On Tobit 1–38

The prophetic book entitled Tobit has been read. Although Scripture has set out the virtues of the holy prophet fully for us, I think I should use a brief discourse before you to review his merits and works, so that what Scripture has arranged at length in the manner of a history we may take in more compactly, gathering the kinds of his virtues as in a kind of summary.

He was a just man, merciful, hospitable; and though endowed with this choir of virtues he underwent the hardship of captivity. He bore it humbly and patiently, grieving more over the common wrong than over his own, and not lamenting that the support of his virtues had done him no good, but rather judging that this disgrace had been inflicted on him as a lesser price than his sins deserved.

He brought on himself an edict that none of the children of the captivity should give burial to the dead; but the prohibition did not hold him back so much as it spurred him on, lest he seem to abandon a duty of piety out of fear of death; for the price of mercy was the penalty of death. Caught as guilty of such a ‘crime,’ he was at last, with difficulty, restored to his family through a friend, his property plundered, himself poor and an exile.

Again he busied himself with these duties, seeking a stranger with whom to share his food whenever there was any. So when he had come back weary from the work of burial and the means of a meal were set before him, he sent his son to look for a companion at table. While the guest was being fetched, news came of the remains of an unburied body, and he left the meal; he did not think it devout to take food himself while a lifeless body lay in public.

This was his daily work, and a great one; for if the law commands us to cover the naked who are living, how much more ought we to cover the dead! If we are accustomed to escort travellers on longer journeys, how much more those who have set out for that eternal home from which they will never return? “I,” says Job, “wept over everyone who was weak.” Who is weaker than one who has died, of whom Scripture says elsewhere: “Weep over the dead”? And Ecclesiastes says: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools in the house of feasting.” Nothing is more excellent than this duty: to bestow it on one who can no longer repay you, to protect a sharer of your nature from the birds, to protect him from the beasts. Wild animals are said to have shown this humane care to dead bodies; will human beings refuse it?

While the prophet, wearied by so holy a duty, was resting in his room, he fell into blindness from the white droppings falling from a sparrows’ nest. He did not groan in complaint or say: “Is this the reward for my labors?” He grieved more at being deprived of the means of his services than of his eyes, and he thought his blindness not a punishment but a hindrance. And when he was relieving their living by his wife’s wages, he took care that nothing stolen should enter his house. His wife had received a kid as wages; but he, consulting honesty more than his own sustenance, would not withhold good faith from the one to whom he owed his food. He had entrusted money to his neighbor, and in all his life, in such great need, he did not ask for it back. Only when he saw himself worn out and laid low by old age did he make it known to his son, not so much wishing to reclaim the deposit as anxious not to defraud his heir.

So in depositing his money rather than lending it at interest he kept the duty of a just man; for that lending by which interest is sought is evil. But that lending is not evil of which it is written: “Lend to your neighbor in the time of his need.” For David too says: “The just man shows mercy and lends.” That other lending is rightly accursed: to give money at interest, which the law forbids. Tobit shunned this, and he warned his son not to pass over the Lord’s command: to give alms from his substance, not to lend money at interest, not to turn his face from any poor man. One who gives such warnings condemns the interest of moneylending, from which many have made gain, and for many lending money has been a business. And indeed the saints forbade it.

The more serious an evil moneylending is, the more praiseworthy is the one who shuns it. Give money if you have it; let what lies idle with you benefit another. Give as if you will not get it back, so that, if it is returned, it counts as gain. One who does not return the money returns gratitude. If you are cheated of money, you acquire righteousness; for the just man is he who shows mercy and lends. If money is lost, mercy is gained; for it is written: “He who shows mercy lends to his neighbor.”

Many do not lend for fear of loss, being afraid of fraud, and this is what they usually reply to those who ask. To each of them it is said: “Lose money for the sake of a brother and a friend, and do not hide it under a stone to be lost. Put your treasure in the commandments of the Most High, and it will profit you more than gold.” But men’s ears have grown deaf to such saving precepts, and the rich above all have their ears stopped with the bronze of their money. While they count their money they do not hear the answers. As soon as someone, pressed by necessity or anxious to ransom his own whom a barbarian is selling as captives, begins to ask, the rich man at once turns away his face. He does not recognize their common nature, does not pity the humility of the suppliant, does not relieve his need, does not consider their common frailty. He stands unbending, head thrown back; he is not swayed by prayers, not moved by tears, not broken by wailing. He swears he has nothing, indeed that he himself is looking for a moneylender to meet his own needs. Why do you add an oath to your hardness and avarice? You are not cleared by perjury, but bound.

