to impress the travel-weary Odysseus with a display of their athletic prowess. All goes well until Laodamas, son of the prince and a champion boxer, urges their guest to participate, telling him, ‘there is no greater glory that can befall a man living than what he achieves by speed of his feet or strength of his hands’. When Odysseus declines, arguing that home is all he can think of, Laodamas rashly counters, ‘You do not resemble an athlete.’ Such a challenge does not go unanswered by the ‘darkly resourceful Odysseus’. He grabs a heavy discus, and then offers to take on anyone at boxing, wrestling or running, ‘except Laodamas / himself, for he is my host; who would fight with his friend?’12 The crisis is averted when the prince intervenes with music and dancing. Odysseus is less successful in avoiding a fight when, ten books later, disguised again, he returns home to Ithaca. There, Iros, a large and greedy beggar, insults him gratuitously. Egged on by Penelope’s suitors, Iros rejects Odysseus’s claim of solidarity between beggars and demands a ‘battle of hands’.¹³ The suitors enjoy this tremendously and offer prizes. Here we find the first instance of spectators as villains in a boxing story: unwilling to fight themselves, but vicariously enjoying the risks someone else will run, and gambling on the outcome.¹⁴ Although Odysseus is outweighed and does not fight at full capacity (he is still anxious to conceal his identity), he manages to break some bones in Iros’s neck, and as a final humiliation drags his opponent’s prostrate body to the foot of the courtyard wall. Survival is the issue here, not prize-winning. The contest is ‘a street fight that happens to involve a very skilful athlete in disguise’.¹⁵ If the Iliad reminds us of Ali’s theatrical boasting, the Odyssey anticipates his resilience.

Such pragmatism was of no use to subsequent idealizations of pugilism’s golden age. As Tom Winnifrith points out, ‘there is not in Homer the belief that behaving well somehow wins matches and battles’.¹⁶ However reluctant Odysseus is to fight, when persuaded he does not hold back. Honour and restraint, however, were central to the Virgilian ethos of the Roman Empire. It was Virgil, not Homer, who was evoked by the nineteenth-century muscular Christians, and the founding of the modern Olympics in 1896 was ‘fired by Virgilian enthusiasm’.¹⁷ Greater honour, paradoxically, was accompanied by even greater brutality. This is apparent if we compare the gloves used in Greek and Roman times.¹⁸ Today, boxers tend to use eight- to ten-ounce gloves in competition and anything up to eighteen-ounce gloves for sparring. Heavier gloves give greater protection both to the hands of the person striking the blow, and to the face and body of the blow’s recipient. Until around the end of the fifth century BC, strips of leather of between ten and twelve feet long were used as ‘soft gloves’ (himantes). These protected the knuckles rather than the opponent’s face. They were replaced by caestus, ‘sharp gloves’, lined with metal, which could maim and even kill an opponent (illus. 3). Dryden translated Virgil’s caestus as:

The Gloves of Death, with sev’n distinguish’d folds,

Of tough Bull Hides; the space within is spread

With Iron, or with loads of heavy Lead.19

This sounds like the kind of excessive violence, much more than sufficient to its purpose, that Odysseus tried hard to avoid.

The fact that boxing gloves were made of bull hide may have been the reason that boxers and bulls were often compared with each other. In the Argonautica, Apollonius likens Amycus and Polydeuces to ‘a pair of bulls angrily disputing for a grazing heifer’, while Virgil, in the Georgics, describes a young heifer as he trains for a fight, ‘learn[ing] to put / Fury into his horns’ and ‘sparring with the air’.²⁰ The link between boxers and bulls continued into the twentieth century with men fighting under names like ‘El Toro’ and ‘Bronx Bull’, and their opponents figured as matadors. Hemingway admired the way a particular animal used his left and right horn, ‘just like a boxer’, while for Mailer, it was George Foreman’s ability to use his gloves ‘like horns’ that made him so dangerous.²¹

The funeral games for Anchises staged in the Aeneid (19 BC) recall, and to some extent imitate, those of the Iliad. But Virgil’s structure is more intricate and his tone is quite different from Homer’s easy exuberance.²² The boat and foot races over, Aeneas sets out prizes for the boxing – a bullock for the victor, and a sword and helmet for the loser. As in the Iliad, one man comes forward immediately. Here is it Dares, the Trojan, ‘who stood there with his head held high to begin the battle, flexing his shoulders, throwing lefts and rights and thrashing the air. They looked around for an opponent, but no one in all that company dared go near him or put on the gloves’. Thinking there is to be no contest, Dares goes to collect the bullock as his prize. Only then does Entellus, spurred on by Acestes, come forward.

