Did the Roman Legions adopt Pankration?

[Guest SassinidAzatan]

For those of you who never heard of it, Pankration is an ancient martial art. It was the official martial art styles used by the ancient Greek armies.Here is a documentary showing basic info on the martial art:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha32Kuc6-6I&feature=related

 

Now considering the Roman Legion burrowed much of their tactics from the Greeks, Iam curious did the Roman Legion ever standardized Pankration as their official martial art?Most sources I found in martial arts based websites state that the Romans generally looked down on Pankration but Iam really skeptical and find this claim very hard to believe considering much of Roman culture was influence heavily or even burrowed from Greek culture.

 

This is something I have been curious about for years. If Pankration was not the standard martial art of the Roman Legion, than what was?

Edited March 11, 2011 by SassinidAzatan

[GhostOfClayton]

I was under the impression that 'one-on-one' combat (be it with or without weaponary) wasn't something they considered worth training infantry in. Taking up their trainng time with close order battle drill. This obviously changed as time wore on, but mainly because training became more and more neglected, not due to a change of focus.

 

Perhaps the Praetorian Guard trained differently?

Edited March 12, 2011 by GhostOfClayton

[caldrail]

Pancration was never a formal part of Roman 'martial art'. It's wrong to think that the Romans were all performing training in exactly the same way. Whilst they did elvolve manuals (we know the departing legions gave some to the Britons to help defend themselves at the start of the 5th century) the training of Roman legionaries was very much at the whim of the senior commabnder.

 

Now in fairness there was an accepted 'Roman way', but this left considerable license. Vegetius muddies the water by decribing how the legions ought to be trained by recounting all the things he'd found in the records that seemed like a good idea. Not all legions at any given timne did all those things.

 

'Martial Arts' is a fashionable phrase these days. Personaly I would be wary about using it in connection with the Roman legions because they were not taught a martial art, rather a martial style. Much of their training was by rote and employed standard moves. Whereas 'martial art' suggests expertise and instinctive moves, the Romans were more concerned with optimising a particular method of fighting, one that meshed with their tactical doctrines. After all, 'martial art' is the expertise of the singular fighter. Legionaries were taught to fight as part of a formation.

 

Did the Romans employ the pancration for off-duty relaxation? Possibly, but bear in mind the brutal nature of the contests did not lend itself to legionary fitness for duty afterward.

[CiceroD]

We're also missing somthing else here. Martial Art or no, Pankration was part of the larger world of Greek Athletics. I always heard that the Romans were never very thrilled at the institution. Didn't they see it as leading to certain character defects. (Well excluding Emperors Nero and Commodus of course!)

[Pilus Ultimus]

We're also missing somthing else here. Martial Art or no, Pankration was part of the larger world of Greek Athletics. I always heard that the Romans were never very thrilled at the institution. Didn't they see it as leading to certain character defects. (Well excluding Emperors Nero and Commodus of course!)

 

The real problem with pankration was the rule that you continued to mash your opponent until he asked for mercy. Very un-Roman. Un-Spartan, too. Part of the Roman distaste may be due to their discomfort with Greek homosexuality.

[Guest ParatrooperLirelou]

We're also missing somthing else here. Martial Art or no, Pankration was part of the larger world of Greek Athletics. I always heard that the Romans were never very thrilled at the institution. Didn't they see it as leading to certain character defects. (Well excluding Emperors Nero and Commodus of course!)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Boxing the exception to the rule?Its generally accepted among Boxing historians that Boxing was a craze in ancient Rome.

[caldrail]

The real problem with pancration, or even boxing, was that it was the preserve of the slave athlete, and no self respecting soldier was going to lower himself to take part. Seems a bit odd at first considering how ready a typical legionary might be to engage in roughhouse, but a drunken brawl in the vicus outside a fort was a different matter.

 

Boxing was quite a craze. It lasted throughout the length of the empire and changed along with Roman tastes for hard edged violence. Originally the cestus, the boxing glove, was no more than a means to protect the fist when punching your opponent (the hand is quite vulnerable to damage), and the infamous metal glove was a later development along with the nastyier side of gladiatorial style.

