Those who did survive the boxing or Pankration seem, moreover, to have frequently suffered severe injuries. Although no skeletons of confirmed ancient boxers and pankratiasts have yet been found, clearly broken bones would have been very common among them. Apart from the possible ankle fracture by Arrichion, we also have records of a man called Sostratus who won three Olympic Pankration competitions by simply grabbing his opponent’s fingers and bending them back until they either broke or the pain became unbearable.15 This, in the modern UFC, is called small-joint manipulation, and is outlawed due to the crippling injuries it causes (wrist fractures, apparently, are a frequent result). The Greco-Roman father of modern medicine, Galen, writes disparagingly of pankratiasts whose eyes have been knocked out. Vase paintings dating back to the sixth century BCE show that despite the ban on gouging, fighters could punch with thumbs and fingers extended. Boxing injuries seem to have been even more catastrophic—so bad that a second-century manual on dream interpretation, the Oneirocritica, lists dreams of boxing as bad omens foreshadowing serious bodily harm. The face of a famous first-century BCE bronze statue of a boxer found in Rome bears a broken nose, cauliflower ears, and numerous gaping cuts—the Greeks jokingly called these last “ant tracks.” The statue’s hands show where such cuts came from: Greek boxers wore sharp leather thongs wrapped around their knuckles, not to protect their opponent’s head, but to damage it. (The facial wounds that resulted were so severe that one ancient Greek boxer apparently failed to inherit his dead father’s estate because he no longer resembled his own portrait enough to prove his identity.) Even these cruel instruments, however, were nothing compared to the barbaric refinements that the Romans introduced into boxing. Their gloves, the infamous caestus (also known as “limb-breakers”), featured projecting metal spikes, lumps of lead sewn into them, and jutting metal plates with serrated, saw-like edges. Fights using these must have caused almost as many violent injuries as those suffered in straight-out gladiatorial contests.
Given the nonexistent mortality rate of modern ultimate fighting, it seems positively cruel to compare it with actual Roman gladiatorial death fights—truly the ultimate in ultimate fighting. There’s also the fact that gladiators, unlike UFC fighters, used weapons. Yet boasts by UFC competitors of their willingness to die in the octagon make at least one comparison fair: how does their supposed readiness to face death compare to that of the Roman gladiators? Clearly, for a start, their follow-through doesn’t quite measure up to their hype. UFC star Ken Shamrock, for example, once vowed at a UFC fight to “get my respect or die” (he presumably got his respect, since he is alive and fighting at the time of writing). Then there is Aleksander Emelianenko, an expert in the Russian combat sport of Sambo and likewise still alive, who once told an interviewer he was ready to fight “…on foot or on horseback. With maces or poleaxes. To first blood or to death.” Such vows sound impressive, until you compare them to the sacramentum gladiatorum, the sacred oath by which Roman gladiators agreed to be uri, vinciri, verberari, ferroque necari patior, or “burnt, bound with chains, beaten and put to death by sword.”16 What’s more, the gladiators really did follow through. Even low estimates of gladiatorial mortality rates, taken from the least bloodthirsty periods of the empire’s history, put their chances of dying in the arena at one in every nine appearances. Nor were these quick, simple deaths in the heat of combat. If defeated and given the crowd’s shouted order IUGULA! (“lance him through”), the defeated gladiator was expected to kneel, clasp his opponent’s thigh, and offer his neck as the victor drove a sword into it or cut his throat. He was also required to maintain a stoic silence, neither screaming nor begging for mercy. Nor did his travails end here. If he somehow managed to hang onto life through this treatment he was then dragged away, through the “Gate of Death” by the libitinarii (“funeral men”), and then killed with a blow to the temple by a hammer-wielding servant playing the part of Dis Pater, the Roman god of the underworld. (A second century gladiators’ cemetery recently excavated in Ephesus, Turkey, shows that 15 percent of gladiators received these blows.17)
Equally lethal hammers were employed in contests in prehistoric Australia, again by men demonstrating a readiness to die far exceeding that of modern UFC champions. A survey of ninety-four skulls of prehistoric Australian Aboriginal men held by the Adelaide Museum in South Australia, for example, showed fifty-four to have severe fractures from strikes by knobkerries, or fighting clubs.18 Remarkably, these probably came from the brutal dispute-resolution process first recorded by nineteenth-century anthropologist John Fraser, in which Aboriginal men took turns to kneel and receive a blow to the head, the loser being the first to die or otherwise become incapacitated. It is unclear exactly what the death rate was in these fights, but it must have been high. (As an interesting aside, this cultural practice, according to paleoanthropologist Peter Brown, may also have left its stamp on the skeletal form of modern Aboriginal people: they have the most robust skulls of any living Homo sapiens—possibly due to this selective pressure.)
