The Roman goddess Fortuna was associated with gold because this metal represented prosperity.  To this day it is routine to speak of a fortune in gold or also some other kind of wealth.  That makes sense, given that gold can be exchanged for just about anything else.  Sometimes that idea gets far removed from the reality of gold as a mineral.  For example, we sometimes find the Greek word φιλοχρηματία (filochrematia – love of wealth) translated from Greek chronicles into Old Russian as златолюбие (zlatoliubie), which really means ‘love of gold’ (Вялкина 1966:164).  This would be consistent with the translators having been familiar with gold only in the form of coins which were either imported as such, or minted from gold which had been imported.  By contrast to the medieval situation, modern Russia, just like Australia or the United States of America, is a country with plenty of identified gold deposits which people routinely dig out of the ground, in some instances on an industrial scale.  In such countries where people can actually see gold nuggets – or, more rarely, crystalline gold – it can make more sense to think of gold alongside precious stones, instead of as an abstract notion of wealth.

Quite a few precious stones have had their own associations with fortune, and not only because of their perceived financial value.  Perhaps the most overt associations are found with dice made of precious gemstones such as emerald.

Semi-precious gemstones have also often had their associations with fortune.  Dice have been made from a variety of semi-precious gemstones such as jasper and topaz, a practice going back centuries.  Given the long-standing popularity of dice games, this could obviously have been an important motivation for trade in gemstones.  A medieval manuscript in Old Russian, the Палея толковая (Explanatory Palea), dated to 1406 C. E., says that jasper is obtained at the mouth of the Thermodon River (Аванесов 1988:98).  This is the area of Northern Anatolia where the Amazons lived in ancient times, the country once known as Themiscyra.

Topaz is another prominent semi-precious gemstone which has been used for dice.  In ancient and medieval times, topaz was supposed to have had healing powers.  The Палея толковая claims for topaz both extensive healing powers and Old Testament religious associations (Панкратова 2002:349).  Needless to say, it was the latter that the Christian author was most concerned to put across to readers.

Most of the information given in the Палея толковая about gemstones and where they can be found came indirectly from the encyclopedic Latin work Historia naturalis (Natural History) by the first-century Roman scholar Pliny.  But the writers of Christian religious works such as the Палея толковая were often averse to naming sources like Pliny as sources of their content because Pliny was a pagan.  Many such writers may not have even known that their information came from Pliny if they had gotten it from an intermediate source.  This was a pity, since Pliny’s work is a mine of information, as has been recognized and acknowledged since the Renaissance even in hardcore Christian countries.  Pliny, in his turn, makes a point of telling us who his sources were, such as the scholar and poet Callimachus. He was a Greek pagan from the third century B. C. E. whose work is mainly lost except for references by later scholars such as Pliny.  In the nineteenth century Karl Marx studied Pliny’s work intensely.  Marx cited Pliny’s information and views about ancient money in his economic works such as the Grundrisse (Outlines) (Marx 1983:697) and the Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Critique of Political Economy) (Marx 1961:110).  It is from Pliny that we find out that King Servius had the first Roman copper coins minted with depictions of sheep and cattle.   Later on, in the Soviet Union, Pliny’s name even crops up in a Ukrainian historical grammar as an early source about the ancient Slavs (Жовтобрюх, М. А. et al. 1980:13).

Also used for dice and chess pieces is ivory.  Given its biological origin – it comes from elephants (Pliny writes about this), narwhals and walruses – you would be reasonable in saying that ivory is not a gemstone.  But there has long been a trade in the ivory of mammoth tusks dug up in Siberia, as the German philosopher Hegel pointed out a couple of centuries ago (Hegel 1986:346).  So I tend to think of fossil ivory, at least, as belonging to a category closely related to gemstones.

Approaching the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C. E., Pliny was understandably keen to investigate this unusual geological phenomenon, as well as rescuing other people who were in the vicinity.  When advised not to approach too close to the eruption, he said “Fortes Fortuna iuvat” and pressed on.  He soon died, apparently from the effects of poisonous volcanic gases.  His utterance became a cliché, which survives to the present day in English translation as ‘fortune favors the bold’.  Since he died very soon after saying this, he may seem to have been wrong.  But his story did not end with his death.

After the fall of the western Roman Empire, the Latin language continued to be used as the language of the Roman Catholic Church and for most official purposes for centuries.  The Renaissance saw both the revival of classical philology and the invention of printing with moveable type.  Fortunately, to use an English word which continues the name of our Roman goddess, there was a manuscript of Historia naturalis available which was the basis of the first printed edition in 1469.  Pliny’s other works have not survived although there are excerpts from them which had been quoted by other authors.  His big work has survived not only in the Latin original, but also in translations into many other languages such as English in the early seventeenth century and Russian a couple of centuries later.  In this way fortune has favored this bold pagan investigator.

REFERENCES:

Hegel, G. W. F.  1986  Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830). – Zweiter Teil. Die Naturphilosophie. Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen  (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main)

Marx, K.  1961  Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie  pp. 3-160  in: Marx, K. & Engels, F.  Werke  Band 13.  (Dietz Verlag, Berlin)

Marx, K.  1983  Ökonomische Manuskripte 1857/1858 in: Marx, K. & Engels, F.  Werke  Band 42.  (Dietz Verlag, Berlin)

Аванесов, Р. И. (Главный редактор)  1988  Словарь древнерусского языка (XI-XIV вв.) в десяти томах  (Том I)  (Издательство  “Русский язык”, Москва)

Вялкина, Л. В.  1966  Греческие параллели сложных слов в древнерусском языке XI-XIV вв.  Pp.154-188 in:  Аванесов, Р. И. (Ответственный редактор)  Лексикология и словообразование древнерусского языка  (Издательство “Наука”, Москва)

Жовтобрюх, М. А. et al.  1980  Исторична граматика української мови  (Головне видавництво видавничого об’єднання “Вища школа”, Київ)

Панкратова, Н. Л. (Редактор)  2002  Палея толковая  (Издательство  “Согласие”, Москва)

[Dr Neile Kirk’s most recent publication was “Giant Ants and Royal Riches: Herodotos in Context’ in Aothen, issue 7 Summer 2024.]