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  Whatever the form they take, play-fights are not always easy to separate from the real thing. Yet three differences seem to be involved. First, play, precisely because it is not in earnest, tends to last longer than fighting does. Second, as long as play lasts, retaliation, instead of being blocked, is permitted. Third, look at what happens after the fight is over; does one of the combatants flee the field, or do they stay together and resume peaceful relations?12 Since animals cannot explain their motives, we can only try to guess why so many of them engage in sham fighting. As with humans, probably the “conscious” – if one may use that word – motive is to experience a thrill. Like many other forms of play, sham fighting may also serve as a useful method to train for the real thing, in which respect it is similar to many forms of human play. Finally, it may help define social relationships and preserve the peace inside the group.

  For example, it is one of the distinguishing features of mock fighting that, among many primate species, it involves much younger and smaller animals “attacking” older, larger, and more dominant ones. The latter react, but in doing so they use a small fraction of the force they are capable of. As long as the game lasts, ordinary behavior is suspended and the two animals, each in its own way, pretend they are equals. However, if the younger one goes too far, a sudden sharp, but still largely harmless, response may put it in its place, drawing a line between what is and is not allowed and terminating the game, at least for a time.13 Whatever the motive, the advantage of sham fighting over the real thing is that the cost, and the risk involved, is very low (though not nonexistent, for presumably that would eliminate the thrill).

  Human children who are too young to understand an existing set of rules or to create one of their own also engage in sham fighting. More important for the topic at hand, so do some adults. There are even cases, such as “professional” wrestling matches, when the fighting is made to follow a pre-arranged script. The combatants open their matches with noisy verbal contests, pretending that they are boiling with rage and ready to tear their opponents to pieces. Not seldom they resort to extraordinary methods such as using chairs to hit their opponents or else banging their heads against the steel floor of the arena. In fact, though, professional wrestling is a “sophisticated theatralized representation of the violent urges . . . [consisting of] largely pantomimed confrontations,” which is why it is discussed, among other places, in The Drama Review.14 Some organizers go further still by providing a story line, comparable in some respects to a scene in a theatrical drama or a film. Allegedly the fight is the result of a long-running feud, or else it represents an attempt to avenge an injury. In many ways the stories are like the scenarios routinely dreamt up by those responsible for organizing many kinds of political-military and military wargames described later in this volume; another analogy is with the thin stories often provided by the makers of pornographic films to surround the main act and make it more interesting.

  Professional wrestling sometimes results in serious injuries, especially among long-time fighters who have been through it all many times. Nevertheless, all this makes the “shows” much less of a fight and more of a sham. Almost always the outcome is fixed in advance in such a way as to confirm the spectators’ expectations as to what is right and what is wrong. So considered, the fights’ closest relative is not war but the morality play. Not just the scenario but even individual moves are planned not merely with an eye to defeating the opponent, but in such a way as to increase their appeal to the crowd; the more important the show and the better known the combatants, the less “real” it is likely to be. All of which explains why the matches are not held in high esteem by those who engage in, or watch, “serious” combat sports.

  Unarmed – and, as we shall see, armed – humans preparing to fight one another resemble animals in that they start by maneuvering for position. Next, they assume either an offensive stance or a defensive one. The fights themselves take on a variety of forms. Since humans only have small and weak teeth and nails, in fights among them biting and scratching are much less important than with animals. In fact it is almost exclusively when women and children (and Mike Tyson) fight that they play any role at all, and in many cases they are banned altogether. That is not the only difference. Primates, as our closest relatives, do not use their legs for kicking and indeed that practice is limited to horses, donkeys, mules, and elephants. Humans, by contrast, often do so. Another difference is that even the members of species that have digits, notably primates, rarely use them to grasp opponents when they wrestle.15 Above all, humans are able to use their arms to throw punches, something no animal does.

  Fights between unarmed humans that are governed by rules are known as combat sports. Probably there has never been a society that did not have them in one form or another, though they are said to be more widespread among warlike societies than among less warlike ones.16 Often they were associated with religion, particularly during funeral ceremonies when the gods demanded their pound of flesh. Wrestling is known to have been practiced 5,000 years ago in Sumer where the hero Gilgamesh had to engage the undefeated Endiku as part of his epic journey. Judging by the frequency with which it appears on the monuments, in ancient Egypt it almost amounted to a national sport. It is represented on temple walls, tomb walls, and stelae, as well as by hundreds of sculptures and miniatures, some of them carefully made and of a very high artistic quality. Wrestling seems to have been a particular favorite among military personnel who boasted of their achievements and regularly practiced it in front of the Pharaoh. The palace window from which Rameses III (c. 1186–1155 BC) watched the proceedings still exists.17 On the other hand, though Pharaohs are known to have engaged in various sports such as running, archery, and driving chariots, they did not, as far as the evidence goes, engage in either wrestling or other combat sports.

