Ancient Greek Boxers an interesting thought.

Yes. They could very well have been better than modern era fighters.

 

Given that the ancient Greeks extolled physical fitness and the benefits of a hard life (some even fanatically by modern standards if we look at the Spartans) I don't see why not. Imagine what the boxing scene would look like if all youngsters were encouraged to compete in physical combat from a young age. I'd venture to say that with a few exceptions you'd have an entirely new bunch of world champions even better than the old ones, simply because drawing on a base 1000 times larger than the current one has to yield up better athletes.

Then again, the primes of the Greek boxers were probably pretty short. They used rawhide strips on their knuckles which I guess would have cut up faces a great deal and shortened the duration of a given fighter's stay at the top by a lot.

 

lol at deathray,,,

interesting post :think

you would think over a few hundred years and lots of competition there would of been some amazing Greek boxers.

wonder what the average size of the people were at that stage?

 

Compared to us, small.

We've got all kinds of dodgy hormones in our food that makes us bigger than people who eat more naturally. But this is off the top of my head. I could try find out ...

 

Apparently measuring skeletal remains at Pompeii and Herculaneum yielded up an average height for men of around 1,68m for ancient Romans. AFAIK the peoples were probably pretty similar.

 

The title fragmented 325 ways; ωβα, ιβζ, λπο, Ωθξ, and so on with 250 weight classes, the whole thing imploded when every boxer had a world title.

 

So basically Gladiator showed have starred Midgets..... :rofl:rofl

 

so maybe the old greeks produced some legendary flyweights :bbb

 

According to wikipedia, these were the rules:

No holds or wrestling
Any type of blow with the hand was allowed but no gouging with the fingers
No ring was used
There were no rounds or time limits
Victory was decided when one fighter gave up or was incapacitated
No weight-classes, opponents were selected by chance
Judges enforced the rules by beating offenders with a switch or whip
Fighters could opt to exchange blows undefended if the fight lasted too long


LOL, that's the problem with modern boxing. The refs don't have whips anymore!

 

In 2009 some guys tried to reconstruct ancient Greek boxing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47jmOxzux-8
Quite interesting...

 

I've got a book on Greek Pankration, it's a pretty complete fighting system and the root of western boxing and wrestling, also submissions are a big part of it.