A Playful Coroplast? A New Look at the Terracotta Group of the Early Roman Board-Game Players NAM 4200 and Related Finds

This study reconsiders a 1st-century AD Athenian terracotta group, NAM 4200, which shows two seated board-game players and a standing dwarf. Reportedly discovered in 1855 during construction near the royal palace within a large cemetery, the piece is treated as a rare depiction of play in the Roman period. Its central argument is that the object is a deliberate and meaningful composition rather than a generic genre scene. The board is tentatively identified as Poleis or a precursor to the Roman ludus latrunculorum, and the elite character of the figures' garments is noted as a key contextual clue.

The most original contribution concerns the impressed motifs on the chairs: a rosette on the male player's seat and a long-necked bird, probably a goose, on the female player's. The author argues that these are intentional, drawing on comparative iconographic, textual, and ethnographic evidence rather than on newly discovered inscribed parallels. The goose is read as evoking feather-plucking, a metaphor for defeat or exploitation, while the rose connects to Aphrodite and good fortune. Together these suggest that the seated male is the likely winner and the female the loser, with the coroplast offering a playful commentary on the contest.

The dwarf figure is interpreted in several ways, including as a household slave, entertainer, good-luck figure, or matchmaker framing the game as a love metaphor, but the study favors his role as an observer or narrator of the scene. Taken together, the readings address whether such figures are signatures, decoration, or carriers of contextual meaning, concluding that the motifs likely carry playful significance.

The study also considers a funerary setting, proposing that the scene may be read as a commendation of a male victor in a male-dominated society or as an allegory of a lamented love affair, with the bird and flower signaling loss. Its broader conclusion is that board games were a popular pastime among the population of early Roman Athens, and that craftsmen produced grave goods reflecting this everyday leisure. The surrounding bibliography situates the work within scholarship on Attic terracotta grave goods and ancient games.