A fragment of an Attic red-figure cup, depicting a pankration match on one side and an athlete with a pickaxe on the other. This artefact, attributed to the Onesimos Painter and dated to 490 BC, originally came from the collection of Dietrich von Bothmer, a historian and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is now part of the classical antiquities collection at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, USA.
The fragment depicts two pankratiasts in a phase of combat: the standing athlete strikes his opponent with a fist while simultaneously throwing him to the ground. On the other side of the fragment is an athlete with a pickaxe, skapane in Greek, the very symbol and icon of the ancient gymnasium, repeatedly depicted on surviving artefacts and suggested by ancient sources. Athletes trained with this tool by sticking it into the sand, using the same motion as today's power hammer—an exercise also employed in Mixed Martial Arts, which involves hitting a truck tyre with maximum force using a large hammer. The area where combat sports training took place, known as skamma, was often cleared with these exercises to soften it, cushion falls, and provide stability for holds and movements.
Pankration was both dangerous and spectacular, and had no direct equivalent in modern combat sports, such as wrestling and boxing. It was perhaps similar to today's Vale Tudo and its evolution: MMA, albeit with significant technical, methodological, and conceptual differences. Aurelius Ambrosius, better known as Saint Ambrose, bishop of Milan in the 4th century AD, describes this sport in his Commentary as follows: "...other athletes combine takedowns and throws on the sand with the intertwining of all limbs and the use of every type of blow. These are the pancrats, because they are allowed to use all techniques in fighting one another." Philostratus, in his Gymnasticus, states that pancratium "is a combination of imperfect wrestling and imperfect boxing."
The concept of imperfection is the translation of άτελούς, i.e., atelḗs, meaning "adaptation" or "continuous adjustment”. This is what we now define, for example, as "dirty boxing" or "dirty wrestling," adapted to the ever-evolving world of mixed martial arts. In pankration, everything was permitted: punches, kicks, knee strikes, elbow strikes, strangulations, and throws with any variation. Even blows to the private parts, and many other techniques now prohibited in modern combat sports, were allowed; only biting and scratching were punishable by whipping.