1
Games, Greek and Roman
ULRICH SCHAEDLER
Games discussed in this article include games
with dice, board games, and games of skill
played by children or adults, excluding athletic,
acrobatic, and theatrical activities, as for
example the Olympic and other contests, glad-
iatorial combats, or chariot races, although
the Greek term paignion and the Latin term
ludus comprise all these kinds of games.
Information comes mainly from written
and archaeological sources, which in some
cases can be completed or explained through
and compared to ethnographical evidence.
Secondary evidence comes from representa-
tions of playing scenes in ancient art such as
vase and wall paintings, relief, mosaics, or
statuettes.
The written sources are mostly limited to
mentions and anecdotes in ancient literature
and more often in poetry; only rarely do
we find more contiguous descriptive texts
(see e.g., Nux elegia and Laus Pisonis). Sueto-
nius book Peri ton par Hellesi paidion is lost,
but has been used by lexicographers such as
Hesychius and Eusthatius. Also lost is Claudius
book about dice games, De arte aleae. The nec-
essary methodological attention has not always
been paid in interpreting these texts: Roman
authors, for example, tend to avoid the repeti-
tion of words and therefore use different names
for dice (see, e.g., Seneca Apocolocyntosis 15) or
counters, so that the latrones, calculi, bellatores,
or milites of the ludus latrunculorum should
not be taken as otherwise unattested differen-
tiated pieces, such as in chess. Translations also
often equate ancient games with modern ones
such as chess or draughts, which is completely
misleading.
Archaeological finds of gaming material
such as dice, knucklebones, counters, boards,
and marbles, appear frequently among the
finds in settlements and sanctuaries, but are
better preserved in funerary contexts. Terracotta
models of gaming tables for Pente grammai
The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, First Edition. Edited by Roger S. Bagnall, Kai Brodersen, Craige B. Champion, Andrew Erskine,
and Sabine R. Huebner, print pages 28412844.
2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah22285
have been found among the grave goods in
Attic burials of the early sixth century BCE.
Marble plaques fashioned like game boards
for the game of alea (see below) have been
used to close tombs in several Roman cata-
combs. Dice and counters (with too large
a variety of numbers as to allow for detailed
conclusions) figure among the grave goods in
Greek and Roman burials; in Nubian, Celtic,
and Germanic graves the remnants of wooden
gaming boards have also come to light. None-
theless, even well-preserved or seemingly
complete finds, such as the game board
with counters found in Stanway, near Colchester
in southeast England, cannot readily be
interpreted without preliminary assumptions.
Surprisingly, games found in private houses
are extremely rare: the only example is a
copy of a wooden XII scripta-board engraved
before 260 CE into a marble table found in
slope house 2, app. 7, at Ephesos.
While wooden gaming boards were used in
private homes, numerous game boards can still
be seen engraved into the marble pavements of
public buildings in Roman towns, especially
where an important Late Antique and early
Byzantine period existed (as for example at
Ephesos and Aphrodisias), but they have hardly
ever been systematically documented. They
mostly lack a precise dating, a fact that holds
especially true for the drawings on the roof
of the Sety temple at Qurna, Egypt: among
masons marks, magic symbols, and possible
game boards, Coptic crosses are also found,
which makes it impossible to cite the roof as
evidence that the games of alquerque, mancala,
and nine mens morris existed at the time of the
construction of the temple in the fourteenth
century BCE or in Greek and Roman times.
It is not always possible to identify game
boards, which usually have the shape of
a geometric pattern, nor to link them to
games mentioned in the literary sources. This
is the case, for example, with Minoan
cup-holes as well as with the circular wheel
patterns present in countless examples at
Roman imperial-Byzantine sites. Although
2
they frequently appear near boards of known
ancient games (such as XII scripta/Alea), their
conventional identification as a round version
of three mens morris, proposed by Carl
Blumlein in 1918, is purely conjectural. No
imaginable rule makes it a playable game
(Blumleins version does not work either), and
the game is not attested elsewhere on the planet.
Descriptions of rules of games are extremely
rare: the only complete rule for dicing with
knucklebones is given by Augustus in a letter
quoted by Suetonius (Suet. Aug. 71). Other
rules can be inferred from Nux Elegia, Polluxs
account, and Ovids short verse on three mens
morris (Ars am. 3.3812). It should be consid-
ered that it is useless to try to reconstruct
a single rule for a given game. Traditional
games develop and change over time and
have been played in a great number of variants,
which differ from country to country, from
tribe to tribe, from village to village, or even
from family to family.
It seems that among the Greeks and
Romans, children and adults respectively
played their own games. Anecdotes of adults
playing with children (Augustus, Heraclitus)
appear as exceptions from the rule. At their
coming of age children used to offer toys
to the gods, as a symbolic gesture for them
leaving childhood behind. Dolls, pets, nuts,
knucklebones, tops, marbles, balls, or playing
at odd and even, heads or tails, and skittles lar depressions, with a target hole at the end.
are described and depicted as childrens favor-
ite play activities together with a number of
games played without the use of objects, some
of which continue to be practiced in many
parts of the world. Not all these games were
played by both boys and girls. Certain games
appear to have been particularly appreciated
by girls, such as Cheli Chelone (Poll. Onom.
