This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[2]
They are luxurious and swaggerers, luxurious because of their luxury
and the display of their prosperity, swaggerers and ill-mannered because all men
are accustomed to devote their attention to what they like and admire, and the
rich suppose that what they themselves are emulous of is the object of all other
men's emulation. At the same time this feeling is not unreasonable; for those
who have need of the wealthy are many in number. Hence the answer of Simonides
to the wife of Hiero concerning the wise and the rich, when she asked which was
preferable, to be wise or to be rich. “Rich,” he answered,
“for we see the wise spending their time at the doors of the
rich.”
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.