Clearly, then, we modern males have mouths far bigger than our hearts—at least where fighting and dying are concerned. But what about the sheer love of the fight itself? Are we really the hot-headed, bare-knuckled brawlers, ready to fight at the drop of a hat, we’re so often cracked up to be? Some media reports would have it so. English newspapers, for example, often describe the weekend streets of London as charnel houses of bloody, booze-fueled brawling. Some statistics, certainly, bear this out—violent incidents on streets and in hotels rose from 39 percent of all UK violence to 49 percent between 1996 and 2004.19 A 2006 study by the University of London, similarly, found that one in eight young men admitted having indulged in some form of recreational violence in the past year, and a five-year survey of fifty-eight British hospital emergency wards found an average 0.75 percent of the male population presented annually with injuries from assaults or other violence.20
These figures do seem to indicate an impressive level of aggression, but how does this aggression compare to the drunken brawling of earlier cultures? An exact comparison might seem impossible, since most such cultures have long since vanished, yet there is, surprisingly, one study that does allow a close evaluation. In the 1960s and 1970s anthropologist Mac Marshall conducted a study of male alcohol abuse and violence in the Truk group of the Micronesian Caroline Islands. Trukese culture was still heavily traditional at the time of Marshall’s arrival, partly due to the intense aggression of the islands’ men, who had long kept colonization at bay (Truk was known to ancient mariners as “dread Hogoleu”). Marshall described a violent drinking culture that set aside “battleground” areas in almost every village for drunken weekend brawling.21 Young men would strut these “battlegrounds” issuing high-pitched war cries, giving swinging kung-fu kicks (Bruce Lee had been quickly adopted as a warrior role model by the modern aggressive Trukese), and generally seeking opportunities for violence. Clan loyalties meant that the inevitable fights quickly became all-in brawls involving multiple armed participants. While he gives no direct statistics, Marshall implies participation in these brawls far exceeded the one-in-eight ratio of young British males listed above. Similarly, Marshall does not calculate injury and death rates, but the Trukese fondness for fearsome homemade weaponry (such as nanchaku made from steel pipes) coupled with their disregard of injury (Trukese warriors often deliberately sliced their own arms open to show their bravery to enemies) suggests far more than 0.75 percent of the islands’ men acquire wounds severe enough for hospitalization in any given year—or indeed, on any given weekend.
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City of fight
To the modern traveler Venice is a city of high culture: the “Queen of the Adriatic,” the “City of Light.” Particularly charming are its beautiful stone bridges such as the “Bridge of Sighs”—the covered limestone walkway from which criminals were given their last sight of the medieval city before they were thrown into the dungeon. Yet few know that these same bridges were
once the scene of brutal mass pugni “fistfights” in which thousands of men from the city’s two main factions, the Castellani and Nicolotti, beat, stabbed, and drowned one another for fun. From 1369 to 1710 CE, great mobs of fishermen, arsenal workers, porters, and tanners held battagliole sui ponti, “little wars on the bridges,” for possession of the tiny stone arches that marked the boundaries of each faction’s territory. Such wars usually began with scores of mostre, or individual fistfights, in which champions such as Magnomorti, “Eats the Dead,” Zuzzateste, “Sucker of Heads,” and Tre Riose de Cul, “Three Ashole Roses” or i.e. “Three Farts,” fought to bloody their opponent’s face or throw him into the canal. Such brutal fist fests usually failed to satisfy the bloodlust of the tens of thousands of onlookers though, leading them to take matters into their own hands by pelting the combatants with roof tiles and rushing onto the bridges with fists, sticks, and daggers flailing. As ferocious as these fights were, the pugni were an improvement on the earlier guerre di canne, in which fighters charged each other en masse with staves of cane sharpened and hardened by repeated dipping in boiling oil (fighters also wore specially designed armor and helmets). The battagliole sui ponti only began to decline in the 1650s, when the loss of their best fighters to the war with the Turks led the Castellani faction to suffer repeated defeats. The coup de grace came in 1705, when the brawlers proved so unwilling to desist from their recreational violence that they wouldn’t even save the church of San Girolamo from burning down. The city’s secretive governing body, the Council of Ten, didn’t see the joke and shut the pugni down five years later.