But when interest or a pledge is mentioned, then the moneylender lowers his brow and smiles; the man he had denied knowing before, he now recalls as if from a friendship of his father’s. He receives him with a kiss, calls him the pledge of an inherited affection, and tells him not to weep. “We will look at home,” he says, “to see whether we have any money. For your sake I will break up my father’s silver, which is finely wrought. It will be a great loss. What interest will make up the value of the inlaid work? But for a friend I will not shrink from the loss. When you pay me back, I will have it made again.” So before he gives, he hurries to get back, and he who says he is helping with the principal demands interest. “On the Kalends,” he says, “you will pay the interest; the principal, meanwhile, if you have nothing to repay it with, I will not ask for.” So, to give once, he harasses often, and makes sure the man is always in his debt. This is the art with which he handles the man. First he binds him with written bonds and ties him with the bonds of his own word. The money is counted out, liberty is made over; the poor wretch is released from a smaller debt and bound to a greater.

Such are your kindnesses, you rich: you give less and demand more. Such is your humanity, that you despoil even while you help. Even a poor man is fruitful for your gain. The needy man is a debtor of interest: under your compulsion he has something to repay, but nothing to spend. Merciful men indeed! The one whom others set free you make over to yourselves. He who lacks food pays interest. Is anything harsher? He seeks medicine, you offer poison; he begs for bread, you hold out a sword; he begs for freedom, you impose slavery; he prays for release, you tighten the knot of a hideous noose.

Holy David especially laments this injustice, saying: “I have seen iniquity and contradiction in the city.” And, he says, “usury and deceit have not departed from its streets.” And when he went on to speak of the betrayal of Judas, he put this first, either because the crime of moneylending was added, beyond the odium of sacrilege, to those who conspired in the Lord’s death, or because so great a sacrilege would be amply avenged by the usury of moneylending. Wicked moneylenders were those who gave money in order to kill the author of salvation; wicked also are these who give in order to kill the innocent. And that man too who took money as the betrayer, Judas, himself hanged himself with a noose. He thought Judas himself should be condemned with this curse, that the moneylender should search out his substance. For what the proscription of tyrants or the hand of robbers usually accomplishes, the wickedness of the moneylender alone regularly brings about. More learned men, however, think that the devil himself is compared to a moneylender, who overturns the goods of the soul and the patrimony of a precious mind by a kind of loan of usurious iniquity. So he catches by expense, so he entices with gold, so he entangles in guilt, so he demands the head in place of the treasure.

What is more unjust than you, who are not satisfied even with repayment of the principal? What is more unjust than you, who give money and bind a life and a patrimony? You take gold and silver as a pledge, and do you still call him a debtor who has entrusted more to you than he received from you? You claim to be creditors, though you owe more; you, I say, call yourselves creditors, who trusted not a man but a pledge.

Rightly is what you give called faenus, “interest”: it is as cheap and worthless as faenum, hay. What is owed you call the sors, the “lot.” And indeed, as in a funeral urn, the wretched lot is shaken, to be paid off by the punishment of a debtor about to perish. The defendants stand pale awaiting the fall of the lot. Those for whose condemnation a lot is drawn do not tremble so; those dejected and anxious ones whose captivity hangs on the fall of the lot are not so afraid. For there one man’s captivity is decreed, here that of many. And perhaps it is called the lot because patrimonies are at stake, turning over under this lot. A great and memorable kindness of God is proclaimed especially by the prophet’s mouth, which he conferred on the fathers: that he set them free from usuries and iniquities. And he says aptly, “from usuries he set them free,” because usuries bring slavery; as if to say: he rescued them from the chain of slavery and restored them to liberty.

A grievous term is that of “debtors.” Sins are called debts, and criminals are also called debtors; for these too, like those, are judged on a capital charge. Faults, however, have a difference of names as of deeds; debts, though of differing amounts, have one name, one burden, one danger. So the unhappy man who asks for a loan of money does not know what he is asking; he does not know what he is receiving.

