Entrance to the Colosseum
So far as the number of players is concerned, first of all there was the single game in which one played alone with one, or also with two and three balls, keeping them in perpetual motion as he sat or walked. From this juggler’s game was derived the art of Ursus Togatus, who, proud of his steadiness, first used glass balls. Then there was the double game in which two played and threw the ball to each other, and then one of the most popular games, which was played before the bath and very frequently in the Campus Martius, was the trigon, in which three players took part. It is often mentioned but never described. The stations of the three players were at the three corners of an equilateral triangle; but the ball did not travel simply from one player to another; it was thrown at one of them arbitrarily, so that he had to rid himself of two balls at the same time, a process which involved the use of both hands, and not only the catching of the two balls but their discharge at one of the other players. Besides the players themselves, three persons were necessary for the trigon to pick up the balls, and three others to keep the score.
The games for players en masse (sphæromachiæ) were particularly interesting to the Romans. There were three kinds, ἡ ἐπίσκυρος or ἐπίκοινος τὸ φενίνδα, and τὸ ἁρπαστόν. We are only partially informed of the difference between them; according to the latest investigation however the following may be assumed to be probably correct particulars. In the ἐπίσκυρος, the players divide into sides of equal numbers which are separated by a line marked in stones (σκῦρος): they also had a limit at the back of them beyond which they were not allowed to go. The ball is placed on the σκῦρος. One of the sides, whichever is the first to capture the placed ball, throws off as far as possible; the other side remains where it is caught and in turn throws it back. The object is to throw the ball with such force that the opposite side are driven back, and to drive them right back to the boundaries of the court, in which case they have lost the game.
In the second game, the φενίνδα, two sides are also engaged. The man who throws off challenges a definite person on the opposing side to catch the ball, but then throws it in quite another direction, in which case it has to be caught by someone else. If it falls to the ground, the side which failed to catch it has lost. We know least of all about the harpastum, but the ball seems to have been thrown up in the air so that the thrower himself is in a position to catch it again. In order to stop this all the players scrum up, and while they are struggling for the ball upset one another to the accompaniment of a tremendous noise. Finally, the game described by Cinnamus the Byzantine, which Meineke and after him Grasberger have identified with the harpastum, has nothing whatever to do with it. It was quite a particular game for the imperial family, was played on horseback, and the ball was hit with a racket, none of these features being characteristic of the harpastum.[f]
The Roman Theatre and Amphitheatre
Roman Lamp
If the Roman people was ill accommodated in its streets, it might derive compensation in the vast constructions which were erected for its amusement, the ample walks and gardens devoted to its recreation, and the area which was sedulously preserved for its exercise in the Campus Martius, and the circuses of Romulus and Flaminius. The theatre of Pompey, the first fabricated of stone for permanent use, was rivalled by that of Balbus, and Augustus dedicated a third to the pleasures of the citizens under the title of the theatre of Marcellus. From the enormous size of these celebrated edifices, it is clear that the idea of reserving them for dramatic performances entered but little into the views of their builders. The Roman theatre was an institution very different from ours, where a select audience pay their price of admission to a private spectacle on a large scale. They were the houses of the Roman people, to which every citizen claimed the right of entrance; for they were given to him for his own by their munificent founders, and the performances which took place in them were provided gratuitously by the magistrates. The first object, therefore, was to seat the greatest number of people possible; and when that was accomplished, the question followed of how they should be safely and conveniently entertained.
An assemblage of thirty thousand spectators, gathering excitement from the consciousness of their own multitude, could not sit tamely under the blaze of an Italian sun, tempered only by an awning, in the steam and dust of their own creating, which streams of perfumed waters were required to allay, to hear the formal dialogue of the ancient tragedy declaimed by human puppets from brass-lipped masques, staggering on the stilted cothurnus. Whatever might be the case with the Greeks, it was impossible, at least for the plainer Romans, so to abstract their imaginations from the ungraceful realities thus placed before them as to behold in them a symbolic adumbration of the heroic and the divine. For the charms, however, both of music and dancing, which are also considered pleasures of the imagination, they appear to have had a genuine though perhaps a rude taste. Their dramatic representations, accordingly, were mostly conducted in pantomime; this form at least of the drama was that which most flourished among them, and produced men of genius, inventors, and creators in their own line.