. Greek athletic sports and festivals . us was loaded. The tju-avres o^ets were certainlycapable of inflicting all the injuries on which the writers ofepigrams in the Anthology delight to dwell.^ The use ofmetal to render the caestus heavier and more dangerous isa purely Roman invention, utterly barbarous and entirely fatalto all science in boxing. The Roman caestus may havefigured in some of those gladiatorial shows which found favourin some parts of Greece under the empire, but the silence ofPhilostratus and others proves that it was never used atOlympia, or indeed at any place when any vest
. Greek athletic sports and festivals . us was loaded. The tju-avres o^ets were certainlycapable of inflicting all the injuries on which the writers ofepigrams in the Anthology delight to dwell.^ The use ofmetal to render the caestus heavier and more dangerous isa purely Roman invention, utterly barbarous and entirely fatalto all science in boxing. The Roman caestus may havefigured in some of those gladiatorial shows which found favourin some parts of Greece under the empire, but the silence ofPhilostratus and others proves that it was never used atOlympia, or indeed at any place when any vestige of theathletic tradition of Greece yet lingered. The caestus has really no place in the history of Greek 1 Gym. 10. 2 Plutarch, Mor. 825 e. s Jiithner, Fig. 68. Helbig, 619. ?* Cp. Inschr. v. Priene, 112, 1. 91, where mention is made of boxing eV eiixaaL. ^ The word /xvp/mrjKes, which is used by the epigrammatists {Anth. Pal. xi. 78),appears to be merely a humorous designation of these weapons, but to have nospecial XIX BOXING—THE CAESTUS 411 athletics except in so far as it is a development of the i/xai/resoget? or (TcfiaLpai of the Greeks. Completely ignorant of trueboxing, the Romans assumed that the power of attack could beincreased by additional weight. They did not understand thatin boxing a quick, sharp blow is far more dangerous andeffective than a slow, heavy blow, and that the more the handis weighted, the slower the blow is, and therefore the easierto guard against or avoid. According to the poets they in-creased the weight by sewing pieces of lead and iron into theglove. In the existing repre-sentations of the caestus the handseems to be encased in a hardball or cylinder, from the back ofwhich over the knuckles is atoothed protection presumablyof metal, which sometimes takesthe form of two or three spikes have been sometimes Tni^tflkpn for thp finp-erc; but their ^°- l^, from mosaic in themiStaKen lOr tne nngers, out tnei
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