Historically Speaking: You Might Not Want to Win a Roman Lottery

Humans have long liked to draw lots as a way to win fortunes and settle fates

The Wall Street Journal

November 25, 2022

Someone in California won this month’s $2.04 billion Powerball lottery—the largest in U.S. history. The odds are staggering. The likelihood of death by plane crash (often estimated at 1 in 11 million for the average American) is greater than that of winning the Powerball or Mega Millions lottery (1 in roughly 300 million). Despite this, just under 50% of American adults bought a lottery ticket last year.

What drives people to risk their luck playing the lottery is more than just lousy math. Lotteries tap into a deep need among humans to find meaning in random events. Many ancient societies, from the Chinese to the Hebrews, practiced cleromancy, or the casting of lots to enable divine will to express itself. It is stated in the Bible’s Book of Proverbs: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.”

The ancient Greeks were among the first to use lotteries to ensure impartiality for non-religious purposes. The Athenians relied on a special device called a “kleroterion” for selecting jurors and public officials at random, to avoid unfair interference. The Romans had a more terrible use for drawing lots: A kind of collective military punishment known as “decimation” required a disgraced legion to select 1 out of every 10 soldiers at random and execute them. The last known use of the practice was in World War I by French and possibly Italian commanders.

The Romans also found less bloody uses for lotteries, including as a source of state revenue. Emperor Nero was likely the first ruler to use a raffle system as a means of filling the treasury without raising taxes.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

Following the fall of Rome, lotteries found other uses in the West—for example, as a means of allocating market stalls. But state lotteries only returned to Europe after 1441, when the city of Bruges successfully experimented with one as a means to finance its community projects. These fundraisers didn’t always work, however. A lack of faith in the English authorities severely dampened ticket sales for Queen Elizabeth I’s first (and last) National Lottery in 1567.

When they did work, the bonanzas could be significant: In the New World, lotteries helped to pay for the first years of the Jamestown Colony, as well as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia and many other institutions. And in France in 1729, the philosopher Voltaire got very rich by winning the national lottery, which was meant to sell bonds by making each bond a ticket for a jackpot drawing. He did it by unsavory means: Voltaire was part of a consortium of schemers who took advantage of a flaw in the lottery’s design by buying up enormous numbers of very cheap bonds.

Corruption scandals and failures eventually took their toll. Critics such as the French novelist Honoré de Balzac, who called lotteries the “opium of poverty,” denounced them for exploiting the poor. Starting in the late 1820s, a raft of anti-lottery laws were enacted on both sides of the Atlantic. Debates continued about them even where they remained legal. The Russian novelist Anton Chekhov highlighted their debilitating effects in his 1887 short story “The Lottery Ticket,” about a contented couple who are tormented and finally turned into raging malcontents by the mere possibility of winning.

New Hampshire was the first American state to roll back the ban on lotteries in 1964. Since then, state lotteries have proven to be neither the disaster nor the cure-all predicted. As for the five holdouts—Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah still have no state lotteries—they are doing just fine.

Historically Speaking: The Long Fight Against Unjust Taxes

From ancient Jerusalem to the American Revolution and beyond, rebels have risen up against the burden of taxation.

March 19, 2020

The Wall Street Journal

With the world in the grip of a major health crisis, historical milestones are passing by with little notice. But the Boston Massacre, whose 250th anniversary was this month, deserves to be remembered as a cautionary tale.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

The bloody encounter on March 5, 1770, began with the harassment of a British soldier by a crowd of Bostonians. Panicked soldiers responded by firing on the crowd, leaving five dead and six wounded. The colonists were irate about new taxes imposed by the British Parliament to pay for the expenses of the Seven Years War, which in North America pitted the British and Americans against the French and their Indian allies. Whether or not the tax increase was justified, the failure of British leaders to include the American colonies in the deliberative process was catastrophic. The slogan “No taxation without representation” became a rallying cry for the fledgling nation.

The attitude of tax collecting authorities had hardly changed since ancient times, when empires treated their subject populations with greed, brutality and arrogance. In 1st century Judea, anger over the taxes imposed by Rome combined with religious grievances to provoke a full-scale Jewish revolt in 66-73 A.D. It was an unequal battle, as most tax rebellions are, and the resistors were made to pay dearly: Jerusalem was sacked and the Second Temple destroyed, and all Jews in the Roman Empire were forced to pay a punitive tax.

Even when tax revolts met with initial success, there was no guarantee that the authorities would carry out their promises. In 1381, a humble English roof tiler named Wat Tyler led an uprising, dubbed the Peasants’ Revolt, against a new poll tax. King Richard II met with Tyler and agreed to his demands, but only as a delaying tactic. The ringleaders were then rounded up and executed, and Richard revoked his concessions, claiming they had been made under duress.

Nevertheless, as the historian David F. Burg notes in his book “A World History of Tax Rebellions,” tax revolts have been more frequent than we realize, mainly because governments tend not to advertise them. In Germany, 210 separate protests and uprisings were recorded from 1300 to 1550, and at least 1,000 in Japan from 1600 to 1868.

The 19th century saw the rise of a new kind of tax rebel, the conscientious objector. In 1846, the writer and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau spent a night in the Concord, Mass., jail after he refused to pay a poll tax as a protest against slavery. He was released the next morning when his aunt paid it for him, against his will. But Thoreau would go on to withhold his taxes in protest against the Mexican-American War, arguing in his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” that it was better to go to jail than to “enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”

Irwin Schiff, a colorful antitax advocate and failed libertarian presidential candidate, wouldn’t get off so easily. Arguing that the income tax violated the U.S. Constitution, he refused to pay it, despite being convicted of tax evasion three times. In 2015, he died at age 87 in a federal prison—an ironic confirmation of Benjamin Franklin’s adage that “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Fortunately for Americans at this time of national duress, tax day this year has been mercifully postponed.