Alexander's Coins and Alexander's Image Book

"Dicing plays a similar role in Isocrates' extended account of the decadent state of Athenian youth in the Antidosis:

'For in fact, you have caused the most reliable [of the young men] to spend their youth in drinking bouts and hanging out and relaxation and games, neglecting to be serious about how they will become better men, while those who have a worse nature spend their days in such acts of licentiousness in which not even a self-respecting house slave would have dared spend his time in the old days. For some of them cool their wine in the Nine Springs, others drink in taverns, still others play dice in the gambling houses, and many of them spend their time idling around the schools for flutegirls.'

Here, Isocrates offers us two grades of debauchery; the 'better sort' of young men spend their time in drinking, hanging out, idleness, and games, while the completely irredeemable engage in activities that a self-respecting house slave would not have dared in former days. It is worth noting that the activities of these young men beyond the pale consistently represent a kind of mercantilization or monetarization of the first-order decadence: thus the better sort of young men drink, the worse sort drink in taverns; the better sort play games, the worse sort play dice; the better sort hang out, the worse sort hang out around the schools for hired flutegirls. In each case their activities are worse because they have come to involve the domination of money disembedded from its proper social networks, a process marked by the turning-inside-out of civic space. For the other thing that characterizes the second-order debauchery as opposed to the first- in this passage is that activities that should properly be private - sympotic drinking and game-playing - have invaded and taken over the public domain (hence the geographic specificity of the second list in contrast to the first). And all these pursuits conspire in Isocrates' nightmare vision to transform the city from political space to marketplace of private pleasures. Under the circumstances, the unfavorable comparison of the worse sort of young men to the 'self-respecting house slave' is not fortuitous: Isocrates implies that in their addiction to the pleasures of drinking, dicing, and ogling girls, these youths have relinquished the self-control and autonomy that make them free men."