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The Iron Age indigeni of Sicily used bronze objects as currency, weighed against a pound that the Greeks called the litra. With the introduction of Greek-style coinage in 550 BC, the litra took on new significance as a small silver coin equivalent to the native bronze measure. Though the first litrai were minted at Greek cities, indigenous Sicilians were minting their own by the mid-fifth century. Initially bound to the native bronze standard, as at Himera, the litra was soon assimilated into the Attic standard at Syracuse as one-fifth of a drachm.

This paper deals with the use of second persons in Virgil’s Georgics: we should distinguish between the

addressee (Maecenas) and imagined figures that are not addressed but rather apostrophized. Apostrophe

is poetic, creative figure of speech and thus a potential vehicle for artifice or representation (see Quint.

Inst. 9.1.11, 9.2.26-7 and Culler 1981: 134-46). Thus it opens space within didactic poetry’s generally

veridical discourse for fiction: the poet is free to fashion the apostrophized “audience” as he likes, since

From a formal point of view, Horatian satires, especially his ‘diatribe’ satires, strongly resemble other didactic poetry; and yet they are rarely explicitly studied as such. Even though the complexities of Horatian irony arguably set his Sermones apart from the more ‘serious’ genres of didactic verse and Cynic diatribe, it is the contention of this paper that even Horace’s ironized doctores inepti enter in a productive dialogue with multiple audiences both inside and outside the poem’s narrative frame.

This paper will examine how recurrent images in De Rerum Natura (DRN) form a central and coherent aspect of Lucretius’ didactic program and his relationship with his audience.

To a first degree of approximation the authors of ancient didactic works were the peers and social equals of their audience members (Thibodeau 2011, 33–7). Yet in the archetypical scene of instruction, that involving a child student and an adult teacher, the student clearly occupies a subordinate social position vis-à-vis the instructor.

The goddess Fortuna provided Romans with an abstract yet embodied means to contemplate the nature of chance. Related to, but not entirely continuous with her Greek counterpart Tyche, she is found in a wide range of contexts, from lararia to imperial iconography. Drawing on material and literary evidence, this paper explores Fortuna’s development under the Roman Empire as a vehicle for understanding chance, luck, precarity, and power.

The coining of the term ‘risk’ has been interpreted by sociologists Niklas Luhmann and Anthony Giddens as a new way of conceptualizing danger and uncertainty, which signaled a break between modernity and ‘traditional’ societies. The novelty, they argue, consisted of the advent of statistics and probability that revolutionized the way societies interact with nature and the future.

This paper begins from a surprising coincidence. There were two types of dice that Greeks regularly gambled with: six-sided cubic dice, and four-sided knucklebone dice. Usually in Greece three dice were thrown in dice games with cubic die, while five knucklebones were thrown in games with knucklebones. What is a remarkable coincidence is the number of combinations that these two types of dice—five knucklebones and three dice—produce. When one throws three cubic dice the number of possible permutations is 216 (6x6x6).

As Gerd Gigerenzer has stated, ‘[t]he term “risk” has several senses.’ In his book ‘Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty’, the focus is, importantly, on its numerical assessment. He argues that risk can be distinguished from uncertainty when it can be expressed as a number—a probability or frequency—on the basis of empirical evidence.

In 9 CE, the colonia Fanum Fortunae (modern day Fano, Italy) received a triple-arched gateway with an inscription denoting it as a gift from Augustus Caesar. Built of gleaming white Istrian stone, the entryway marked where the Via Flaminia, a prominent road connecting Rome with Northern Italy, intersected with the main east-west road of Fano. This structure however was not unique; during his forty-five year reign, Augustus built numerous city gates, known as portae, and used them to demarcate his rule over the Roman empire.