 

As far as i'm aware, there are no records of soldiers engaging in either boxing or pancration as an activity though I'm sure they enjoyed watching two slave smah each other to bloody pulp.

[barca]

I just started reading Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus and I found this related paragraph:

 

And so Marcius, who was by nature exceedingly fond of warlike feats, began at once, from his very boyhood, to handle arms. And since he thought that adventitious weapons were of little avail to such as did not have their natural and native armour developed and prepared for service, he so practised himself in every sort of combat that he was not only nimble of foot, but had also such a weight in grapplings and wrestlings that an enemy found it hard to extricate himself. At any rate, those who from time to time contended with him in feats of courage and valour, laid the blame for their inferiority upon his strength of body, which was inflexible and shrank from no hardship.

 

So he took it upon himself to learn these martial arts, suggesting that it wasn't common practice.

[caldrail]

'Martial Arts' is a modern phrase and anachrinistic when used in reference to the Romans. However, regarding the passage you quoted, that does not equate to the pancration. The greeks invented that form of competition as an athletic sport, not a combat style, and given they took the attitude that winning was everything and losers can limp away loathed and despised, it follows they thought of wrestling with almost no holds barred.

 

I have no doubt that Roman soldiers engaged in bouts of wrestling from time to time. That was considered a manly pursuit and indeed, note your quotation applauds his skills at it. It must be understood however that Roman soldiers were not athletes, who generally took on the stigma of slavery and infamy in Roman circles, and that the idea of rebdering your opponent too severely injured to continue (the whole point of pancration was to win mercilessly) did not lend itself to Roman policy of fitness, virility, and latin conformity.

 

Also, be aware that these sort of descriptions are often written to underline the special nature of the individual, and there's no guarantee that the prose was not an exaggeration, something Roman writers often indulged in.

[Trajan]

Pankration was practiced by the Greek ethnic auxiliary units, but not formally, and was never really adopted by the legions. Plutarch mentions hand-to-hand combat, but that can be interpreted as any one of many forms of hand-to-hand, least of all simple boxing and wrestling. The Romans carried their pugio, which was definitely used when CQC was at hand, probably more so than any hand-to-hand. In addition, the lorica would have made any type of grappling form like pankration imprudent. Josephus also wrote about how Roman soldiers tended to subdue and capture rebels by throwing them to the ground, but he does not elaborate on any sort of practiced martial art.

[Guest ParatrooperLirelou]

So basically as opposed to the Greeks, who loved any form of Hand to Hand COmbat, the Romans saw fighting sports like Pankration as something only for slaves and other people of lower status?

 

And they avoided H2H training because of pain and suffering it brings?

 

Quite contradictory to the view of Romans as Warrior Culture and Martial People!

 

Generally Warrior Cultures and Militaristic people such as the Greeks and Japanese have valued War so much that their most sacred and popular sports tend to be those related to Hand to Hand combat such as Boxing and Sambo(Russian martial art that was huge in Russia duing the Soviet Years and still remains popular-after all the Russians are a Militaristic people!).

 

The Mongols loved Archery as a sport,the Greeks Wrestling and Pankration and Boxing,so more examples i could list.

 

 

So this is one contrasts the Romans have with other Warrior Cultures/Militaristic peoples!

[Melvadius]

Quite contradictory to the view of Romans as Warrior Culture and Martial People!

 

I suspect that you are reading too much into the previous answers and allowing your knowledge of more modern armies to influence what you expect from the period.

 

The basic aim of Roman training as described by Vegetius was to ensure that they were a disciplined fighting force capable of effectively engaging their enemies and ideally catching them when they were 'unarmed'.

 

Nowhere does that mean that in addition to being taught basic (and/or combined unit) combat skills they did not indulge in some forms of unarmed combat whether formally taught or otherwise.

