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Damoxenos told Kreugas to lift his arm and, when Kreugas had done so, Damoxenos struck him under the ribs with his fingers straight out. The combination of his sharp fingernails and the force of his blow drove his hand into Kreugas' guts. He grabbed Kreugas' intestines and tore them out and Kreugas died on the spot.

The judges found, posthumously, for Kreugas, and expelled Damoxenos from the Olympics. Their ruling, so clever it was almost Talmudic, was that each of Damoxenos' fingers had delivered a separate punch, and so he had violated the agreement. I'm not sure about the reasoning there, but I'm with them anyway. To have ruled otherwise just wouldn't have been sporting.

Jeremy Lott is a contributing editor to Books & Culture and assistant website editor for The American Spectator.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Ancient Greek Athletics and Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources are available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.

Books & Culture Corner appears every Tuesday. Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week include:

Rediscovering 'Husbandry' | What Colonial farmers have to teach us about living with the land. (Aug. 03, 2004)

China's Spiritual Hunger | The lessons of Falun Gong (July 27, 2004)

Ambiguous Redemption | A riveting memoir by the author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. (July 20, 2004)

Tending the Garden | Evangelicals and the environment. (July 07, 2004)

How the Monster Grew | A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian looks at the origins of modern media. (July 05, 2004)

Wasn't That a Mighty Fall | Martha Stewart, VeggieTales, and Narnia revisted. (June 29, 2004)

Insect Theodicy | Who sent the locusts? And who exterminated them? (June 22, 2004)

Telling Lies, Telling Stories | Lars Saabye Christensen's The Half Brother reveals imagination as escape. (June 15, 2004)

The Art of Political War | A veteran columnist urges his fellow liberals to take a lesson from those nasty conservatives. (June 07, 2004)

Thou Shalt Not Swap | The uses and abuses of copyright. (May 24, 2004)

Mystery and Message | Must they compete? (May 10, 2004)

Celebrating Faith in Writing | A dispatch from Calvin College's biennial event. (April 26, 2004)

Shabbos, Sheitels, and Yarmulkes | A novel set in the world of Orthodox Judaism. (April 19, 2004)

The Naked City | The story of the 1977 blackout in New York-the occasion of widespread looting and destruction-has some surprisingly timely lessons for America in 2004. (April 19, 2004)

A Curious Contingency | Confessions of a wordsmith. (April 05, 2004)

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August (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48