File:Greek athletic sports and festivals (1910) (14770008702).jpg

Identifier: greekathleticspo00gard (find matches)
Title: Greek athletic sports and festivals
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: Gardiner, E. Norman (Edward Norman), 1864-1930
Subjects: Athletics Sports Olympics Fasts and feasts
Publisher: London : Macmillan and Co.
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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ankration as inboxing the contest continued till one or other of the partiesheld up his hand in sign of defeat. At Sparta, where for thisreason the laws of Lycurgus forbade citizens to compete in theseevents, the primitive rough and tumble unrestricted by lawand unrefined by science was allowed and encouraged as a testof endurance and a training for war. The pankration at thegreat festivals was something quite different ; it was governedby the law of the games (vo/xos eVaywitos), and was, at all eventsin the best period, a contest no less of skill than of strength.Modern writers turn up their eyes in holy horror at the 1 J.H.S. xxvi. pp. 4-22.435 436 GREEK ATHLETIC SPORTS AND FESTIVALS CHAP. brutality of the pankration, and marvel that a race so refinedas the Greeks could have tolerated so brutal a sport. Un-doubtedly the pankration might degenerate into brutality, andperhaps sometimes actually did. So may football, boxing,wrestling, unless they are controlled by rules, and unless the
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Fio. 151.—R.-f. kylix. British Museum, E. 78. rules are enforced. But the pankration was controlled by rules,and the rules were enforced in the wrestling school and in thegames by trainers and officials under public control, and enforcedwith the rod in a practical way which the modern umpire orreferee may well envy, and the rod was certainly not spared.Further, the rules were enforced by a public opinion andtradition that in the best times certainly placed skill and gracefar above brute strength in all athletics. No branch of XX THE PANKRATION—ITS BRUTALITY (?) 437 athletics was more popular than the pankration. Philostratusdescribes it as the fairest of all contests.^ Mythology ascribedits invention to Heracles and Theseus,^ the typical representativesof science as opposed to brute strength. What the pankrationwas in the fifth century we can learn from Pindar. No lessthan eight of his odes are in praise of pankratiasts, and fromthese odes can be illustrated every feature of the p

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