Wrestling might be the purest athletic test there is. Picture it: Two nude dudes coated in olive oil vigorously gripping and grabbing each other in a sandpit, possibly for hours on end. At least that’s how the ancient Greeks did it. (They were big on male nudity.) As Vice described, wrestling didn’t have time limits or weight classes back then. However, it did have intellectual heavyweights. Iconic philosophers Socrates and Plato liked to engage in oily tussling. We don’t know how well Socrates did, but that’s okay because true wisdom is knowing we know nothing. However, we can say that history’s smartest ignoramus trained alongside Plato. In fact, “Plato” was a wrestling nickname that referenced the philosopher’s broad shoulders. (Plato’s real name was Aristocles.)

Apparently wrestling wasn’t violent enough to frighten away big-brained thinkers, but as the book Sport in Ancient Times observed, choke holds were a big part of wrestling, and athletes weren’t legally liable if they killed someone mid-competition. And there was one vicious competitor, ominously known as “Mr. Fingertips,” who defeated opponents by breaking their fingers. That tactic was later, mercifully, banned. Presumably, Mr. Fingertips was like the Mr. Glass to the unbreakable grip of Milon of Kroton, who was associated with another famous philosopher: Pythagoras. Milon supposedly had a grip so strong that no one could pry a pomegranate from his hand. Impressive.

Ancient relief carvings tell us that Egyptians walked like the 1980s band the Bangles. Also, they liked hitting each other with sticks. As detailed inSports and Games of the Ancients, stick fighting served as self-defense and combat training and might have provided a “safe” competitive outlet. It also provided a deadly competitive outlet known as fisherman jousting. As the name implies, fisherman jousting involved fishermen trying to knock each other into the Nile River. It’s believed the contents were used to resolve disputes over who got the primo fishing spots or as a form of “good-natured” roughhousing.

Of course, everyone knows it’s all fun and games until someone gets eaten by a crocodile, and that was a very real possibility for jousters. Then again, crocodiles were sacred in ancient Egypt, so maybe it was an honor to be eaten by a beast that can grow to 19 feet long. But let’s not forget the ginormous hippos that lived in the river and were “notorious for capsizing fishing boats” and wreaking havoc. Some competitors had to worry about more than being eaten by divine reptiles or becoming marbles in history’s grimmest game of Hungry Hungry Hippos. Fisherman jousting was literally a sink-or-swim situation, and not all fishermen knew how to swim.

“Grabbing the bull by the horns” wasn’t just a figure of speech if you lived on the island of Crete during the Bronze Age — at least according to some historians. Bull-leapers are believed to have used those horns to jump onto bulls’ backs before jumping back off. Glyphics indicate that jumpers also leaped over the length of a charging bull or performed somersaults.

As you might have guessed from the somersaults, ancient Cretans were head-over-heels for bulls. Per National Geographic, Crete was the birthplace of the Minoan civilization, which mysteriously deteriorated around the 15th century B.C. and possibly became the basis for the legend of Atlantis. Minoans viewed bulls as sacred symbols of strength and fertility and showed a cultish devotion to them. They made bull sculptures, bull jewelry, bull paintings, and are famously associated with the Minotaur myth, which for all we know was just ancient bull fanfic.

Some experts think the notion of Minoans actually jumping over bulls is a load of horse pucky. According to the Penn Museum, the most convincing case against bull-leaping as an actual practice is that it seems “physically impossible.” But the existence of modern-day bull-leaping in southwest France and Spain debunks that claim. Those who believe bull-leaping happened during the Bronze Age argue that artistic depictions of it evolved in ways that only make sense if they were based on a real sport.

If life was fair, Russell Crowe would be reading this entry to you aloud and in person while dressed as Maximus from Gladiator. But life isn’t fair, and it was terribly unfair to actual gladiators. Their “Maximus” was the Circus Maximus, which, like the Colosseum, was a massive Roman arena where armed combatants killed animals and each other for the amusement of the masses. Fights weren’t always fatal and sometimes referees may have intervened to prevent deaths. But the University of Chicago noted that in the first century A.D. a gladiator might have had a 1-in-10 chance of leaving the arena as a corpse. Occasionally the combatants weren’t the deadliest part of an event because temporary stadium stands sometimes collapsed, “killing hundreds, even thousands,” of spectators who were eager to see people die.

Not everyone thinks it makes sense to apply sports terminology to gladiators. Alastair Blanshard, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Queensland, argued that they were more akin to death row inmates since “the vast majority of gladiators” were either war prisoners or condemned criminals. However, History noted a demographic shift in the first century A.D. in which “scores of free men” willfully signed up to be gladiators. A handful of women also entered that bloody fray voluntarily, though most who fought were slaves. Ladies were sometimes relegated to fighting dwarves, but some slayed animals. That is, until female gladiators were banned altogether.

If the name “Dead Sea” didn’t famously belong to an excessively salty body of water, it would be the perfect moniker for the Roman Colosseum when it was supposedly filled with water for mock naval conflicts known as “naumachiae.” “Red Sea” might also work as a nickname because these battles were bloody. Plus, much like the Red Sea, experts are split on the issue of whether naumachiae actually happened in the Colosseum, according to National Geographic. At the very least, mock conflicts occurred on lakes, some of which were manmade.

Naumachiae were sort of the big-budget action movies of antiquity, except the performers were extreme method actors and their method was extreme madness. Emperors employed craftsmen to build theaters, choreographers to make the killing visually appealing, and performers to, well, die. Emperor Claudius organized a mock conflict that incorporated 100 boats and conscripted 19,000 criminals to act as fighters. The historian Tacitus said they fought “with the spirit and courage of free men; and, after much blood had flowed, the combatants were exempted from destruction.” Say what you want about those bloodthirsty ancients — they’re dead, so it won’t hurt their feelings.