DICAST, a member of the popular courts of Athens. To Solon is attributed the institu tion of these courts. From the citizens over 30 years of age about 6,000 were chosen annually by lot and of this number sections of from 20 to 500 members were chosen daily to hear cases. These dicasts listened to the speeches of the litigants and heard the evidence read; then they voted in secret, being sworn to give their decision in accord with the evidence and the laws. The dicasts were sole arbiters alike in points of law and in points of fact. Consult Lipsius, 'Das attische Recht und Rechtsfahren' (Leipzig 1905- ), and Meier and Schumann 'Der attische Process) (Berlin 1887).
DICE (plural of Die), small cubes of bone or ivory, on each of the six sides of which a number, ranging from one to six, is marked permanently. The sum of the two numbers on the opposite sides of a die is always seven; thus if six is at the top one is at the bottom, and so on. One, two, three, or five dice are used, according to the game to be played. They are placed in a cylindrical box about four inches high, and from one and a half to two inches in diameter, open at the top. The box is shaken and turned quickly up so that the dice will fall flat on the table. The aggre gate amount of the spots uppermost at each throw are summed up and placed to the score of the thrower. They are used for a number of purposes and various games are played with them. The principal games are ((throwing the dice,' "round the spot," ((centennial;' (multiplica tion?
to Boston,* ((draw poker? and evingt-et-un? all of which will be found de scribed in detail with the rules of each game in A. Howard Cady's
period of history, and no nation, in which some form of dice has not been used. They are depicted on the early Egyptian monuments; those excavated at Thebes can scarcely be dis tinguished from the dice made to-day, and their use is attested by laws regulating the games played with them in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in most European countries. The invention of dice is attributed to Palamedes (circa 1,244 }Lc.). But the use of cubes with numbered sides for gambling purposes is prob ably much earlier. The Latin word for dice, tessera', is derived from the Greek tesseres, Ionic for tessares, four, because it is on every side square. Numerous passages in the ancient writers, and very many representations in marble or paintings, show how frequent dice-playing was among them. Different from the tessera, which were precisely like our dice, were the tali (which means, originally, the pastern bone of an animal — Greek, astragalos). These were almost of a cubic form, and had numbers only on four sides, lengthwise. Three tessera and four tali were often used together, and the game with dice was properly called ales, though ales afterward came to signify any game at hazard, and elector a gambler.