photo: Herakles wrestling with Triton from MCAD Library

This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Beholder


which one of them is raw, or baked in the sun or not,
so you might get to know one who is inactive and open,
pulling him down after throwing him over from the Chersonese
after hooking his leg with yours behind his knee
then after you turn his shoulder over,
you fall heavily upon him
Aristophanes, Knights


If I can catch him once upon the hip,
I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act 1, scene 3


Like all who contended in the games, the Wrestlers were accustomed to rub their bodies with oil, partly to check the excessive perspiration occasioned by the heat and the violence of the exercises, and partly from an opinion that the oil gave the limbs a greater degree of pliancy and agility. As the smoothness occasioned by the oil would have prevented the combatants from grasping each other with firmness, it was customary for them, after being anointed, to roll themselves in the dust of the Stadium, or to be sprinkled with a fine sand kept for that purpose at Olympia. If in falling, one of the Wrestlers dragged his adversary along with him, the combat was continued on the ground, till one of the parties had forced the other to yield the victory.
Jacob Robinson and Sidney Gilpin, Wrestling and Wrestlers


we need to know what to do
when we're getting cranked
Jeff Kass, All wrestlers practice failing


Too true it is, deserted of my strength,
These withered arms and limbs have failed at length.
Oh! had I now that force I felt of yore,
Known through Buprasium and the Pylian shore!
Victorious then in every solemn game,
Ordained to Amarynces's mighty name;
The brave Epeians gave my glory way,
Aetolians, Pylians, all resigned the day.
I quelled Clytomedes in fights of hand,
And backward hurled Ancaeus on the sand
Homer, The Illiad


Here we are, my mercenary Greek,
back at the same crossroads
where you bested my father.
The ground when you pinned him down
is what defeated you in
hold after hold or until
you found the way to filet his strength,
the way a fisherman's instinct
cleans flesh from the bone of earth.
Terreson, Antaeus's Son to His Father's Killer


we hold until I am exhausted
he is a trickling thing of sand
a scintilla that drains back into the beach
a shock of trees
released by strong winds
he is a fish, a slither
an eel that flits away
then has me pinned
Steve Parker, Lights fall from the Old Man of the Sea


In fact the modern Olympic style of wrestling most closely resembling that of Ancient Greece is Judo, a sport invented by a Japanese professor of English in 1882
Christopher Miller, Submission Fighting and the Rules of Ancient Greek Wrestling


If an Olympic champion of 20 years ago were to attend a wrestling tournament now, he probably could not tell what is going on.
Nenad Lalovic, president of the international wrestling federation