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Nuccio D’Anna

Primordial Symbols

Cosmic Harmony and Sacred Law in Ancient Greece

In the famous description of the forging of Achilles’ shield outlined in the Iliad, at the beginning of the narrative, Homer focuses on an enigmatic celestial map depicting some constellations not present in the zodiacal belt (XVIII, 481-487). Of course, there is mention of the sun and the moon, but in an overall context that also includes the other stars “that form a crown in the sky”. In reality, what seems to particularly catch Homer’s attention are the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Orion, three constellations that, as Hesiod will later document, were the original basis for calendar notations when time was not yet calculated based on the movements of the sun and the twelve stations of the zodiac. The appearance of these constellations marked the beginning of the ancient liturgical year and the three seasons (harvest, plowing, and harvest) which, just like the Vedic Ṛbhus studied by Lokamanya Tilak, marked an ancient triadic division of the calendar that was not yet related to the time it took for the sun to traverse the entire zodiacal belt. This was a year arrangement that preceded the one centered around the sun’s path, the stations it touched, and the division of the year into four parts.

At the center of this extraordinary and unexpected celestial map, we find the constellation of Ursa Major, “which the people now call the Big Dipper,” says Homer, thereby declaring almost incidentally, and as something well known to his aristocratic listeners, that this constellation had a special symbolic “history” starting from the time when, before being called “Ursa,” it was considered the abode of the “seven Lights,” the sapta-rikṣa of Vedic tradition. Then, facing Ursa Major, Homer points to a fixed and immovable “point” around which the entire celestial quadrant rotates, the only star “that never sets,” the North Star. As we can see, we are faced with the essential elements of an archaic celestial quadrant: the Pole, the Big Dipper, and a little further on, the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Orion, the constellations that, as Lokamanya Tilak revealed in his 1893 work Orion, or researches into the antiquity of the Vedas, entered the astronomical calendar as fixed points of orientation after a series of cosmic readjustments that inevitably brought forth new celestial references. Homer seems to assume, as something well known to the warrior caste to whom his song is addressed, the existence of a stellar calendar regulated by the periodic appearance and celestial position of certain fixed constellations that preceded the adoption of the notation system centered around the sun. And perhaps the most extraordinary thing that emerges from observing this cosmic structure is the fact that the celestial map in Homer’s text is identical to the situation supposed by the stellar calendar in use during the time of Hesiod, a calendar that regulated the three seasonal changes of a “year” not yet structured around the passage of 12 months and indicated the rhythms of life on which the work of the Greek farmer should be based during periods of an “annual” duration not yet regulated.

The celestial setting outlined by Homer with his curious attention to these non-zodiacal constellations is important. It situates the listener in a primordial reality, when the perpendicular of the axis mundi touched the celestial pole, allowing them to observe the depictions of the shield created by the divine blacksmith Hephaestus as if they were unfolding at the “center of the world” and at the beginning of time. Homer intends to place the listener not only in the illud tempus of origins, when the “axis of the sky” began to rotate and orient the entire celestial quadrant, but also in the corresponding sacred omphalos in which all “formed forms” took shape. Moreover, Hephaestus’ extraordinary work is not just an unrepeatable “beautiful” and perfect artifact, but a true agalma (= “sacred object”) forged with the intention of reshaping the cosmogonic act that led to its manifestation. On its surface, in fact, the demiurge god, who has the “exemplary” function of acting on “raw matter” to transmute it, depicted the rhythms on which the entire cosmic and human order is articulated. In this creation, Hephaestus captured the archetypes that give substance to the creation, and the agalma has the task of conveying the “forming forms” on which the cosmos is ordered.

