Wealth & Money Quote by Hesiod

Poverty, in Hesiod, doesn’t just empty a cupboard; it colonizes a person’s posture. The line anatomizes “false shame” as a social toxin that latches onto the poor by default, regardless of what they’ve actually done. Shame here isn’t moral feedback. It’s a public verdict: you are lesser, therefore you should feel lesser. Hesiod’s move is coldly practical. He’s warning that this kind of shame can “harm a man greatly” by making him timid, compliant, and easy to exploit; or it can “profit him” by forcing him into relentless labor and self-discipline to escape humiliation. Either way, the emotion functions like a tool in the hands of the system.

The second clause lands with brutal clarity: “confidence with wealth.” Hesiod isn’t praising rich people’s character. He’s pointing to a self-reinforcing loop where money reads as legitimacy, so it generates ease, audacity, and social permission. Confidence is treated as a virtue, but it’s also an accessory purchased with security. Wealth lets you fail without being defined by failure; poverty makes even caution look like guilt.

Context matters: Hesiod wrote in an agrarian world where survival hinged on harvests, weather, and fragile household economies. His Work and Days is obsessed with labor, justice, and the indignities that attend scarcity. The subtext is almost modern: economic status becomes a moral aesthetic. The poor don’t merely have less; they’re expected to look ashamed while having it.