Dares is obviously modelled on the brash and youthful Epeios, but while Homer simply confirms that Epeios is ‘godlike’ with a straightforward victory, Virgil makes both character and action more complicated. Entellus is not presented as just any opponent (as Euryalos had been in the Iliad); he is motivated less by a desire for prizes or boastfulness than by a complex mixture of emotions. Acestes’ words have roused his sense of honour; he feels indebted to his teacher, the god Eryx; he does not want to be thought a liar, or a coward; he feels himself a representative of Sicily against Troy. In all things Entellus is the antithesis of Dares:

3 Three types of early boxing glove.

Dares had youth on his side and speed of foot. Entellus had the reach and the weight, but his knees were going. He was slow and shaky and his whole huge body heaved with the agony of breathing. Blow upon blow they threw at each other and missed. Blow upon blow drummed on the hollow rib cage, boomed on the chest and showered round the head and ears, and the cheekbones rattled with the weight of the punches.

Dares begins well, knocking Entellus down; the giant man falls ‘as a hollow pine tree falls, torn up by the roots on great Mount Ida’ – a common simile in classical, and subsequent, depictions of fights. But, as we might expect, this only spurs on Entellus:

He returned to the fray with his ferocity renewed and anger rousing him to new heights of violence. His strength was kindled by shame at his fall and pride in his prowess, and in a white heat of fury he drove Dares before him all over the arena, hammering him with rights and lefts and allowing him no rest or respite. Like hailstones from a dark cloud rattling down on roofs, Entellus battered Dares with a shower of blows from both hands and sent him spinning.23

Dares may have the strength, youth and confidence of a young animal, but Entellus, armed with psychological demons as well as mere muscles, is a true force of nature – falling like a pine tree and retaliating with blows like hailstones. Nature, or ‘savage passion’, must, however, be controlled, and so ‘Father Aeneas’ intervenes and ends the fight. This is one of the first fight stories in which the restraining referee is the hero.²⁴ Aeneas tells Dares to acknowledge that ‘the divine will has turned against you’, while Entellus ritually slaughters the bull he has won in honour of Eryx, and retires from boxing. The two men play no further part in the poem: boxing itself seems like a relic from some long-gone mythic age. The values of Augustan Rome have been made clear: piety is the basis for power and success; temperance and restraint the mark of a military leader.25

In years to come, the fights described by Homer and Virgil would provide models for many writers. Both tell stories of drama and suspense, but each has a different emphasis. In Homer, fighting may come as a last resort but when it does, no punches are pulled, and there is no need to be modest about one’s prowess. Virgil’s fighters are equipped with lethal gloves, but checked by the need to govern their anger, and by vanity.

BOXING BY ANALOGY

Homer and Virgil both compare conduct in games to that in war. It is not always the case that the same man is good at both activities, merely that they are analogous. In the Iliad, Epeios’s boast begins, ‘Is it not enough that I am less good in battle? . . . a man cannot be expert in all things’.²⁶ Less expert at boxing, but more so at battle, is Achilles, yet he shares with Epeios a firm belief in his own ability. He boasts that no one is a match for him, and we soon see that no one can challenge his ‘invincible hands’.²⁷ And in the Aeneid, we are reminded of Dares and Enthellus when later we come to compare the behaviour of Turnus and Aeneas in a real fight to the death.²⁸ The relationship between pugilism and war is also at the forefront of many of Plato’s references to boxing (three of his dialogues are set in the gymnasium and palaestra). In the Laws, he argues for the necessity of training soldiers to be prepared for war by comparing them with boxers training for fight (‘if we were training boxers . . . would we go straight into the ring unprepared by a daily work-out against an opponent?’); in the Republic the analogy is extended further – as ‘one boxer in perfect training is easily a match for two men who are not boxers, but rich and fat’, so a well-prepared Athens could go to war against wealthier and more powerful enemies.²⁹