The moneylender’s money does not know how to stay long in one place; it is accustomed to pass through many hands. It cannot be held in one purse; it wants to be turned over and counted; it requires use, so as to acquire usury. It is a kind of tide of the sea, not a harvest. Money never rests. It slips away as if dashed on a rock: so it strikes the lap of the debtor and at once slips back to where it came from. It comes with a murmur and returns with a groan. Yet often the sea lies calm under the winds, but the wave of interest is always tossed. It drowns the shipwrecked, spits them out naked, strips the clothed, leaves them unburied. So you ask for a coin and take on a shipwreck. On one side Charybdis roars around you, on the other the Sirens, who, as the fables tell, by a show of pleasure and the sweetness of their song lured men into hidden shoals and cheated them of the hope and desire of returning home.

At once sellers of perfume and of various spices rush in like hounds caught by the keen scent of roaming prey: hunters, fishermen, fowlers, innkeepers too who mix water with the wine and loudly praise the nobility of its ancient stock, its country, and its vintage. Parasites suddenly crowd round and greet the man they used to despise; they escort him, invite him to merriment, urge him to spend, saying: “Come, let us enjoy the good things that exist, and let us use the creation as in youth, eagerly. Let us fill ourselves with costly wine and perfumes, and let not the flower of the time pass us by. Let us crown ourselves with roses before they wither. Let there be no meadow which our luxury does not pass through; everywhere let us leave signs of our merriment, for this is our portion and this our lot.”

And truly their whole lot has been spent, while you remain without a lot of good things. Scripture did not show you lots of that kind; it is not among such lots that holy David says we should sleep, when he says: “If you sleep among the middle of the lots.” For if you had slept in the middle of those lots, that is, of the Old and New Testaments, the desire for money would not have plunged you into the abyss of the worst moneylending; rather, the grace of spiritual faith would have given you silver and fashioned you into the likeness of gold by the instruction of divine wisdom. Indeed, if we have set down one testimony of divine Scripture and turned away from that luxurious banquet, surely this man too could have been saved, had he clung to the heavenly oracles.

Let us nevertheless return to the banquet, not to taste its dishes but to show others that they are to be avoided. The table is loaded with foreign and exquisite foods; gleaming servants are brought in, bought at a great price and fed at greater expense; the drinking goes on into the night; the day closes with the banquet and gives out before the drunkenness does. He rises full of wine, empty of wealth; he sleeps until daylight and on waking thinks it was a dream. For just as in sleep a man seems to himself suddenly rich from poor, so he is suddenly poor from rich. Meanwhile, while the money flows away, the interest overflows. Time diminishes, the interest grows; the treasure is emptied, the principal is heaped up. Little by little the guests withdraw; the sureties gather. In the morning the moneylender knocks at the doors, complains that the appointed days of payment have passed, assails him with insults while awake, rouses him from sleep. No night is quiet, no day pleasant, no sun cheerful. Little by little the gilded and silk garments are taken off and sold at half price. With tears the wife, now sadder, lays aside her ornaments, bought dear and to be sold cheap. The slaves who waited at table are put up at auction, and, badly trained, they put buyers off. The money is offered to the creditor: “This,” he says, “barely pays the interest; you owe the principal.”

His patrimony exhausted and the interest reduced, he goes back still liable for the principal; he receives a respite more grim than a truce in war, as though he must fight again in two days. For in war victory is uncertain, here poverty is certain; there a man covers himself with a shield, here he goes to meet the foe naked; there a breastplate encloses his chest, here he is wholly enclosed in prison; there he loads his hands with weapons and arms them with arrows, here he offers them, empty of money, to be bound with chains. Often both are led off captive: the one has the fortune of war to blame, the other has no one to blame but himself. Nothing is more unbearable than misery that cannot be excused. Conscience makes the weight of the injury bitterer.

Then he takes stock with himself, then he remembers the Scriptures, then he says: “Was it not written for me: ‘Drink water from your own vessels and from the springs of your own wells’? What had I to do with the moneylender’s well, where even the water is shut in? Vegetables with security were sweeter than a feast got from another’s money with anxiety. I should not have sought what belonged to others. Then, when I had fallen into debt, I should have sought the remedy from my own springs. There were smaller vessels at home. Better to lack servants than food, better to put my clothing up for sale than to make over my liberty. What good was it that I was ashamed to make my poverty public? See, another has made it public.”

“I did not want to sell my nurses; see, another is assigning them by judgment.” This reflection comes late. You should have feared for your own things when you took what belonged to others; you should have applied help when the first wounds were spreading. It would have been better at the start to cut expenses and to relieve the necessity of debt by the straits of your household than, enriched for an hour with others’ goods, to be stripped afterwards even of your own.

We blame the debtor for having acted too imprudently; but nothing is more wicked than the moneylenders, who reckon others’ losses their gain and count as their own loss whatever others possess. They hunt for new heirs; through their agents they spy out rich young men; they attach themselves to them, pretending a friendship from father’s and grandfather’s time; they want to learn their household needs. If they find some occasion, they reproach their modesty and chide their shyness for not having hoped and presumed on them earlier. But if they come upon no snares of any necessity, they weave tales: they say a fine estate is for sale, a spacious house; they pile up its yields of produce, exaggerate its annual returns, and urge him to buy. They do the same, praising costly garments and fine necklaces. When he says he has no money, they press their own on him, saying: “Use it as your own;

from the produce of the property you buy you will multiply the price and repay the debt.” They hold out others’ farms to the young man in order to strip him of his own. They spread their nets; as soon as he has entered the ground ringed by the hunters’ toils, they drive him into the nets of bonds and the snares of interest. They ask that his grandfather’s country house, his father’s tomb, be pledged to them. A day is set for payment; the agreement is overlooked while payment can be put off. When they have made him secure enough, they suddenly fall on him and press harder; when he makes excuses they bear down on him, saying: “You have your estates, we do not have our money. We gave gold, we hold wood. The profits of the produce come to you; nothing accrues to us of the money. Your excuse is idle; at least let the bond be renewed.”

And so, while the young man at first thinks that nothing of his clothing or even of his possessions need be sold, or asks for a delay in doing so, the interest is added to the principal and the monthly hundredth piles up. Now he begins to sigh, now to recognize his trouble. Day and night he thinks of the interest; whatever he meets he takes for the moneylender; whatever creaks, he seems to hear the moneylender’s voice. If you have it, why do you not pay? If you do not have it, why do you add evil to evil and seek a remedy from the wound? Why do you endure the moneylender’s siege every day and dread the storming? It is an old saying: “When the moneylender and the debtor meet, the Lord looks upon them both.” The one seeks his prey like a dog; the other, like prey in the open, turns aside. The one like a lion seeks whom he may devour; the other like a young bullock dreads the robber’s attack. The one like a hawk seeks to seize a swan with his talons; the other like a goose or a coot prefers to throw himself over cliffs or plunge into the depths rather than endure this hawk of human form. Why do you flee daily? Even if the moneylender does not meet you, want meets you like a good runner. So the Lord sees both, the moneylender and the debtor; he watches both as they meet, a witness of the one’s iniquity and the other’s injury; he condemns the one’s avarice, the other’s folly. The one counts every step of the debtor and lies in wait for his turnings; the other at once hides his head behind the columns, for a debtor has no standing. On the fingers of both the reckoning of interest is gone over again and again. Equal care, but unequal pull: the one rejoices at the growth of interest, the other is crushed by the pile of debt; the one counts his gains, the other his hardships.

Why do you flee a man whom you could have had no need to fear? Why do you flee, or how long will you flee? If anyone knocks at night, you think it is the moneylender: under the bed at once! If you sense someone suddenly coming in, you leap outside. A dog barks, and your heart pounds, sweat pours out, panting shakes you; you look for a lie to put off the moneylender, and when you have got a delay you rejoice. The moneylender pretends to be burdened by your ruin, but he grants it gladly: like a hunter who has ringed in a beast, he is sure of his prey. You kiss his head, embrace his knees, and like a stag struck by a poisoned arrow you go on a little and at last fall, overcome by the poison; or like a fish pierced by a trident, wherever it flees it carries its wound. And indeed that fish swallows death in the bait; it gulps the hook while seeking food, but still it does not see the hook, which the morsel covers. You see the hook and swallow it. Your hook is the creditor’s interest; you devour the hook and the worm always gnaws at you. It is the bait itself that deceives. And so the food of interest is of no use to you, and the hook serves only to wound. Or do you not know that one once caught in a noose tightens it the more on himself if he flees, and one caught in the nets pulls the nets down on himself the more by fleeing? You flee through the streets, since you cannot be safe within your walls. The moneylender finds you when he wishes. At last, when you have filled up the time, he rushes in like a wolf at night, does not let you sleep, and at daybreak drags you into public or forces you to sign the deeds of sale. To escape the loss of face, you sign at once, ready to sell your grandfather’s tomb, sparing your father’s, of course, so that some cover of decency may be kept. The hungry soil is bought; the complaint is thrown at him that he has sold barren land and loaded the seller with expenses, and the losses of the present are added to the losses of the former time. Soon even the lands that were praised are sold, and what is brought in is no longer the means of farming but chains.

