Arrhichion, Mercutio and the Black Knight walk into a room . . .

I love how a strong culture retells its stories down the centuries.

The founding story is that of the death match of Arrhichion of Phigalia. Arrhichion was a champion wrestler in the ancient Olympic Games. He died while successfully defending his wrestling championship in the 54th Olympiad (564 BC).

For when he was contending for the wild olive with the last remaining competitor, whoever he was, the latter got a grip first, and held Arrhachion, hugging him with his legs, and at the same time he squeezed his neck with his hands. Arrhachion dislocated his opponent's toe, but expired owing to suffocation; but he who suffocated Arrhachion was forced to give in at the same time because of the pain in his toe. The Eleans crowned and proclaimed victor the corpse of Arrhachion.

Jump forward twenty centuries and there is a similar pyrrhic victory in the scene in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, wherein Mercutio describes his mortal wound as "Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch."

Another five centuries forwards and we have John Cleese as the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.


Double click to enlarge.

From Wikipedia describing the Black Knight role in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

According to the DVD audio commentary by Cleese, Palin, and Idle, the sequence originated in a story told to Cleese when he was attending an English class during his school days. Two Roman wrestlers were engaged in a particularly intense match and had been fighting for so long that the two combatants were doing little more than leaning into one another. It was only when one wrestler finally tapped out and pulled away from his opponent that he and the crowd realised the other man was, in fact, dead and had effectively won the match posthumously. The moral of the tale, according to Cleese's teacher, was "if you never give up, you can't possibly lose" – a statement that, Cleese reflected, always struck him as being "philosophically unsound". The story would have been a deformed (or misremembered) description of the death of Arrichion of Phigalia.

The Black Knight's line "'Tis but a scratch" has become a sarcastic description of any dramatically failed endeavor. I wager that few know that they are quoting Shakespeare or paying unconscious tribute to Arrhichion, but the cultural line zig-zags all the way back.