Toward the end of the Iliad, the great warrior Achilles mourns his dead companion Patroclus with an elaborate funeral. The funeral includes a series of games in which the great warriors of the Greek army compete against one another. There’s a chariot race, a javelin throw, a footrace, an archery contest. The games are a little break from the relentless tragedy and death of the poem; they come after the Trojan hero Hector has killed Patroclus and Achilles has taken brutal revenge on Hector, ignoring his pleas for mercy.
At this point, the fighting of the book is mostly over, but there’s one more fight to be had — a boxing match:
A tall and powerful warrior stood up, a champion boxer, Epeius, son of Panopeus. He placed his hand on the mule, saying: ‘Whoever wants the cup, step forward. No man will beat me with his fists, and take the mule, since I’m the best boxer, I say. I may not be the greatest warrior, a man can’t be best at everything, but this thing is for sure, whoever I fight I’ll tear his flesh to ribbons and break his bones. I hope his kin are here to take him away when I’ve felled him.’
A silence fell at his words. Godlike Euryalus alone stood up to fight him… He buckled on his belt, and bound the ox-hide thongs carefully on his hands. When the two contestants were ready, they stepped to the centre of the arena, and raising their mighty arms, set to. Each landed heavy blows with their fists, and they ground their teeth, as the sweat poured over their limbs. Euryalus sought an opening, but noble Epeius swung and struck his jaw, and he went straight down, his legs collapsing under him. Like a fish that leaps in the weed-strewn shallows, under a ripple stirred by the North Wind, then falls back into the dark wave, so Euryalus leapt when he was struck, but the big-hearted Epeius, lifted him and set him on his feet, and all his friends crowded round, and supported him from the ring his feet trailing, his head lolling, as he spat out clots of blood. He was still confused when they sat him down in his corner, and had to fetch the cup, his prize, themselves.
Patroclus’ funeral games are meant to be a bit of a lighthearted farewell to the Greek heroes who are left alive at the end of the book, and a bit of an emotional break between Achilles’ wrathful killing of Hector and his emotional encounter with Hector’s father in the following book. But I can’t help being shocked at the brutality of the boxing match, especially as Euryalus flops like a fish and concussedly spits out blood.
In the Romans’ great epic poem, the Aeneid, there’s a boxing match, too. This isn’t all that surprising, since the Aeneid remixes many parts of the Iliad. This time, it’s a boxing match between Dares, an arrogant young warrior, and Entellus, a grizzled veteran who has had enough of the young man’s boasting, at funeral games for Aeneas’ father:
Then shame and knowledge of his own ability revive his strength,
and [Entellus] drives Dares in fury headlong across the whole arena,
doubling his punches now, to right and left. No pause, or rest:
like the storm clouds rattling their dense hailstones on the roof,
as heavy are the blows from either hand, as the hero
continually batters at Dares and destroys him.
Then Aeneas, their leader, would not allow the wrath to continue
longer, nor Entellus to rage with such bitterness of spirit,
but put an end to the contest, and rescued the weary Dares,
speaking gently to him with these words:
“Unlucky man, why let such savagery depress your spirits?
Don’t you see another has the power: the gods have changed sides?
Yield to the gods.” He spoke and, speaking, broke up the fight.
But Dares’ loyal friends led him away to the ships,
his weakened knees collapsing, his head swaying from side to side,
spitting out clots of blood from his mouth, teeth amongst them.
Again, we get the slightly sickening description of a defeated boxer with his head flopping around, expelling bloody globs of spit on the ground.
The fight between Dares and Entellus got some attention from artists later on. Here’s a mosaic from the floor of a French villa showing the two fighters, along with the bull that Entellus won and then sacrificed to the gods with a single blow to the skull:
A French artist tried to depict the scene in the 1500s, with much less fidelity to the original description (what’s up with those clubs?):
As we will see, the artist who made this may have added clubs to the fight because boxing had largely disappeared by the sixteenth century.
These stories of ancient boxing illustrate, maybe even more than the accounts of actual warfare, the brutality of ancient society. What does it say about ancient Greece and Rome that boxing was one of their most significant athletic competitions? And what does it say about the modern societies that revived this ancient combat sport?
What attracted the ancient Greeks to boxing? Well, they were big fans of all sorts of combat and competition. They weren’t much for team sports — the purpose of athletics was to find out which man was the best. Facing off against an opponent, with no weapons and little protection, was just about the manliest thing you could do. In fact, women were prohibited from watching boxing matches.
The violence was the point. An ancient inscription reads, “A boxer’s victory is gained in blood.”
One of the oldest depictions of boxing comes from Akrotiri, a Greek island town that was buried under volcanic debris in the 1500s BCE. In this fresco two young boys punch one another, wearing leather gloves.