[caldrail]

Further to that we have to stress that the Romans taught combat skills of a particular style. This was true in all walks of life as certain behaviour was acceptable and others not so. There is a great deal of traditional thought in Roman minds, a cultural confirmity and adherence to set standards that we don't experience in anything like the same intensity today. Modern western culture has the luxury of enjoying many diverse forms of martial art. The Romans did things their way (though sometimes they did learn from their enemies and adopt methods out of sheer expedience, or perhaps even fashion in some cases)

 

Roman writers for instance talk about gladiatorial training as composed of standard moves. Notice however that a fighter who does nothing more than 'fight by the numbers' (something the Romans themselves said) results in a dull and uninspiring fighter. Although these men performed within strict guidelines, audiences looked for something other than a mere swordfight. They wanted courage, aggression, drama, and a very real flair for combat in the arena. In other words, whereas we might like look at fighting in a generic overview, the Romans looked for those all-important details, those qualities that set one contestant above another in a blood sport fought to rules and governed by referees.

 

The problem with the pankration is that it was too all or nothing, besides being considered greek or essentially low level sport. It was a no-holds-barred style of wrestling. Only biting and gouging of eyes was forbidden, though classical sources tell us that occured anyway. One contestant won his fight by breaking the fingers of his opponent. According to sources, one greek contestant killed his opponent by forcing a fatal abdominal wound with his bare hands. Clearly that wasn't good for legionaries. What's the point of having men volunteer for military service if they all end up disabled in the hospital?

 

In any case, legionaries were given a measure of pride and esprit-de-corps in imperial times. That meant they generally considered ceratin fighting styles or contest types as beneath them. Don't forget that wrestling, as a formal and less harmful physical contest, was considered a manly pursuit. So was the practice of swordplay, the essential weapon of the warrior, a sort of phallic symbol of manhood as it always tends to be in some way or other. The male pride of Romans is not generally realised but they were a very macho lot.

 

Besides, injuring your opponent beyond capability in a ruthless and merciless fashion was a bit barbaric, surely? Civilisation demands rules and standards of behaviour, even among the roughnecks in armour that swaggered around the empire and beyond.

[Feanor]

I think it's worth mentioning here that while the individuality of combat styles such as pankration does mean that there would've been little benefit in training legionaries in them, as their strength was their ability to fight as a unit, the same can be said of the Greek Phalanx. Much has been discussed of the apparent contradiction between the Greek love of single combat and their wartime fighting style which relied on teamwork to keep the phalanx formation together.

 

Since both the Greek and Roman fighting formations would have been undermined by soldiers indulging in one-on-one combat, which would presumably mean that such feats were discouraged, both cultures had the same love of individual combat and competition and so experienced the same contradictions.

 

So while I agree that any individualistic "martial art" or ancient fighting style that you might be able to trace back to ancient times doesn't really tell us much about how the Roman soldier was trained, I think the same thing goes for the Greek soldier.

[Onasander]

Ummm....

 

No style of fighting is ever beneath a infantry soldier. Just some are unreasonable in context. Like techniques that seriously hurt others in a unit, or injure a soon to be made slave.... you want the highest returns for such people.

 

But never is there a fighting art too low. And further, it's not an anachronism to consider the Romans had a concept of fighting styles, they, after all, gave us that concept via the various forms of gladitorial fighting styles. A Roman military colony had arenas, and arenas had gladiators.

 

A soldier fighting in a particular style in his off time, doesn't lower himself in status when done with fellow soldiers. Even a commander such rank as Julius Caesar could get down and dirty on show occasions if he cared to WITHIN his own legions in good sport. The highest rank of the republic, after all was a military dictatorship. The capacity to hold your own is a prerequisite. Making sure your men could fight wasn't a slaves job, it was very legitimately the highest commanders duty, and failure his fault. In order to do this, you gotta get dirty on occasion. Your lower ranks are indeed lower ranks, but you draw your subject matter experts in terms of technique, training, and simple brutality from them.

 

How prevalent was it? By the time of say, Onasander.... I suspect it damn near WASN'T universal, but still practiced..... until the end of the empire. But whenever you see evidence of a competent, highly trained roman unit.... you can rest assured the ranks got rough with one another in mixed training and trusted one another, because they knew from top to bottom what everyone was capable of.

 

In mordern armies, officers or NCOs don't fight with the lower enlisted in off schedule training, but it still happens still even then, and though cautious of becoming too familiar in terms of the seperation of rank, isn't bad... often seen as a good thing. But in offical training, everyone gets thrown in, rank be damn. Few times you can get away with pinning down and tormenting the bastard too. Good way to root out who are your field leaders, and who should be more involved in paper work and planning.