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Even the prehistoric Trukese, however, probably couldn’t match the aggression of another group of big-drinking brawlers—the pre-modern Irish. The Victorian-era boyos’ fondness for recreational violence was simply mind-boggling. Of the 1,932 homicides reported to police between 1866 and 1892, for example, 41 percent were from brawling for fun.22 At roughly 35 deaths per year (and no doubt countless injuries) this might seem unbelievably high, but for two factors. First, the Irish didn’t fight bare-handed, but with lethal stick weapons such as the lead-filled, knobbed, blackthorn-wood shillelagh—a cross between a walking stick and a long croquet mallet.23 Second, they also didn’t fight alone, but in massive gangs, sometimes of hundreds or even thousands, known as factions. These armed hordes might form on the flimsiest of excuses: Limerick, for example, was the battleground of the “Three-Year-Olds” and “Four-Year-Olds,” who took opposing sides in a 30-year debate over the age of a calf. Equally absurd were the pretexts used to get a stick fight going—Irish author William Carleton describes challengers strutting before opposing factions at county fairs (a frequent venue for faction fights) swinging their shillelaghs and shouting, “Ram’s horns! Who dares say anything’s crookeder than ram’s horns?” or, “Black’s the white of my eye. Who dares say black’s not the white of my eye?” The fact that these were consensual fights, engaged in purely for fun, is shown by the refusal of Irish courts to convict those who killed in faction fights—only 8 percent ever received prison sentences of more than 2 years.
In the small wars of the arena and the street, then, we modern males obviously would have been judged unfit even for the reserves. But what about in real wars? How does the savagery of modern combat compare with that of ancient war? Again, media reports often give the impression that we modern, war-mongering males simply blow our ancient counterparts away. In 2006, for example, newspaper and TV outlets worldwide reported that the 2003 invasion of Iraq had officially become the most destructive war in America’s history, based on casualty estimates from a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study published in The Lancet that same year.24 That study estimated 654,965 Iraqi civilians and combatants had perished as a result of coalition military activities in Iraq between March 2003 and July 2006—an overall death rate of 2.5 percent for those forty months, or 0.79 percent annually. (Meaning, basically, that almost 1 person in 100 died from military violence every year.) Several commentators pointed out that this appalling statistic represents almost double the percentage population loss of the United States in the American Civil War, making the second Gulf War the most violent in U.S. history.25 While The Lancet study’s figure is contentious, it seems fair to take it as a baseline for comparison.26 Such carnage, after all, seems only too believable in light of the devastating advances in the destructive power of modern weapons.
Remarkably, however, these concerns turn out to be simple reruns of arguments that have consumed every generation before us. Members of America’s “Greatest Generation” (those born in the first quarter of the twentieth century) for example, often proudly declare World War II, which they fought and won, the most devastating in world history. In terms of percentage of population lost, however, this is not strictly true. Just 3 percent of the world’s 1938 population died in World War II—approximately 0.5 percent per year. This pales in comparison to the population loss suffered by Germany in the early seventeenth century due to the Thirty Years War, which may have reached 30 percent, or an average 1 percent of population per year.
