ANCIENT AND MODERN GREEKS AND ROMANS, TURKEY IN EUROPE, AND ASIA MINOR.
It is probable that the fall of Greece was due to the license that prevailed as to gaming, and consequently to all other and lesser forms of dissipation and corruption. Philip of Macedon was planning the battle of Cheronea at the very time when dicing had reached its most shameful height in Athens. Public associations existed, not for the purpose of defending Greece against her foes, but for the encouragement of the basest passions that surge in the human breast. Both Philip and Alexander knew the value to despotism of vice among the people. Alexander put a fine on those of his courtiers who did not play, for he had a jealous fear of subjects who were engaged in more serious pursuits.
But dice alone did not furnish the implements of gambling. The ancient Greeks had the equivalent of Cross and Pile, and gambled at cocking mains. The Athenian orator, Callistratus, notes the desperation of these practices when he says that the games in which the losers go on doubling their stakes “resemble ever-recurring wars, which terminate only with the extinction of the combatants.”
It was a practice of the ancients to put the invention of vicious acts or games upon foreign nations. Thus we have Plutarch’s indignant answers to Herodotus; but no Grecian ever resented the story that dice was first made by Palamedes, at the siege of Troy. Dice were called alsae by the Romans, and there were two kinds, the tali, or four-sided knucklebones, and the tesserarae or six-sided bones. The tali has four sides long-wise, the two ends were not regarded. Up one side there was an ace, or canis; on the opposite side six; on the other two sides four and three. On the tesserarae the numbers were from one to six. But on both sides of alsae or dice the numbers on the upper and lower side would make seven, as now-a-days on dice.
The game was played with three tesserarae and four tali. They were put into a box made into the form of a tower, with a straight neck—wider below than above, called fritillas turris, turricula, orca, etc. This box was shaken, and the dice was thrown upon the gaming board, forus, alvenus, tabulalus oriae. The highest or most fortunate throw was called Venus, or jactus venereus, or basilicas (the King’s throw.) It consisted of three sixes on the tesserarae[tesserarae], and differing numbers, as two alike, on the tali. The worst throw, the dog throw, was called in Latin jactus pessimus, or jactus canes. In this throw, the three tesserarae must be aces, and the tali all the same number. The other throws were valued according to the numbers. Cocked dice nullified the throw, as now-a-days. While throwing the dice it was customary to name the desires of the player, and this practice still holds with negroes in their game of craps. Old men were specially fond of the game. Jacta alsa, esto! Let the die be cast! was Cæsar’s cry at the Rubicon when he betrayed the Roman republic. The law prohibited dice-playing, except in the month of December, during the Saturnalia, and the character of gamesters was then as infamous as now, although there was much gambling. The works of Horace, Cicero, Suetonius, Juvenal, Tacitus, Plautus, Varro, Ovid, Pliny, and Paulus, show by direct reference and by metaphor, the familiarity of dice in the public mind, and the evils they involved. Persius, in his satires, speaks of the practice of cogging the dice, and cheating the unwary.
Augustus, the first Roman emperor, was an habitual gambler, and, notwithstanding the laws prohibiting the practice, gambling was prevalent at Rome in all ranks of society. Although the emperor was a passionate gambler—as devoted to the vice, at least, as his cold and deliberate nature would permit—yet he was nothing if not a politician, and in frequenting the gaming table, he had motives other than cupidity. For example, he wrote Tiberius: “If I had exacted my winnings during the festival of Minerva; if I had not lavished my money on all sides, instead of losing twenty thousand sestercii (about $5,000) I should have gained 150,000 sestercii (about $37,000). I prefer it thus, however, for my bounty should win me immense ‘glory.’”
If Horace may be credited, they could “cog” a die in the Augustan age, if they could not “secure” it, as in this.
The emperor, Caligula, converted his palace into a gambling house, and while indulging his passion for play, this human monster conceived his most fiendish deeds, and resorted to falsehood and perjury in his efforts to escape the tide of ill-luck that set against him. When frenzied by losses, this wretch would vent his cruel spleen upon those about him, and to make good what he had lost he did not hesitate at murder most foul and confiscation most wanton. On one occasion, it is related, after having condemned to death several Gauls of great opulence and confiscated their wealth, he rejoined his gambling companions and exclaimed, “I pity you when I see you lose a few sestercii, whilst, with the stroke of a pen I have just won six hundred millions” (about $150,000,000). Although the author of a treatise on gambling, yet the emperor Claudius played like an imbecile. In gaming, as in all else, Nero was a veritable madman, and would stake hundreds of thousands on a single cast of the dice. In ghastly humor the imbecile, Claudius would play against the estates of his murdered victims. In his caustic description of the hypotheosis of Claudius, the great Seneca brings the emperor finally to hell, and represents him as there condemned to play at dice forever with a bottomless box, always in hope, but ever balked.
“For whenso’er he shook the box to cast,
The rattling dice delude his eager haste;