Sometimes also, as with us, they spun their tops with cord. The amusement is thus described by Tibullus:[[470]]
“Namque agor, ut per plana citus tota verbere turben,
Quem celer assuetâ versitat arte puer.”
The hoop, too, so familiar to our own schoolboys, formed one of the playthings of Hellenic children. It was sometimes made of bronze, about three feet in diameter,[[471]] and adorned with little spherical bells and movable rings, which jingled as it rolled. The instrument employed to urge
“the rolling circle’s speed,”
as Gray expresses it, in his reminiscences of the Eton play-ground, was crooked at the point, and called a plectron: its exact representation may any day, in the proper season, be seen in the streets of London impelling forward the iron hoop of our own children. The passages of ancient authors, in which mention of the trochos occurs, appear to have been imperfectly understood before the discovery of a basso-rilievo, in marble, on the road from Rome to Tivoli, afterwards removed to the vineyard of the Cardinal Alexander Albani. On certain engraved gems also, in the cabinet of Stosch, are several representations of boys playing at hoop, where the trochos in some cases reaches to the waist, in others to the breast, and where the child is very small up to the chin. It has been conjectured by Winkelmann,[[472]] that a circle represented in one of the paintings of Herculaneum was no other than an ancient trochos. Rolling the hoop formed a part of the exercises of the palæstra, which were performed even by very young children. Thus we find the nurse describing the sons of Medeia returning from playing at hoop the very day that they were slain by their mother.[[473]] This amusement has been described briefly by the Roman poets. Thus Martial:[[474]]—
“Garrulus in laxo cur annulus orbe vagatur
Cedat, et argutis obvia turba trochis.”
Propertius[[475]] notices the crooked form of the plectron, or clavis:—
“Increpat et versi clavis adunca trochi.”