The cosmos was divided by lot.
After the Titanomachy, when Zeus and his brothers had defeated the Titans and the world required organization, the three surviving sons of Kronos, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, drew lots to divide the inheritance: Zeus drew the sky, Poseidon drew the sea, and Hades drew the underworld. The earth and Olympus were held in common. The specific power each brother would exercise for the remainder of the cosmos’s existence was determined not by merit, not by strength, not by wisdom, but by the random draw of a lot.
This is the Greek tradition’s account of how the world’s most fundamental political arrangement was determined, and it is not a coincidence that this tradition coexisted with one of the most gambling-saturated cultures in the ancient Mediterranean. The Greek world understood that chance was not the opposite of the divine order but one of its primary instruments: the lot that divided the cosmos, the lot that selected the Athenian archons, and the lot that fell from the cup in the gambling tavern were all expressions of the same principle, that the world’s distribution of outcomes was not entirely predictable or entirely controllable, and that the specific outcome of a specific throw of the knucklebone was as much a revelation of fate as the Pythia’s utterance at Delphi.
The Astragaloi and the Ancient Art of the Throw
The astragaloi, the knucklebones of sheep and goats, were the most widely used gaming pieces in the ancient Greek world, and their prevalence in the archaeological record, from the deposits of household refuse to the dedications in sanctuaries and the grave goods placed with the dead, reflects a gaming practice so embedded in daily life that it crossed every social boundary the Greek world maintained.
The astragalos, the specific ankle bone of the ovine or caprine foot, has four usable faces: the flat belly, the convex back, the curved lateral sides. Each face was assigned a value in the standard gaming convention, and the four values were designated by the names of their best and worst outcomes: the Aphrodite throw, in which all four bones landed on different faces, was the highest and most fortunate cast, the Dog throw, in which all four bones landed on the same face, was the lowest and worst. Between these extremes, the intermediate throws were evaluated by their combinations and their sums.
The bones were cast from a cup, shaken and thrown onto a flat surface, and the specific combinations that resulted determined the outcome of the game in progress. The most basic games were pure chance, the players staking objects or sums on the outcome of the throw. The more complex games used the throw values to move pieces across a board or to determine the sequence of play in a game that also required strategic decision-making. The combination of chance and skill that the astragaloi games provided was the combination that the Greek gaming tradition consistently sought: a game of pure chance was too mechanical, a game of pure skill was too predictable, but the game in which a chance throw determined the conditions within which skill then operated was the game that most closely replicated the structure of the world as the Greek tradition understood it.
The dedications of astragaloi in sanctuaries, particularly in the sanctuaries of Artemis and Apollo whose specific divine domains included the youth rituals in which the transition from childhood to adulthood was marked, and in the sanctuaries of the healing deity Asclepius, reflect the specific sacredness that the Greek tradition attached to the throwing of bones. The astragalos cast before the deity was not a prayer addressed to the divine but a moment of submission to the divine determination of outcomes: the throw would fall as the deity permitted, and the result was a kind of divination, the reading of the divine will through the random fall of the bone.
Palamedes, the Siege of Troy, and the Origin of Dice
The specific hero to whom the Greek tradition credited the invention of the cubic die, the pessos or kubos, was Palamedes, the clever Nauplian hero who appears in the post-Homeric tradition of the Trojan War as the inventor of several technologies attributed to the specific problem of keeping the Greek army occupied through the years of the siege.
Palamedes in the tradition attributed to Sophocles and the later mythographers invented the dice specifically to provide the Greeks with a game during the long idle periods of the siege of Troy: ten years of siege produced more waiting than fighting, and the specifically Greek genius for creating structured games of chance was, in this tradition, a response to the specific psychological problem of keeping large numbers of soldiers mentally occupied without the stimulation of combat.
The cubic die, with its six faces numbered from one to six in the convention that the Greek world established, extended the range of the astragaloi’s random outcomes from four to six and provided a more precisely equiprobable random device: the perfectly cubic die, in which each face has exactly equal probability of landing uppermost, provides a genuinely random distribution across six outcomes, whereas the astragalos’s four faces are not equally likely due to the bone’s asymmetry. The improvement in randomness that the cubic die provided was recognized and valued by the Greek gaming tradition, which used both forms simultaneously depending on the game’s requirements.
The Palamedes attribution is the tradition’s way of encoding the specifically military context in which gaming practices were understood to develop: the soldier’s game, created for the specific conditions of the siege camp, was the most socially integrated form of the gambling tradition because it brought together men of different origins, different social ranks, and different levels of wealth in the shared democratic experience of the random throw. The dice did not know which hand had cast them, and the outcome of the throw was the same for the general as for the foot soldier.
The Throw of Aphrodite
The naming of the highest and lowest throws of the astragaloi and the dice as the Aphrodite throw and the Dog throw, respectively, is among the most revealing details in the ancient record of Greek gaming, because it encodes in the gaming vocabulary the specific mythological associations that the Greek world attached to fortune and misfortune.
