Beer Pong With Gravitas
Learning from lost civilizations, into the sloppy hours of the evening.
We don’t know much about the Etruscans. They flourished alongside the Romans for 900 years, until Rome learned to organize at scale and overwhelmed them, a trend followed by great civilizations before and since. Etruscans lived in loosely-confederated city-states, ranging from Italy’s coast near Pisa, and inland across Tuscany (which gets its name from “Etruscan”) through Umbria. They traded with everybody. They carved a lot of Greek myths on their funerary urns, along with many arresting sculptures.
And most notably, they practiced what is believed to be history’s first drinking game.
You fans of Pennies, Never Have I Ever, Drunk Twister, Fuzzy Duck, Drunk Jenga, Bite the Bag, and the many, many other games for folks who aren’t simply content with drinking too much, you owe this civilization your thanks.
This is a kottabos, still ready for action after 2500 years in the dirt. If you and your friends want to make one at home, it stands about seven feet high. The little plate the statue is holding on top is detachable. The pan in the middle is not.
The kottabos came out after the early parts of a symposium. In contrast to today’s stale academic gatherings of the same name, symposia were divided into long sessions of eating, followed by much drinking, and then unlimited hēdonē, or “fun.” People played kottabos in turns, flinging the last of the wine in their cups at the little plate, aiming to knock it loose and have it fall onto the big plate, making a noise.
That may not sound like much, but neither do most drinking games until you play them. Later on the hēdonē would get romantic: The noise of the little plate hitting the big plate signified a disturbance of equilibrium, akin to the feeling of nervousness one has around a new love. When Pete Townshend wrote, “I feel hot and cold, I can’t explain,” he was channeling the immortals. And of course, an empty wine cup is a wine cup in need of filling.
Often the guy (apparently, sheesh, it is always the guy) would declare for someone in the room before flinging his wine, which made the action an ancient, “she loves me, she loves me not.” Only with considerable expertise and some tension: If you were good at the kattabos your hand-eye skills were rated like those of a great javelin thrower. Another edge this game has on beer pong.
This sport was probably derived from a corruption of a religious ceremony in Sicily (how many ways is this better than beer pong?). It was also popular in Greece, and is depicted on much pottery. What these commemorations never show, but professional and amateur research has all but guaranteed, is that most people aren’t great kottabos athletes, and once this game got going many more symposium goers ended up drenched in wine dregs than passionate suitors disrupted the auditory equilibrium. Anything in the name of hēdonē, right?
Which was probably the point. Then as now, the cleaning bills must have been epic.
Vintage Quentin, as it were! Exploring the history they forgot to tell us in school. I.E. the useful parts