  Present-day tribal societies all over the world also engage in wrestling and appear to have done so for a long time past. In some cultures, such as that of the Nuba of the Sudan, it played a very important role indeed by helping reinforce the social order without resort to actual fighting.18 Among the Ona, a people of the island of Tierra del Fuego, it even served as a method for resolving conflict. If a feud had gone on for too long and threatened to run out of hand, the leaders of one family would send an old woman not worth capturing to talk to its rival. A meeting would be arranged and a series of individual matches held, attended by the men of both sides. The matches would continue until all wrestlers on one side had been defeated one by one. Then the other side would proclaim its victory, and everybody went home happily enough.19 The Siriono people of eastern Bolivia had a somewhat similar custom.20

  Modern wrestling is commonly divided into no fewer than five different kinds, i.e. Graeco-Roman, freestyle, grappling-submission, beach, and folk (Scandinavian). Many other forms of wrestling probably existed at various times and places but have been abandoned and forgotten. Boxing, whether carried out with or without gloves, is probably as old as wrestling is. Once again, the evidence goes back all the way to ancient Egypt; boxing is also shown on vases produced in the island of Thera (in the Aegean) during the fifteenth century BC. Sometimes the two sports may have been combined, as in the ancient Greek pankration (literally, “crushing by every available means”). Pankration fighters were allowed not only to kick but to aim their kicks at the groin. Some even got away with bending back their opponents’ fingers.21 Like wrestling, boxing is commonly divided into several kinds of which the most important ones are ancient Greek, ancient Roman, and modern. Yet wrestling and boxing in all their different varieties by no means exhaust the list of combat sports; such a list would also have to include Thai kickboxing, judo, karate, kung fu, sumo, cage fighting – which is currently the most violent combat sport of all – and others too numerous to mention.

  In all these forms of combat sports the combatants fight unarmed, either bare-breasted or while wearing only light clothing that provides no protection. In some forms of boxing the part
icipants wear gloves. Depending on the culture, the intention may be to increase the damage. Alternatively it may be to protect the wrist or limit the injury that the party that takes the punch can suffer.22 Modern boxers also wear devices to protect their teeth, and sometimes their heads. These precautions, as well as the fact that weapons are not allowed, do not entirely eliminate the possibility of serious injury and even death. They do, however, considerably reduce their probability. However it is done, the fact that combat is unarmed renders the relationship between it and war problematic, to say the least. Probably at no time or place was this fact more in evidence than in ancient Greece, the reason being the exceptionally important role that sports in general, and combat sports in particular, played in the culture.23

  The belief that combat sports helped achieve success in war was expressed most clearly by the comic poet Aristophanes. In more than one of his plays he claimed that it was training in the palaestra, best translated as school for combat sports, which enabled the Athenians to turn back the Persian invasions in 490 and 480 BC.24 Aristophanes’ objective was to make the Athenians of his own day take up the sports in question which, he thought, had been sadly neglected. Some modern writers have followed his lead, describing Greek warfare as “gymnastic” and contrasting it with the Persian one.25 How such claims may be reconciled with the weight of armor, which seriously interfered with the movements of those who wore it, is not entirely clear.26 Nevertheless it was hardly accidental that, at Olympia, the statue of Agon, a term that may be translated as task, or painful burden, or contest, stood right next to that of Ares, the god of war; throughout the Greek world, the language of inscriptions used to praise successful athletes was quite similar to that employed to glorify victorious soldiers.

  Several Olympic champions at pankration were excellent soldiers, though whether and just how the two things were connected is not very clear. On the other hand, the Iliad mentions a man by the name of Epheios who admits that he is not very good at war. He excuses himself by saying that nobody can excel at everything, and promises to crush anybody who dares to confront him in a boxing match;27 incidentally this was the very man who later built the Trojan horse, thus playing a crucial role in the Greek victory. In a fragment of a lost play, the late fifth-century BC tragic poet Euripides has one of his characters claim that no wrestler or any other athlete had ever helped save his city from an invader and that, in the presence of “steel,” their various bends, leaps, grips, and blows are so much foolishness.28 Plato in The Laws also opined that the tactics used in wrestling and boxing were worthless in war. In the ideal state, he wrote, they should be replaced by more realistic, and necessarily more dangerous, exercises. This included gymnastics in full armor, all sorts of mock warfare, and “fighting with balls” (sphaeromachia) and darts as nearly real as possible – though he did admit that the points of the darts would have to be blunted.29

  By that time, the individual fights between outstanding warriors that take up so much of the Iliad had long been replaced by hoplite warfare in which the exploits of individuals, however brave and however skilled, counted for much less. No wonder classical Greek writers and commanders were divided on the issue. Xenophon claimed that Boiskos, a famous boxer who early in the fourth century BC had won many matches, was unreliable as a soldier, and had once run away from a battle with the excuse that he was tired.30 During his youth the great fourth-century BC Theban commander Epaminondas engaged in running and wrestling (exceptionally, he felt that in war speed was more useful than strength). Yet his main concern was weapons practice; he once told his troops that, though wrestling shows might impress the enemy, the proper place to prepare for war was not the palaestra but the camp. A century and a half or so later, the Achaean commander Philopoemen, who like Epaminondas had wrestled in his youth, went so far as to claim that athletes did not make good soldiers and barred them from competition. Alexander the Great too had little respect for the combat sports of his day, though he did admire fighting with staves.31

