I found primary sources reference to Constantine enjoying the view of a boxing match in my initial reading for The Broken Dance back in 1998. The early Church had worldly and ascetic aspects and there was a real dilemma in the separation from institutional paganism which had many specific masculine rites as part of the faithful religious man’s life journey. On one hand the Church had the warrior kings like Constantine, who wanted to see old-fashioned boxing matches with only leather hand-straps, without the gauntlet, and on the other the intellectuals, who were, well, not real men by most measures of manhood across the span of our race...

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