to compete fairly and honestly, the enormous pressure for victory would
have led to instances of cheating. Authors from the period, such as Xeno-
phanes, regularly decried the loss of pure athletic competition and the evils
of professionalism in the local and Olympic games, indicating the magni-
tude of the problem.
It is unknown if pankration was taught exclusively as a sport or also
taught as a means of self-defense in and of itself. Pankration experts obvi-
ously were sought out as bodyguards and instructors, just as was the case
with retired gladiators during the Roman Empire. Evidence suggests that
the emphasis would most likely have been on sport development. Roman
sources sometimes did mention, however, the effectiveness of “Greek box-
ing” as a method of self-defense; whether they were talking about pankra-
tion or Greek boxing proper is unknown. However, by the time of the
Greek incorporation into the Roman Empire, the emphasis would have
been on learning proper striking techniques so that the lethal cestus (a
spiked metal glove) could be employed. This alone might indicate a loss of
interest in grappling techniques for self-defense, suggesting that boxing
proper was probably employed.
The Romans conquered much of Greece in 146 B.C. The athletic skill
and combat spirit displayed by pankrationists were less appreciated by the
Romans than the slaughter of the gladiatorial games in the Colosseum.
Pankration was relegated to secondary status. Therefore, pankration grad-
ually began to disappear from the mainstream of Greek and Roman life.
With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, pankration continued to be
practiced within the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire, but never achieved the
same level of popularity as it had among the ancient Greeks.
The Olympic Games were banned in the fourth century A.D. as pagan
rituals, and pankration was relegated to local athletic festivals. Soon, the
chaotic circumstances following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the
constant struggle for survival by the Byzantine Empire against external
threats, and the prohibition by the Church of any form of paganism dis-
couraged the practice and transmission of the art. By the tenth century,
pankration had, for all practical purposes, died out under the impact of so-
cial events of the times. Medieval Christianity suppressed events associated
with the pagan world as well as prohibiting the study of the human body,
critical for unarmed fighting systems. In addition, the nature of warfare in
the Middle Ages, specifically the development of vastly superior armor and
the counterdevelopment of innovative weapon systems to counteract the
defensive abilities of armor, placed a much greater emphasis on weapons
training. With the decline and eventual extinction of pankration, the West-
ern world lost its preeminent unarmed martial art. Historical conditions in
Europe did not allow for a revival.
Pankration 415