Greek Dicing, Astragaloi and the ‘Euripides’ Throw

Abstract

Greeks, unlike Romans, gambled with five not four knucklebones (astragaloi) in their dice games. As Pollux explains, the high number of an individual knucklebone was sometimes eight rather than six, and so when a dicer rolled ‘all eights’ they attained a sum of 40. This roll was called the ‘Euripides’. The confusion about this throw is due to a report found in Byzantine sources and attributed to Suetonius, where it is claimed that dicers of Greek antiquity used four knucklebones. Suetonius may have confused the Roman custom with the Greek one, but there are good grounds for questioning whether the report is from ‘Suetonius’ at all. Elsewhere ‘Suetonius’ reports that Greeks played with three rather than two cubic dice, but such a report cannot have been made before the seventh century AD.