By
Gregg Opelka
Oct. 22, 2018 7:13 p.m. ET
With the Mega Millions lottery jackpot at a record $1.6 billion, I’m tempted to buy a ticket. But I won’t. As Angelo tells Escalus in “Measure for Measure,” “ ’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, another thing to fall.”
The Mega Millions hype is omnipresent and inescapable. As the jackpot grows, invariably so does the coverage. When asked by complicit media members what they would do with their winnings, hopeful gamblers lay out a panoply of extravagant splurges, bucket-list wishes, and other pie-in-the-sky dreams, all suddenly made possible by a magnificent, Kramdenesque stroke of luck.
I’m still not buying. My reluctance has nothing to do with the odds—astronomically stacked against me—and everything to do with an all-but-forgotten poet named Albius Tibullus.
Some 2,050 years ago, in the waning days of the Roman Republic, young Tibullus wrote love poems in Latin, many of them elegies to his pseudonymous lover and inspiration, Delia. (Her real name was Plania.) Little is known about Tibullus. We don’t even know his full name. All told, only a few dozen of his poems are extant.
Yet in his first poem Tibullus captured the essence of pre-Empire Rome’s revered frugality in a terse three-word phrase. Spurning the desire for wealth, he describes himself as contentus vivere parvo—“content to live on a little.” In this elegant elegy, the poet does not so much decry the riches others seek either through military campaigns or by braving the seas as commercial merchants, as extol the joy of leading a simple, carefree life in which having enough is satisfactory. A farmer as well as a poet, Tibullus lived off a once large, now small, plot of land. Much of his property, the poem implies, had been confiscated. (If you thought Marxists and progressives cooked up the idea of redistribution, you give them too much credit.)
Yet Tibullus revels in his modest circumstances. As long as he knows the gods will grant him a decent harvest and Delia will weep for him at his funeral, he is, in his own word, content.
What panting Mega Millions journalists and starry-eyed ticket buyers fail to appreciate is that they enjoy wealth unimaginable in the time of Tibullus—or even a few decades ago—by virtue of living in the richest nation in the history of the world. They carry hand-held computers and have the ability to contact people thousands of miles away in an instant, often at no cost. Those of us of a certain age still remember a time when we changed ribbons in our typewriters and film in our cameras, wound our watches, turned pages manually, watched movies in a packed movie theater, played instruments you didn’t plug in, purchased our garb in edifices called “clothing stores,” and paid by the minute to talk to our friends on telephones attached to the walls. Miraculous improvements in medicine have significantly extended our lives, relimbed us, reduced our pain, and made mere existence more joyful than it has ever been.
For these reasons and 1.6 billion others—and with a nod to old Albius Tibullus—I’m passing on the Mega Millions drawing. I won the lottery the day I was born.
Mr. Opelka is a musical theater composer-lyricist.