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Games for all ages: the ball

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Games for all the seasons of life
Games, then, always games and of every kind. The game princeps of all and one of the most ancient was the ball. When and where was the first ball made? But who on earth could ever know? As a matter of fact its origins are lost in the mists of time. We only know that it already existed in the Geometric period, and it was already represented in little scenes of the Archaic one: some very ancient balls had been found among the offerings to the gods, such as the clay ones decorated by a netlike red motif and now exposed in the Historic Basel’s Museum, and there is no doubt that also the little ivory one which was found in Thebes’ Sacrary of the Cabirian gods was an object consecrated to them.
Apart of all this the ball as a game was in effect one of the most versatile and interesting passtimes and to try to reconstruct its history and to find who was its inventor was very enticing. Everyone wanted to unveil the mistery. Nothing sure came up, thus each one ascribed its discovery to some celebrated person he knew and admired. For instance Agallis, III cent B.C. Corcyra ‘s intellectual, attributed its invention to Nausicaa, the beautiful girl who appeared like a vision to Ulysses, when this hero, fallen in a deep sleep after the shipwreck, was abruptly awakened by a loud shout of the girls whose ball had fallen into the sea. It is evident that the ancient “grammarian” - as in ancient times the scholars like Agallis were called – was pushed to make this deduction part because the first description of this game was found in Homer’s Odissey, and Nausicaa was the girl that the great poet described as playing it, and part, as Atheneus ( the “Deipnosphists” author) insinuate, because Agallis wanted to attribute the honor of this discovery to one of her own country as handsome Nausicaa was. Of course these of Agallis were only hypothesises.
On the ball and all its games much has been written: there have been treatises that have not arrived to us, and of which we only know the titles. Author of one of the more important study was a Spartan, a certain Timocrates, but to reconstruct what was written in his book we are obliged to bade ourselves on the few notices which other literary sources derived from it. Nearly always we find this in Greek works and also Greek are the first representations of people playing ball.
From all this, we discover that, as it happens also in our times, there were different kind of balls, each one adapted to a different kind of game. Thus there was a small hard ball stuffed with wool or flax fibers which in Greek was called “harpastum” and was used in a game called by the same name. It was a very lively match played by two teams reunited in a large field. Its rules were very similar to the ones used today by the Anerican Football league. The game consisted in trying to bring the ball at the extremity of the adversary’s field. The match developed amid furious fights, scrummages and tripping the adversaries. Around the field a public of fan routed for one or the other of the groups, shouting and applauding their team and whistling and insulting the adversary. In brief it had nothing to envy to our modern matches of football.
The game is described to us by Antiphanes, who worked just after the 338 B.C.. In his comedy the actor just after having shouted
“Damn! what a terrible crick in the neck I got!”
describe one of this match
“ He took the ball and laughing threw it to one of his fellow player. He succeeded in avoiding one of his adversary and sent another one falling headlong. After this he helped one of his friends to rise again while from all the sides people were shouting “It was out!” “It is too long” “It is too low” “It is too high” “It is too short” “Send it back in the scrummage”
As we see, nothing is new in this world. This kind of game was triumphally adopted by the Romans and also here it had groups of passionate fans. The field was a normal open air country field whose soil was not compacted, thus the match was always fought in a cloud of dust.The players were many, the scrummages fiery and the dust enveloped everybody and everything. For all these reasons the Romans, who always gave anything facetious but appropiate names, instead of calling the match wiuth the Greek name of “harpastum” called it “pulverulentum” a word which better described the fiery scene: “Dusty”.
Apart of the “harpastum” there was also another kind of ball calle “paganica”: It was much bigger than the “harpastum”, and, as it was filled with feather, was very light. To throw it or take it back was easy: it was probably used for more tranquil games like the ones that Nausicaa played with her compamions. in which the lancing of the ball was accompanied by music, singing and dancing.
Then there was another ball called “follis” or “folliculus” that was said to be invented by a certain Atticus the Neapolitan, who was Pompeius Magnus’ trainer, but which probably already existed before him. It was full of air, thus it bounced and could also be played individually as did the young woman man depicted in a nice red figure “kilix ( fig.2). Amotjer one on the same subject is exposed in Ancona’s Museum. In this scene a boy, with his right hand stretched, made a medium sized ball rebound on the floor.
Many kind of balls and so many kind of games. Probably with a “Harpastum and some special sticks shaped as modern hockey ones(fig. 3). such a game was played in ancient Greek times, and we can see two players engaged in this match on an ancient Greek bas-relief.
Then there were all the games in which each player throw the ball to a friend and so on until one of them missed it and let it fall on the ground. Some time to make it more difficult this game was coupled with the “ephedrismus” which consisted in having the player bringing one of his fellow astride on his shoulder. A game much represented on Greek vases and statuettes (fig.4). It is clear that any match played by half the players brought astride by the other half and all of them trying desperately to cohordinate their movements and catch the ball must make each moment of the competition a lot more eventful and it must often awake the audience’s laughter. Always with the Ephaedrismu there was another game to play. In this the man brought astride by a companion and guided only but his indication is trying to find a stone placed on the floor (fig.5)
There are many other ways to play with a ball. There is the one depicted in the Hatterii’s tomb in which a group of boys is engaged in this occupation, which must have been very similar to the one of Trimalchio engaged inthis kind of passtime and described by Petronius Arbiter in its “Satyricon”
“In the meantime” tells Encolpius describing the scene that they found at the Baths where he went with Ascilto and Gito before going to trimalchio home where they had been invited to dinner “We went around there still clad and we spent our time looking curiously around the different groups of people staying there, when all of sudden our interest was caught by the view of an old bald man with dressed in a reddish tunic, was playing ball with a group of long haired teenagers and our interest was not centered on the young ones - and yet it was certainly wortwhile to ogle them – but we were attracted by their slippered master who played throwing them green balls. When one of these fell on the ground he didn’touch it again, and called for a new one which was given to him by a slave that stood there with a bag full of green balls. We were also struck by another oddity, on one side stood as stiff as a ramrod two eunuchs, one kept in his hand a silver cahmber pot, while the other was counting not the the green balls that had been catched by the players, but the ones that had fallen on the ground.”
This as a matter of fact was not a normal match, but it was something done by Trimalchio who wanted to display his richness.
Last of all those games there was also the “Trigone” play, much cited by Horace who, good intellectual as he was, didn’t like it. As a matter of fact the poet was not disposed to exercise, at least every time he could avoid it. In his verses his reluctance to partecipate to any of those game is quite clear. He writes
“But when the scorching sun summon me to the Baths
I flee away from Campo Marzio and the “trigone” game”
His friend Virgil was the same. It is evident that the two great poets were not sportsmen, and in Horace verse we read of the tome in which. One of them with the pretext of his conjunctivitis and the other with a real liver trouble got out of a game which Maecenas was organizing to pass the time on a stop during their journey toward Brindisi.
“Maecenas went to play. Virgil and I to sleep
because the ball game isnot suitable to conjunctivitis or dyspepsia.”
Unfortunately ball games and precisely the “trigone” was also the favourite play of Maecenas. Thus, willing or unwilling, the poet had often to com to accept to come to the “Campo Marzio”, assist at the games and even to play at them. It was to this“Campo Marzio”, that all the important and also the not so important persons of Rome went before going to the Baths. to relax themselves from the Forum’s activities. The “trigone” was always played by three players set as a triangle who threw the balls one to another. It is highly possible that all of them – also if eviting incorrectness - tried to launch the ball in such a way that also if desperately running their companion could not catch it.


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

Scientific book
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Giochi e giocattoli, Casa editrice Quasar, Roma 1995