Zeno (emperor) - Zeno in Culture

Zeno in Culture

Zeno was a player of Tabula, a game related to modern backgammon. In 480 he had a hand that was so unlucky that he wrote an epigram to record it; Agathias reproduced it half a century later and this allowed the game to be reconstructed in the 19th century. The game is considered the ancestor of backgammon and has similar rules. Zeno, who was white, had a stack of six checkers, three stacks of two checkers and three blots, checkers that stand alone on a point and are therefore in danger of being put outside the board by an incoming opponent checker. Zeno threw the three dice with which the game was played and obtained 2, 5 and 6. The white and black checkers were so distributed on the points that the only way to use all of the three results, as required by the game rules, was to break the three stacks of two checkers into blots, thus ruining the game for Zeno.

Zeno is the protagonist of the theatrical drama in Latin language Zeno, composed in 1641 circa by the Jesuit play-writer Joseph Simons and performed in 1643 in Rome, at the Jesuit's English College. On this Latin Zeno is modelled a Greek anonymous drama, belonging to the so-called Cretan Theatre, written and performed at Zakynthos in 1682–1683, which has Zeno buried alive and his brother Longinus executed.

The play Romulus the Great (1950), by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, has Zeno as one of its characters. The plot is loosely based on history; here Zeno flees to Italy and tries to convince Romulus Augustulus to unite their forces and fight together, but his plan fails. Dürrenmatt's Zeno is an Emperor oppressed by the Byzantine ceremonial.