Boxing similes were not only used in discussions of war and its attendant virtues and risks. They can also be found, for example, in debates about the qualities needed for successful political debating (Plutarch) and ways of dealing with the dishonest in everyday life (Marcus Aurelius).³⁰ Aristotle evokes boxing in the Nicomachean Ethics (c. 330 BC) when he wants to explain the nature of pain and pleasure in courage. Men who withstand painful things, he writes, are brave, while those spurred on by passions such as revenge are ‘pugnacious but not brave’. Sometimes, however, there is a gap between the pleasant end ‘which courage sets before itself ’ and the painful ‘attending circumstances’. This is the case in athletic contests:

the end at which boxers aim is pleasant – the crown and the honours – but the blows they take are distressing to flesh and blood, and painful, and so is their whole exertion; and because the blows and the exertions are many the end, which is but small, appears to have nothing in it.31

Boxers are brave because, in the heat of the fight, it is not prizes but virtue (courage) that motivates them. Courage, like all Aristotelian virtues, operates as a mediating strategy between other qualities; here, confidence and fear. Too much confidence, or too little fear, and no courage is needed; too much fear or too little confidence, and one is paralyzed.

The use of boxing analogies to discuss virtue was not restricted to classical philosophy. The nature of courage required for religious struggle (and the importance of keeping your eyes on the prize) was one of the subjects of the First Letter to the Corinthians (c. 48 AD). There Paul insists that he is a genuine fighter rather than a shadow boxer (‘one that beateth the air’, in the King James version). Moreover, he goes on, in a phrase that would prove resonant for muscular Christianity, ‘I keep under my own body, and bring it into subjection.’³²

AT THE GAMES

Boxing played an important part in the games of ancient Greece; both in the four great Panhellenic festivals – the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian – and in the numerous local games held in individual cities. The most prestigious Games, the Olympic, began in 776 BC, and boxing was introduced in 688 BC.³³ The festival spanned five days; the first and last were reserved for ceremonies and celebrations; boxing took place on the fourth day at midday so that neither competitor had the sun in his eyes. The sport was similar to modern boxing to the extent that each competitor attempted to injure or exhaust his opponent by punching him. There were, however, no rounds, rest periods, weight classes or points systems. There was no rule against hitting an opponent when down and no confined ring. Boxers were paired by lot; a single elimination format was used. A winner was declared when one boxer was no longer physically able to continue (illus. 4). Although the Olympic ideal has long been evoked as a model of fairness and sportsmanship, often in contrast to modern corruption, Pausanias’s Guide to Greece (170 AD) reveals that fight fixing actually began at the 98th Olympics:

Eulopos of Thessaly bribed the boxers who entered, Agetor of Arkadia and Prytanis of Kyzikos, and also Phormion of Halikarnassos, who won the boxing at the previous Olympics. This is said to have been the first crime ever committed in the games, and Eulopos and the men he bribed were the first to be fined . . .³⁴

The Romans were generally disdainful of the Greek love of the gymnasium, but boxing also played a part in the Ludi Romani. According to Suetonius, ‘none of Augustus’s predecessors had ever provided so many, so different, or such splendid public shows’. He goes on to detail wild-beast hunts, mock sea-battles and gladiatorial shows of all kinds, but says that Augustus’s ‘chief delight was to watch boxing, particularly when the fighters were Italians – and not merely professional bouts, in which he often used to pit Italians against Greeks or Africans against each other, but slogging matches between untrained roughs in narrow city alleys’ (illus. 5).³⁵ The boxers in these contests used the oxhide caestus, and injuries were severe. This perhaps accounts for Augustus’s introduction of a series of regulations as to who could take part (a senatorial decree banned persons ‘of good family’ from events such as boxing) and who could watch such contests.³⁶ Suetonius notes that whereas ‘men and women had hitherto always sat together, Augustus confined women to the back rows even at gladiatorial shows’:

4 Boxers with prize tripod in background, fragment of Black-figure vase, mid-sixth century BC.

No women at all were allowed to witness the athletic contests; indeed, when the audience clamoured at the Games for a special boxing match to celebrate his appointment as Chief Pontiff, Augustus postponed this until early the next morning, and issued a proclamation to the effect that it was the Chief Pontiff’s desire that women should not attend the Theatre before ten o’clock.³⁷

In a reassessment of Plato’s Laws, Cicero argued that the theatre should be kept free from the bloody sport of the Games, but it is clear that some infiltration took place.³⁸ Horace complained of crowds calling out for boxers or bears in the middle of a play, while Terence attributed the failure of one his plays to the rival attraction of boxing.³⁹ A couple of millennia later, Bertolt Brecht was to make a new theatre out of such infiltrations. While Brecht felt that boxing fans viewed the sport with cool objectivity and rationally judged the performance of each participant, the more common view (exemplified in every Hollywood fight film and first expressed in another classic work of the late Roman Empire, St Augustine’s Confessions) was that boxing degrades its audience as much as its participants. St Augustine tells the story of a reluctant visit to the gladiatorial arena by his pupil, Alypius. At first Alypius closes his eyes, but he cannot close his ears. When the crowd roars, he is unable to contain his curiosity and so opens his eyes. Immediately, and dramatically, he is corrupted by what he sees: ‘he fell, and fell more pitifully than the man whose fall had drawn that roar of excitement from the crowd’.⁴⁰

5 African boxers; terracotta, second or first century BC.

ODES TO VICTORY

The funeral games of Homer’s and Virgil’s epics provide one enduring model for depicting sporting events. Another can be found in the odes, known as epinicians (epi-Niké-ans), written by the fifth-century BC poets Pindar and Bacchylides, in celebration of the victors in the athletic games.

To the lyre the Muse granted tales of gods and children of gods, of the victor in boxing, of the horse first in the race, of the loves of swains, and of freedom over wine.41

Pierian Muses, daughters

of Zeus who rules

on high, you are famed for your

skill with the lyre: strum

and weave for us then intricate

songs for Argeius, the junior boxer,

the Isthmian games’ victor.⁴²

If epic poetry memorialized battles that spanned decades and had national significance, the epinician celebrated the fleeting triumphs of sport, giving ‘lasting form to the deed of the moment.’⁴³

I look for help to the Muses

with their blue-black hair,

to bless my song of how, in this life,

contingent, ephemeral,

a few things somehow endure.⁴⁴

The victories of the athletes were often represented as imitative of the battle victories of epic heroes such as Achilles and Odysseus, whose triumphs in turn were compared to those of the gods.

Let Hagesidamos

Who has won in the boxing at Olympia,

Thank Illas as Patroklos thanked Achilles.

One born to prowess

May be whetted and stirred

To win huge glory

If a God be his helper.⁴⁵

Also located within this hierarchy of kinds of victory was the poet himself, without whom all heroes would be forgotten, and whose memorializing skill was itself worthy of praise (and medals).⁴⁶ A different notion of honour emerges, one less directly attached to the virtues necessary for combat and having more to do with those essential to art. According to Richmond Lattimore, it was the ‘very uselessness of . . . [the athletic] triumphs which attracted Pindar’: ‘A victory meant that time, expense, and hard work had been lavished on an achievement that brought no calculable advantage, only honour and beauty.’47

Father Zeus, ruler on Atabyrion’s ridges,

Honour the rite of Olympian victory,

And a man who has found prowess in boxing.

Grant him favour and joy

From citizens and strangers.

For he goes straight on a road that hates pride,

And knows well what a true heart

From noble fathers has revealed to him.⁴⁸

The odes of Bacchylides and Pindar, which firmly connect the activities of the poet with those of the athlete, were echoed in Roman times by Horace and by neo-classical poets in the eighteenth century.⁴⁹ It might be argued that epinician tradition also lies behind some of the more extravagant claims made by sports-writers in modern times.