Further on, the representation transforms, and Homer, the “blind” singer who must interpret and then reveal the visions bestowed upon him by the world of the gods, after describing a traditional wedding with its characteristic sacred procession that unfolds in the light of torches at night, introduces the scene of a trial that must determine the condemnation of a murderer and establish the “blood price” that the guilty party must pay to atone for such a serious offense. The underlying intent of the trial scene is probably to show the solidarity between:

  1. The primordial sacred right (= dike);
  2. The divine law that governs every aspect of creation and is under the protection of Themis1, the ancient celestial form, daughter of Uranus and Gea (the earth or “prime matter”), who at the beginning of the world, when the other divine figures also began to take shape, had generated with her husband Zeus her three daughters, the divine Hôrai: Eurynome, “Righteous Norm”, Dike, “Justice”, Irene, “Peace”. The symbol of the balance that belongs specifically to the sacred area in which this divine figure operates can only refer to a primordial era when harmony was the very condition of the cosmos, the gods were beginning to take “form,” and the Balance did not yet designate the current zodiacal constellation but resided in a celestial situation.
  3. Public law that orders the functioning and relationships among ancient families2. This particular form of primordial justice is articulated as a balance that sustains and directs the multiplicity of cosmic planes, establishing the overall harmony that must also touch the inner structure of man. On the social level, it manifests as a spiritual value that reflects the very meaning of cosmic order. In the words of Jean Rudhardt, “thémis […] is a felt requirement, the desire or need to invent behaviors that ensure understanding, peace, and balance in a society […], while acts contrary to thémis dissolve societies.”

The judges in the process depicted by Homer sit on a row of stones arranged in a way that forms a circular enclosure, and at the center of this true representation of a sacred omphalos, two talents of gold are placed. It is the depiction of a reality that follows exactly the same “exemplary” modalities used in positioning the aethla belonging to the winner of the funeral games celebrated in honor of the transfiguration of Patroclus, the “prizes” that Achilles had placed “at the center” of the assembly. The arrangement of the two “talents” and the circular shape of the space that must accommodate them, in many respects, reproduces the ancient sacred tradition of placing the captured spoils of the defeated at the “center” of the assembly of winners, to be later given to the Hero chosen by Destiny through a drawing that is actually a ritual interrogation. Everything suggests that the agreement reached between the parties arises from a religious background and that the supposed drawing, according to some scholars, does not aim at absolute judicial impartiality, as too hastily assumed by many interpreters of Homer. The ultimate mediator between the two contenders, and between the contenders and the sphere of the sacred, remains the seer-diviner with the task of consulting destiny following the rules of an oracular art that originally constituted, among other things, the oldest source of archaic law. In this way, it was destiny itself that indicated the one to whom the most important part of the spoils belonged, which was assimilated to a sacred offering, while the distribution of goods according to justice not only resulted in fairness because it followed dictates derived from an oracular interrogation, but also aimed to restore an altered order, to recover overall balance.

The Homeric expression δύο χρυσοῖο τάλαντα is usually translated as “two talents of gold”3 because it seemed natural to many scholars to connect this primitive form of Homeric currency to the “talents,” that is, the types of currency that circulated abundantly from the late Bronze Age in the Aegean Sea between Crete and Cyprus. It is very likely that these forms of currency reached the Hellenic civilization area, perhaps following the extensive movements of travelers, craftsmen, and blacksmiths that have affected the entire Eastern Mediterranean since the second millennium. The breadth of their horizons, their ability to involve various artisanal categories with their technical-operational knowledge, and their own power of penetration convinced an expert like Andreas Alföldi to hypothesize the existence of a sort of prehistoric “civilization of blacksmiths” rich in its own mythology and adequate spiritual foundations4. Moreover, it is in the Mesopotamian world that the value of the “talent” was calculated in relation to the mina (mana; gr. mna; a mina was made up of 60 shekels) and here 60 minas formed the value of a “talent” which, as is evident, derived its weight and symbolic meanings from the spiritual and arithmosophic substratum that underpinned Babylonian sexagesimal numeration.

