Students have always had a reputation for disorderliness and drunkenness. The earliest works of drama, originating in Greece, depicted foolish characters as drunk students. It can even be argued that the legally independent universities that exist in the Western World today were established due to drunken students. A bar fight erupted into a riot at the University of Paris in the 1100s and the subsequent damages led the Pope to grant the university self-governance (Chrzan 3). American Greeks, the ones that go by 3 letters on college campuses, continue the age old tradition and have been throwing raucous parties since the earliest American universities opened their doors. Today, the frat party is a cultural staple. Dark basements, red cups, orange balls—the drinking game features prominently in American Greek drinking culture. Just as the drunken student has deep roots digging all the way back to Greek culture, drinking games are no different.
The real Greeks, the ones that poisoned Socrates and liked columns, have been known for their relative temperance for thousands of years. Most of southern Europe, deriving from Hellenic culture, tends to stray away from drunkenness to this day. They drink wine regularly, but in moderation. When ancient Greeks drank wine, they always mixed it with water. The particular ratio of water to wine varied, but it was common to drink a water to wine ration anywhere from 1:1 to 5:1, the latter earning the invective, ‘frog’s wine’ (Blumner 210). For the ancients, drinking parties, called symposia, had strict rules that regulated how much the party-goers drank. Guests were made to drink wine in rounds, so that everyone drank at the same rate, and descended into a state of intoxication to equal degrees.
While the Greeks were not necessarily drinking to get drunk, they still had their deal of fun and revelry when it came to wine. Much like the Greeks of college campuses today, they were known to play several games which revolved around alcohol. These games, to varying degrees, involved wine.
First among the ancient Greek drinking games is a nameless game of wit that occurred at symposia. Greek men, reclining on couches in a circle or square, would take turns in a counterclockwise direction giving short speeches or solving riddles (Blomner, 213). Sometimes there was a prompt given, and different hosts were known to have different themes of conversation. In Plato’s famous description of this game in his The Symposium, the prompt for these short speeches is to praise the god of love. The best and most clever of the speakers were rewarded with wreaths and kisses, while the worst were insulted and made to drink undiluted wine. Although not necessarily a formal game either, Greeks were known to play games of balance at their drinking parties. Attendees would balance cups and jars on various parts of their body like their arms, heads, and stomachs (Lissarrague 76).
A game more aligned with our modern conception of drinking games was called kottabos. This was a target game in which the lounging drinkers who had emptied their cups, called a kylix, would flick the lees of the wine at a target. This target could be a disc balanced on a stick or a plate floating in a basin of water (Cazzato 163). The goal was to get the remaining residue of wine to form drops that flew through the air and hit the target perfectly. As players took their shots, they made dedications to their lovers and some poets even described these flying drops as Aphrodisiacs.
“Never will love of you grow old or perish, so long as a slave-boy carries around water mixed with wine for the cups, dispensing toasts to the right, and female choruses conduct sacred all night festivities, and the scale pan, daughter of bronze, sits on the lofty peaks of the kottabos for the drops of Bromios”
-Critias
A less common game, but a game nonetheless, occurred at the yearly celebration of the Great Dionysia. After celebrating the god of wine and imbibing a great deal of the juice itself, revelers would gather around to watch naked, young boys play the game askolia. This game was based on the mythology and culture of wine as wine skins were filled and smothered in oil. The boys would compete to see who could hop on the slick skins for the longest without falling. The closest American analog must be that of greasy watermelon football.
Other festivals had other games and the Athenian celebration of Anthesteria, another festival to the god of wine, had the most basic drinking game of all. Men who were to compete filled their bowls with wine and at the sound of a salpinx, a kind of bugle, the men would drink until their cup was empty (Cosmopoulos 312). The first to finish was proclaimed winner and was awarded a wine skin.
Beer pong or kottabos, never-have-i-ever or a contest in eloquence, drinking games are an ever-present sidecar to a glass of wine or a cup of beer. The Greeks of fraternity row continue a long legacy not only of drunk students, but of drunk students who play games. In this context, the name greek is fitting; as the philosopher Isocrates said, ”And if a man should partake of our culture, let him be called Hellene.”
Blümner Hugo. The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks. Cassell, 1910.
Cazzato, Vanessa, et al. The Cup of Song: Studies on Poetry and the Symposion. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Chrzan, Janet. Alcohol: Social Drinking in Cultural Context. Taylor and Francis, 2013.
Cosmopoulos, Michael B. Greek Mysteries: the Archaeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults. Routledge, 2004.
Hays, Jeffrey. “WINE, DRINKING AND ALCOHOLIC DRINKS IN ANCIENT GREECE.” Facts and Details, factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub406/entry-6201.html.
Lissarrague, Francois. Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet. Princeton University Pres, 2016.
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