Aphrodite was the goddess of the specific kind of beauty and attraction that the Greek tradition understood as most unpredictable and most powerful: the quality of Eros that struck without warning, that could not be resisted, and that produced its effects regardless of the appropriateness or the consent of the parties involved. To call the highest gaming throw the Aphrodite throw was to characterize the best outcome of chance as the specific quality of divine irrationality that Aphrodite represented: the best throws came not from skill or preparation but from the same irrational and uncontrollable divine favor that Aphrodite distributed in the domain of love.
The Dog throw’s negative associations in the Greek world were extensive: the dog in the Greek cultural imagination was the scavenger, the creature that ate what others had left, the animal that the Greek tradition consistently associated with shamelessness and with the lowest social position. To call the worst gaming throw the Dog throw was to characterize the worst outcome of chance as the specific quality of social degradation that the dog represented: the player who threw the Dog had been given the fate of the lowest, the most shameful, the most socially marginal outcome that the game’s range of possibilities contained.
The pairing of Aphrodite and the Dog as the extremes of the gaming vocabulary was also, implicitly, a pairing of the extremes of the divine-human relationship as the Greek tradition understood it: Aphrodite represented the divine gift that came without deserving it, the irrational favor of the most irrational goddess, the Dog represented the complete withdrawal of divine favor, the fate of the person whom the gods had abandoned to the scavenging condition of the scavenger animal. Between these extremes, every throw was a position on the spectrum between divine favor and divine abandonment, and the player who played the astragaloi was playing a game whose deepest stakes were the question of where the divine will placed them in the distribution of outcomes.
The Kottabos and the Symposium
The kottabos, the wine-throwing game that the Athenian symposium tradition developed into one of the most socially embedded forms of competitive play in the classical period, is the gambling tradition’s intersection with the specifically Athenian institution of the elite dinner party whose gaming dimension the standard accounts of the symposium tend to underemphasize.
The game required the player to flick the last drops of wine from their kylix, the shallow two-handled wine cup of the symposium tradition, toward a specific target: in one version, a bronze disc balanced on a tall stand that fell and struck a resonating basin when the wine drops dislodged it. In another version, small bronze discs or saucers floating in a basin of water that the wine drops were aimed at. The skill required was the specific skill of the wrist flick that launched the wine in the right trajectory with the right force, and the game was played for stakes that ranged from the eggs and sweetmeats placed on the symposium table to more substantial wagers among the wealthy participants.
The erotic dimension of the kottabos is the dimension that distinguishes it from the dice games and the astragaloi games of the street and the kyveia: the player named the person they were in love with before casting the wine, and the success of the throw was read as an omen for the success of the love pursuit. The game was therefore simultaneously a skill competition, a wagering game, and a form of erotic divination, the outcome of the throw revealing the player’s erotic prospects in the same way that the dice throw revealed the player’s gaming fortune.
The symposium kottabos was explicitly the gambling game of the elite: it required the specific material conditions of the symposium, the wine, the kylix, the elaborate bronze equipment, and the time and the social setting that the symposium provided. It was the aristocratic form of the gaming impulse that the dice in the street expressed in a more democratic register, and its specific erotic associations distinguished it from the purely financial stakes of the street games.
The Kyveia and the Social Geography of Gambling
The kyveia, the gambling establishments that operated in the urban spaces of classical Athens and other major Greek cities, occupied a specific position in the social geography of the city that the ancient sources describe with a mixture of fascination and disapproval that is itself informative about the social meaning of the gambling space.
The kybeutai, the habitual gamblers who frequented the kyveia, were consistently described in the ancient sources as belonging to a specific social type: the person who had abandoned the productive civic activities of the male citizen, farming, trading, practicing a craft, serving in the military, for the unproductive pursuit of chance. The moral criticism of gambling in ancient Athens was not primarily the criticism of the act itself but of the specific social failure that habitual gambling represented: the failure to be productive, the failure to engage with the civic community in the ways that citizenship required, the substitution of the passive reception of fortune for the active engagement with the world that the citizen ideal demanded.
Demosthenes in his speeches against Philip of Macedon uses the imagery of gambling to characterize the passive and hope-dependent foreign policy that he was arguing against: the Athenians who waited for fortune to deliver them from Philip rather than taking action were gamblers, staking the city’s fate on the throw rather than determining it by their own effort. The gambling imagery was available for this political argument precisely because the cultural association between gambling and passive dependence on fortune was established enough to make the comparison immediately legible.
The paradoxical location of gambling establishments in or near sacred spaces, which the original article notes in the case of a kyveia near the sanctuary of Athena Skiras on the Sacred Way, reflects the specific understanding of chance and the divine that the Greek tradition maintained: if chance outcomes were a form of divine revelation, the space where chance was most intensely sought was not entirely separate from the space where the divine was most intensely present. The boundary between the oracle and the kyveia was more permeable in the ancient Greek imagination than the moral criticism of gambling would suggest.
The Philosophical Critique and Its Limits
The philosophical criticism of gambling in ancient Athens was the criticism of a practice that had too much chance and too little reason in its constitution to satisfy the philosophical tradition’s commitment to the rational organization of life.
