Throughout the works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius one finds an abundance of references to combat sports such as boxing, wrestling, and gladiators. The enormous popularity of these sports in the Classical world, and especially during the first two centuries of the Common Era, rivals that of our own. Combat athletes then as now devoted their lives to conditioning their bodies, developing their skill, and perhaps most importantly confronting and overcoming their fears. The fighter learns to discipline every aspect of his life. His eating and drinking are restricted, he must learn to curb his appetites and desires. He must abstain from drugs and alcohol. He must go to sleep early and wake up early. He must push his physical training past the point of endurance. He must surround himself with good company, friends, teammates, and coaches who will help, support, and encourage him. And he must learn to control his judgments, thoughts, and feelings. Multiple times per day during training, he will think: “I cannot go on.” And every time, he must respond: “Yes, I can.” When he stands in the ring in front of hundreds or thousands of spectators, he will think to himself: “What if I make a fool of myself? And he must respond: “I don’t care what they think.” When his opponent breaks his body, he will think: “I cannot endure the pain.” And he must respond: “I will endure it.” When his opponent stands over him, victorious, he will think: “I am defeated and humiliated.” And he must respond: “I did my best and I am proud, regardless of the outcome.” In short, the fighter learns to do exactly what is recommended as the proper task of the philosopher: “See how I eat, how drink, how sleep, how endure, how refrain, how help, how employ desire and how aversion.”[1]
Over the past 15 years of training, fighting, and coaching, I have seen firsthand how combat sports teach the same philosophical principles as those found in Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. In fact I would say, also having done a PhD in the humanities, that one is much more likely to learn how to apply these principles through sports, particularly combat sports, than in academia, where philosophy is taught as a discourse and not as it was intended, which is to say, as a way to learn how to live a good life. Following Socrates, whom most ancient schools of philosophy including Stoicism saw as the model sage, the good life is achieved through rigorous investigation of the self. For Stoicism this meant a continuous process of disciplining ones desires and perceptions with the ultimate goal of accepting whatever conditions one finds oneself in and insisting upon the ability to behave virtuously and with dignity no matter the circumstances. In this regard, Seneca admiringly quotes the gladiator’s oath: “I will endure being burned, bound, beaten, and killed with iron.”[2] The fighter, like the virtuous man, is able to overcome his fear because he has discovered that inner fortress, which is impervious to all harm.
Many of the greatest Stoics were not philosophers in any sense that we would recognize today. Cato the Younger, for example, did not write philosophical treatises or lecture on philosophical concepts. He did not, in other words, engage in philosophical discourse. He was revered as a model Stoic because of the way he lived. While it is not altogether accurate to characterize Stoicism as an ascetic philosophy, it is nevertheless true that a key part of the Stoic way of life involved living simply. Pierre Hadot writes: “His [Cato’s] whole way of life was that of a philosopher, who tried at the same time to revive the rigorous life of the ancient Romans. He trained himself for physical endurance, traveled on foot, went against current fashions, affected disdain for money”[3]. Marcus Aurelius thanks his teacher Diognetus for inspiring in him “the desire to sleep on a cot and a simple animal-skin, and for things of this sort which belong to the ‘Hellenic’ way of life.”[4] The cot and animal skin were well known symbols of austerity and simplicity, while Hadot has suggested that what is generally translated as “‘Hellenic’ way of life” may be better translated as “Spartan” or “Laconian way of life,” the latter, of course, being synonymous with rough living, simplicity, and endurance. In fact the pallium or tribon, the philosophers’ cloak, which was adopted by both Socrates and Diogenes, the two main ideal sages of the Stoic tradition, was nothing other than the Spartan cloak. Thus we have a clear link between Spartan training in physical endurance and perseverance and Stoic simplicity. For the purposes of this essay, of course, it is relevant to note that the Spartan training program was essentially designed to produce warriors.
