Pankration: The Brutal No-Rules Combat Sport of Ancient Greece

Pankration was the third combat event of the ancient Games, alongside boxing and wrestling, and it borrowed from both. From wrestling it took throws, takedowns, holds and the fight on the ground. From boxing it took striking, though pankratiasts fought with bare hands rather than the leather thongs boxers wrapped around theirs. To that it added kicks, joint locks and chokes. The result was the closest thing the ancient world had to an all-in fight.

The name itself tells the story. It comes from the Greek for "all" and "power" or "strength", so a rough translation is total combat. It was introduced at the 33rd Olympiad in 648 BC and stayed a fixture of the Games for centuries, one of the most watched and prestigious events on the programme.

The thing people remember about pankration is how little was banned. The two prohibited actions were biting and gouging, meaning digging fingers into an opponent's eyes, nose or mouth. Beyond that, the fighters were free. Punches to the face, kicks, trips, throws, arm and leg locks, and strangleholds were all part of the sport. A judge stood by with a rod or switch to punish anyone who broke the two rules, striking the offender on the spot.

Even those two rules were not universal. The Spartans, according to several ancient accounts, permitted biting and gouging in their own version of the contest, which is part of why Spartan athletes were sometimes barred from or chose to skip the Olympic pankration. It is a reminder that "the rules" varied by place and era, and that the Olympic version was, by the standards of the time, the regulated one.

There were no rounds, no points and no time limit at all. A bout ended one of two ways: an opponent gave up, usually by lifting a finger or slapping the ground, or an opponent could no longer continue. There were also no weight classes, so a smaller, faster fighter might face a much larger one. Skill, conditioning and pain tolerance decided most fights.

That format produced the single most famous moment in the sport's history. Arrhichion of Phigalia, already a two-time Olympic pankration champion, was crowned a third time in 564 BC at the instant he died. Caught in a chokehold he could not escape, he wrenched his opponent's ankle hard enough to force a submission. The other man signalled defeat, but Arrhichion had already stopped breathing. The judges crowned the corpse, the only Olympic victor known to have won a title at the moment of death. The story is recorded by the traveller Pausanias and retold ever since as the purest emblem of the sport's ferocity.

Pankratiasts trained in the palaistra, the wrestling school, under a coach, and the best of them became celebrities across the Greek world. Champions had statues raised in their honour, poems written about them, and cash and privileges waiting back home. Winning at Olympia was a route to lasting fame in a culture that took athletic glory extremely seriously.

The training blended what we would now split into separate disciplines: strength work, wrestling drills, striking practice and a great deal of conditioning. Diet mattered, and ancient athletes were known for eating large amounts of meat, though the everyday Greek diet leaned heavily on bread, olives, figs, cheese and pulses such as lentils and beans, which carried much of the protein for ordinary people. The point is old and still true: build the engine with hard practice, feed it enough, and repeat for years.

• Grappling first. Most pankratiasts came from a wrestling base, then added striking on top.
• Conditioning. With no time limit, the fitter fighter often outlasted the more talented one.
• Pain tolerance. Joint locks and chokes meant you had to know how far you could be pushed before quitting.
• Tactics. No weight classes meant reading your opponent's size and adjusting, closing distance on a bigger striker or keeping a stronger grappler at bay.

If the description above feels familiar, that is because the format the Greeks landed on is close to the one combat sports rediscovered in the modern era. Mixed martial arts (MMA) combines striking and grappling, allows fights to continue on the ground, and is often decided by submission. The lineage is not literal, modern MMA grew out of judo, wrestling, boxing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu and other arts rather than a surviving Greek tradition, but the design problem and the answer rhyme closely.

The big differences are the safeguards. Modern MMA has weight classes, timed rounds, gloves, referees who can stop a bout, and doctors at ringside. Those exist precisely because a near no-rules fight to submission is dangerous, which the Greeks knew and largely accepted. There have been modern attempts to revive pankration as a regulated sport, with strict rules and protective gear, which is a fitting irony: to bring back the ancient "no-rules" contest safely, you have to add most of the rules it never had.