Despite the many attempts made by scholars, the value of the Homeric “talents” has always remained completely undetermined. Aristotle already assured that the Homeric “talent” never corresponded to a fixed quantity or a predetermined value, and since then, various conjectures have been put forward to determine its weight. However, only a series of hypotheses have been listed, which have always remained personal hypotheses advanced by some scholars. And yet, as the old, good William Ridgeway suggested with good reason5, the Homeric “talents” must necessarily correspond to a weight value very close to or directly related to that attributed to the ox. This animal, in fact, due to the exceptional ritual value that has always made it the offering par excellence to be sacrificed and the “most pleasing to the gods,” has always been valued as the basic unit of measurement with which all other goods were normally measured in the traditional world celebrated by Homer. And since the weight values of the Homeric civilization have always been expressed in relation to the number of oxen to be sacrificed and not to the number of “talents,” it is necessary to conclude that the original base measure of every weight valuation was precisely the sacred ox, which was absolutely fundamental both in the archaic sacrifice and in the consequent distribution of the meat of the sacrificed animal to the participants in the sacred banquet. The undeniable fact remains that the contiguity of these two ancient values (oxen and “talents”) in the competitions, the agonies, the games, and many other sacred contexts, primarily attested by the Homeric poems, would not only show their strong solidarity but also the deep relationships that, from a “pre-monetary” point of view, must have existed between oxen and “talents”.

It is very likely that the same weight quantification of each of these “talents” should have reshaped an aspect of the coin value attributed to the very particular circulating monetary types in the opulent Mesopotamian empires, where every human phenomenon or physical event was traced back to “divine forms” and “celestial archetypes” that Chaldean doctrines have always assimilated to “deities = numbers”. Now, in the Babylonian system brought to light by Hugo Winkler and subsequently explained with careful doctrine by Alfred Jeremias6, the ratio between gold and silver coins (also fundamental to determine the real value of the Homeric “talents”) has always been calculated as 1:13½ and derived from the measurement of certain astral movements computed on the ratio between the 360 days of the solar year (= gold) and the 27 days of the lunar month (= silver) = 360:27.

In turn, copper (an absolutely indispensable mineral not only for the intrinsic qualities it could boast in obtaining bronze and many other metal alloys, but above all because it was considered the metal belonging to the area of worship of the goddess Venus) maintained a ratio of 1:60 compared to silver, according to a weight value determined, again, on the sexagesimal numbering so important in Mesopotamian cultures. As can be seen, the three metals (gold, silver, and copper = sun, moon, and Venus) that constituted the essential foundation of every weight evaluation, those considered always absolutely indispensable in every type of coinage or metal alloy, maintained their respective value ratio according to a computation derived from the orbital cycles of the sun, moon, and planet Venus, the three most important celestial bodies in the Mesopotamian system, where it was a common doctrinal norm to assimilate every star or planet not only to the respective deity of reference, but also to a specific number, symbol, or color.

The term “talents” is formed on the same semantic value on which the verb “talanteuō” is built, meaning “to weigh”, “to balance”, “to measure”, “to oscillate” (cf. Latin “libra”). So, in reality, the noun used by Homer does not seem to indicate only the “talents” coined in gold – the precious metal belonging to the area of solar cults and therefore considered the vehicle par excellence of the symbol of light belonging to the status of all sovereigns=deities – but also the plates of the balance as a typical instrument used for “weighing”. It was precisely these semantic values that convinced Angelo Segrè in his extensive book on ancient metrology to associate these terms with the Hebrew “kikkar” (= Latin “libra”). Moreover, it was precisely these “talents” = “golden plates” that were indispensable utensils in the Homeric world for “measuring” the value of precious metals (Iliad VIII, 69; XII, 209; XI, 433; XIX, 223; etc.). And the solidarity between the “talents” and the balance would have been so close as to authorize some scholars to hypothesize (perhaps even with too much interpretative freedom) that the same characteristic indentation found on the surface of all “talents” would derive from a specific technical choice intended to make the “talents” resemble the balance even in their external form: this too would be a sign of their substantial symbolic identity.