In his Letters Seneca urges his friend Lucilius to practice intentionally depriving himself in order to condition and discipline himself:
Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?” It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. In days of peace the soldier performs manoeuvres, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and wearies himself with gratuitous toil, in order that he may be equal to unavoidable toil. If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.[5]
This is precisely what is achieved by training to fight. In the course of a standard 5 week fight preparation, a fighter must endure running several miles per day, intense calisthenic exercises, training for three hours a day, including hard sparring, eating the simplest food, and, in some cases, severe caloric restriction and intentional dehydration in order to manipulate bodyweight. Eliminating all sodium from ones’ diet in order to ensure that no excess water is being retained several days before weighing in is common practice. It is not unheard of for fighters to do jumping jacks in a sauna while fully clothed before a weigh in or even to continuously spit into a cup so that every extra drop of water is squeezed out of the body. After weighing in, fighters then take on enormous amounts of water and calories. While pushing the body to such extremes, many other functions of the body are adversely affected.
During these periods, the fighter must learn to control his body’s urges. Exhaustion, pain, hunger, and thirst will constantly tempt the fighter to give up. He must learn to utterly disregard comfort and pleasure. For many fighters, this is the most difficult part of fighting. The truth is that we don’t realize how addicted we are to pleasure. The Stoics believed that philosophy primarily teaches us how to tell the difference between what is good and what is bad, between what is desirable and what is indifferent. Eating a pint of ice cream in one sitting will certainly give me a stomach ache and, if I do it often enough, is likely to make me obese and diabetic. Despite all this, if the notion of eating a pint of ice cream in one sitting pops into my head, I am very likely to decide that it’s a splendid idea. The error here, from a Stoic perspective, is that I have mistakenly valued the pleasure derived from eating ice cream higher than my health or even how I will feel in my body moments after eating it. Marcus Aurelius charmingly puts it thus:
At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work–as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for–the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? But it’s nicer here. So you were born to feel “nice”?[6]
Snuggling in bed and eating ice cream is pleasurable, no doubt, but stoicism challenges us to look into our hearts and answer truthfully whether or not the pursuit of pleasure and comfort is the purpose of our lives. The fighter knows his answer.
We might consider in passing, however, the response given by the Epicureans, the arch rivals of the stoics. Epicurus taught that the best way to achieve pleasure was to deprive yourself until the most simple fare tasted like a sumptuous feast. Truly, I have never enjoyed a meal more than after eating nothing but lettuce and water for a week for a particularly brutal weight cut. Seneca, who was not afraid to find wisdom in the teachings of his rivals, writes: “Hunger will make even such bread delicate and of the finest flavour. For that reason I must not eat until hunger bids me.”[7]
The fighter must do more than simply condition herself to physical endurance and overcome her desire for pleasure and comfort. Fighting is different from other sports. You might certainly get injured playing basketball but that’s quite a different thing from standing in a ring with someone who is going to try to kill you. In fact, this person has been doing nothing for weeks other than training to kill you. She has watched footage of you, she has thought about you, she and her coaches have developed strategies specifically designed to destroy you. Not only that but you will be fighting in a brightly lit ring or cage on a raised platform with hundreds or even thousands of people watching and scrutinizing your every move. Faced with this prospect, every single part of the psychology and physiology of a sensible person will urge her to flee. I have seen talented and successful fighters literally paralyzed by fear before going out to fight. John Wayne Parr, one of the most highly decorated muay thai fighters of the early 2000s, has said publicly that even after hundreds of fights, each time he walks into the ring, he looks around for the emergency exit, in case he decides to make a run for it at the last minute. One of the fighter’s greatest challenges is to overcome his fear.