THE BODY, BEAUTIFUL AND VULNERABLE

Today classical Greek athletics continues to fascinate us, not simply because of the sporting principles it initiated, but because of the language it provides for talking about the human body, and, particularly, its glories. Training, and the culture of the gymnasium, are treated widely in Greek literature, and much writing about that culture focuses on the beauties of the naked bodies displayed there. Disapproving of the violence of the Roman gladiatorial contests, Dio Chrysostom sets up an alternative in the gentler, more philosophical, world of the Greek gymnasium where his ideal boxer Melancomas ‘did not consider it courage to strike his opponent or to receive an injury himself, but thought this indicated a lack of stamina and a desire to have done with the contest’. Melancomas’s unblemished beauty is directly linked to his moral virtues – his discipline, courage, modesty and self-control. Dio compares Melancomas to his closest rival, Iatrocles, whom he remembers in training.

He was a very tall and beautiful young man; and besides, the exercises he was taking made his body seem, quite naturally, still taller and more beautiful. He was giving a most brilliant performance, and in so spirited a way that he seemed more like a man in an actual contest. Then, when he stopped exercising and the crowd began to draw away, we studied him more closely. He was just like one of the most carefully wrought statues, and also he had a colour like well blended bronze.50

If Melancomas’s beauty reveals his inner virtue, that of Iatrocles exists on the surface only.⁵¹

The comparison of (stationary) athletes with statues would prove enduring and later commentators were less inclined to worry about the gap between outer and inner beauty. Boxing’s revival in the eighteenth century coincided with a revival of interest in the classics, and much writing about the male boxer, then and later, drew on notions of statuesque perfection as exemplified by Greek athletes. In 1755, for example, the German Hellenist, Winckelmann, famously argued that the excellence of Greek art was, in some part, due to the availability of fine models:

The gymnasia, where, sheltered by public modesty, the youths exercised themselves naked, were the schools of art. These the philosopher frequented, as well as the artist. Socrates for the instruction of a Charmides, Autolycus, Lysis; Phidias for the improvement of his art by their beauty. Here he studied the elasticity of the muscles, the ever varying motions of the frame, the outlines of fair forms, or the contour left by the young wrestler in the sand. Here beautiful nakedness appeared with such liveliness of expression, such truth and variety of situations, such a noble air of the body, as it would be ridiculous to look for in any hired model of our academies.⁵²

Gymnasia were, of course, also places of seduction and athletic statues often highly eroticized, but Winckelmann insisted that ‘ideal beauty’ was about establishing a connection to ‘something superior to nature; ideal beauties, brain-born images’ – what James Davidson defines as ‘the sculptural complement to the idealism of Platonic philosophy’. ‘The ideal body is not at all earthly or earthy: it provides an accurate material reflection of the heavenly, the insubstantial and the divine.’⁵³

There was, however, one undeniable difference between artistic and real life bodies. Whereas art is long, the real bodies exemplifying physical perfection, were, of course, perishable. Pindar’s odes capture the fleeting moments of an ideal physical state as well as those of victory. The very transience of the ideal body is made all the more poignant by the less than perfect bodies that surround it. This phenomenon is foregrounded in boxing – and not in other Olympic sports such as the discus or running – by the fact that while the processes of training are all about perfecting the body, and while at the moment of triumph, the body may move beautifully, the sport itself is all about damaging (and making ugly) the body.⁵⁴ Apollonian form could only temporarily contain Dionysian energy. The odd exception only serves to prove the rule. Dio Chrysostom praises Melancomas – ‘although boxing was his speciality, he remained as free from marks as any of the runners’ – while, much later, the thought of ‘pretty boy’ Janiro’s unmarked face fuels Jake La Motta’s paranoia in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull.⁵⁵

6 Etruscan engraved bronze; probably Polydeuces training with a punch bag, with Amycus to his right; late fourth century BC.

The damaged body of the boxer appeared in literature and art as early as its beautiful counterpart. A popular model for later writers, Theocritus’s version of the mythical fight between Polydeuces and Amycus in the Idylls (third century BC) was based on real fights he had seen in the stadium. His account is alert to technical detail and strategy, but perhaps even more memorable are his graphic descriptions of the wounds that fighters carry and inflict.56 While searching for the legendary golden fleece, Castor and Polydeuces – sons of Leda and Zeus, and brothers of Helen of Troy – are shipwrecked on Bebrycia. There, in a grove, Polydeuces, an Olympic champion, encounters Amycus, the King of the Bebryces, brother of the Cyclops and ‘a giant of a man’ (illus. 6):

He was an awesome spectacle: His ears were thickened

By blows from leather mitts, and his huge chest and broad back swelled

Like the iron flesh of a hammered statue. Where his shoulders and hard arms

Met, the muscles jutted out like rounded boulders, polished smooth

By the whirling onrush of a winter torrent.

