“Iacta alea est!”—Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.)
Dice have been around for thousands of years. In 49 B.C., when Julius Caesar ordered his troops across the river Rubicon to wage civil war in Italy, the alea of the well-known proverb that he quoted already had the standard form of the die we use today: a cube engraved or painted with one to six dots, arranged so that the number of dots on opposite faces totals seven and the faces marked with one, two, and three dots go counterclockwise around a corner.