Milo of Croton
Milo or Milon of Croton was a famous ancient Greek athlete from Croton, which is today in the Magna Graecia region of southern Italy.
Milo was a seven-time winner at the Olympics, once for boys' wrestling in 540 BC at the 60th Olympics and later five times for wrestling at the 62nd to 66th Olympics. He continued competing long after what would have been considered a normal Olympic athlete's prime, and would have been over 40 years of age by the 67th Olympiad. He also attended many of the Pythian Games. His historicity is attested by many classical authors, among them Aristotle, Pausanias, Cicero, Herodotus, Vitruvius, Epictetus, and the author of the Suda, but there are many legendary stories surrounding him.
Diodorus Siculus wrote in his history that Milo was a follower of Pythagoras who commanded the Crotonian army which defeated the Sybarites in 511 BC, while wearing his Olympic wreaths and dressed like Heracles in a lion's skin and carrying a club:
Milo's death, said to have occurred by wolves or a lion whilst his fingers were trapped in a tree stump he was trying to help someone split, became a popular subject in art in late Italian Renaissance sculpture; it continued to around 1900 and allowed the sculptor to show his skill in a dramatic anatomical pose, being a more compact equivalent of the Roman Laocoön and His Sons.
Feats of strength
Ancient sources and legends report that Milo took great pleasure in showing off his strength. He had a number of feats he would perform, such as holding out his arm with his fingers outstretched and challenging people to attempt to bend his little finger, standing on a greased iron disk and challenging people to push him off it, and holding a pomegranate in one hand and challenging others to take it from him; nobody ever succeeded, and the fruit was never damaged despite him holding it very tightly.In what would become his most famous feat of strength, Milo trained in the off-years by carrying a newborn calf on his back every day until the Olympics took place, by which time he would be carrying a four-year-old cow on his back; he then carried the adult cow the length of the stadium before killing, roasting, and eating it.