Hide and Seek

This animation was made from a wall-painting (fresco) in a house in Herculaneum. The fresco shows a hide and seek style game being played by little eroti, mini love gods, winged children, also known as 'putti'. 

The House of the Deer (‘Casa dei Cervi’ in Italian) is a large and intricately decorated house in the centre of Herculaneum with spectacular views of the Gulf of Naples. The house takes its name from the statues of deer in its grounds. 

The fresco of the eroti is in the covered corridor (cryptoporticus) of the villa. These were often purely functional corridors but the fabulous decorations in the corridors of this house suggest that they were used by guests as well as members of the household. The frescos were painted straight onto wet plaster. They featured birds, plants and animals as well as eroti. Visitors to the House of the Deer likely found it amusing or at least sweet to see the fresco of little eroti playing games that they knew from their own childhoods. Perhaps there were children living in the house who still loved to play those games.

The House of the Deer, like the rest of Herculaneum, was badly damaged by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79CE. But much of the house survived, offering us fabulous insight into the living environments of well-to-do Romans.

Find out more about Herculaneum from the archaeological site’s homepage: https://ercolano.beniculturali.it/

The fresco shows eroti playing a hide-and-seek style game. To explore how these games might have been played, Véronique Dasen of Locus Ludi turned to an ancient author called Julius Pollux. Pollux was a Greek philosopher and Roman citizen from Egypt. He lived in the 2nd century CE. He studied in Athens and later opened a school there. His encyclopaedia, Onomasticon, survives, written in Greek. Among the entries in his encyclopaedia Pollux listed the different rules by which children played hiding and chasing games. The Hide and Seek animation shows the different rules outlined by Pollux:

• Myinda is much like the game which in English is known as Blind Man's Buff. One player wearing a blindfold hunts the other players. Pollux lists two ways of playing this game. In one version the blind-folded player simply tries to catch the others. In the second, the person who's 'it' has to guess the name of the person they've caught – a bit trickier.

• Apodidraskinda has many different names in English, such as 40:40, 1-2-3 In, and Pom-Pom 40. Players start at a base. One player is ‘it’. The others hide while the player who’s ‘it’ counts. The hiding players must try and get back to the base without being caught. Have you played this game?

• Chalké Muia has not survived so well. It's a chasing game. Two players must try and poke the third player with slim strips of papyrus.

It was an interesting challenge to make the Hide and Seek animation. It's not like animating a pot. One of the big differences was dealing with colour. Frescoes were painted onto walls using a much wider range of colours than pots have. Shading was used to help create the shape of the limbs and the sense of depth. In order to have the figures turn and move their limbs, Steve K Simons of Panoply took spots of colour from all over the figures' bodies to recreate them using the same tones. Once there were versions of their limbs pointing in all directions, the figures were manipulated like puppets, just as the vase figures are. The font used for the game names and as speech captions was specially created from the font used in the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii.