Wealth & Money Quote by Empedocles

Empedocles is selling salvation by cognition, and he does it with the blunt moral clarity of a man who thinks cosmology is personal hygiene. “Wealth” is the bait: not coin, not status, but a stockpile of “divine thoughts” that pays out as happiness. The line flatters the listener into spiritual ambition while quietly redefining piety as intellectual access. In a Greek world where the gods could be bargained with through ritual, Empedocles pivots the bargain inward: the real sacrifice is ignorance.

The subtext is almost polemical. “Dark” beliefs aren’t just mistaken; they’re degrading. Wretchedness isn’t punishment from Zeus but the natural consequence of a muddled picture of the divine. That framing lets Empedocles critique popular religion without naming it: fear-driven myths, capricious deities, and superstition become psychological impoverishment. He can sound reverent about “the gods” while smuggling in a philosopher’s agenda, the move that keeps him intelligible to the city and authoritative to his students.

Context matters because Empedocles is a hybrid figure: pre-Socratic theorist, mystical poet, alleged wonder-worker. His universe runs on impersonal forces (Love and Strife) and cycles, not on divine mood swings. So “divine thoughts” likely means aligning your mind with the deep structure of reality, the kind of insight that turns ritual into ethics and cosmology into self-command. It’s an elitist comfort, too: happiness becomes a credential. If you’re miserable, perhaps you’re not unlucky; perhaps you’re unenlightened.