Risks are a fundamental condition of human life. People must navigate uncertainty, assess potential dangers, make decisions—and at times deliberately take risks. The annual theme "RISK & LIFE" explores this basic human experience in the ancient world, asking how people perceived, evaluated, and engaged with risk in their everyday lives.
Ancient societies were shaped by a wide range of uncertainties. Disease, natural hazards, military threats, economic dependencies, and political decisions could all have far-reaching consequences. At the same time, taking risks could open up new opportunities. Long-distance trade, military strategies, or investments in infrastructure were always bound up with uncertainty, yet they also created new scope for action. Then as now, it was necessary to continually renegotiate the balance between danger, opportunity, and the prospect of success.
To make risks more predictable and manageable, people developed a variety of strategies. These included prevention and precaution, the accumulation of experiential knowledge, technical solutions, and institutional frameworks. The sophisticated infrastructures of the Roman Empire offer a telling example: roads, harbours, and water systems not only enabled mobility and supply, but also reduced risks for trade, administration, and everyday life. Religious practices, legal regulations, and medical advice likewise helped to interpret uncertainty and shape possible courses of action.
The annual theme brings together the disciplines of classical studies with perspectives from sociology, philosophy, and the history of science and the environment. Archaeology, ancient history, the history of medicine, religious studies, legal history, and building archaeology jointly explore the strategies developed by pre-modern societies to assess, mitigate, and productively engage with risk.
Through talks, an interdisciplinary lecture series, discussion formats, and further events, the Berliner Antike-Kolleg invites participants to explore historical ways of living with risk and to reflect on their relevance for contemporary debates on uncertainty, precaution, and decision-making.
