This article by Dr Konstantine Panegyres, from The University of Western Australia, was originally published in The Conversation on Thursday 20 August 2026.
Australia is once again debating how gambling should be regulated, particularly the reach of online betting and gambling advertising.
The arguments may sound modern, but the problem is not. Ancient Greeks and Romans also gambled enthusiastically, worried about people who gambled too much, and tried different ways of keeping the habit under control.
Their efforts were not particularly successful.
The popularity of gambling
The Roman emperors themselves show how attractive gambling can be.
Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE), Rome’s first emperor after the fall of the Republic, was an enthusiastic dice player.
The Roman biographer Suetonius preserves one of Augustus’ own letters that describes a holiday spent gambling:
we played all day long and kept the gaming-board warm.
Augustus admitted he lost 20,000 sesterces (worth about A$150,000 today), while another player, after heavy losses, “unexpectedly and little by little got back a good deal”. The excitement of losing, recovering and continuing to play sounds remarkably familiar.
Claudius, emperor from 41 to 54 CE, took the passion for gambling even further.
Suetonius says Claudius was “greatly devoted to gaming”, and even wrote a book about it. More remarkably, Claudius played while travelling: he had a gaming-board fitted to his carriage so “his game” would not be disturbed by the movement.
The stigma of gambling
Gambling was a common pastime in the ancient world, but it could carry a stigma.
One of the most famous ancient gambling stories concerns Philip II of Macedon (382–336 BCE), father of Alexander the Great.
The Greek writer Athenaeus says Philip was throwing dice when someone announced the arrival of one of his most trusted generals, Antipater. Philip hesitated, then pushed the gaming-board under his couch.
Philip’s embarrassment at being caught gambling in front of a man associated with sobriety and discipline is revealing. Gambling was common entertainment, but excessive enthusiasm for it could still look undignified, especially in a ruler.
The dangers of gambling
Some ancients believed gambling was a bad habit because it wasted people’s time and could also cause pain, even though it seemed momentarily pleasurable.
The Athenian orator Isocrates in the fourth century BCE complained of young men “drinking in taverns” and “tossing dice in gambling dens”. These, he thought, were two of the ways
our young men are wasting their youth […] to the neglect of all efforts to improve themselves […] [they] are engaged from morning until night in extremes of dissipation.
Regulating gambling
In the Greek world, there is no evidence for a legal restriction on gambling of the kind we later find in Rome. But habitual gambling could still damage a person’s reputation.
The writer Athenaeus, for example, gives an anecdote about two politicians in Rhodes. Comon mocked Rhodophon for “shooting dice”. Rhodophon answered by attacking Comon for his womanising and lack of self-control.
The exchange shows gambling could be treated as one of the habits for which a prominent man might be publicly ridiculed.
The Romans took a more legalistic approach. The Roman lawyer Julius Paulus, writing in the early third century CE, mentions three laws against gambling: the leges Titia, Publicia and Cornelia. They restricted gambling for money, while allowing wagers on some contests involving physical skill, such as running, wrestling, jumping and javelin-throwing.
The rules were not just theoretical. The Roman poet Martial in the first century CE gives a glimpse of what happened when somebody was caught. He describes a gambler
betrayed by an all too alluring dice box and just hauled out of a secret tavern is pleading with the aedile.
An aedile was one of the officials responsible for enforcing such restrictions.
There was an important exception. During the Saturnalia, Rome’s great December festival, people were given much greater freedom to gamble. Martial tells us during the Saturnalia, the dice-box becomes “king” and “rules” the land – showing many people took up gambling when the restrictions were lifted.
Christian authorities later tried another approach.
The first known council of the Christian church in Spain, known as the Council of Elvira, held around 305–306 CE, ruled Christians who gambled for money could be excluded from communion until they gave it up.
Did anything work?
Authorities in Greek and Roman times tried hard to put a limit on gambling. The methods changed – social disapproval, laws and religious penalties – but the basic problem did not. People kept gambling.
Perhaps that is the uncomfortable ancient lesson. Governments can restrict gambling, shame it, tax it or suspend the rules for special occasions. What they have found much harder to control is the mostly futile hope that keeps people playing: that the next throw, the next bet or the next game might turn everything around.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
