Theagenes of Thasos was a legendary athlete hailing from ancient Greece who was famed for his strength and ability to suplex motherfuckers into next week. However, he is best remembered not for the people whose asses he kicked while alive, but the dipshit he bested in one-on-one combat as a corpse.
Theagenes was a remarkable, all round athlete known for his speed and power, which allowed him excel at both combat sports as well as athletics at the Olympics. In particular Theagenes was near undefeated in the pankration event, a precursor of sorts to modern MMA that incorporated elements of wrestling and boxing seasoned with a smattering of legal testicle shots to make it interesting. In addition Theagenes was a proficient boxer and was able to sprint so fast many who saw him compete openly compared him to the Greek hero, that guy Brad Pit played in Troy.
However, Theagenes’ greatest asset wasn’t his speed, but his freakish brute strength which allowed him to effortlessly lift fully grown men into the air and spike them into the ground spine first at mach 3. Theagenes’ peers first became aware of his unnatural levels of strength when, as a 9 year old boy, he tore a solid bronze statue off its pedestal and carried it home because he thought it looked neat.
The act outraged citizens who were about this close to having him executed, until one guy suggested that he be forgiven if he could put the statue back. The angry mob agreed, thinking that a mere child wouldn’t be able to hoist the several hundred pound statue back to its original place and that it’d make them feel better about the whole killing him thing because hey, they gave him a chance to make it right. Theagenes then effortlessly carried the statue from his home and daintily placed it back in it’s original position, leading to stories of Thasos’ inhumanely ripped beast child spreading all across Greece.
As an adult Theagenes easily bested almost every challenger he faced in both boxing and pankration to the point people wouldn’t bother entering an event if they saw his name. This inevitably saw Theagenes make enemies, one of whom, a boxer called Euthymos, went as far to mock his spine-demolishing fighting style as unrefined. This annoyed Theagenes so much he entered a boxing event at the next Olympiad, beat the living piss out of Euthymos then told the judges he was too tired to do anything else. Theagenes was fined the modern equivalent of well over a quarter of a million dollars for entering the event just to spite Euthymos.
These minor incidents aside, Theagenes’ physical and athletic prowess more than made up for his more childish transgressions as a hot-headed young man and when he died, his home town dutifully built a large bronze statue of him. Which is where this story gets amazing.
As we mentioned earlier, Theagenes’ many, seemingly effortless victories earned him a lot of enemies throughout his life. Now you’d think being dead would shut a lot of these enemies up, since it’s hard to be mad at a dead guy because hell, you kind of win that one. However, one dude just couldn’t deal with the fact that Theagenes had, had the audacity to die before they could defeat him in combat and decided to deal with their anger in a calm, rational manner. By which we mean they began sneaking out every night to beat the shit out of his statue with a whip. Just for a second imagine how mad you’d have to be to not only angrily whip a statue of someone you don’t like, but do so every single night. Theagenes’ ghost apparently didn’t take kindly to this slight since after the guy had spent several nights ineffectually hitting his statue, it fell over and crushed him. Yeah, you read that correctly, this guy was such a shitty wrestler he was pinned by a statue of a guy who’d beaten him before.
We’d be hesitant to feel sorry for the guy who died if it wasn’t for the fact he kind of brought his death upon himself. We mean, he went up to a statue night after night and slapped it with a whip while calling the man it was made in honor of a fucking coward, what did he think the statue was gonna do, just stand there and take that shit? If you think that then you clearly haven’t seen many statues of Theagenes, even when carved from marble or bronze this fucker was depicted as always being ready to throw down.
The man’s family didn’t see it that way and his children, clearly having inherited the salty, piss-baby sore loser genes from their father, had the statue put on trial for murder. They won and it was subsequently banished by being thrown into the ocean. A few years later, after plague and famine rocked Thasos, an oracle told the people that they probably shouldn’t have been such a dick Theagenes and the statue was fished out of the water. Isn’t history fun sometimes?
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