“20. But Samson’s wife was given to his companion, whom he had used as his friend.”
Now, in this very ancient story, we find embodied as much roguery and crime as in any modern turf episode. Samson bet without any means of paying, if he lost: he lost, and was a defaulter. But, to pay this “debt of honour,” he had recourse to wholesale murder and robbery—to satisfy men, who to his own knowledge, had (to use a modern expression) “tampered with the stable.”
The early Greeks betted, as we find in Homer’s Iliad, b. xxiii. 485-7 where Idomeneus offers a bet to the lesser Ajax to back his own opinion:
Δεῦρό νυν ή τρίποδος περιδώμεθον, ἠὲ λέβετος̓
Ἳστορα δ̓ Ἀτρείδην Ἀγαμέμνονα θείομεν ὕμφω.
Ὀππότεραι πρόθ̓ ἵπποἰ ἵνα γνοίης ὰποτίνων.
“Now, come on!
A wager stake we, of tripod, or of caldron;
And make we both Atreidès Agamemnon
Judge, whether foremost are those mares: and so
Learn shalt thou, to thy cost!”
In Homer’s Odyssey, xxiii. 78, Eurycleia wagers her life to Penelope that Ulysses has returned: Aristophanes in his Equites, 791; Acharnes, 772, 1115; and Nebulæ, 644, gives examples of wagers; and, in the eighth idyll of Theocritus, Daphins proposes a bet to Menalcas about a singing match.
Among the Romans, Virgil tells us of a wager in his third Eclogue of the Bucolics, 28-50, between Menalcas and Damœtas, which is virtually the same as that of Theocritus, and Valerius Maximus tells us how a triumph was awarded by the senate to Lutatius, the Consul, who had defeated the Carthaginian fleet. The prætor Valerius, having also been present in the action, asserted that the victory was his, and that a triumph was due to him also. The question came before the judge; but not until Valerius had first, in support of his assertion, deposited a stake, against which Lutatius deposited another. But in classical time they seem to have known little about odds.
The word wager is an English word—and was spelt in Middle English, Wageoure, or Wajour, as in The Babee’s Book.
“No waiour non with hym thou lay,
Ne at the dyce with hym to play.”