Kottabos
[citation needed] Ancient writers, including Dionysius Chalcus, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Pindar, Bacchylides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Antiphanes, make frequent and familiar allusion to the practice;[2] and it is depicted on contemporaneous red-figure vases.
[3] Dexterity was required to succeed in the game, and unusual ability was rated as highly as corresponding excellence in throwing the javelin.
Kottabos was customary, and, at least in Sicily, special circular buildings were established, so the players might easily be arranged around the target, and follow each other in rapid succession.
Like all games in which the element of chance found a place, it was regarded as more or less ominous of the future success of the players, especially in matters of love – and the excitement was sometimes further augmented by some object of value being staked on the event.
[4] The kottabos game seems to have originated in Sicily, or the land of the Sikels, but it spread through Greece, from Thessaly to Rhodes, becoming especially fashionable at Athens.
[a][4] The player is expected to throw the wine-lees found in the drinking cup, in such a way that it does not break bulk in its passage through the air, towards the plastinx.
The discovery in Etruscan burial sites (by Wolfgang Helbig in 1886) of two sets of actual apparatus in Umbria, near Perugia, as well as various representations on Greek vases help explain the somewhat obscure accounts[b] of how kottabos was played.
The rhabdus (pole) had a flat base, and the main structure tapered towards the top, with a blunt end (on which the plastinx or manes was balanced).
The manes was in the shape of a man, with his right arm and leg uplifted, sometimes holding a drinking horn (or "rhytum").
On a red-figure cup by Apollodoros, it shows some symposiasts aiming at a target with a phallus-headed bird balancing on top of a tripod which is placed on a flat pan.
Leagros was a popular youth frequently named in kalos inscriptions on sympotic vases around this period.
[citation needed] Kottabos involves disruption of equilibrium when the plastinx falls, or the oxybapha are sunk.
So when balance is broken, the sound of the plastinx falling onto the manes, and the sunk of the oxybapha, serves as a good omen, indicating that the love of the player is assured.
This would account for the Doric dialect used on the inscription and also the absence of couches, which is consistent with the stereotypes about Sparta held by the Athenians.
[citation needed] The use of female symposiasts as a humorous trope is consistent with several black-figure vases with figures that are interpreted as Etruscan women.
[10][clarification needed] Most of the cups being used to play the kottabos game were regular kylikes as shown on painted pots.
