One day the philosopher Amaranthus met his companions Hermocles, Diophantus, and Philolaus busily discussing the doctrines of Epicurus and Democritus, anxiously debating which was more plausible and nearer the truth. To draw them away from that ill-tempered controversy and refresh their spirits, he told them an amusing story about the physician Stratocles’s wedding, which he had just attended, with all its details: the company, food, music, and so forth. They were so delighted by his account that Philolaus blessed his heart and wished him many a good wedding and many such cheerful gatherings, so that he might please himself by seeing them and others by telling them about it.

News is generally welcome to all our ears: “we listen eagerly, for people’s ears delight in novelty,” as Pliny observes. We crave reports, eager to hear and listen to them: “the crowd, packed shoulder to shoulder, drinks it in with its ears.”

Most of us are too inquisitive and eager for news. Caesar remarks in his Commentaries that the ancient Gauls would question every carrier and traveller about what they had heard or seen, and what news there was from abroad:

… What is happening throughout the world, What the Chinese and Thracians are doing, the secrets of a stepmother And her boy, who is in love, and so forth.

Just as at a public dining-house, bakery, or barber’s shop among us. When the great Gonzalo, having incurred King Ferdinand’s displeasure, was confined to the city of Loja in Andalusia, his only comfort for easing his melancholy thoughts, says Giovio, was to hear news and follow everyday events, reports of which were brought to him “among the first,” by letter or otherwise, from the remotest parts of Europe.

Some people’s entire delight is to smoke tobacco and drink all day in a tavern or alehouse, talking, singing, joking, shouting, and telling cock-and-bull stories over a drink. Or, when three or four good companions meet, they tell old stories by the fireside or in the sunshine, as old people generally do, “things old men remember as they sit in the sun,” recalling with fresh pleasure old affairs and events that happened in their younger days. Other people’s favourite pastime is gambling; nothing pleases them so much.

One indulges in love; another is ruined by dice …

Many people object too scrupulously to cards, backgammon, dice, and other games combining skill and chance; Gataker refutes them well. Although these are innocent recreations in themselves, there may nevertheless be good grounds for objecting to them when they are abused, as they often are, and for forbidding them as most harmful things. Lemnius calls gaming “a mad and ruinous business.” For in most pastimes of this kind, it is not art or skill that carries everything off, but cunning, swindling, dishonesty, chance, and luck: it is “money on the move”—

… In a moment of the shifting hour It changes owners and passes under another’s rights.

For the most part, they strive not to pass the time in innocent recreation, but for filthy profit and from greed for money. “It is turned to the foulest gain and human avarice,” as Daneau observes. “The source of frauds and crimes”: it is the fountain of cheating and villainy. Gaming is now so common throughout Europe, and so widely abused, that many people are utterly ruined by it: their resources spent, their inheritances consumed, themselves and their descendants reduced to poverty. Besides these come swearing, quarrelling, drinking, wasted time, and the other troubles that usually accompany it.

For once they have become accustomed to such company and acquired the habit of gambling, they can scarcely be drawn away from it. It keeps teasing them like an itch; as with men who frequent prostitutes, once they begin, they cannot easily stop. “A mad desire torments their minds”: they are crazed about their pastime.

In the end—as Charles VII, that good French king, declared in an edict against gamblers—“from which came the support of a dutiful and cheerful life for themselves, their children, and their whole household,” and so forth: what was once their livelihood, which should have maintained wife, children, and family, is now spent and gone. “Grief and want,” and so forth: sorrow and poverty follow.

Good things can thus be abused. What was first devised to refresh people’s weary spirits after other labours and studies, to cheer the mind, to pass the time and entertain company—which would otherwise grow tedious on those long, lonely winter nights—and to keep people from worse things, is turned against its purpose: an innocent recreation is perverted.

Chess is a good and ingenious exercise of the mind for certain people, and, Rhazes holds, suits those melancholy people who are idle, whose thoughts wander into irrelevant matters, or who are troubled by cares. Nothing better diverts their minds and changes the course of their thinking. Some say it was invented by an army commander during a famine, to keep his soldiers from mutiny.

But if melancholy comes from too much study, chess may do more harm than good. For some people’s brains it is too taxing, too full of anxiety, every bit as bad as study. Besides, it is an irritable, anger-provoking game, deeply vexing to the player who is checkmated.

In his youth, William the Conqueror, playing chess with the prince of France—Dauphiné had not yet been annexed to that crown—was checkmated and struck the prince about the head with the chessboard. This later caused much hostility between them. It is probably for some such reason that Patrizi, in book 3, title 12 of On the Education of a King, forbids his prince to play chess. He allows hawking, hunting, riding, and so forth; and he allows chess to other men, but on no account to the prince.