And pois’d the pond’rous engines in his hands.”
In Smith’s “Antiquities of Greece and Rome,” and in Lenu’s “Costumes des Peuples de l’Antiquité,” are other patterns. The subjoined is from the last named work.
Fig. 3.
The last form (No. 4) we shall give is also from a bas-relief found at Herculaneum. It is certainly of a less destructive form, the knuckles and back of the hand being covered by the leather, held in its place by a thumbhole, and further secured by two crossed straps to the vellus, which ends half way up the forearm. A similar engraving forms the tail-piece to the fifty-first page of the second volume of the Abbé St. Non’s “Voyage Pittoresque,” already quoted.
Fig. 4.
The Amphotides, a helmet or head-guard, to secure the temporal bones and arteries, encompassed the ears with thongs and ligatures, which were buckled either under the chin or behind the head. They bore some resemblance to the head guards used in modern broadsword and stick play, but seem to have fitted close. They were made of hides of bulls, studded with knobs of iron, and thickly quilted inside to dull the concussion of the blows. Though it may be doubted whether the amphotides were introduced until a later period of the pugilistic era, yet as their representation would prevent the faces or heads of the combatants being seen, sculptors and fresco painters would leave them out unhesitatingly, as they do head-dresses, belts, reins, horses’ harness, etc., regardless of reality, and seeking only what they deemed high art in their representations.
The search after traces of boxing among the barbarism of the Middle Ages, with their iron cruelty and deadly warfare—not unredeemed, however, by rude codes of honour, knightly courtesy, and chivalrous gallantry, in defence of the weak and in honour of the fair—would not be worth the while. The higher orders jousted and tilted with lance, mace, and sword, the lower fought with sand-bags and the quarter-staff.
Wrestling, as an art, seems to have only survived among Gothic or Scandinavian peoples. A “punch on the head,” advocated by Mr. Grantley Berkeley as a poacher’s punishment, is, however, spoken of by Ariosto as the result of his romantic hero’s wrath, who gives the offender “un gran punzone sulla testa,” by way of caution. That there were “men before their time,” who saw the best remedy for the fatal abuse of deadly weapons in popular brawls, we have the testimony of no less an authority than St. Bernard. That holy and peace-loving father of the Church, as we are told by Forsyth, and numerous other writers, established boxing as a safety-valve for the pugnacious propensities of the people. He tells us: “The strongest bond of union among the Italians is only a coincidence of hatred. Never were the Tuscans so unanimous as in hating the other States of Italy. The Senesi agreed best in hating all the other Tuscans; the citizens of Siena in hating the rest of the Senesi; and in the city itself the same amiable passion was subdivided among the different wards.