This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
The dances spoken of in Homer are partly those of tumblers and partly those of ball-players; the invention of which last kind Agallis, the Corcyrean authoress, who wrote on grammar, attributes to Nausicaa, paying a compliment to her own countrywoman; but Dicæarchus attributes it to the Sicyonians. But Hippasus gives the credit of both this and gymnastic exercises to the Lacedæmonians. However, Nausicaa is the only one of his heroines whom Homer introduces playing at ball. Demoteles, the brother of Theognis the Chiansophist, was eminent for his skill in this game; and a man of the name of Chærephanes, who once kept following a debauched young man, and did not speak to him, but prevented him from misbehaving. And when he said, “Chærephanes, you may make your own terms with me, if you will only desist from following me;”“Do you think,” said he, “that I want to speak to you?” “If you do not,” said he, “why do you follow me” “I like to look at you,” he replied, “but I do not approve of your conduct.” The thing called φούλλικλον,, which appears to have been a kind of small ball, was invented by Atticus the Neapolitan, the tutor in gymnastics of the great Pompey. And n the [p. 24] game of ball the variation called ἁρπαστὸν used to be called φαινίνδα, and I think that the best of all the games of ball.
Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. Or Banquet Of The Learned Of Athenaeus. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1854.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.