Greeks, unlike Romans, gambled with five not four knucklebones (astragaloi) in their dice games. As Pollux explains, the high number of an individual knucklebone was sometimes eight rather than six, and so when a dicer rolled ‘all eights’ they attained a sum of 40. This roll was called the ‘Euripides’. The confusion about this throw is due to a report found in Byzantine sources and attributed to Suetonius, where it is claimed that dicers of Greek antiquity used four knucklebones. Suetonius may have confused the Roman custom with the Greek one, but there are good grounds for questioning whether the report is from ‘Suetonius’ at all. Elsewhere ‘Suetonius’ reports that Greeks played with three rather than two cubic dice, but such a report cannot have been made before the seventh century AD.

The emergence of mathematical probability has something to do with dice games: all the early discussions (Cardano, Galileo, Pascal) suggest as much. Although this has long been recognized, the problem is that gambling at dice has been a popular pastime since antiquity. Why, then, did gamblers wait until the sixteenth century ce to calculate the math of dicing? Many theories have been offerred, but there may be a simple solution: early-modern gamblers played different sorts of dice games than in antiquity. While ancients diced at communal risk, early-moderns diced at individualized risk. These individual wager-games, for example, the game “hazard”, incentivized solving questions like “how likely is it to roll a triple-six?”. Before the early modern period there was no gambling game to which working out mathematical probability would have brought an advantage.

This book examines the concept of 'nonsense' in ancient Greek thought and uses it to explore the comedies of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. If 'nonsense' (phluaria, lēros) is a type of language felt to be unworthy of interpretation, it can help to define certain aspects of comedy that have proved difficult to grasp. Not least is the recurrent perception that although the comic genre can be meaningful (i.e. contain political opinions, moral sentiments and aesthetic tastes), some of it is just 'foolery' or 'fun'. But what exactly is this 'foolery', this part of comedy which allegedly lies beyond the scope of serious interpretation? The answer is to be found in the concept of 'nonsense': by examining the ways in which comedy does not mean, the genre's relationship to serious meaning (whether it be political, aesthetic, or moral) can be viewed in a clearer light.

The bōmolokhos (buffoon, fool) has received misguided attention in comic scholarship due to a misunderstanding of Pherecrates fr. 150 KA. The second-century c.e. Harpocration (who cites the line) considers this passage to consist of a genuine etymology, and his view has gone roughly unchallenged ever since. But this is a mistake: the etymology which Pherecrates provides is not a legitimate one but rather a typical case of comic wordplay.