Friday, March 29, 2013

Pleonexia


From The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant:

By the time of Plato's death (347 B.C.) his hostile analysis of Athenian democracy was approaching apparent confirmation by history. Athens recovered wealth, but this was now commercial rather than landed wealth; industrialists, merchants, and bankers were at the top of the reshuffled heap. The change produced a feverish struggle for money, a pleonexia, as the Greeks called it--an appetite for more and more....

No comments: