THE COTTABUS.
For a most laughable prize. How shall you do?
A. I then will show you how: whoever throws
The cottabus direct against the scale ([Greek: plastinx]),
So as to make it fall B. What scale? Do you
Mean this small dish which here is placed above?
A. That is the scale—he is the conqueror.
B. How shall a man know this? A. Why, if he throw
So as to reach it barely, it will fall
Upon the manes,[1] and there'll be great noise.
B. Does manes, then, watch o'er the cottabus,
As if he were a slave?
And in a subsequent passage he says—
B. Just take the cup and show me how 'tis done.
A. Now bend your fingers like a flute-player,
Pour in a little wine, and not too much,
Then throw it. B. How? A. Look here; throw it like this.
B. O mighty Neptune, what a height he throws it!
A. Now do the same. B. Not even with a sling
Could I throw such a distance. A. Well, but learn.
5. For a man must curve his hand excessively before he can throw the cottabus elegantly, as Dicæarchus says; and Plato intimates as much in his Jupiter Ill-treated, where some one calls out to Hercules not to hold his hand too stiff, when he is going to play the cottabus. They also called the very act of throwing the cottabus [Greek: ap' ankylês], because they curved ([Greek: apankyloô]) the right hand in throwing it. Though some say that [Greek: ankylê], in this phrase, means a kind of cup. And Bacchylides, in his Love Poems, says—
And when she throws [Greek: ap' ankylês],
Displaying to the youths her snow-white arm.
And Æschylus, in his Bone Gatherers, speaks of [Greek: ankylêtoi kottaboi], saying—
Eurymachus, and no one else, did heap
No slighter insults, undeserved, upon me:
For my head always was his mark at which
To throw his cottabus. . . .[2]
Now, that he who succeeded in throwing the cottabus properly received a prize, Antiphanes has shown us in a passage already quoted. And the prize consisted of eggs, sweetmeats, and confectionery. And Cephisodorus, in his Trophonius,, </poem>
which is wholly unintelligible; but Schweighauser gives an emended reading, which is that translated above.]
