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Here are two games not perhaps so universal nowadays. Πενταλιθίζειν was a technical word for tossing up five pebbles or astragali, and receiving them so as to make them lie on the back of the hand. Μηλολόνθη, or the beetle game, consisted in flying a beetle by a long thread, and guiding him like a kite. But by way of improvement they attached a waxed splinter, lighted, to his tail; and this cruelty is now practised, according to a good authority (Papasliotis), in Greece, and has even been known to cause serious fires.ssss1 Tops were known under various names (βέμβιξ, στρόμβος, στρόβιλος), one of them certainly a humming-top. So were hoops (τροχοί).

Ball-playing was ancient and diffused, even among the Homeric heroes. But as it was found very fashionable and carefully practised by both Mexicans and Peruvians at the time of the conquest, it is probably common to all civilized races. We have no details left us of complicated games with balls; and the mere throwing them up and catching them one from the other, with some rhythmic motion, is hardly worth all the poetic fervor shown about this game by the Greeks. But possibly the musical and dancing accompaniments were very important, in the case of grown people, and in historical times. Pollux, however—our main authority for most of these games—in one placessss1 distinctly describes both football and handball. “The names,” he says, “of games with balls are—ἐπίσκυρος, φαινίνδα, ἀπόῤῥαξις, οὐρανία. The first is played by two even sides, who draw a line in the centre, which they called σκῦρος, on which they place the ball. They draw two other lines behind each side, and those who first reach the ball throw it (ῥίπτουσιν) over the opponents, whose duty it is to catch it and return it, until one side drives the other back over their goal line.” Though Pollux makes no mention of kicking, this game is evidently our football in substance. He proceeds: “φαινίνδα was called either from Phænindes, the first discoverer, or from deceiving (φενακίζειν),” etc.—we need not follow his etymologies—“and ἀπόῤῥαξις consists of making a ball bound off the ground, and sending it against a wall, counting the number of the hops according as it was returned.” And as if to make the anticipations of our games more curiously complete, there is cited from the history of Manuel, by the Byzantine Cinnamus (A.D. 1200), a clear description of the Canadian lacrosse, a sort of hockey played with rackets: “Certain youths, divided equally, leave in a level place, which they have before prepared and measured, a ball made of leather, about the size of an apple, and rush at it, as if it were a prize lying in the middle, from their fixed starting-point (a goal). Each of them has in his right hand a racket (ῥάβδον) of suitable length ending in a sort of flat bend, the middle of which is occupied by gut strings dried by seasoning, and plaited together in net fashion. Each side strives to be the first to bring it to the opposite end of the ground from that allotted to them. Whenever the ball is driven by the ῥάβδοι (rackets) to the end of the ground, it counts as a victory.”ssss1