Life & Wisdom Quote by Sextus Propertius

Gold is the new god here, and Propertius doesn’t bother pretending the conversion was subtle. “Every man now worships gold” lands like a civic diagnosis: not a few greedy elites, not a temporary craze, but a society-wide liturgy of money. The phrasing matters. “Worships” isn’t just “wants” or “chases”; it’s devotion, ritual, surrender. Propertius is sketching a moral regime change, where value has slid from virtue and tradition into pure purchasing power.

The second clause sharpens the blade: “all other reverence being done away.” That passive construction suggests something systematic, almost administrative, as if older forms of honor have been quietly abolished by custom. It’s not that people stopped believing in gods, family lineage, civic duty, or erotic ideals; it’s that those reverences have been priced out, made quaint, demoted to aesthetics. Propertius, an elegiac poet working in the early Augustan era, is writing as Rome consolidates after civil war and begins to launder violence into stability. With empire comes spoils, property, patronage networks, and a new kind of social mobility that looks, to an old moral imagination, like corruption.

The subtext is personal as much as political. Elegy is obsessed with desire and dependence; in a world where everything has a cost, even intimacy starts to feel like a transaction. Propertius’s line isn’t nostalgia for a pure past so much as a warning about what gets flattened when money becomes the only language left: honor, love, faith, and the idea that some things should refuse a price tag.