Childhood, toys and games in ancient Greece

A baby, a βρέφος, spent its first years at home with its mother and with nurses. Babies and small children had rattles. The philosopher Aristotle wrote that the rattle of Archytas was a good invention. Parents gave it to children to keep them busy, so that they did not break things in the house. Young children, he said, cannot keep still.

In Athens, small children also had a part in a big festival. At the Anthesteria, a spring festival of the new wine, the youngest children probably received a tiny jug called a χοῦς. Many of these jugs are painted with children at play. On one jug, now in a museum in Chicago, a little boy pulls a small cart. On another, a baby crawls towards a bird.

The philosopher Plato noticed that small children invent their own games whenever they meet. In Greek today you would say it like this: τα παιδιά παίζουν, the children play. The word παιδί (child) comes from the ancient παιδίον, “little child”.

Many ancient toys look very familiar. Children threw and caught a ball, a σφαῖρα. They spun a top, a στρόβιλος. They rolled a hoop, a τροχός, along the street. Some had a disc on a string that went up and down like a yo-yo. There were swings and seesaws too.

Girls and boys had dolls, called πλαγγόνες, and little animals, above all horses, some of them on wheels. Most of the toys that we still have are made of clay. Children surely also had toys of wood, leather and cloth, but these materials rot, so almost none of them have survived.

A toy is a παιχνίδι in Greek today. The word comes from the ancient παίγνιον, “plaything”, through the later form παιγνίδιον. The word σφαίρα is still Greek, but it has changed. In everyday speech a ball is usually a μπάλα, and a σφαίρα is a sphere, or the bullet of a gun.

The most popular game of all was knucklebones, the ἀστράγαλοι. An ἀστράγαλος is a small bone from the ankle of a sheep or a goat. It can land on four different sides. Children played with these bones in two main ways. They threw them into the air and tried to catch as many as possible on the back of the hand. Or they threw them like dice, to see which side landed on top.

Girls and boys played knucklebones, and so did adults. The game even appears in Homer’s Iliad. There, the ghost of Patroclus remembers a sad day when he was a little boy. In a quarrel over knucklebones, he killed the son of a man called Amphidamas, although he did not mean to. Because of this, he had to leave home, and he grew up in the house of Achilles’ father.

The historian Herodotus wrote that the Lydians, a people in Asia Minor, said they had invented knucklebones and ball games during a long famine. They played all day so that they forgot their hunger. It is a good story, but nobody really knows who invented the game.

When children grew up, some of them gave their toys to a god. A short poem by Leonidas of Tarentum, written in the 3rd century BC, tells of a boy called Philocles. He hung up the toys of his childhood for the god Hermes: his ball, his rattle made of boxwood, the knucklebones he loved so much, and his spinning top.

Another poem tells of a girl called Timareta. Before her wedding, she gives the goddess Artemis her ball, her tambourine and her dolls with their little dresses. Experts still discuss how to read some words in this poem, but it shows how girls left their childhood behind when they married.

Knucklebones did not end with the ancient Greeks. Children went on playing with the little bones for a very long time. In Modern Greek the bones are called κότσια, and so is the game. The old word ἀστράγαλος is still used too: in a doctor’s office it means your ankle.