Rhetoric

​The characters that follow wealth are easy for everyone to see on the surface. For they are insolent and arrogant, affected in some way by the acquisition of wealth (for they are so disposed as if they possessed all good things; and wealth is like a sort of price of the value of other things, wherefore all things appear to be purchasable by it). ​They are also luxurious and ostentatious: luxurious indeed on account of their mode of life and the display of their prosperity, but ostentatious and rude because of everyone being accustomed to spend time around what is loved and admired by them, and because of their thinking that others emulate what they themselves do. And at the same time, they reasonably feel this (for those who need the possessors of wealth are many; hence also the saying of Simonides about the wise and the rich was uttered to the wife of Hiero, when she asked whether it was better to become rich or wise, and he replied, “Rich”; for he said he saw the wise spending their time at the doors of the rich). ​They also think themselves worthy to rule; for they think they possess those things for the sake of which it is worthy to rule. And to put it in a nutshell, the character of wealth is that of a foolishly happy person.

​But the characters of those who have recently acquired wealth differ from those who have possessed it of old, in that the newly rich have all vices to a greater degree and in a worse form (for to be newly rich is, as it were, the ill-breeding of wealth); and the injustices they commit are not malicious, but some are from insolence and others from lack of self-control, such as assault and adultery.