Spilling wine may be the ultimate party foul, especially if it lands on the host’s couch.
However, for the ancient Greeks, a party wasn’t good unless the wine flowed freely, and they didn’t just fling their glasses of wine about willy-nilly!
This game of wine-slinging, known as kottabos, had a well-defined target, and both pride and prizes were the awards.
The game had two iterations, and the favorite to play, which is the iteration often depicted in plays and especially on pieces of pottery, involved a pole. Players would balance a small bronze disk, called a plastinx, on top of it, and the goal was to flick dregs of one’s wine at the plastinx so that it would fall, making a clattering crash as it hit the manes, a metal plate or domed pan that lay roughly two-thirds down the pole. The competitors reclined on their couches, arranged in a square or circle around the pole a couple of yards away, and each then took turns launching their wine from their kylix, a shallow, circular vessel with a looping handle on each side.
A less common version, on the other hand, featured players aiming at a number of small bowls, which floated in water within a larger basin. In this case, the object of the game was to sink as many of the small bowls as possible with the same arcing shots. Since it lacked the resounding clang of the plastinx striking the manes, this version of kottabos has been regarded as the quieter, more civilized way to play.
Either way, technique was essential to maintain elegant form, accuracy and, above all, to avoid spilling on oneself.
The player, sprawling on a drinking couch and propped up on their left elbow, placed two fingers through the loop of one handle and cast the wine dregs in a high arc toward the target, something similar to throw a javelin.
Despite unknown origins, kottabos definitely spread throughout parts of Italy, where the Etruscans played it, and Greece, too, and the game’s craze even resulted in industrious people building special round rooms where it could be played, so all competitors could be equidistant from the target.
Nonetheless, these were not high stakes contests, and a winner might typically receive a sweet as a prize. Playing for kisses or other favors from attending courtesans (hetairai, as they were called) was also a possibility. In fact, some vases portraying kottabos reveal that women played the game as hetairai, too.
It was customary to dedicate one’s throw to a lover, with the implication that success at kottabos augured success in one’s love life. In one poem, Cratinus recalls a hetaira dedicating her shot to the Corinthian male organ: “It would kill her to drink wine with water in it. Instead she drinks down two pitchers of strong stuff, mixed one-to-one, and she calls out his name and tosses her wine lees from her ankule [kylix] in honor of the Corinthian dick.”
It seems that kottabos’s free-wheeling nature and prizes weren’t enough to sustain the game, as It eventually disappeared from artwork and plays, which suggests that it faded from popularity in the 4th century BC.
Part of that might be due to how difficult it is to play, which doesn’t get any easier after players have had more than a few glasses of wine, as well as the inevitable cleanup afterwards….
Images from web – Google Research