Milo[1] the pankratiast[2] used to tie a string of gut around his forehead like a headband or garland. Holding his breath and filling the veins of his head with blood, he would break the string with the strength of his veins as if it were papyrus. He used to put his upper arm next to his side and stretch out his lower arm straight toward his fingers. With his thumb turned up and his fingers lying next to one another in a row, his littlest finger was in the lowest position. No one could separate it from the others by force.[3] He was killed when he chanced upon a dry tree that was held apart by wedges. He purposefully put his hands into the tree to split it apart. The wedges slipped, and, gripped by the tree, he became the windfall of wolves.[4]
From
Pausanias 6.14.7-8; see more fully at
mu 1066, and summarily at
phi 720. The headword itself, tainia, has already been defined at
tau 208.
[1] Milon, a.k.a. Milo, came from Croton (modern Crotone) in Italy, a city famous in his day for its winning athletes. He won six victories in wrestling at
Olympia, one of them as a boy, and once as a boy and six times as a man at the Pythian Games in
Delphi (
Pausanias 6.14.5;
Diodorus Siculus 12.9). He was also victorious ten times at the Isthmian Games and nine at the games in
Nemea. For a biography of Milo see H. A. Harris, Greek Athletes and Athletics (Indiana and London: Indiana University Press, 1966) 110-112; Michael B. Poliakoff, Competition, Violence, and Culture: Combat Sports in the Ancient World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987) 117-119.
[2] Milo was a wrestler as
Pausanias (6.14.5-8), the source for this entry and for
mu 1066 Milon, specifies.
[3] Milo's career spanned twenty-four years, an achievement that justifies Michael B. Poliakoff's conclusion that his prodigious strength is historical (117-118). Milo is also said to have been able to hold a pomegranate in his hand in such a grip that his hands could not be dislodged nor did they crush the fruit (
Pausanias 6.14.6;
Aelian, Historical Miscellany 2.24). Such myths about Milo's strength may have been inspired by an archaic bronze statue described by
Philostratus (Life of Apollonius of
Tyana 4.28). Milo is standing on a discus; in his left hand he holds a pomegranate; the fingers of his right had are stretched out; his head is bound with fillets. For a discussion, see Walter Woodburn Hyde, Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art (Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1921) 105-107.
[4] The story of Milo's death is told in essentially the same way by
Strabo 6.1.12. Poliakoff points out that "The Greeks tended to attribute `significant deaths' to famous persons in keeping with their purported characters. So according to legend, overweening belief in his strength brought Milo to his death" (118). For "significant deaths," see Mary R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) 3, 85-86 and 96-97.
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