The Knights of the Square Table

According to Herodotus all games (from ball games to dice to knucklebones…) were invented in Lydia during a famine, in order to distract the populace from their hunger. There is only one exception: chess, a form of intelligent gaming that has existed since time immemorial, like Ideas for Plato, the Torah for the Jews, the Koran for Muslims – or, for practically all living beings, War itself, of which chess is the bloodless depiction. Each piece moves in its own fashion, but even the most humble, the pawn, which moves forward one tiny step at a time, can determine victory, winning the battle singlehandedly. Those who play aspire to eliminate chance – though it cannot be eliminated – and exert implacable control over everything that happens; as Stefano Salis explains, that dream has lasted for millennia, in both the East and the West, among the ancients as well as the moderns.