One thing leads to another and soon the ‘son of Zeus’ has challenged the aggressive and inhospitable ‘son of Poseidon’ to a fight, the loser agreeing to become the winner’s slave. The description that follows relishes the damage done to ‘this huge / Mound of a man’:

A loud cheer rose from the heroes, when they saw the ugly wounds

Around Amycus’ mouth and jaw, and his eyes narrowed to slits in his

Swollen face. . .

Another punch and Amycus’s nose is skinned; a few more and his face is ‘smashed’ into ‘a dreadful pulp. / His sweating flesh collapsed, and his colossal form shrank in on itself’. Finally, Polydeuces finishes off the fight with a blow to his opponent’s mouth, head and left temple (‘The bone cracked open, and the dark blood spurted out’). With Amycus lying ‘near to death’, Polydeuces, clearskinned and with ‘limbs enlarged’, walks away.⁵⁷ He lets his opponent live.⁵⁸

The contest between modern Greek speed, skill and ‘guile’, and mythic bulk has proved unsatisfyingly one-sided.59 The main purpose of Theocritus’s description seems to be to dwell on the damage done, a purpose not unheard-of in subsequent representations of pugilism.

Not all depictions of a boxer’s injuries are marked by such gruesome relish. Many are simply documentary; vase paintings often depict blood streaming from the boxer’s nose as well as from cuts on his cheeks.⁶⁰ A more sophisticated realism can be found in the fourth-century statue of a battered boxer, sometimes known as ‘The Pugilist at Rest’ (illus. 7).⁶¹ In a 1993 short story of that title, the American writer Thom Jones describes it:

The statue depicts a muscular athlete approaching his middle age. He has a thick beard and a full head of curly hair. In addition to the telltale broken nose and cauliflower ears of a boxer, the pugilist has the slanted, drooping brows that bespeak broken nerves. Also, the forehead is piled with scar tissue . . .

The pugilist is sitting on a rock with his forearms balanced on his thighs. That he is seated and not pacing implies that he has been through all this many times before. It appears that he is conserving his strength. His head is turned as if he were looking over his shoulder – as if someone had just whispered something to him. It is in this that the ‘art’ of the sculpture is conveyed to the viewer. Could it be that someone has just summoned him to the arena? There is a slight look of befuddlement on his face, but there is no trace of fear . . . Beside the deformities on his noble face, there is also the suggestion of weariness and philosophical resignation.⁶²

The sculpture is notable for the acute detail in its rendering of wounds both long-accumulated and from the immediate fight. Scars are visible all over the body but especially on the face, the nose is broken, the right eye swollen. Moreover, the bronze statue has red copper inlaid in order to indicate fresh facial wounds and blood that has dripped down on to the right arm and thigh. Attention is also drawn to the athlete’s tangled hair, his finger and toenails, weary face and sagging muscle. ‘No other work of art from antiquity,’ writes Harris ‘takes us into the stadium with such intimacy as this statue.’⁶³

The destruction of the boxer’s body, and in particular his face, also provides the basis of much gruesome humour in Lucilius’s debunking epigrams:

Your head, Apollophanes, has become a sieve, or the lower edge of a worm-eaten book, all exactly like ant-holes, crooked and straight . . . But go on boxing without fear, for even if you are struck on the head you will have the marks you have – you can’t have more.⁶⁴

With loss of face comes loss of identity:

7 The Pugilist at Rest, also known as the Terme Boxer, bronze copy, 1st century AD, of a signed 4th-century sculpture by Apollonius.

