War & Peace Quote by Anacreon

A toast-poet suddenly turns prosecutor: Anacreon’s curse is less about personal budgeting than civic rot. In a culture where poetry often greased the wheels of elite conviviality, he aims his sharpest line at the very class most likely to be listening. The opening malediction (“Cursed be he…”) adopts the language of ritual and religion, as if greed isn’t merely a vice but a contaminant that should be exiled. That’s strategic. You can argue with a moral lecture; you don’t argue with a curse without admitting the stakes are communal.

The repeated “Money takes the place…” is doing more than emphasis. It mimics substitution, a kind of moral counterfeiting: currency as a counterfeit brother, a purchased parent, a pay-to-play version of kinship. Greek society ran on networks of reciprocity, obligation, and honor; Anacreon frames money-love as an invasive technology that rewires those bonds. The subtext is that greed doesn’t just make you selfish, it makes you unrecognizable inside your own social ecosystem.

Then he widens the indictment into geopolitics: “war and slaughter.” That jump is the point. Avarice isn’t confined to the household; it scales. In the late Archaic Greek world of competing poleis, mercenary labor, ransom, plunder, and the cash needs of warfare, money was already entangling intimacy with violence. Anacreon’s rhetoric treats greed as a domino effect: once relationships become transactions, betrayal becomes a price, and bloodshed becomes an investment. The poem’s bite comes from how quickly it turns the private sin into public catastrophe.