The tendency to overestimate current catastrophe seems, in fact, to be a simple resurfacing of the old “Golden Age” concept first introduced by the Greek poet Hesiod, who wrote of an “Age of Gold” when men lived forever in perfect peace—vastly different to the degenerate Greeks of his day, who lived in a violent “Age of Iron.” Another way of putting it is that the atrocities each generation experiences directly burn far brighter in its memory than those it merely reads about. Though naïve, this is perhaps forgivable, considering exactly the same mistake was made by scientific anthropologists for most of the last century. Archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, in his book War Before Civilization, describes the mistaken notion of a “pacified past” that so blinkered twentieth-century archaeologists that they described finds of ruined Neolithic forts—walled with palisades and littered with the flint arrowheads of their attackers—as “symbolic” enclosures (the frequent scatterings of broken human bone were described as possible funeral by-products). In fact, as Keeley’s own research shows, the idea that prehistoric males were pacifists couldn’t be more wrong.
His survey of annual death rates from war among twenty-three prehistoric societies around the world, for instance, reveals an average annual mortality rate of 0.56 percent.27 This already seems appallingly close to The Lancet study’s figures, yet several statistical quirks indicate prehistoric casualty rates were often higher. First, 0.56 percent is an average rate—at least five of Keeley’s societies considerably exceed The Lancet study’s rate.28 The second quirk is that many of those groups that Keeley records as having a lower rate than wartime Iraq often maintained their rate for decades. Keeley describes two New Guinean societies, the Mae Enga and the Tauade, who averaged an annual death rate of 0.32 percent for over fifty years. Given that, at the time of writing, the casualty rate in Iraq is falling dramatically, it seems highly possible the peak casualty rate in the second Gulf War will be confined to the five years between 2003 and 2008. If so, it might take just another five years for Iraq’s annual war mortality rate to equal that of the Mae Enga and Tauade. Within another five (fifteen years in total) it might well fall to half. Even faced with the devastating power of U.S. cluster-bomb artillery shells and four-thousand-round-per-minute mini-guns, modern Iraqis might well have statistically better odds than the average ancient hunter–gatherer did of escaping death through military violence.
Why was prehistoric warfare so lethal? One reason is the almost complete absence of prisoners of war. Keeley was unable to find more than a handful of prehistoric societies that took defeated warriors captive—the exceptions being those such as the Iroquois, who waged war specifically to assimilate prisoners, and the Meru herders of Kenya, who might ransom them for cattle. Most, however, killed prisoners outright. If they did save them, temporarily, it was usually for later torture, sacrifice, or trophy taking (such as in the case of the Colombian Ca
uca Valley chief who proudly showed Spanish explorers his collection of four hundred smoke-dried corpses of his victims, all arranged in gruesome poses with weapons).29 The usual aim of prehistoric warfare was simple annihilation—of the warrior himself and, sometimes, his entire social unit. Keeley reports, for example, that the subarctic Kutchin frequently sought to exterminate whole villages of their adversaries, the Mackenzie Eskimo, sadistically leaving just one male, “The Survivor,” alive to spread word of the massacre. Sometimes defeated warriors even faced the ultimate annihilation—they were eaten. Contrary to the belief that “culinary” cannibalism (eating human flesh for food, rather than ritual) was unheard of in prehistoric societies, eating the loser was clearly a major motivation for war among some groups. The return of a war party with bakolo—dead prisoners for eating—in Fiji, for instance, was a cause for wild celebration and feasting using specially carved “cannibal forks.” Anthropologist Robert Carneiro, reporting the case of one Fijian chief, Ra Undreundre, who “buried” over nine hundred of his enemies in his stomach, estimates that almost 100 percent of war dead in Fiji became food.30 English missionary Alfred Nesbitt Brown, similarly, described early nineteenth-century Maori war parties singing, on their way to the slaughter, of “how sweet the flesh of the enemy would taste.”31 Ethnographer Elsdon Best, likewise, confirmed that Maori war parties literally lived off their enemies, describing a procession he saw in which twenty female captives bore baskets heavy with the flesh of their murdered clansmen.
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