When Ulysses after twenty years came safe to his home, Argos the dog recognized his appearance when he saw him, but you, Stratophon, after boxing for four hours, have become not only unrecognizable to dogs but to the city. If you will trouble to look at your face in a glass, you will say on your oath, ‘I am not Stratophon.’⁶⁵

Narcissus died because he fell in love his own reflected image. By this reckoning, however, the vanity of boxers is likely to prove short-lived:

Having such a mug, Olympicus, go not to a fountain nor look in any transparent water, for you, like Narcissus, seeing your face clearly, will die, hating yourself to the death.66

While ancient literature and art have provided models for subsequent depictions of the boxer as an exemplar of either statuesque beauty or grotesque injury (often contrasted as the ideal and the real), it is worth remembering that the figure that most appealed to aficionados was neither. Philostratus notes that while the best fighters have small bellies, ‘such people are light and have good respiration’, a big-bellied boxer also has a certain advantage, ‘for such a belly hinders blows at the face.’⁶⁷

BOXING AGAINST EROS

The body was never, of course, merely a sign of temporal vulnerability and metaphysical dissolution. The palaestra was also the setting for homoerotic admiration and seduction, where the vulnerable as well as the statuesque body proved attractive:

When Menecharmus, Anticles’s son, won the boxing match, I crowned him with ten soft fillets, and thrice I kissed him all dabbled with blood as he was, but the blood was sweeter to me than myrrh.⁶⁸

Although most writing about exercise focuses on men, women also used gymnasia and, in Greece, participated in women’s games.⁶⁹ This fuelled heterosexual fantasies, particularly among nostalgic Romans. One of Ovid’s Heroides, a series of imaginary letters from mythical figures to their lovers, is a letter from Paris to Helen. In it he describes the power of her beauty and imagines Theseus coming upon her competing in the palaestra, ‘a naked maiden with naked men’. ‘I revere his act, I can only wonder / why he ever let you be returned.’⁷⁰ Another Augustan love poet, Propertius, also evokes Helen in recalling the glory days of Spartan athletics. Particularly commendable was the Spartan practice of having naked men and women competing together. Propertius waxes lyrical about naked women ‘covered in dust’ at the finishing-post, and with swords strapped to ‘snow-white thighs’. Even the binding of ‘arms with thongs for boxing’ excites him, and he imagines two bare-breasted Amazons resembling Pollux and Castor ‘(One soon to be prize boxer, the other horseman)/ Between whom Helen with bare nipples took up arms.’ Roman women, in contrast, pay ‘boring attention to perfumed hair’.⁷¹

If pugilism had its erotic qualities, erotic love could also be seen as a potentially pugilistic activity:

Bring water, bring wine, O boy, and bring me the flowery

Crowns. Bring them, since I am indeed boxing against Eros!

(Anacreon)

Whoever challenges Eros to a match

Like a boxer fist-to-fist, he is out of his wits.

(Sophocles)72

Multiple contests are possible: the lover struggles against the conventional resistance of the beloved; rival lovers compete; the lover’s desire struggles for expression. Boxing might even be easier than love. In another epigram by Lucilius, sexual yielding is more devastating than any acknowledgment of defeat in the stadium:

Cleombrotos ceased to be a pugilist, but afterwards married and now has at home all the blows of the Isthmian and Nemean games, a pugnacious old woman hitting as hard as in the Olympian fights, and he dreads his own house more than he ever dreaded the ring. Whenever he gets his wind, he is beaten with all the strokes known in every match to make him pay her his debt; and if he pays it, he is beaten again.⁷³

But love and pugilism are not only comparable as amateur sports; in some ways the analogy works better on the professional level. Thomas F. Scanlon notes that athletes and courtesans are paired in many poems, and describes a fifth-century BC column-krater which places on opposite sides, and in near-identical poses, an athlete and a courtesan. ‘The pun may be interpreted on several levels,’ he writes: ‘she is “athletic”; he is a “courtesan” whose prizes are her payment; both place a premium on the beauty of the body; both possess erotic attraction.’⁷⁴

In the classical era, then, boxing was the literal or metaphoric subject of a great variety of representations, many of which will recur in the chapters which follow. More often than not, whether it is Homer describing the contest between Epeios and Euryalos, or Aristotle defining courage, or Pindar the function of poetry, or Lucilius marriage, the representations turn on a violence which is at once actual and symbolic. It is the inextricable mixture in pugilism of high decorum and low cunning, of beauty and damage, of rhetoric and bodily fluids, which has made it for so long and so productively a way to imagine conflict.