Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/509

Rh of those eminent amateurs, the old Count de Trictrac and the venerable Abbé du Cornet, to whose teaching history records that Miss Becky Sharp ascribed the proficiency at backgammon which made her society so agreeable to Sir Pitt at Queen's Crawley.

It is not known so exactly what manner of backgammon the Greeks played in earlier ages; but there are various passages to prove that, when they talk of dice-playing, they often mean not mere hazard, but some game of the backgammon sort, where the throws of the dice are turned to account by skillful moving of pieces. Thus Plato says that, as in casting dice, we ought to arrange our affairs according to the throws we get, as reason shall declare best; and Plutarch, further moralizing, remarks that Plato compares life to dicing (κνβείά), where one must not only get good throws, but know how to use them skillfully when one has got them. So with Plutarch's story of Parysatis, mother of Artaxerxes. She was "awful at dice" (δεινὴ κνβενειν), and, "playing her game carefully," won from the king the eunuch Mesabates, who had cut off the head and hand of Cyrus; having got him, she had him flayed alive and his skin stretched. This episode of old Persian history is noteworthy in the history of the game, because Persian backgammon, which they call nard, is much like the European form of the game, which, it has not been unreasonably guessed, may itself have come from Persia. This nard is popular in the East, and orthodox Moslems have seen in the fateful throws of the dice a recognition of the decrees of Allah, that fall sometimes for a man and sometimes against him. It is, said one, a nobler game than chess, for the backgammon player acknowledges predestination and the divine will, but the chess-player denies them like a dissenter. Not to lose ourselves in speculations on the Oriental origin of backgammon, at any rate it was from Rome that it spread over Europe, carrying its Latin name of tabulæ with it in French and English tables. This word has dropped out of our use since the Elizabethan period, but an instance of it may be cited in a couple of lines, conveying another little sermon on backgammon, which the English author no doubt borrowed from the Latin of Terence, even as he had copied it from the Greek of Menander:

There is an idea which readily presents itself as to how backgammon came to be invented, namely, that the draughts were originally mere counters, such as little stones, shifted on a calculating board to reckon up the successive throws, and that it was an afterthought to allow skill in the choice of moves. This guess fits well enough with the classic draught being described as a stone, νῆφος, calx or calculus, while in Germany, though now made of wood, it still keeps its old name of stein. Also the playing board on which the stones were moved shares the name of the calculating board, ἇβαξ, abacus. But if the classical