Wealth & Money Quote by Plutarch

Plutarch isn’t offering a moral scold about greed; he’s diagnosing a republic the way a physician reads a pulse. “Oldest” does double work: inequality isn’t a modern glitch but a recurring feature of self-rule, a problem baked into the civic experiment. “Most fatal” raises the stakes from ethics to survival. A republic can endure bad leaders, foreign threats, even cultural decadence, he implies, but not a permanent split between those who own the game and those who merely play it.

The line’s intent is preventative, almost clinical: treat the imbalance early or watch it metastasize into faction, demagoguery, and collapse. The subtext is that inequality doesn’t just hurt the poor; it corrodes the shared fiction that makes a republic possible - that citizens have comparable standing, comparable obligations, and a credible path to influence. When the rich and poor stop recognizing each other as members of the same project, politics becomes a struggle over spoils rather than a debate over the common good.

Context matters. Plutarch lived under the Roman Empire while writing about Greek and Roman lives, steeped in histories where land concentration, debt, and patronage repeatedly turned civic equality into oligarchy or mob rule. His point lands with the force of pattern recognition: republics don’t usually die from a single dramatic coup. They die from a slow civic anemia, when wealth becomes power becomes law, and “the people” becomes a slogan one side uses against the other.