Ancient Life: Shooting the Moon
Gaga over games in Greece and Rome
Well before yo-yo mania struck in the 1930s, and even before 18th-century French audiences watched Figaro nervously playing with a toy that “dispels the fatigue of thinking,” the ancient Greeks were using metal, wooden and clay disks to “skin the cat” and “shoot the moon.”
Yo-yo’s like the terracotta example above, dating to about 460 B.C., have been found in archaeological excavations throughout Greece. Images of people playing with yo-yo’s were also painted on vases and plates, such as the mid-fifth-century B.C. plate above.
Children in ancient Greece and Rome played with a variety of toys—including tops, hoops, marionettes, rattles and the so-called Trojan horse toys, or miniature horses with an inner cavity for storing toy soldiers. A game called astragali in Greek and tali in Latin, which involved tossing the anklebones (astragals) of a sheep or a cow, was originally devised as a way to predict the future; eventually, it became a game of skill played mostly by young girls.
Boys, on the other hand, used astragals as dice—an especially popular Roman pastime. Romans adults so enjoyed playing games of chance that they established professional dicing leagues in which men could make a respectable living by gambling. The emperor Claudius (41–54 A.D.) wrote a book about dicing, and Nero (54–68 A.D.) is said to have played for up to 400,000 sestertia a throw—the equivalent of the annual pay of 400 soldiers. Not surprisingly, the Roman emperor Caligula (37–41 A.D.), known for his megalomania, was not above playing with loaded dice.
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