9.125). Miniature objects such as diminutive
vases or furniture are often taken as belonging
to some kind of dolls house, although doubts
may be raised about the existence of such
a bourgeois toy in ancient times.
As far as the games of adults are concerned,
most written sources relate to men. An amuse-
ment of Greek men until about the fourth
century BCE at the symposium was kottabos,
a game where a drop of wine had to be flicked
against a target. Nonetheless, red figure vase
paintings and terracottas sometimes depict
Greek women at play, especially with knuckle-
bones (Poll. Onom. 9.126 calls pentelitha the
favorite game of women) or at ephedrismos.
From Ovid (Ars am. 3.35684) we learn that,
at least in his time, men and women played
together and therefore played the same games.
As indicated by one inscribed gaming table for
alea found at Ephesos, as well as numerous
written sources about playing with dice and
knucklebones, most games (at least games of
chance) were usually played for stakes. Some
players are credited with remarkable expertise,
and in some cases the behavior at play was
understood to reflect the good or bad character
of a person, notably the Roman emperors.
Besides board and dice games, and puzzle-like
games such as morra (micare digitis), playing
with balls was popular and a favorite activity in
Roman baths: different types of balls (Martial
Epigr. 7.32) were used for a variety of games
(Poll. Onom. 9.1037; Isidore Etym. 18.69). It
seems that playing with marbles was also an
adult pastime. Lanes for playing with marbles,
widespread in public places all over the Medi-
terranean, follow a precise scheme: two parallel
starting lines followed by several rows of
depressions and irregularly distributed singu-
One of the board games where we know
somewhat more than just the name is the
Greek game five lines (pente grammai),
played on a board with five parallel lines with
the central one called the sacred line (Poll.
Onom. 9.97; Eust. Od. 1297.28). This is the
game Ajax and Achilles play in the scenes on
Attic vases (from ca. 540 to 480 BCE; see the
black-figured kyathos at Musees Royaux
dArt et dHistoire, Brussels, inv. R2512).
Numerous boards with two rows of five or
eleven squares inscribed into the pavements
of Roman sites can perhaps be interpreted as
boards for Roman versions of the game.
Polis (often wrongly called petteia) was
played on a grid of squares with counters

in two colors called dogs (Poll. Onom. 6.206,
9.98; Eust. Il. 1290, 2; Od. 1397.45). It was
played without dice (Eusthathius was
confused by the double meaning of dog as
a counter in polis and as a throw in dice
games), counters being captured by enclo-
sure from two sides. The Roman ludus
latrunculorum applies the same method of cap-
ture and therefore appears to have been the
same game. Three mens morris is attested
through a short description by Ovid (Ars am.
3.3656; Tr. 2.4812) and three types of
boards: a cross-cut square, a cross-cut square
with additional diagonals, and a cross-cut
square with an inscribed lozenge. Nine mens
morris seems not to be attested until Byzantine
times.
Ludus duodecim scriptorum was the earlier
Latin name of a game of the backgammon
family played on a board of three rows of
two by six fields. Nonius (170.22) explained
scripta as puncta tesserarum, whence the
name of the game should be understood
as the game of twelve points, referring to
the highest possible throw (see also the mosaic
CIL XIV 607 from Ostia). In Isidores times
(Etym. 18.604) the game was played with
three dice and had changed its name accord-
ingly to alea (played with three dice, its name
twelve points was no longer appropriate).
Magnificent marble gaming tables dating to
the fifth and sixth centuries from Aphrodisias,
Perge, and Ephesos testify to the high reputa-
tion this game enjoyed even in Christian times.
The latest example of the game is a Soghdian
wall painting from Piandzhikent (kept in the
State Hermitage Museum at St. Petersburg).
At least from the fifth century onwards,
a two-row board was introduced, apparently
influenced by the Persian game nard. The
board is represented in a mosaic from the
Kourion complex in Cyprus, and a match is
described in an epigram by Agathias of Myrine
(Anth. Pal. 9.482). It is not certain whether or
not the term tabula was ever used as a name for
that game.
Mancala seems not to be mentioned in the
written sources, although the typical boards
3
with two parallel rows of depressions two
by six, but often also two by five can still
be seen at various archaeological sites in
the eastern part of the Roman Empire. Unfor-
tunately they lack precise dating, with the
exception of those found in a gaming room
in the late Roman fort at Abu Shaar, Red Sea,
Egypt.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
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Lamer, H. (1927) Lusoria tabula. In RE 13,2:
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Schadler, U. (1994) Latrunculi ein verlorenes
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Schadler, U. (1995) XII Scripta, alea, tabula new
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Schadler, U. (1996) Spielen mit Astragalen.
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Schadler, U. (2002) The Talmud, Firdausi, and
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Schadler, U. (2007) The doctors game new light
on the history of ancient board games. In
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P. Crummy et al., eds., Stanway: an elite burial site
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