Approaching Risk in Antiquity

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.