Still, when he looks for sureties, a respite is granted him, not so that he may find a way to freedom, but so that he may add a partner in slavery to share his misery. But what help can the addition of another’s calamity bring? Now his friends too flee, his table companions do not recognize him; he himself shuns the sight of everyone, and as a boxer dodges the various blows of his opponents, so he avoids meeting respectable men, and anxious lest he run into anyone, he goes out with a watchful eye. He returns ready for chains, returns wishing for death, thinking that, if he died, it would bring him a respite. He returns, wretchedly condemning himself for not having shunned another’s money and for having bound himself by the moneylender’s bronze.

O how many wretches have others’ goods made! “What have you to do,” he says, “with drinking the water of Gihon?” What, I say, have you to do with drinking the moneylender’s cup? “Many,” someone says, “have borrowed for a time, met their needs, and repaid the money.” And how many have strangled themselves because of interest? You consider those, you do not count these. You remember that some escaped; you do not remember that some perished. You reckon the coins repaid; you do not count the nooses sought, which many, too modest to bear insult or too frail to bear injury, have chosen by seeking death rather than the disgrace of so shameful an agreement, fearing the reproach of life more than the punishment of death.

I myself have seen a pitiable sight: children led to auction for a father’s debt, held as heirs of his calamity though they had no share in his inheritance, and the creditor not blushing at so monstrous a crime. He presses, urges, claims them. “Raised on my money,” he says, “let them acknowledge slavery in return for their keep; let them undergo bidding in return for the expense. Let the spear be raised over the price of each one.” Not without reason is the auction spear raised where a head is sought; not without reason does it come to auction where the lot is demanded. This is the moneylender’s inhumanity, this the debtor’s folly: that from the children to whom he leaves no money he takes away freedom; instead of a will he leaves a bond; instead of the profit of an inheritance, a contract of obligation. What does Scripture’s curse of a father upon his children mean, where there is no offense of impious sin? Or can any curse be harsher, any slavery heavier? And the dead man often has this advantage after death, that he does not see the miseries of his children.

Often a father himself sells his children by the authority of begetting, though not with the voice of love, and drags the poor things to auction with shamefaced look, saying: “Pay, children, the cost of my gluttony; pay the price of your father’s table. Vomit up what you did not devour, give back what you did not receive; you are the better for this, that by your own price you redeem your father, by your own slavery you buy your father’s freedom.”

Suppose someone who can help comes forward. Who could fill such a Charybdis, who could understand the moneylender’s accounts, who could satisfy his avarice? What price will he not inflate when he sees a redeemer? For he feeds not so much on his own gain as on another’s loss. True indeed, true is the divine sentence, as God’s own. When he was angry at the impiety of the Jewish people because it went after foreign gods, he said: “To which moneylender have I sold you?” For one who has been bound to a moneylender is sold, and sold not at one price but at a daily price; he is sold not with a limit but with a lasting increase. There is a new auction of interest every month, a new sale under daily bidding. Whoever offers more always drags him off; he is knocked down as merchandise, never valued as one already sold. Great, then, is the force of the heavenly sentence. The Lord did not think it enough to say: “To whom have I sold you?” He added: “to a moneylender.” Offended, he could find nothing harsher with which to punish the faithless. Forsaken, he remonstrates with them for fleeing the author of salvation, as if the Lord had sold them to some moneylender, a penalty fit for one who abandons the Lord. Slaves have something to fear more than the penalties of prison and chains; free men have something to dread for their carelessness of freedom.

Notice at the same time that moneylending has been judged a cause of transgression, since one who could bind himself to a moneylender easily departs from the Lord; for moneylending is the root of lying, the cause of faithlessness. “I did not sell you,” he says, “but you were sold by your sins.” So one who binds himself to a moneylender sells himself, and what is worse, sells himself not for bronze but for guilt.

Who is this moneylender of sin but the devil, from whom Eve borrowed sin and so put the whole human race in debt with the interest of a liable inheritance? Indeed, like a wicked moneylender he held the bond which the Lord afterwards blotted out with his own blood. For what had been written in the letters of death had to be dissolved by death. So the devil is a moneylender. Indeed, he showed the Savior his riches, saying: “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” But the Lord, the payer of others’ debts, owed him nothing, he who could say: “Behold, the prince of this world comes and finds nothing of his in me.” He owed nothing, but he paid for all, as he himself testifies, saying: “What I did not steal, I then paid back.”