In the case of Homeric text, the ambivalence of the term would lead the listener of the scene to clearly assimilate the object being weighed with the means to evaluate it and to bring out their symbolic value. With the “oscillation” of its two plates, the scale serves to “measure” or “weigh” and is the typical ritual object forged by the sacred corporations of blacksmiths and metallurgists in imitation of the scale, the “classic” symbol of Themis, the cosmic order structured around the polar axis. Therefore, the polar axis, along with the overall balance achieved with the movement of the two Chariots, is the archetype of every scale, the “pivot” from which the slow rotation of the two “golden plates” of the celestial Libra develops, the Great and the Little Chariot, the truthful “hinge” that with its slow movement orients the “oscillation” of these two celestial “plates” and guarantees the stability, harmony, and “right” balance of the entire astral quadrant7.

According to classical astronomy, the celestial Chariot that “revolves” around the Pole is pulled by “seven oxen”. This is a true cosmic transposition of the ritual function of the sacred ox, which is very likely also related to the function covered at a certain time by the symbolic “Land of the Bull”, and has allowed it to become an important symbol in determining the ritual orientations of the oldest civilization flourishing in the Hellenic area. Such orientations were also supposed to correspond to the position gradually assumed by certain celestial constellations to determine the essential moments of the liturgical calendar in full accordance with the celestial rhythms and the cosmic changes produced by cyclical development.

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Eduard Hahn8, a brilliant German anthropologist and historian of religions, had managed to list a whole series of data, facts, and documents aimed at proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that originally the ox was not used at all as a beast of burden and that its meat itself was never used for food purposes. The ox and the chariot – as, moreover, the same wheel that originally was an important “polar” symbol that became, after a process of secularization and secularization, the instrument for profane use that everyone knows – had an essentially sacred function that justified their symbolic references, while the consumption of the meat of this animal at the beginning remained only linked to offerings and sacrificial banquets. Only later, following a process of secularization common to many other aspects of traditional life, the symbols related to the ox and the chariot lost their sacred or ritual character and became the well-known tools of human labor, very useful for alleviating daily toil. It is therefore important to remember the solidarity of these original symbolic and ritual dimensions with the exemplary value of the septem triones, “the seven oxen” which, as every Latinist knows well, in classical cosmology also taken up by Varro (De lingua lat., VII, 4, 74: “nostri eas septem stellas triones et temonem et prope eas axe”) are precisely the animals that gave the name to the Septemtriones. It is the deep ritual rooting of the ox that explains the cosmic function of the “seven oxen” (and excludes any other animal, although important for the Greeks, such as the horse, the deer, the lion, etc.) always represented as they perpetually revolve around the Pole positioned in the northern quadrant of the sky. Here, the “seven oxen” slowly drag the “cosmic chariot” to lazily “plow” the special portion of “land” that actually delimits their celestial quadrant. Their very slow rotation around the “fixed pivot” of the sky covers the entire cosmic circle, taking a symbolic “cosmic era” corresponding exactly to what in “classical” India has always been referred to as an entire “kingdom of Dhruva”.

In order to judge the contenders of this archaic process, which can only be understood when interpreted from the perspective of a sacred ordeal aimed at restoring harmony, the Homeric judge “weighs” the guilt on a scale and rewards the winner with two “golden talents”, here revealed as ambivalent symbols stemming, once again, from the oldest forms of coinage created in the forge of the blacksmith-demiurges, where 1. the objects forged by these extraordinary “manipulators of iron” and metals, 2. the “weighing” on the scale, and 3. justice were revealed as aspects of a single creative function emerging from the same substrate that has always nourished the most ancient forms of sacred law, those that Louis Gernet had classified collectively within the scope of the so-called “pre-law”.

