Tricks of ancient drinking game revealed

The best way to win at the ancient drinking game “kottabos” is to fling your wine dregs like a baseball, not like a frisbee, one expert has declared.

Greek drinkers playing kottabos, the figure on the far right seems to have something on his mind other than the game however.

“Kottabos” was a game played throughout the ancient Greek world, it is thought to have originated in Sicily, and involved flinging one’s wine dregs at a target in the centre of the room while saying who or what was the object of your affection.

Like most drinking games there was little actual point to it other than a test of skill and dexterity (it was favourably compared to throwing the javelin) and it was understood that if you hit the target perfectly then it boded well for the acquisition of whatever it was you most desired.

Bets were also regularly placed on throws.

Wine would be drunk from a shallow cup called a “kylix” and the players would be reclining on couches a suitable distance from the target – which was usually a small statuette holding a disc, the best hit would knock the disk out of the statuette’s hands and down onto another with a satisfying noise.

Using a 3D printer to make a kylix, Dr Heather Sharpe from West Chester University of Pennsylvania has found through long hours of study with her students (though without the drinking part and only using grape juice), that flicking the dregs from the kylix more like a baseball pitcher rather than a frisbee thrower is the best method.

She also gathered that playing the game at “symposia” led to a lot of mess. She told Live Science: “By the end of our experiment we had diluted grape juice all over the floor. In a typical symposium setting, in an andron, you would have had couches arranged on almost all four sides of the room, and if you missed the target, you were likely to splatter your fellow symposiast across the way.

“You’d imagine that, by the end of the symposium, you’d be drenched in wine, and your fellow symposiasts would be drenched in wine, too.”

As numerous depictions of the game in ancient Greek art show players poised with their kylix overarm (see picture above), the point of this experiment is perhaps debatable.

Nonetheless, those inspired to take up kottabos as a result of the study may now do so in the assurance that they are doing so correctly.