Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/508

 may be asked to look closely into the games presently to be described, so as to satisfy himself that their agreement goes even further, as in the peculiar principle on which the high and low throws are counted, and, so far as one knows, in there generally being in some shape the rule of hitting a blot, that is, taking an enemy's undefended man off the point one's own man moves to. The exact primitive game whence all known games of the class were derived can not now be pointed out, and indeed is perhaps lost in prehistoric antiquity. So we may as well keep to our own word, and call the whole set the backgammon family. It is in this sense that I use the word here, with the purpose of proving that, before Hernando Cortes landed with his invading Spaniards at Vera Cruz, one variety of backgammon had already found its way over from Asia into Mexico, and had become a fashionable amusement at the barbaric court of Montezuma. But, before following the game on its hitherto unnoticed migration into the New "World, let us first glance at its Old World history.

Clearly our English backgammon and the more complicated French trictrac are descended from the Roman game of the "twelve lines" (duodecim scripta), which was played throughout the empire. This is the game which Ovid says has lines as many as the gliding year has months, and he means it where he gives the lover insidious counsel, when his mistress casts the ivory numbers from her hand, let him give himself bad throws and play them ill. Among the Christian antiquities in Home is a marble slab, on which a backgammon-table is cut, with a Greek cross in the middle, and a Greek inscription that Jesus Christ gives victory and help to dicers if they write his name when they throw the dice—Amen. Carelessly scratched as it is, by some stone-cutter whose faith went beyond his trictrac, it shows that the board was like ours even to the division in the middle, which makes the two groups of six points on each side. From ancient Rome, too, we inherit the habit of making the backgammon-board with a draught-board on the reverse side, at any rate the commentators so interpret Martial's epigram on the tabula lusoria:

''Hic mihi bis seno numeratur tessera puncto Calculus hic gemino discolor hoste perit.''

The very mode of playing the men in classic backgammon may be made out from a fifth-century Greek epigram, commemorating a remarkable hit, in which the Emperor Zeno got his men so blocked that, having the ill-luck to throw 3, 5, 6 (they used three dice, as indeed we continued to do in the middle ages), the only moves open obliged him to leave eight blots. This historic problem, and other matters of Greek and Latin backgammon, are worked out by M. Becq de Fouquières, in his "Jeux des Anciens", with a skill that would have rejoiced the hearts