You know, I get tired of people telling me that I'm stupid for being a wrestling fan. I'm not stupid. I've got an I.Q. well into double digits.

But even more than the average wrestling fan, we Internet wrestling writers take criticism from people who, frankly, have no idea what it is we do. And you know, I don't even know what it is we do. Given that neither the perpetrators nor readers of Internet wrestling columns can figure out their purpose, how can anyone criticize them?

Logic would seem to dictate that any activity without a purpose must be successful by definition.

There.

And now, he goes into the stretch.

It was the classical Greeks who first developed logic as a separate discipline, in its most famous form by Aristotle. Aristotle wrote treatises (or lectured) on every subject of his day, including classical Greek tragedy. Certain conventions of Greek tragedy have persisted in various entertainment forms to this day. Including - and you knew I'd get to it - professional wrestling.

That much stretching officially qualifies me as a contortionist.

Some of these features of entertainment that we take for granted: seats for spectators, a centrally located stage, music, costumes, and audience participation. You might think all of these things just came naturally, but the Greeks (and a few other cultures) only came upon them when at very developed stages.

Just as Greek theater grew out of the apparently dissimilar festivals of Dionysus (which were more primitive rites intended to bring the spring back after winter) so did wrestling grow out of the apparently dissimilar world of carnivals, where "the show" was the thing. The point in a carnival is and always was to amaze and astound the viewer, and so, draw in more of them.

The most successful promoters of wrestling worldwide have played up rather than diminished its carnival roots. What sets wrestling apart from most other forms of entertainment - besides circuses - is its desire to entertain by amazing its audience. It must continuously present the viewer with the new and unusual. Hence we see the large amount of personnel turnover in the business. If your act gets old, you're gone.

My brother's long-time theory is that wrestling is like melodrama: the crowd knows exactly how to react and when to do it, and that's a large part of the show. I tend to think of it more like opera, in the sense of it being totally ridiculous and the people watching it taking it incredibly seriously. And before you write me, I love the opera, but it is pretty inane, if you think about it.

The word "dithyramb", used in the title of this piece, has a history analogous to wrestling. It was at one time a tightly controlled piece of theater/poetry with a definite form. This is comparable to how wrestling was in the mid-1900's, with definite form and tightly controlled action.

Over time, the Greek dithyramb disintegrated and became so wild and free form that the most common meaning of the word dithyrambic is now "wild and vehement rhetoric". In the same vein, wrestling has become the very by-word of the shocking, sleazy and free form in entertainment.

For the ancient Greeks, who loved competition of all kinds, the idea of what we call professional wrestling, that is, staged contests with predetermined outcomes would have been antithetical.

It wouldn't have been Greek to them.