![]() Pollux lists four variants of hide and seek games : Myinda, Apodidraskinda, Chalké Muia, some of which are still practiced today.In the game, you can also collect weapons that have been left on the battlefield by your opponents. The dictionary (Onomasticon) written by Julius Pollux in the 2nd century CE provides a list of games with descriptions. Images, however, do not provide us with game rules. The picture shares an imaginary, cheerful world where children are no longer mortal, but divine: they are depicted as carefree winged supernatural beings. The scene is a perfect example of the contribution of images to the history of play and games: it preserves the memory of children’s social life they perform a collective activity, hide and seek, which otherwise left no archaeological trace and belongs to an immaterial heritage. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE destroyed the city but the pyroclastic flow preserved the splendour of this wealthy house.Ĭhildren may have actually played hide and seek in the corridor which was decorated with a series of small panels depicting Erotes engaged in various lively activities. The animation is based on a wall painting from the so-called cryptoporticus of the House of the Stags (Casa dei Cervi), one of the largest dwellings in Herculaneum with a beautiful terrace that once overlooked the sea. In the past as today, play and games can provide suspended moments of shared happiness. This delicate animation, evoking the carefree happiness of loved children and hope, is meant as a gesture of solidarity with all our Italian friends, our colleagues and the many people throughout Europe and the world who are currently isolated. “Play Hide and Seek in Herculaneum” is the new animation realised by Steve Simons and Sonya Nevin (Panoply) for Locus Ludi. As a difference to other attempts to reconstruct the rules of ancient board games one may find here and there, our rules are based on scientific archaeological, philological and anthropological evidence. This is what we did for the four ancient board games of which sufficient information is available: the Greek game of “Five Lines”, the Roman games “Latrunculi” and “XII Scripta” and “Three Men’s Morris”, the only ancient board game still played today. But we can in some sort invent a game based on what we know about them and filling the gaps with plausible assumptions. Of course, it is impossible to reconstruct lost rules exactly, also because they certainly changed over time or varied from one region to another. By uniting all this evidence and checking it against what we know about similar games played around the world, we can paint a fairly good picture of how Greek and Roman board games were played. ![]() ![]() However, what we have got are archaeological finds of gaming material such as boards, dice and counters, representations of people playing games in painting, sculpture and mosaic as well as some allusions to games in ancient Greek and Roman literature. Simply because rules of ancient board games have not come down to us. Wherever we go to explain ancient Greek and Roman games to a wider audience, people ask that question: How are these games played? As obvious this question is, as difficult it is to answer. ![]()
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