Tag Archives: HOW OLD IS THE GAME OF BILLIARDS?

291.HOW OLD IS THE GAME OF BILLIARDS?

Billiards, or pool, seems to be a game that leads a kind of double life. For many years in the big cities a pool hall was a place where decent people would never be found. Yet billiards has been a popular game with the aristocracy of the world. Some of the finest homes and clubs have billiard tables in them.

 

The game is so old that no one can say when it began. There are some authorities who claim it was played in ancient Egypt. The Greeks knew the game as long ago as 400 B.C. In the second century after Christ, a king of Ireland, Catkire More, left behind him “fifty-five billiard balls of brass, with the pools and cues of the same material.” And St. Augustine mentions billiards in his “Confessions,” written in the fifth century.