This 20-sided object appeared on the internet somewhere around 2003, or so my evening of Googling tells me. Apparently it was up for auction by Christie's at http://www.christies.com/Lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4205385 and ultimately sold for something like $18 000 US.
(A 20-sided object is called an icosahedron, and it is one of the five Platonic Solids; one other example is the cube. 20-sided dice are used in role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, and are sometimes called "D20s", pronounced "Dee-twenties" or "Die-twenties")
I was on the internet at that time in 2003, I believe, but like most people, I didn't really pay it much attention. I did wonder to myself what the symbols were, but nothing I could Google at the time would even tell me.
So today I really determined to find out what those symbols were. The first thing I found was that they are apparently Greek, not Roman (or Latin, I should say).
The symbols visible and immediately identifiable (to me) were:
Omicron Ο
Xi Ξ
Rho Ρ
Eta Η
Theta Θ
that left three symbols which I'm still not sure about, but I think they're:
Alpha Α or Lambda Λ
Tau Τ
Zeta ζ
I basically had to go digging around with Google image search, and ultimately end up at the http://www.dicecollector.com/ to Mr. Kevin Cook's old dice page http://www.dicecollector.com/THE_DICE_THEME_OLD.html
and I had to examine the totally different Greek die that he happened to have in his collection. I basically had to turn the image around in my head, because even four angles wasn't enough for me to be absolutely sure what was on that die.
However, I did compare that die with what I found on Wikipedia's page on the Greek Alphabet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet , and I managed to deduce that the first twenty letters of the Greek alphabet, or what was called the "Attic script" were arranged, in order (luckily) around Mr. Cook's Greek die.
The symbol that gave me the hardest time was the one that ultimately turned out to be Zeta, because on every webpage I could find, Zeta is represented as a pretty straight-forward "Z". The only time I've ever seen Zeta represented with those little curly loops has been on the two examples of ancient Roman/Greek d20s. However, it was pretty clear on Mr. Cook's die that the squiggly symbol appeared in the exact spot that the letter Zeta should have appeared, leaving me with little room for doubt.
The other two difficult symbols were Alpha/Lambda and Tau. Alpha because it had a pointy middle, which our modern "A" doesn't have (except in rare stylized and decidedly modernist examples), and which I have also never seen in any ancient version of "A" or Alpha that I have ever seen. But Mr. Cook's Alpha was a lower-case Alpha, and isn't it possible that that middle bit is just a bit of scarring? So perhaps it was Lambda ("Λ").
Add to that the fact that for some reason Mr. Cook's version seems to have a lower-case Alpha ("α") that looks like a Rho ("P") since it's not clear that the orientation of the characters on the die is correct, and part of the letter seems to have worn away.
Tau ("T") confused me because there seemed to be a bunch of extra flourishes present on that particular face of the die. But my speculation there is that they are markings due to wear and tear, and not actually part of the intended letter.
The reason I've gone through all this trouble though, is because the original question I had about that "Ancient Roman d20" (and take note that the Romans often used Greek as a language of literacy, so it's entirely correct that the die is Roman even though the language is Greek) is whether I could get myself a replica.
Now that I'm pretty sure about which characters are supposed to go on all the faces (ie. the Attic letters of the Greek alphabet), I can go about looking for dice makers on the internet who can make it for me. In the meantime, I do have blank dice that I can put stickers on, and I'll have to be satisfied with that for now.
