Millennia before modern-day military recruiters talked up potential
soldiers in shopping malls or put up posters, one Roman city took a
rather different approach to recruiting soldiers for the emperor's army.
A newly translated inscription, dating back about 1,800 years, reveals
that Oinoanda, a Roman city in southwest Turkey, turned to a mixed
martial art champion to recruit for the Roman army and bring the new soldiers to a city named Hierapolis, located hundreds of miles to the east, in Syria.
His name was Lucius Septimius Flavianus Flavillianus and he was a
champion at wrestling and pankration, the latter a bloody, and at times
lethal, mixed martial art where contestants would try to pound each
other unconscious or into submission.
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