Ancient Combat Sports - The BAS Library

Endnotes

1.

Dio Chrysostom 31.110.

2.

See Michael B. Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 89-91.

3.

See Cicero, Brutus 69; Philostratos, Gymnastika 11, Heroikos 15 (147 K.); Pausanias 6.24.1.

4.

See Inscriptiones Graecae 14.1102; Luigi Moretti, Iscrizioni agonistiche greche. Studi pubblicati dall’ Istituto Italiano per la Storia Antica 12 (Rome: Angelo Signorelli, 1953), no. 79; and Poliakoff, Combat Sports, p. 106.

5.

J.G.C. Anderson, Journal of Roman Studies 3 (1913), p. 287 n. 12.

6.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, “Les ‘Trustees’ de l’Idée Olympique,” Revue Olympique, July 1908.

7.

J.G.M.G. Te Riele, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellenique 88 (1964), pp. 186-87.

8.

G. Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca (Berlin, 1878), p. 942; and Moretti, Inscrizioni agonistiche greche, no. 55.

9.

Artemidorus, Oneirocriticus 1.61-62.

10.

Plato similarly recommended that soldiers engage in military exercises with weapons equipped with protective buttons on their tips. See Plato, Laws 830a-831a; see also Plutarch, Praecepta rei publicae gerendae 32 (Moralia 825e), with further discussion in Poliakoff, Combat Sports, p. 73.

11.

Libanius 64.119 and Galen, Protrepticus 12 (1.32 K.)

12.

Denys Page, Epigrammata Graeca, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, LII, 283 ff; also see Joachim Ebert, Griechische Epigramme auf Sieger an gymnischen und hippischen Agonen. Abhandlungen der Saechsichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, philologisch-historische Klasse 63.2 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1972), no. 34.

13.

Plato, Laws, 796b; Plutarch, Quaestiones conviviales 2.4 (Moralia 638d). For a translation of the wrestling manual, see Poliakoff, Combat Sports, pp. 52-53.

14.

For further information on disputes over scoring a fall, see Ambrose, Commentary on Psalm 36.51, in Patrologia Latina 14.1038-39; see also Aristophanes, Knights, pp. 571-73.

15.

Lucian, Anacharsis 1.8; Nonnus, Dionysiaka 37.602-9.

16.

E.N. Gardiner, Journal of Hellenic Studies 25 (1905), p. 14-31.

17.

Peter Siewert, “The Olympic Rules,” in Proceedings of an International Symposium on the Olympic Games, William Clulson and Helmut Kyrieleis, eds. (Athens, 1992), pp. 111-17.

18.

Pausanias 6.4.3 tells of Leontiskos’s skill at breaking fingers.

19.

Sostratos the pankratiast is known from Pausanias 6.4.1-2 and a surviving inscription: Moretti Iscrizioni agonistiche greche, no. 25; see also Ebert, Griechische Epigramme, no. 39.

20.

Lucian, Anacharsis 3.

21.

See H.W. Pleket, “Games, Prizes, and Ideology,” Stadion 1 (1976), pp. 49-89; and David C. Young, The Olympic Myth of Amateur Greek Athletics (Chicago: Ares, 1984).

22.

The story of Diagoras and his family was often told in antiquity. See in particular Pausanias 6.7.1-7 and 4.24.1-3; Pindar praised Diagoras in a victory ode, Olympian 7, and Cicero tells the story, in Tusculan Disputations 1.46.111, of a spectator who saw Diagoras carried on the shoulders of his sons who had triumphed in boxing and pancratium on the same day at Olympia; the spectator remarked, “Die, Diagoras, for you cannot go up into heaven”—in other words, there is nothing greater that any mortal man could ever have.

23.

Tiberius Claudius Rufus’s victory is commemorated on a surviving inscription, Inscriften von Olympia 54/55. For further discussion, see Reinhold Merkelbach, Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik 15 (1974), pp. 99-104; and Walter Ameling, Epigraphica Anatolica 6 (1985), p. 30.

24.

Aristotle, Rhetoric 1365a, 1367b; and Page, Simonides XLI, pp. 238-239

25.

Isocrates, On the Team of Horses 16, pp. 2-35.

26.

Note how the Athenians forbade the successful generals of the Persian wars to erect monuments to themselves; see Aeschines, Against Ktesiphon, pp. 183-186, with discussion in M. Detienne, “La Phalange,” in J.-P. Vernant, ed., Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne (Paris, 1968), pp. 127-28; also see Poliakoff, Combat Sports, 112 ff.

27.

See Isocrates, Against Lochites 20.9-11 and Demosthenes, Against Meidias 21.45.

28.

Pindar, Olympian Odes 1.