  The view that most combat sports as practiced in ancient Greece were irrelevant to, or at any rate insufficient for, military training seems to have been shared by the most warlike Greek city-state of all. It was hardly accidental that, in the Spartan version of pankration, biting and gouging were also permitted. Though there is no indication that they were allowed to practice these “skills” at Olympia, the list of Spartans who won the pankration at the games is very impressive. Yet the parallel can be carried only so far. Tyrtaeus, the seventh-century Spartan bard who provided his (adopted) city-state with many of its most powerful martial songs, specifically wrote that skill in wrestling and similar sports did not make a man fit for war. The latter demanded the ability to witness, commit and withstand, “bloody slaughter”;32 as when arms and legs are sliced off, bodies ripped open, and heads sent rolling on the ground.

  In ancient Greece sports in general, and combat sports in particular, were an expression of aristocratic culture. As the famous Olympic oath indicates, only free men could participate. True, there was no legal prohibition to prevent members of the lower classes from training and competing; however, to do so it was first necessary to have sufficient leisure, or schol. Furthermore, regularly attending the palaestra was not inexpensive. This aristocratic character may be one reason why so many victors whose names are known to us were members of the upper classes. It also helps explain why, centuries later, the question was caught up in the debate as to which culture, the Greek or the Roman, was preferable. Second-century AD Greek writers often used sports in general, and combat sports in particular, as evidence of Greek superiority. One of them, the philosopher Philostratus, summed up the idea by saying that the great athletes of the past “made war training for sport, and sport training for war.” Turning Spartan logic on its head, Plutarch even claimed that the Thebans at the great Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC defeated the Spartans because they had done more training at the palaestra; he also wrote that sport, wrestling specifically included, was an imitation and exercise of war. The novelist and satirist Lucian, who was a close contemporary of both, devoted an entire essay to the question. Cast as a dialogue between the Athenian lawgiver Solon and a Scythian visitor, it concludes that athletic training helps citizen-soldiers defend their city’s freedom and defeat the enemy if necessary.33

  By that time the Greek world had long been conquered by the Romans, whose approach to the problem was entirely different. To be sure, as early as the second century BC many “progressive” Romans recognized the excellence of Greek achievements in art, literature, and science as far exceeding anything they themselves produced. The fact that they asked for, and obtained, permission for their citizens to participate in the prestigious Olympic Games also speaks volumes, since it was by such means that they set themselves apart from the remaining “barbarians.” Yet side by side with this view there was also one that accused the Greeks of lacking gravitas, seriousness. As early as the middle of the second century BC Polybius, a Greek statesman-soldier who spent much of his life in Rome and knew it well, noted how seriously the Romans took military training.34 Though he does not say so explicitly, clearly he saw them as an example his own countrymen should follow, if they only could.

  About a century later we find the statesman and orator Cicero describing the exercises which Greek youths undertook as useless for the purpose of military training. He even coined the term Graeculi, meaning, roughly, “despicable little Greeks”35 − a fact all the more remarkable because Cicero, along with his other accomplishments, was the most important Roman exponent of Greek philosophy of his day. Several Roman poets claimed that the palaestra only produced degenerates incapable of carrying weapons. Both the encyclopedist Pliny and the historian Tacitus warned against the effect it might have on Roman bodies. Plutarch himself sums up the Romans’ attitudes by saying that, in their view, the palaestra was the real reason why Greece had lost its independence. Instead of teaching youths to survive on simple military fare, it made them feed on fin
e-tuned diets. Leaving no time for weapons practice, it encouraged laziness, profligacy, and pederasty; and ended up by producing wrestlers rather than soldiers.36

  Both these views, the one which held that combat sports contribute to military preparedness and the one which claimed no such link existed, continued to be heard down to the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed it was probably during the interwar years, when people everywhere were fearfully contemplating the next major conflict, that they reached their peak. Governments, especially but by no means only totalitarian ones, did whatever they could to encourage their populations to engage in sports. The Nazis were particularly interested in boxing and made it compulsory for members of the Hitler Jugend. Along with a breakfast diet consisting of porridge, they saw it as one of the secrets behind Britain’s military-political success.37 Things only started changing after 1945 when the proliferation of nuclear weapons began making war, or at any rate war as waged by major developed countries against each other, obsolete. As conscription was gradually abolished, the number of those involved with war and the military went down. Few today believe that engaging in wrestling, boxing, or even much more violent combat sports such as Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) will help prepare either them as individuals or their nations for eventual armed conflict.