Conditioning the body is difficult and learning to deprive oneself is certainly difficult but over the years I have seen many strong men and women, who have mastered their bodies, fall prey to fear. When a student tells me that he wants to fight, provided that he has trained for a sufficient amount of time and gained a base level of proficiency, the first thing that we do is set up a hard spar for him with another member of the gym who is of a similar size and level of skill and experience. It is a way to test to see how he will respond to being hit very hard, likely for the first time in his life. In order to feel confident that this student is ready to train for a fight, we need to see that when he gets hit, when he is faced with someone who is trying to hurt him, he will not crumble. I have seen students who have all the skill and physical conditioning needed to excel burst into tears or literally drop down on the ground and curl up in a ball after getting hit hard for the first time. This is not because their bodies were hurt or injured but because they were mastered by their fear. As Seneca writes: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”[8] Contrarily, I have seen men get hit so hard that it draws blood and breaks bones smile or even laugh and throw themselves into the struggle with even greater enthusiasm. It is not the pain that matters, it is the narrative or idea that we create around it.
For Epictetus and the earlier Stoics, there is a tremendous emphasis placed on properly responding to external stimuli, or rather, the internal impressions occasioned by external stimuli, called phantasia. A classic example given by Epictetus is being shocked by a loud clap of thunder. Certainly we cannot control being surprised by a sudden explosive noise or by being punched in the face. The initial reaction is involuntary. In the split second afterwards, however, we have the ability to make a choice to either accept or reject these impressions and therein lies all the difference. Epictetus writes:
The mind of even the wise man cannot help but be disturbed, and shrink, and grow pale for a moment, not from any anticipation of some evil, but because of certain swift and unconsidered motions which forestall the action of the intellect and the reason, Soon, however, our wise man does not give his assent, but rejects and repudiates them, and sees in them nothing to cause him fear.[9]
In other words, I cannot prevent things from happening but I can control my response to them. The fighter is not the man who does not experience fear, the fighter is the man who masters his fear. Incidentally, this is an important point of clarification that is commonly confused in the popular image of the Stoic sage. Stoicism does not teach us not to have emotions such as fear, it teaches us how to prevent negative emotions from controlling our lives and decisions.
Ultimately, like Stoicism and the teaching of Socrates, combat sports is a method for achieving knowledge of the self. It is a way to examine parts of the self which, for most of us in the modern world, are likely to remain unexplored. It is the reason men have gone off to war in ages past. It is the reason men have boarded ships to discover unknown lands, not knowing if they would ever return. It is a way to discern, surrounded by a universe of contingencies, the only flicker of certainty that forms the bedrock of our existential position. As Seneca puts it: “He is most powerful who has power over himself.”[10] We cannot control the world, we cannot control other people, we cannot control what happens to us. This much is self-evident. Much of the hopelessness one sees in the world today, however, is due to the fact that we mistakenly assume that because we cannot control externals, we must therefore abandon the notion of control altogether, including the notion of exerting any degree of control over our selves, our thoughts, and our actions. This mistake brings catastrophic consequences. Because the world is crazy, we must insist upon remaining sane. Because we cannot control others, we must learn to control ourselves.
The fighter, like the sage, says to the universe: bring it on, do your worst. So many of us spend our lives trying to avoid difficulties and challenges. The tragic paradox here is that the more we seek to avoid suffering, the more poorly prepared we are for it when it inevitably comes. Seneca writes:
No prizefighter can go with high spirits into the strife if he has never been beaten black and blue; the only contestant who can confidently enter the lists is the man who has seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent’s fist, who has been tripped and felt the full force of his adversary’s charge, who has been downed in body but not in spirit, one who, as often as he falls, rises again with greater defiance than ever.[11]
Happiness, for the Stoics, depends upon willfully choosing what the fates have in store for us. We will struggle in life and we will suffer. This we cannot avoid. We can run away from the struggle or we can joyfully embrace it. Either way, we will not change the facts. But at the very least, we can face life’s challenges with dignity, gratitude, and happiness. As Cleanthes writes in his “Hymn to Zeus”: “Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.”