Aristotle’s discussion of luck, the tyche, in the Nicomachean Ethics is the philosophical framework within which the gambling critique makes most sense: Aristotle distinguishes between the goods that come from the activity of the person, the virtues and the products of skilled action, and the goods that come from external sources including luck. The life devoted to gambling was the life organized around the pursuit of the external goods of luck at the expense of the internal goods of virtuous activity, and this was the Aristotelian diagnosis of the gambling life’s specific failure.
The Stoic tradition’s critique of gambling was more radical: the Stoics argued that the goods of luck were not goods at all in the sense that truly mattered, because the only genuine goods were the goods of virtue, which were internal to the agent and therefore not subject to the volatility that the throw of the dice represented. The Stoic response to gambling was not simply the criticism that it was a bad way to pursue good things but the more fundamental claim that the things it pursued were not the things worth pursuing.
But the philosophical critique had its limits in practice, and the limits were visible in the philosophers themselves: Plato’s dialogues are set in the symposium and the gymnasium and the marketplace, the same social spaces where the gaming impulse was most active, and the Platonic tradition was not immune to the cultural fascination with chance that it philosophically criticized. The philosophical engagement with the question of luck, fate, and fortune was itself a form of the Greek fascination with the specific domain that the dice and the astragaloi explored in their more concrete register.
Byzantine Survival
The specific form in which the Greek gaming tradition survived into the Byzantine world was the tabula, the board game that the Roman tradition had developed from the Greek petteia and that the Byzantine tradition received and maintained under the Greek name tavli, the direct ancestor of the contemporary backgammon that the Greek and Middle Eastern worlds still play.
The tabula was the game that combined the random element of the dice with the strategic element of piece movement on a board, in the specific proportion that the Greek gaming tradition had always found most satisfying: the dice determined the moves available at each turn, but the skill of the player determined which of the available moves was made. The game was played on a board of twenty-four points arranged in two rows of twelve, with the pieces moving in opposite directions, and the objective was to bear all fifteen pieces off the board before the opponent did the same.
The Byzantine emperors whose gambling habits the historical sources document, the figures whose passion for gaming was noted as a personal characteristic and sometimes as a political liability, were playing this game or its close variants in the same imperial courts where the formal Byzantine religious and political culture was maintaining its characteristic public solemnity. The private passion for the game existed alongside the public piety without obvious contradiction in the Byzantine understanding of the human person: the person who was devout in the liturgical context and passionate about the dice in the private context was not seen as a hypocrite but as a person whose different dimensions found their appropriate expression in different contexts.
The Church fathers who condemned gambling, Clement of Alexandria and Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian among them, were condemning the specific social failures that gambling produced in its most habitual forms: the neglect of work, the dissipation of resources needed for family and charitable obligations, the cultivation of the passive dependence on fortune that the Christian tradition identified as the opposite of the providential trust in God that the faith required. They were not condemning the throw of the dice in itself but the specific orientation toward life that the gambling addiction produced.
The Lot That Fell
The Greek tradition’s deepest engagement with chance was not in the kyveia or the symposium kottabos but in the specific democratic and oracular uses of the lot that converted the random throw into a civic and religious institution.
The Athenian democracy selected many of its magistrates by lot, the kleroterion, the bronze selection device that randomized the assignment of public offices across the citizen body. The principle behind the selection was the principle that the random draw was more genuinely democratic than the election, because the election of magistrates allowed the wealthy and the well-connected to dominate the offices while the random draw gave every citizen an equal probability of being selected. The lot was the democracy’s instrument of genuine equality, and the specifically democratic use of chance as a principle of fair distribution was the political expression of the same understanding of random outcome as a form of divine revelation that the gaming tradition expressed in its recreational contexts.
The oracle’s use of lots at certain sanctuaries, including the lot oracle at Dodona where the sacred doves and the oak tree’s rustling had their complementary lot-drawing procedure, was the religious expression of the same principle: the lot revealed the divine will precisely because it was not determined by the human will, and the specific outcome of the draw was the specific answer of the divine to the question the inquirer had posed.
The connection between the lot that decided the archon, the lot that answered the oracle, and the astragalos that fell in the gaming space was the connection that the Greek tradition maintained without making fully explicit: they were all expressions of the same underlying principle, that the random draw was the moment at which the human world submitted to the divine distribution of outcomes rather than attempting to determine that distribution by its own effort. Whether the stakes were a city’s magistracy, a divine prophecy, or a handful of knucklebones, the throw was the point at which the human hand released what it was holding into the determination of the world.
At Olympus Estate, Greek Living traces the customs and rhythms that connect the ancient Greek world to the one still visible in the kafeneion on the main square, where the tavli board has been open since morning and the dice have been rolling since before the coffee arrived. The cosmos was divided by lot. The archons were selected by lot. The oracle spoke through lots. The knucklebone fell in the same world as these larger determinations. The tavli board is the same game at a different table. The dice are still in the same hand as the fates.
