=180. Children’s Games. “Morra” and Dice.=--It is a long cry from child-rearing to philosophy. One must return to the first topic enough to notice the games played by young Romans and also by their elders. Tag-games, blindman’s buff and its refinements, and like sports, can be seen in every street and dusty area in Rome. A favorite game is that of “King”; when a group of children elects a _Rex_ who commands them to perform all sorts of fooleries. Time fails to tell of all the contests with tossing knuckle bones and at “odd and even,” guessing at concealed pebbles, shells, and nuts. The later-day Italian game of “morra” (_micare digitis_) in which both players hold out a hand with a certain number of fingers extended, and then each one tries to shout out the correct number of his rival’s fingers before the other can do the like by his, is a highly popular if noisy method of killing time. At the eating houses and taverns it is regularly used among friends to settle who shall pay the score. All too early boys, and likewise girls, learn also to rattle the dice box. Some of the dice are ordinary six-sided cubes, some are oblong, with the numbers “2” and “5” omitted from the narrow ends. Almost always three dice of bone or fine wood are used; and the familiar expression “three sixes or three aces” is the same as saying “all or nothing.” =181. Board Games of Skill: “Robbers” (Latrunculi).=--Altogether too much time and money are wasted at dice even by fairly grave people, while professional gamblers abound; but the Romans have two games in which men are moved on a gaming board according to rules involving very high degrees of skill. You can play _Duodecim Scripta_ very much like later-day backgammon; fifteen white men and fifteen black men are shifted about on a board marked with twelve double lines (whence the name) according to the casts of the dice. More abstract and learned is _Latrunculi_ (“Robbers”), a game without dice and seemingly very much like later-day checkers or chess. Some of the pieces are called “soldiers” and others “officers”--and the moves are very elaborate.[111] Of course, such games are far removed from a mere youthful sport. Consuls and Emperors delight in them, and while playing forget everything but the problem involved. Devotees cite with pride the story of Julius Kanus, one of the mad Caligula’s victims. He was in prison but was allowed to have a friend visit him, and the two were busy over “Robbers,” when a centurion came in to say he must be immediately executed. Kanus at once arose unmoved, but carefully counted the men on the board; then said to his friend, “Mind you, don’t tell a lie after I’m dead, and say that you won”; then turning to the centurion, “Please bear witness for me that I was one man ahead,”--and so did Stoicism find its way even to the gaming table!