With its “weighing” of guilt on the plate of the scale and the reward of “golden talents”, the gesture of the Homeric judges clearly shows the very close connection between metallurgy, justice, and the exercise of sovereignty, the three aspects of a form of priestly kingship that predates the establishment of democratic pōleis. All of this belongs to an ancient “para-religious” substrate that has traversed the Mycenaean world, has in various ways touched Homeric civilization, and perhaps even the so-called Indo-European culture that has been conventionally referred to. It is the same sacred substrate from which the gesture originated, which, following an archaic royal prerogative, prompted King Brennus (the famous ruler of the confederation of Celtic tribes who had heavily defeated the Romans) to launch his enchanting cry against the defeated, as was customary among all the brotherhoods of “sacred warriors” of Indo-European prehistory, and simultaneously to hurl his sword onto the plate of a scale that was to “weigh” his sacred right as a triumphant king9. He behaved like the winner of an ordeal in which ancient customs were perpetuated, which probably attributed supernatural requirements to the sword of the victorious king. The amount of gold paid by the defeated had to counterbalance the “legal weight” of the sword of the victor. The gold had to have a specific relationship not with the weight value of the sword, but with the sovereign symbol guaranteed by the sacred right of the winner that it represented and conveyed. As can be seen, in this type of contest, the losers were required to compensate for their defeat by paying a certain amount of gold, the metal of kings and solar deities, presented here as a pure “sacrificial offering” commensurate with both the function of “sacred justice” covered by the sword of the victorious sovereign deposited on the scale, and its own “weighing”.

The “judgment” established by the “weighing” of the sword puts us in front of a form of oracular interrogation whose outcome must be framed within what Kurt Latte equated to a true “sacred fine”10. In reality, precisely because of these sacrificial aspects, the amounts due from the loser are not paid to men, but to the deity to which the exaction remains bound because the authentic judge remains the god. It is in his presence that the guilty party must exonerate himself, it is with the divinity that it is necessary to restore the disturbed harmony, and therefore it is to the god that, at the end of the process, the agalmata (= the “sacred objects” or the equivalent amounts in gold or silver) prescribed by the judge must be delivered, which can finally assume their primary function as “votive offerings” aimed at restoring harmony with the celestial world.

The complex Homeric scene, even in a presentation that seems to want to secularize almost completely the rules that support its course and its very meaning, arises from the sacred foundation that substantiated the “pre-law,” when guilt and justice had to be weighed by the diviner-judge on the scales of a balance. The oscillations of the scales and the different positions assumed on the scales by the “weighed” objects were interpreted according to rules of oracular origin that decreed the inescapable fate of the two antagonistic parties in this type of archaic dispute. The oracle pronounced on a dispute by retracing all the conditions set to govern each sacred ordeal. Its judgment could not be limited to the granting of a simple individual punishment, but had to go much further, it had the task of sanctioning a destiny that exceeded the responsibilities of the individual person of the guilty party and also affected the responsibilities attributed to the ghenos to which the defendant belonged. In order for the entire society to regain the previous balance before the guilt, it was necessary to involve even the family roots from which the guilty party had received nourishment. At the end of the dispute, the judicial ceremony concluded with the final acclamation of the assembly which, as Hans Julius Wolff already noted, did not merely approve an unappealable and already concluded arbitration, but also entered into the merits of the sacred controversy and with the elevation of this form of ritual cry, manifested its own active participation in the formulation of the judgment.

As you can see, the judge’s decision involves an entire human reality11, and the granting of the “two talents of gold,” assimilated to a true reparatory oblation aimed at rebalancing the axis of judicial “scales,” must contribute to restoring harmony in the entire disrupted human context. It restores the original balance within the community wounded by guilt, without resorting to any sacrifice or immolation because the judgment itself has taken on the form of a ritual. The overall situation depicted in the Homeric scene leads one to think that the prizes awarded by the judge to the winners aimed to reconstruct a disrupted order and rhythm, restoring harmony to an entire society that the just-judged guilt had made uncertain, lost, and full of disorder: the prizes were not given for their potential commercial value, but constituted true “pre-monetary” signs that were meant to convey sacred symbols and “divine qualities” rooted in a ritual dimension.

It is the same sacred pattern preserved in the archaic game of that primordial chessboard that Homer outlines in the Odyssey, where the use of a kind of “board”/chessboard, perhaps arranged around three concentric squares, is mentioned. Its ritual meaning continued to be well-known even in the time of Plato (Resp. 333B and 374C) when the Athenian Philosopher recalled the value attributed by the Greeks to the “throw” of dice/pawns on this extraordinary “board” to consult the will of the gods12. It even seems that at least on a strictly symbolic level (and certainly not philological), the term δίκη, “justice”13, can be considered linked to the verb δικεῖν, “to throw”. As you can see, the symbolism that substantiated the ancestral relationship between justice and game is clear and emerges from an essentially sacred context: each “throw” of the dice determined an entire spiritual reality, established a destiny, and gave rise to a system of rules structured on the same rhythms that govern the flow of the world.

It may seem strange, this sacred use of dice, but their very existence and special configuration refer to primordial cosmic situations, when the god Saturn still reigned over gods and men, to whom Hellenic geometry of all times (but also astronomers with a “Pythagorean” background like Kepler) not only assigned dominion over the square and the cube, but considered him the ruler of an ancient era in which the extremely slow celestial movement could be determined by “reading” the symbolic system and the signs that emerged from its primordial dimension. It is a particular spiritual experience that sees the manifested world as a reality permeated entirely by symbols and coinciding in many aspects with its own ideal dimension. The diviner believes that he can understand and penetrate the most intimate and essential expression of this reality, the one from which the “form-forming” emerges that has given consistency to the cosmos. The alternating flow of natural events is thus grasped as a particular hierophany that the seer can perceive when he is able to “read” the meaning of the symbols and signs that it reveals to men.

Therefore, the game was part of the same spiritual substratum from which the “pre-law”14 originated, whose precise formulation belonged to the skills of an archaic seer-diviner. From the temporal conjunction in which the ritual takes place, from the movement of the dice thrown by the operator, from the trajectory drawn, from the number resulting from the “throw,” and from the very position finally assumed by the dice/pawns on a game board symbolizing the “cosmic table,” the seer had to first interpret the sacred meaning of that “throw,” then the underlying celestial references, and finally had to formulate the “rules of justice” (themistes) on which the life of the individual questioner, the social structure, and the relationships between the citizens of the ancient poleis were ordered.

  1. Cf. M. Corsano, Themis. La norma e l’oracolo nella Grecia antica, Galatina 1988; J. Rudhardt, Thèmis et les Hôrai. Recherches sur les divinités grecques de la justice et de la paix, Genève 1999, chap. I, entirely dedicated to Themis.[↩]
  2. See in general L. Gernet, Law and Pre-Law in Ancient Greece, in Id., Anthropology of Ancient Greece, Milan 1983, pp. 180-183, which essentially follows H. J. Wolff, The Origin of Judicial Litigation among the Greeks, “Traditio”, 4, 1946, pp. 31-87. Also see J. Rudhardt, Thèmis et les Hôrai, cit., p. 117.[↩]
  3. See the important I. N. Svoronos, The Homeric Gold Talents, “Revue Belge de Numismatique,” 64, 1908, pp. 433-450, which, despite the time passed, has lost none of its original freshness and relies, among others, on the important W. Ridgewey, The Omeric Talent, its origin, value and affinities, “Journal of the Hellenic Studies,” VIII, 1887, pp. 133-157.[↩]
  4. We refer to the recent N. D’Anna, Sacred Wisdom and Ecstatic Experiences, Cenacolo Adytum, Trento 2014, chap. III (“Smiths and Metallurgists”) and its rich bibliography.[↩]
  5. W. Ridgewey, The Origin of metallic Currency and Weight Standards, Cambridge 1892, pp. 216 et seq.; Id., The Omeric Talent, cit., pp. 133 et seq.[↩]
  6. H. Winkler, The Spiritual Culture of Babylon, Rome 2004; A. Jeremias, Handbook of Ancient Oriental Intellectual Culture, Leipzig 1913.[↩]
  7. On the cosmic-astronomical implications of these Homeric data, see N. D’Anna, The Cosmic Game. Time and Eternity in Ancient Greece, Mediterranee, Rome 2006, pp. 33-40.[↩]
  8. We refer to the extensive analyses made by E. Hahn, Age of the Economic Culture of Humanity, Winter, Heidelberg 1905; Id., Domestic Animals and their Relationships to Human Economy, Leipzig 1896; Id., Demeter and Baubo, Lübeck 1896.[↩]
  9. A useful study is that of J. Gagé, The Balance of Kairos and the Sword of Brennus. About the weighing of the “aurum gallicum” and its weighing, “Revue Archéologique”, 1954, pp. 141-176.[↩]
  10. See K. Latte, Sacred Law. Studies on the History of Sacred Legal Forms in Greece, Tübingen 1920, (chap. II: “Punishments”), pp. 48 et seq.[↩]
  11. In general, on the spiritual symbolism of play, A. K. Coomaraswamy’s work remains useful, Lîla, “Journal of American Oriental Studies”, 1941, pp. 98-101; Id., Play and Seriousness, “Journal of Philosophy”, 1942, pp. 550-552; G. G. Filippi, Some notes on the notion of līlā, “Atrium”, 4, 2015, pp. 40-53. The studies of E. Benveniste are important, Play as Structure, “Aut-Aut”, 337, 1946, pp. 123-132; M. P. Nilsson, Dice Oracle επὶ Σκίρᾡ, “Archiv für Religion”, XVI, 1913, pp. 88-91; A. G. Van Hamel, The Games of the Gods, “Archiv für Nordisk Filologi”, 50, 1934, pp. 218-242; L. Kurke, Coins, Bodies, Games and Gold, Princeton 1999, pp. 247-298; G. Lentini, Play and Law in Homer, “Gaia”, 12, 2009, pp. 45-68.[↩]
  12. On the ritual value covered by the chessboard in some traditional civilizations, H. Lüders, Das Würfelspiel im alten Indien, Berlin 1907; P. Magnone, I dadi e la scacchiera. Visioni indiane del tempo, “I Quaderni di Avallon”, 34, 1995, pp. 73-86. For the symbolic and oracular meaning of dice and astragali found abundantly in temple sites in the Greek world, see F. Heine-Vetter, Würfel- und Buchstabenorakel in Griechenland und Kleinasien, Breslau 1912; R. M. Dawkins, Artemis Orthia, London 1929, p. 179. On the cosmic and ritual meaning of “dice throwing,” see N. D’Anna, Da Orfeo a Pitagora, Simmetria, Rome 2011, pp. 94-97; Id., Il Gioco Cosmico, cit., pp. 36-39; pp. 111-113. For the dice/cosmic cycles relationship in India, we refer to Id., Considerazioni su René Guénon e la dottrina dei cicli cosmici, “Perennia Verba”, 12, 2012, pp. 110-122, Id., I cicli cosmici, Edizioni Arya, Genoa 2023.[↩]
  13. On this term and its derivatives, see J. Rudhardt, Thèmis et les Hôrai, cit., pp. 125 et seq.[↩]
  14. We point out a brief memoir that has made history for the contained interpretative perspectives: L. Gernet, Jeux et Droit, (remarques sur le XXIIIe chant de l’Iliade), “Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres”, 4, 1947, pp. 572-574. See also G. Lentini, Gioco e diritto in Omero, cit., pp. 45 et seq.[↩]