The Cups and Balls is one of the oldest verifiable tricks of conjurers. Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger wrote in 63–65 CE what is currently presumed to be the earliest extant mention of the Cups and Balls. In his forty-fifth letter to Lucilius, (see Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, Vol. I, trans. Richard M. Gummere, 1918, p. 295) we find: “Such quibbles are just as harmlessly deceptive as the juggler’s cup and dice [sic: should be pebbles], in which it is the very trickery that pleases me.”

A slightly later and more specific mention was made by Alciphron sometime within the second to third centuries in his Letters of Farmers, Letter 17 (see The Letters of Alciphron, Aelian and Philostratus, trans. Allen Rogers Benner and Francis H. Fobes, 1949, p. 111): “A man came forward, and, setting down a three-legged table, placed three little cups on it. Then under these cups he hid some little round white pebbles, such as we find on the banks of rapid streams. At one moment he would hide them one under each cup; and at another moment (I don’t know how) he would show them all under a single cup; and then again he would make them entirely disappear from under the cups and exhibit them between his lips. Then he would swallow them, and, drawing forward the spectators who stood near him, he would take one pebble from a man’s nose, another from a man’s ear, and the third from a man’s head, and after picking them up he would make them disappear from sight again. A very light-fingered gentlemen!”

Two notable, if little practiced, innovations on the trick are (1) using metal balls, which was done by the elder Comus (1731-1807), according to J. N. Ponsin in his Nouvelle magie blanche dévoilée (1853; see Jean Hugard's translation in Gibecière, Vol. 16 No. 1, Winter 2021, p. 167); and (2) using clear cups, which Bartolomeo Bosco advertised that he would do in 1848 (see his broadside for May 28, 1848, reproduced in Gibecière, Vol. 21 No. 2, Summer 2026, p. 104).