And ever we renew our equal love.[574]
Similarly, Sidonius speaks of his master Hoënius in a way which implies at least some degree of familiarity,[575] while his general recollections of his schooldays seem to have been distinctly pleasing.[576]
(b) Play.
The Romans were not much interested in psychology, or in the full development of personality. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that practically all the child-games we know of in the ancient world are Greek;[577] nor can we wonder that the Gallo-Romans have left us no description of the sort of things the child mind does, the way in which its personality develops, when freed from the guidance of what is called education.
The subtler African mind of Augustine, however, has left us some record of such games; and they are all so human and lifelike that they may very well have been common not only to his country, but also to his age.
He mentions ‘nuts’, handball, and bird-catching (nucibus et pilulis et passeribus).[578] Games of ball were, of course, common to the children of all countries. We find Paulinus of Pella at the age of fifteen wishing for a golden ball just arrived from Rome,[579] and Augustine describes how desperately keen he was on beating a chum in the contest of the ball.[580] As for the sparrows, ‘to capture a bird’, says Bertrand in his Life of St. Augustine,[581] ‘that winged, light and brilliant thing, is what all children long to do in every country on earth’. The same author describes the game of nuts as it is played in modern Africa. ‘A step of a staircase is used as a table by the players, or the pavement of a courtyard. Three shells are laid on the stone and a dried pea. Then, with rapid, baffling movements, hands, brown and alert, fly from one shell to another, shuffle them, mix them up, juggle the dried pea sometimes under this shell, sometimes under that, and the point is to guess which shell the pea has got under. By means of certain astute methods an artful player can make the pea stick to his fingers, or to the inside of the shell, and the opponent loses every time....’
It may be, too, that there were battles in which they took sides as Carthaginians and Romans or Greeks and Trojans.[582] Augustine loved to listen to fairy tales and was passionately fond of watching plays and performances (curiositate magis magisque per oculos emicante in spectacula, ludos maiorum).[583] The spirit of adventure sometimes led him (as it has led children of all ages) to break the laws of property, as the incident of the pear-tree shows.[584]
Of the organized sport of youth and manhood we derive considerable information from Sidonius, who frequently mentions indoor games such as the duodecim scripta, a sort of backgammon,[585] fritilli[586] and pyrgus[587] (in which dice [tesserae] were used), as well as outdoor games. Paulinus of Pella tells us how he was taken ill with fever at the age of fifteen, and his parents, thinking his health more important than ‘doctae instructio linguae’, followed the doctor’s advice and removed him from his school at Bordeaux. Among the pleasures that were planned to speed his recovery was hunting, which his father resumed for his son’s sake.[588] The equipment of a well-to-do Gallic huntsman is described. The young Paulinus wishes for a fine horse with extravagant saddle and bridle adornments (faleris ornatior), a tall groom, a swift hound, and a smart hawk. Fine clothes and scent from Arabia are also objects of his desire.
The main details of the chase may easily be filled in from Sidonius. From the description of Theodoric’s hunting skill, we gather that spears were used as well as bows,[589] and that the unsportsmanlike Roman habit of driving the game into nets was practised in fifth-century Gaul.[590] The hawk was regarded as an indispensable item.[591] There is river and lake fishing,[592] either with nets or with lines laid before nightfall,[593] and we hear of boat-racing[594] on lakes.
The game of ball, which is so frequently mentioned in Sidonius, was undoubtedly the most popular outdoor game. It was played by two persons,[595] or four,[596] or more than four,[597] and we gather that there was a good deal of running about. That is practically all we know of its rules, so that it is, strictly speaking, an assumption to call it ‘tennis’.[598] There were professional ball-throwers or jugglers, and there is an epitaph, found at Narbonne, to one Capito, a ‘pilarius’.[599]