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Quickies

Did you know …

• an ancient Greek marble relief housed in the National Museum of Archeology in Athens shows an athlete balancing a ball on his thigh as a young boy looks on? This very same image is featured on the European Cup trophy.

What was episkyros?

Around 2000 BC, the Greeks played episkyros (also known as phaininda), a kicking and throwing game played primarily by men, usually in the nude. Early balls were made of linen and hair wrapped in string and sewn together, though it is believed inflated balls — inflated pig bladders wrapped in pigskin or deerskin — were used by later practitioners of the game.

Quickies

Did you know …

• Cicero describes an incident in which a man getting a open-air shave was killed when a harpastumball hit his barber?

What was harpastum?

For over 700 years during the realm of the Roman Empire, a game called harpastum (meaning “the small ball game”) was very popular. Employing a small, hard ball, harpastum was played by 5–12 athletes on a rectangular pitch marked by boundary lines and split by a centre line. The game’s objective seems thoroughly counterintuitive to us today: each team had to keep the ball in their own half for as long as they could, while their opponents tried to steal it and take to their side. Both the hands and feet could be used to move the ball. Because the rules indicated that only the player with the ball could be tackled, complex passing combinations developed. Emperor Julius Caesar used harpastum to maintain the physical readiness of his soldiers.