Kottabos

Kottabos playing wine drinker (~ 510 BC)

Kottabos player with flute player

Kottabos (Greek: κότταβος ) is the name of one of the Greeks mainly in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. BC with a particular preference for games of skill operated during drinking bouts . The drinking game came from the Greek colonies of Sicily and came around in the 4th century BC. Chr. Out of fashion.

procedure

With kottabos, it was important, lying on the sofa , to throw a few drops of wine in as high an arc as possible at a target basin or bowl ( kottabeion ) so that nothing was spilled and the target was hit with audible clapping. To do this, one took a dip that remained in the bowl after drinking , the last sip. Vase pictures show participants in the game several times with two vessels. This indicates that the vessel used to spin the wine was refilled several times in this way. Numerous variants existed, e.g. B. with figures that are hit, or floating bowls that had to be sunk. Often a candelabra-like device is shown, on the tip of which a metal disc to be hit lay loosely. Depending on its success, the game was also connected to a kind of love oracle . Often courtesans involved and install the equipment. Cupid himself slips into this role too . Aeschylus , Sophocles , Euripides , Aristophanes and Antiphanes described the game and enjoyed it themselves. Men can also be seen doing kottabos on vases of their time.

Xenophon narrates in the Hellenica that Theramenes poured out the last drops while drinking the hemlock cup, as when playing Kottabos, and cynically dedicated them to “the beautiful Critias ”.

literature

Karl Sartori: The Kottabos game of the ancient Greeks. Munich 1893. Reprint 2013
A. Higgins. Recent Discoveries of the Apparatus used in playing the Game of Kottabos (Archaeologia, 1888)
"Kottabos" in Daremberg and Saglios Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines (1873)
L. Becq de Fouquibres. Les Jeux des anciens (1873)

Web links

Commons : Kottabos - collection of images, videos and audio files

the Kottabos game

Individual evidence

↑ Kottabos on vase pictures , Philologus, Volume 26, Academy of Sciences of the GDR. Central Institute for Ancient History and Archeology, Akademie-Verlag, 1867, page 201ff
↑ Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg : "The revolution eats its own children" - Kritias vs. Theramenes . In: Leonhard Burckhardt , Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg (ed.): Great trials in ancient Athens . Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-46613-3 , p. 144–156, here p. 155 .

[1] Kottabos on vase pictures , Philologus, Volume 26, Academy of Sciences of the GDR. Central Institute for Ancient History and Archeology, Akademie-Verlag, 1867, page 201ff

[2] Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg : "The revolution eats its own children" - Kritias vs. Theramenes . In: Leonhard Burckhardt , Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg (ed.): Great trials in ancient Athens . Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-46613-3 , p. 144–156, here p. 155 .