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Playing in ancient times

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Games have entertained humanity at all times and at all ages and they have also occupied a good part of our lives. Of course everybody has a different way of playing and everybody has different games too, but a person who didn’t employ in them a good part of his life doesn’t exist. Of course a new born baby and an old man have not the same tastes. For a baby in arms an harness bell or a manycoloured clay animal are the most entertaining objects in this world, moreover, they give him different ways to pass his time, but, while aging, the child begin to try to find more complex passtimes some of which requests special skills and creates competition with other children.
Different playthings and different games, then, and all of them are ancient as the world. This bring us to ask how and when they appeared on this earth, but probably they always existed, and also in the caverns when what we could call normal toys didn’t exist men and children were playing. Probably they employed what nature offered them: pebbles, shells and sticks. Simple objects and at those times there was no time to prettify them, thus they did not leave any trace in the paleologists excavations. On the other hand at those times life was short and difficult; nearly all the cavern men efforts were directed in finding food, and very often to the dangers and the effort of their hunts they had also to add the strain to defend their preys from the attacks of other animals. They did not have time to paint a pebble or cut a stick to made it more attractive to their children
But children were children and always found some way to enjoy the games, thus the few moments in which they were not sleeping or they were not employed in chores to help the tribe, as gathering vegetals or carrying waters to the cavern, they passed their time engaging their friends in animated hand to hand fights, or exhibiting themselves in fantastic imitation of a hunters party. More than games those were ways to prepare themselves to the fights for their dear lives which would confont them in a future existence: a life hard and dangerous for everybody. To ignore how to fight or how to hunt would have meant sure death.
On the other hand children games were always a very good way to prepare young people to the hardness of life. It is obvious that wih the passing of time problems and situation changed. They are still changing, and if, to adapt to all those changes the games of children and teenagers became different, the core was always the same. Today for instance hunting has not the same importance it had in the prehistory, and we are not any more warring with arquebuses or cannons, while it is fundamental to hnow how to manage and speedy use a large gamut of technological instruments. Thus as in ancient times young boys exercised themselves in archery, fencing and hand to hand fighting, today boys and girls exercise themselves in the so much defamed videogames. Wrongly defamed because this kind of exercise is fundamental to acquire concentration, quick decisions and movements’ coordination and this are the quality that the war of our times, with all their computers and remote controls war machines, require. As we can see each times had their games and they were always adapted to the times’ life, working and war conditions.
We can see how children were entertained in the ahtiquity, but only in historic times, because in these periods we find writers describing their toys and telling us how their more commonly used games were played. We know quite well a good lot of toys because we find them in the tombs of the young deceased, and moreover we see them painted on jugs and other ceramic objects or sculpted in the basrelief of their marble coffins. However the fact that ancient people was strongly interested in both their children and grown up games is proved by the fact that entire books have been written on them.
The first ones to appear were greek works and we know that a playwright, Crates, wrote a comedy, “Children things”, which unfortunately didn’t arrive to us. We also know that there were learned alexandrine treatises on this argument and from them Svetonius must have taken the materials necessary to write his book “ Hellenic children”, but also this work was lost. Moreover there were very profound dissertations on the games of chance, and an important opus which unfortunately got lost was written, as Svetonius informs us, by no other than the emperor Claudius who was an inveterate player. Today besides some short notices that we find in the writers or poets works, the only thing which has been left is a treatise by Pollux who compiled it getting informations from all the other works which now have been lost.


Bibliography
Scientific popularization
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Dossier Giocare nel mondo antico in Archeo (Anno IX, nº 6 (112)) June 1994, pp. 40-85

Scientific books
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Giochi e giocattoli, Casa Editrice Quasar, Roma 1995