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: Funding Wars Through the Ages

U.S. antiterror efforts have cost nearly $6 trillion since the 9/11 attacks. Earlier governments from the ancient Greeks to Napoleon have had to get creative to finance their fights

The Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2019

The successful operation against Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a bright spot in the war on terror that the U.S. declared in response to the attacks of 9/11. The financial costs of this long war have been enormous: nearly $6 trillion to date, according to a recent report by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, which took into account not just the defense budget but other major costs, like medical and disability care, homeland security and debt.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

War financing has come a long way since the ancient Greeks formed the Delian League in 478 B.C., which required each member state to contribute an agreed amount of money each year, rather than troops,. With the League’s financial backing, Athens became the Greek world’s first military superpower—at least until the Spartans, helped by the Persians, built up their naval fleet with tribute payments extracted from dependent states.

The Romans maintained their armies through tributes and taxes until the Punic Wars—three lengthy conflicts between 264 and 146 B.C.—proved so costly that the government turned to debasing the coinage in an attempt to increase the money supply. The result was runaway inflation and eventually a sovereign debt crisis during the Social War a half-century later between Rome and several breakaway Italian cities. The government ended up defaulting in 86 B.C., sealing the demise of the ailing Roman Republic.

After the fall of Rome in the late fifth century, wars in Europe were generally financed by plunder and other haphazard means. William the Conqueror financed the Norman invasion of England in 1066 the ancient Roman way, by debasing his currency. He learned his lesson and paid for all subsequent operations out of tax receipts, which stabilized the English monetary system and established a new model for financing war.

Taxation worked until European wars became too expensive for state treasuries to fund alone. Rulers then resorted to a number of different methods. During the 16th century, Philip I of Spain turned to the banking houses of Genoa to raise the money for his Armada invasion fleet against England. Seizing the opportunity, Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s chief spymaster, sent agents to Genoa with orders to use all legal means to sabotage and delay the payment of Philip’s bills of credit. The operation bought England a crucial extra year of preparation.

In his own financial preparations to fight England, Napoleon had better luck than Philip I: In 1803 he was able to raise a war chest of over $11 million in cash by selling the Louisiana Territory to the U.S.

Napoleon was unusual in having a valuable asset to offload. By the time the American Civil War broke out in 1861, governments had become reliant on a combination of taxation, printing money or borrowing to pay for war. But the U.S. lacked a regulated banking system since President Andrew Jackson’s dismantling of the Second Bank of the United States in the 1830s. The South resorted to printing paper money, which depreciated dramatically. The North could afford to be more innovative. In 1862 the financier Jay Cooke invented the war bond. This was marketed with great success to ordinary citizens. At the war’s end, the bonds had covered two-thirds of the North’s costs.

Incurring debt is still how the U.S. funds its wars. It has helped to shield the country from the full financial effects of its prolonged conflicts. But in the future it is worth remembering President Calvin Coolidge’s warning: “In any modern campaign the dollars are the shock troops…. A country loaded with debt is devoid of the first line of defense.”