Dot Wordsworth casts the die

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

That would have come as a surprise to Suetonius, who recounts that when Caesar crossed the Rubicon he declared alea iacta est. Philemon Holland translated it, ‘The dice be thrown’, which would help modern readers unaware that the singular of dice is die. Indeed, confusion about dice as a plural or singular is constant in English, from the time of Caxton, who in his book on chess uses dice in the singular.

I fear to trespass on Peter Jones’s territory, for I would soon sink into a Grimpen Mire, but when Plutarch gives Caesar’s remark (in Greek) he uses the word kubos for ‘die’. Kubos gives us Mr Cube, the sugar mascot, and the Kaaba at Mecca, which is a little stone house 36ft by 42ft square, and 43 feet high, looking quite cubical in its smart black silk cover, the kiswah.

Suetonius’s word alea really seems to mean a game played with dice, rather than one of the dice thrown. There is a fine discussion of the social meaning of alea by Nicholas Purcell in Past and Present (1995). The die itself was called talus and the counters used were called tesserae. Cicero in his Cato Major says talos relinquant et tesseras, ‘leave dice and counters’. But when Isidore of Seville remarks in the 7th century that the three dice in alea may represent present, past and future, he uses tesserae for ‘dice’. He says they are called tesserae because they are squared on each side, and he is right in implying that the word comes from the Greeek tessaragonos. His word for a ‘counter’ is calculus. The gaming-board was a tabula or abacus, and archaeologists, Mr Purcell notes, cannot always tell the difference between a calculating abacus and a gaming-table.

Dice were made from huckle-bones, as the Oxford English Dictionary calls them. This bone in the ankle is also called an astragal in English, a word from Greek that looks a little Arabic. The OED says the knuckle-bone is made from the metacarpal or metatarsal, yet it identifies both huckle-bone and knuckle-bone with astragal. These are also called dibs, which — just like alea — signifies the game played with them too.