How does the malice of this prince of the world differ? The moneylender binds the head with money, holds the hand, draws the lot, demands the hundredth. O sad name from a sweet one! The Lord set free the hundredth sheep (that hundredth is of salvation, this one of death), and good ground yields a hundredfold fruit. Woe to those who say that what is bitter is sweet and what is sweet bitter! What is more bitter than usury, what sweeter than grace? Should they not, by the very word with which they name the hundredth, call to mind the Redeemer, who came to save the hundredth sheep, not to destroy it?

Who is a harsher exactor? And this too is a sad name. Indeed the Lord says: “My people, your exactors cheat you”; and in the Gospel you have: “While you are going with your adversary to the magistrate, make an effort to be freed from him, lest he bring you to the judge, and the judge hand you over to the exactor, and the exactor put you in prison.” Recognize who this exactor is, who exacts even the last farthing. And the same man calls himself a creditor, and even in this name he commits fraud, like one who smears a cup of poison with honey, so that death may lie hidden under a pleasant smell and the smeared rim of the cup may conceal the force of the fraud. The creditor puts forward his name as though he trusted, yet he is as one who does not trust, to whom the trusting man gives a pledge.

How often have I seen the dead held by moneylenders as a pledge and burial refused while interest was demanded! I gladly agreed with them that they should bind their debtor, so that, with him taken, the surety might go free; for these are the laws of moneylending. So I said: “Hold your defendant, and so that he cannot slip away from you, take him home, shut him in your room, you who are harsher than executioners; for the one you hold the prison does not receive, the exactor releases. The prison lets go those guilty of sins after death; you shut them up. By the severity of the laws the dead man is released; by you he is held. Surely this man is now said to have fulfilled his lot. Still, I do not begrudge you keeping your pledge. There is no difference between funeral and interest, nothing between death and the lot: usurious interest sounds, yes sounds, the funeral wail. Now truly he whom you are suing has suffered loss of his head; yet bind him with stronger bonds, so that he does not fail to feel your chains. The debtor is hard and stiff, and one who no longer knows how to blush. One thing indeed you need not fear: that he will ask for food.” So I ordered

the body to be lifted and the funeral procession to be led to the moneylender’s house; but from there too sounds of wailing such as this rang out from those shut in. There too you would have believed there was a funeral, there you would have thought the dead were mourned; nor was the impression false, except that it was clear more were going to die there. Overcome by the custom of religion (for elsewhere even such pledges are said to be accepted), the moneylender asked that the remains be carried to the place of burial. Only then did I see humane moneylenders. I pretended to be put out; yet, mindful of their humanity, I took care that they should not complain afterwards that they had been cheated, until, putting their own necks under the bier, they themselves carried the dead man to the tomb, weeping with deeper grief for the funeral of their money.

Hear another thing no less bitter. These men watch the gatherings of gamblers and judge the misfortune of the loser to be their own advantage. They stand surety for each one. At first chance plays out various outcomes; victory often passes to different players, and its rewards and misery change in turn. All are beaten and all win; the moneylender alone gains. With the others the name of having won is empty; with the moneylender alone is the fruit, not yearly but momentary. They alone make profit from the loss of all; to them alone belongs the interest of the victory. You may see the rest suddenly needy, suddenly rich, then stripped, changing their condition with each throw. Their life turns like a die; their fortune rolls on the board; play is made of danger, and danger of play; as many stakes, so many proscriptions. The shouting of those applauding, the weeping of the despoiled, the groaning of the lamenting. Among them the creditor sits like a tyrant, condemning each by a capital lot; he brandishes the spears of auction, and holds a deathly auction of the spoils of each. Some he makes over to proscription, others to slavery: not so many were killed under tyrants. I would more rightly call this a gamble of life than of money; what is valid for ever is carried off in a moment. Drunkenness judges, and no one appeals. Gambling too has its laws, which the rights of the forum do not undo. If you can believe it, one who thinks he should resist is branded with infamy, and the sentence of infamous men brands a disgrace more heavily than a judicial censure; for those condemned before the judge are glorious among them, while those condemned among them are criminals before the judge too. Moses established a noble court of elders; yet they judged the lighter matters, and were accustomed to reserve the weighty word, that is, the more important cases, for Moses’ judgment. Here it is said: “The council of gamblers has judged,” and the power of gamblers is feared more than that of lions. Among these wild beasts you live and move, moneylender; from these beasts you snatch their food; you are thought fouler than they, and you are feared as crueller than they.