Fighting teaches us that our bodies can be broken, our egos can be shattered, and that afterwards we can be okay. Everybody in combat sports starts at the bottom but with every blow you take, you learn more and more how tough you are: “The boy he is training is thrown; “get up,” he says, “and wrestle again, till you get strong.”[12] Life is not about winning and neither is fighting. It’s about showing up and giving it all you’ve got. Anthony Long writes:
Our modern languages are packed with expressions that, however superficially, reflect the popular diffusion of Stoicism as a response to severe challenge and adversity: Be a man; take what is coming to you; roll with the punches; what will be will be; show some guts; make the best of it; go down fighting; don’t be a wimp; we had this coming to us; try to be philosophical; just my luck; go with the flow; don’t make things worse; you’d better face up to it–and so forth. Such expressions, for all their familiarity and banality, have their uses, because every person sometimes confronts a situation for which the only alternative responses to this one are rage, despair, apathy, helplessness, or total collapse.[13]
Given the current cultural climate one finds oneself hearing such phrases less and less often. Unfortunately, the reverse is much more common. Many people, in educational settings and elsewhere, are given messages that emphasize and validate their suffering, which unsurprisingly tends to disempower them. Almost all of the above phrases listed by Long are ones that I regularly use in teaching, especially when getting fighters ready to compete. It is certainly true that it is a powerful pedagogical tool to be able to say: “If you don’t learn what I’m trying to teach you, you are going to get knocked out in front of hundreds of people.” At my gym I tell my students that I am going to train them to be fighters even if they have no intention of ever competing. The point is that these principles, used by Stoic philosophers for hundreds of years, are not only important for fighters to learn. These are the principles that allow us to learn how to live well and happily. The fight for which we are training is not in the ring but in life. We have everything to lose and everything to gain. The fighter’s prize is not wealth, fame, or glory, his prize is learning that he can overcome, that he can endure, that he is indomitable.
Anthony Long is quite right that: “The often repeated criticism that Stoicism is a philosophy only for the strong is hard to rebut.”[14] What this criticism overlooks, however, is that Stoicism is also a philosophy that teaches people to be strong. Strength can be learned and acquired through training by anyone. This is what makes Stoicism the most humanistic philosophy: it fervently wants all human beings to be strong and happy and good and free. As usual, Seneca puts it best: we may not be able to control how things end up but “the beginning is in our own power.”[15]
In closing, it should not be assumed that training in combat sports is sufficient to teach Stoicism. Needless to say, there is no shortage of cases of fighters and athletes who are as far from modeling Stoic behavior as possible. Combat sports can teach us skills, however, that can be applied elsewhere in life. The Stoic ethic, so far from the image of individualism and ruthless self interest with which it is all too often associated, is inherently altruistic. One might even say that in Seneca we find what may be the first articulation of a concept of human rights. The proper use of sense impressions does not only help us overcome fear and desire but also shows us how to be kind and patient with others. The physical strength and endurance we cultivate through training can be applied to helping and protecting others. The key part of recognizing the indomitability of the Stoic self is that a person who cannot be harmed by anyone can afford to be a friend to everyone. And sure enough, it is a nearly universal custom for the winner of a fight to go out with his opponent and buy him a drink. Before the fight, he is my friend and brother. After the fight, he is my friend and brother.
Ramon Elani received his BA in Classics from the University of Massachusetts and his PhD in English Literature from the University of Connecticut. He lives in a small cottage in rural New England, where he raises goats and homeschools his children. He is the head coach at Sitmangpong Thai Boxing and MMA, located in Western Massachusetts.
[1] Epictetus Discourses IV, VIII, 20
[2] Seneca Letter XXXVII
[3] Pierre Hadot The Inner Citadel 298
[4] Marcus Aurelius Meditations 1, 6
[5] Seneca Letter XVIII 5
[6] Marcus Aurelius Meditations 5, 1
[7] Seneca Letter CXXIII 2
[8] Seneca, Letter XIII 4
[9] Epictetus Frag 9
[10] Seneca Letter XC 34
[11] Seneca Letter XIII 2
[12] Epictetus Discourses IV, IX, 15
[13] Anthony Long Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life 24
[14] Ibid 271
[15] Seneca Letter XIV 16
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