Subsection 13. Love of gambling and the like, and excessive pleasures, as causes.

It is astonishing how many poor, distressed, miserable wretches one meets on almost every path and street, begging for alms: people of good family, once prosperous, now ragged, tattered and near starvation, dragging out a painful life in discontent and suffering of body and mind, all through excessive lust, gambling, pleasure and riotous living. This is the usual end of sensual pleasure-seekers and brutish spendthrifts, stupefied and swept headlong away by their various pleasures and desires.

Cebes in his Tablet, Saint Ambrose in the second book of Abel and Cain, and, among others, Lucian in his treatise On Salaried Posts have portrayed such people’s course excellently. Lucian does so in his picture of Wealth, whom he imagines dwelling on a high mountain, eagerly sought by many suitors. On first arriving, they are generally welcomed by Pleasure and Dalliance and given every possible satisfaction as long as their money lasts. But when their means fail, they are contemptuously thrust headlong out of a back door and left there to Shame, Reproach and Despair.

The man who at first had so many attendants, parasites and followers, who was young and vigorous, richly dressed, with every delicacy he could obtain, every welcome and mark of respect, is now suddenly stripped of everything: pale, naked, old, diseased and abandoned, cursing his stars and ready to strangle himself. His only companions are Repentance, Sorrow, Grief, Derision, Beggary and Contempt, his daily attendants for the rest of his life. Just as the prodigal son had exquisite music, merry company and fine food at first, but a sorrowful reckoning at the end, so it is with all such empty delights and those who pursue them.

“The ends of pleasures are sorrowful, as anyone who cares to recall his own pleasures will understand.” Their end is as bitter as gall and wormwood: grief of mind, madness itself. The usual rocks against which such men dash and hurl themselves are cards, dice, hawks and hounds—“a mad passion for hunting,” as one calls it—and “mad building projects”: their extravagant structures, sports, games and the like, when pursued at the wrong time, managed imprudently, and beyond their means.

Some men are ruined by extravagant, fanciful buildings: galleries, cloisters, terraces, walks, orchards, gardens, pools, little streams, bowers and similar places of pleasure. Xenophon calls them “useless houses.” However delightful in themselves and pleasing to everyone who sees them, however ornamental and suitable for some great men, they are unprofitable to others and the sole cause of their financial ruin. In his Observations, Forestus gives an example of a man who became melancholy for this reason, having consumed his wealth on an unprofitable building that afterwards brought him no return.

Others, I say, are ruined by those mad sports of hawking and hunting: honourable recreations, suitable for some great men, but not for every person of low or inferior rank. While they insist on keeping their falconers, dogs and hunting horses, their wealth, says Salmuth, runs away with the hounds, and their fortunes fly away with the hawks. They pursue beasts so long that at last they themselves degenerate into beasts, as Agrippa reproaches them: like Actaeon. For as he was eaten to death by his own dogs, so they devour themselves and their inherited estates in such idle and unnecessary sports, meanwhile neglecting their more necessary business and the duties of their callings.

Our great men, too, are sometimes excessively mad in their delight and obsession with it: when they drive poor farmers from their fields, as John of Salisbury objects in Policraticus, book 1, chapter 4; pull down country farms and whole towns to make parks and forests; starve people to feed beasts; and meanwhile punish anyone who interferes with their game more severely than a common cut-throat or notorious thief. But great men can be excused in some respects; people of lower rank have no defence against being counted mad.

Poggio the Florentine tells an amusing story to this effect, condemning the folly and pointless occupation of such people. A physician in Milan, he says, who treated madmen, had a pit of water in his house. He kept his patients in it, some up to their knees, some to their waists, some to their chins, “according to the degree of madness,” as they were more or less affected. One who had recovered well happened to stand in the doorway. Seeing a gentleman ride past on a fine horse, with a hawk on his fist and his spaniels following, he insisted on knowing what all this equipment was for.

The gentleman answered that it was to kill certain birds. The patient then asked what the birds he killed in a year might be worth. He replied, five or ten crowns. Pressed further about what his dogs, horse and hawk cost him, he said four hundred crowns. At that, the patient told him to be gone, as he valued his life and well-being: “If our master comes and finds you here, he will put you in the pit among the madmen, up to your chin.” The story rebukes the madness and folly of such vain men, who exhaust their means on idle sports while neglecting their business and necessary affairs.

Leo the Tenth, that hunting pope, is severely censured by Giovio in his Life for his excessive passion for hawking and hunting, so much so that, Giovio says, he would sometimes stay near Ostia for weeks and months at a time, leaving petitioners unattended and bulls and pardons unsigned, to his own detriment and the loss of many private individuals.

If anything happened to thwart him in his sport, or the hunting was poor, he became so impatient that he often reviled and abused men of great worth with the bitterest taunts. He looked so sour, was so angry and irritable, so grieved and vexed, that the account seems incredible. On the other hand, if he had good sport and was pleased, he would reward all his fellow hunters “with incredible generosity,” with unspeakable bounty and munificence, refusing nothing to any petitioner while he was in that mood.

To tell the truth, this is the common disposition of all gamblers, as Galateo observes. If they win, nobody alive is so jovial and merry. But if they lose, even a trifle—two or three games of backgammon, or a deal at cards for twopence a game—they become so angry and touchy that nobody can speak to them. They often break out in violent fits of passion, oaths, curses and improper language, differing little from madmen for the time being.

Of all gamblers and gambling, when excessive, we may generally conclude this much: whether they win or lose for the moment, their winnings are “not gifts of fortune but snares,” as the wise Seneca judges—not fortune’s gifts but bait. The usual outcome is beggary. “As plague takes life, so gambling takes money”: as the plague takes away life, gambling takes away possessions, for “all are stripped, destitute and needy.”

Gambling, ravenous Scylla, the surest form of theft, Not content with wealth, treacherously drowns the soul as well: A foul, thieving, infamous, idle, frantic ruin.

For the little pleasure they take and the small gains and winnings they make now and then, their wives and children suffer in the meantime, and they themselves rue it in the end, losing body and soul. I will say nothing of those monstrous spendthrifts, “born to squander money,” as the writer reproached Antony; people “who lose their inherited estates without any legal accusation,” as Cyprian says; and mad, Sybaritic squanderers “who eat up estates at a single dinner.”

They eat everything up at a breakfast or a supper, or consume their means in an instant among bawds, parasites and players, as though they had thrown it into the Tiber, through high wages and vain, idle expenses. They ruin not only themselves but all their friends. As a desperate swimmer drowns the person who comes to help him, so, through guarantees and borrowing, they willingly ruin all their associates and relations. “Angry with money,” as he says: angry with their money.