Roman Martial Arts?

[bnd]

Personally, I don't agree that Ancient Pankration and modern MMA have that much in common. Modern MMA comps have FAR TOO MANY RULES. Especially the UFC and Pride. What they do have in common is utilising both grappling and striking attacks.

Apparently only knock-out really mattered in Pankration, there was no "tap-out"...

A random, nearly off-topic thought... I'm pretty sure I remember seeing Bas Rutten promoting Pancrase a few years back, maybe 10 or so, as the rebirth of the old Pankration. In Black Belt Magazine, I think it was...

OK, back into it... I'd say you could more easily liken Pankration to a brawl outside a city pub, only with fans cheering and booing from arena bleachers. I'd even go as far as to say the same about street Boxing in Ancient Rome. I'd say there wouldn't be a place on the body you couldn't hit, and limbs would be popped and crunched very often...

And those Cestus... are actually called Caestus (from the Latin caedere, "to strike"...), and they're essentially leather thongs tied around the knuckles and down the hand to past the wrist. You can see some on the hands of the sculpture The Boxer of Quirinal in Rome. A Cestus, with no A, was a type of women's belt in Ancient Greece.

The hand wrappings were eventually modified to include iron plates, studs and... spikes. There was another variety of Caestus, known as Myrmex ("limb-piercer"). Two guesses as to how Myrmex were used in competition (which was participated in with no armour)... very brutal.

One original Greek version was called Sphairai, and these were thin leather strappings with cutting blades attached. I imagine these to be more like modern razor blades than actual knife edges.

As it is, I think I remember reading once (please don't quote this...) that Caestus boxing was banned in the first century BC, and boxing was banned all together somewhere towards the end of the fourth century AD.

I was looking to have a single right-handed Titanium-plate Punching Gauntlet made a while back, and somebody suggested I look into Caestus. The early ones were perhaps most simply described as leather versions of the bandages you wear under Boxing Gloves, but they certainly got nastier and nastier as time went on...

Well, certain rules encourages the fighters to hit harder, like MMA gloves for example, you can actually hit much harder with them.
No rules means nothing really, i think this tournament ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo7QP-FLvmg ) is the closest of Pankration, this was forbidden becouse was to violent.
I think more rules encourage fighters to do a better show.
Sorry for the off-topic.