Forget everything you think you know about ancient Greek symposia for a moment. Yes, we are all aware that there was wine, philosophy, and the occasional shouting match over justice or the psyche. However, the drinking game of kottabos was also culturally a part of Ancient Greece, though few are aware of this, and it was truly a mess.
Kottabos was indeed an interesting occasion. Imagine a room lit by oil lamps, men reclining on sofas, and wine flowing freely. Someone hooks a finger through the handle of his kylix, takes aim at a small bronze disc balanced across the room, and flicks his wrist. The dregs of his wine go flying. If he’s any good, the disc clatters down onto a basin below with a satisfying cling. If he’s not, well, someone’s sofa just got doused in wine.
The deeper meaning of the kottabos drinking game in Ancient Greece
Kottabos wasn’t a party trick, as one might initially believe. It demanded real precision, and the Greeks took it seriously enough that Athenaeus of Naucratis, never one to undersell a good anecdote, claimed men were prouder of their aim at this game than they were of throwing the javelin—and, yes, this has actually been said. It outranked actual athletic training in a culture that invented the Olympics. That is quite revealing about how central the drinking game of kottabos was to the entire social convention of the symposium in Ancient Greece.
The stakes were quite significant, as well, as winners walked away with kottabia, prizes that ranged from sweets and cakes to something a little more personal, such as a kiss from one of the companions at the party.
Kottabos was, moreover, a marker of class. The symposium itself was an aristocratic institution, a space where political alliances formed over wine and rhetoric. Mastering kottabos signaled that you belonged to the social circle you admired the most—that you had the leisure, training, and refinement to play a game that ordinary tavern-goers, hunched over cheap cups in dimly lit rooms, simply couldn’t access. There were no brass targets for the common man and no kottabia, either.
The game was so popular that it didn’t remain confined to Greece. Etruscan tombs in Italy are covered in frescoes portraying men in the exact same wrist-flicking pose, immortalized in fresco for reasons that, genuinely, say a lot about what people considered worth painting on a wall for eternity. The customs of Ancient Greece had a way of making their way across the Mediterranean, and the kottabos drinking game was no exception.
One might wonder what became of this popular game. The truth of the matter is it just changed shape. Walk into any university pub tonight, and you will most probably witness some version of it in the form of beer pong, flip cup, or coins bouncing off tables into glasses—different props but same purpose. If we get rid of the bronze disc and the kylix, we detect the same basic human itch to show off a little skill so as to break the tension and possibly catch someone’s eye across the room in the process.
That is the real takeaway here. We like to remember the Greeks for their temples and their treatises, for democracy and tragedy, and the weight of marble columns. However, they were also regular people who liked to drink, flirt, and compete over something silly after dark. Kottabos was truly a part of the Greek civilization. It just involved wine dripping down someone’s chin rather than stone carving.
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