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CHAPTER II.

WRESTLING AND WRESTLERS.

The Origin of Wrestling-Hercules and Antæus, Theseus and Cercyon - Two kinds of Wrestling, the Perpendicular and Horizontal-Wrestling with the Finger Ends-Homer's Description -At what time the Athletes Fought entirely Naked-The Pancrace Anointing and Rubbing - The Group of Wrestlers — Advantages of Wrestling among the Ancients-The Swiss Mountaineers.

ALL the athletes to whom we have referred may be generally described as wrestlers, and their art is perhaps the most ancient of all gymnastic exercises. It is not to be supposed that those who took part in struggles of this nature were actuated by enmity or a desire for vengeance. On the contrary, for many ages wrestling was only a means of testing the strength of members of the same race, tribe, or family. Two brothers would seize each other round the body, and exert all their strength to make each other succumb, but their doing so was considered only a pastime and a preparation for the serious combats of the arena. These encounters, however, body to body, were marked by all the rudeness of primitive times, and brute force decided the victory. One athlete overthrew the other by his mere weight and mass, crushing him as they crush grain in the mill, and only relaxed his hold when his adversary owned himself vanquished. In the heroic ages every man's energies were directed to rendering his body as powerful as possible, either by continual exercise, or by a

strengthening regimen, in order to bring into play in the combats all the force of his frame and muscles. That some perverted the great physical powers which nature had bestowed upon them, and which they had developed by culture, to the purpose of tyrannising over and making profit out of their fellow-creatures is not surprising. The classic mythology teems with examples. Among the most dreaded of such monsters were Antæus and Cercyon, whom Theseus and Hercules were obliged to destroy, and to whom it is said we owe the invention of wrestling. They compelled travellers to try their strength with them, and after easy victories, killed the victims when they had thrown them to the ground. Antæus, the Lybian giant, did not, according to the myth, run any great personal danger, for he had, so to speak, insured his life, and in his encounters a fall was not a defeat, the Museum of Chiusi.) as it was for ordinary wrestlers, but rather gave him renewed strength. He was, the ancients said, the son of Terra, the earth, and each time he fell and touched his mother he received fresh powers. After Hercules had three times in vain dragged him down in his embrace, he raised him with his muscular arm, and strangled him without suffering him to touch the reviving earth. Theseus had to overcome some obstacles of the same nature in his combat with Cercyon of Attica, who used to catch wayfarers, and, after fixing them to the branches of trees, break their limbs as on a rack. The brigands of our own time, in Calabria and elsewhere, are not inexperienced in the refinements of cruelty, but

Hercules and Antæus (From a carving in

modern governments are armed with very effectual means of putting a stop to them. Theseus, however, had not at his disposal the resources of civilisation, and it was purely out of good will, and at great personal peril, that he assumed in his own person the functions which in our days devolve on the police. If he managed to get through a wrestling bout when the odds were against him not only victoriously but with glory, it was because he had discovered the weak points of all the wrestlers who had preceded him. They possessed brute misdirected strength, which did not suffice when opposed by skill, which strips mere strength of its value; which reflects, judges, and contrives; which discovers the weak points of others, but conceals itself; which is at once a shield to defend and a spear to attack. Theseus was the first to perceive its importance in wrestling, and to introduce it in practice; and the result was that what had formerly been only an exercise without method or rules, now became an art pursued in the gymnasium.

Wrestling held a place in the Olympic games from remote times, and the hero Hercules himself carried off the prize for physical strength. When troubles began to come upon Greece the games fell into desuetude; but after they were re-established, at the instigation of the oracle at Delphos, wrestling was again recognised as an institution in the eighteenth Olympiad, and the Lacedæmonian Eurybates had the honour of being the first conqueror.

The Greeks recognised two modes of wrestling—one called the perpendicular, in which the combatants were allowed to rise after they had been overthrown; the other, in which the wrestler did not require to fear a fall, was styled the horizontal mode. It was also called the rotatory,

because in their evolutions and intertwinings the wrestiers, now uppermost now undermost, rolled upon the tan from one side of the arena to the other. Some authors assert that there was a third mode-acrocheirismos-which consisted in seizing the ends of the fingers of an adversary, without touching any other part of his body. The name

but contented himself by squeezing and twisting the fingers of his enemy with such vigour as to oblige him to own himself defeated. Thus, as the wrestling match was often terminated with the preliminary play of hands, it is not surprising that modern critics have considered this a special exercise.

In the Homeric times neither this preliminary play nor the cunning and much-cultivated art of the horizontal wrestle was known, and upright wrestling was the only form practised. When Ajax, the son of Telamon, opposed himself to the wise Ulysses, during the games with which the funeral of Patroclus was celebrated, the perpendicular mode was the only one in use. "The heroes strip, they clasp each other by the back, and they struggle; they press each other tightly in their nervous arms. One would call them two beams which a skilled carpenter unites at the summit of a building, in order that they shall resist the strength of the wind. Their backs resound under the frequent blows given by their sinewy arms, the perspiration rolls down their limbs