Abstract
In his masterpiece Dialoghi con Leucò Cesare Pavese sketches a history of Mediterranean and archaic Greek beliefs which are based on the development of the name-theory. During the pre-Olympic age, human beings shared the uni- versal destiny and had no need to define reality through names. As they improve their linguistic skills,t he perceive the old world as full of monsters. The new gods embody the new fears: they have distinctive names and protect the human life against Chaos. The end of the religious view deletes these mysterious creatures, but not their names, now empty, through which the man discovers that he is alone on Earth.