By 688 BCE, boxing was part of the Olympics. These contests took place without many of the rules that (minimally) protect modern boxers. There was no time limit, and there were no breaks. Boxers had little protection; fights ended when they were knocked out or raised a finger to signal defeat. As described in the Iliad, they wore a strap of leather wrapped around their hands, which, since it protected a boxer’s knuckles and supported his wrist, allowed him to throw more and harder punches. You can see the leather thong here on the arm of a statue of a boxer dating to the second century BCE:
There were many different styles of boxing — Diagoras of Rhodes supposedly refused to dodge punches, absorbing his opponents’ worst and then knocking them out, while Melankomas of Caria bobbed and weaved, declining to throw any punches at all as his opponents wore themselves out.
Referees carried long sticks, presumably to separate boxers, as shown on this amphora:
And this one gives a sense of the visceral nature of the combat, as one fighter’s nose spews blood:
The greatest Greek depiction of boxing is a Hellenistic sculpture of the “Boxer at Rest,” which was cast in bronze in the 200s BCE. It shows a weary pugilist after a tough fight, still wearing the leather thongs on his hands and wrists.
The sculpture doesn’t shy away from the brutality of boxing; you can see the bloody cuts on his face (the artist used inlaid bronze to achieve this effect) and the damage to his ears. Most of all, there’s a sense of weary, dignified suffering. This is a man who’s been through some things.
As in so many things, the Romans took the Greek sport of boxing and made it crueler and more violent.
The main way in which they did this was by making the equipment more dangerous. Instead of using soft leather straps to protect a boxer’s hands, the Romans devised gloves that contained little spikes or bits of metal designed to inflict maximum damage on an opponent’s face.
You can see the beginning of this evolution on the “Boxer at Rest” above — his “gloves” are a little more structured than the ones that would have been used in previous centuries, and were probably intended to cut opponents. But the Romans took it further, inventing the caestus, a boxing glove with a metal spike protruding from it:
This grimacing head of a boxer, who is missing several teeth, shows the toll the sport took on athletes.
While some of the Greek and Roman art depicting boxers is depressingly gritty, archaeologists have also found another type of boxer depicted, often shorter in stature and with a less athletic build. Here’s a Hellenistic child boxer:
And a boxer that the Getty describes as a person with dwarfism, which may represent a type of entertainment that took place in the Roman world:
Boxing seems to have died out as a form of popular entertainment by the late Roman Empire. Some historians credit Christianity for the change — the sport is, after all, not very compatible with Jesus’ instruction to turn the other cheek. There was still a lot of fighting in the Middle Ages, of course, but it mostly involved weapons (this may be why the French depiction of the fight from the Aeneid above shows a battle with clubs).
Boxing didn’t begin to make a comeback in Europe until the late medieval and early modern period. It shows up in Russia, where large groups of people would line up in teams and fight each other in what they called “wall on wall” combat.
Russian rulers tried to suppress boxing in their territory, but it was apparently just too popular — people really wanted to beat each other up even though it was illegal. This was the case in England, too, where modern boxing got its start.
English pugilists were beating the snot out of each other by the late 1600s, often in the same theaters where plays and other performances took place. By the early 1700s, England had a champion, James Figg, who was lionized in the streets of London. Figg, who both boxed and fought opponents with weapons like swords, won over 200 consecutive fights and opened a school to train prospective fighters. Here’s a trade card showing off his sword training:
I quite like this portrait of Figg — he doesn’t look unfriendly, exactly, but he gives off the air of a guy not to be messed with:
By the middle of the 1700s, a boxer named Jack Broughton codified some rules for the sport, outlawing things like low blows and hitting a man when he’s down (and explaining how the prize money should be distributed):
This image, “The Bruiser Bruis’d,” from around 1750, shows Broughton fighting (and losing) a fight according to his new rules. Though Broughton was heavily favored to win, a boxer named Jack Slack walloped him right between the eyes, and he couldn’t see through the blood and the swelling. You can see the spectators exchanging money around the sides of the ring (one gentleman is supposed to have lost thousands of pounds — perhaps a million pounds or more in today’s money — on the match).
Broughton’s rules initiated the modern era of boxing, one in which there were clearer rules and more structure. But “The Bruiser Bruis’d” nods toward the ancient history of boxing:
“Where’s now thy Cestus,” Jack? Broughton retired after this defeat, making his money from teaching boxing and selling antiques, but he continued to be a legendary figure in England for many years.
Boxing once again became one of the most popular sports in many parts of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, peaking with the global fame and athletic dominance of Muhammad Ali. But it’s faded in recent decades. Many people, myself included, are uncomfortable watching two people pummel each other into a bloody mess, no matter how athletic and graceful they are while doing it. And while the squeamish among us no longer want to watch the violence of boxing, those who do want to watch one-on-one combat can find more intense fighting in mixed martial arts.
So it seems that boxing is once again receding from the public eye. But the long history of boxing demonstrates that something deep inside us — or at least in a lot of us — wants to watch two people duke it out until only one is left standing.
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Hmm. Surprisingly no mention of the Marquess of Queensbury. Didn’t he codify the modern version of boxing?