Kottabos

Kottabos was a game of skill played at ancient Greek and Etruscan symposia, the drinking parties of the sixth and fifth centuries BC, in which participants flung the dregs of their wine at a target set in the middle of the room. Winners received prizes called kottabia, which could range from cakes and sweetmeats to a kiss, and success required enough dexterity that ancient writers rated skill at kottabos alongside skill at throwing the javelin. The game was popular enough that Aristophanes, Euripides and Pindar all referred to it in their surviving work, and its play is depicted on red-figure pottery from the period. In Sicily, dedicated circular rooms were reportedly built so that players could be arranged around a central target and take their turns in quick succession. Beyond entertainment, kottabos carried a quasi-divinatory significance, especially about the outcome of a player's romantic prospects, and players sometimes wagered on the results. References to the game largely disappear from later Roman and Alexandrian period writers, suggesting the fashion had died out well before antiquity ended.