Wealth & Money Quote by Terence

A Roman playwright doesn’t need a manifesto when he can land a line like a punch. Terence frames inequality not as a regrettable glitch but as “fate” - a supposedly natural order that conveniently launders human decisions into inevitability. That’s the trick: by blaming ordination, the powerful dodge responsibility, while everyone else is told to accept the accounting.

The sentence is built like a moral ledger. “Those who have the least” and “the wealthy” are not just social categories; they’re opposing poles, made more brutal by the verb choice. The poor aren’t merely losing; they’re “always adding” - performing the labor of enrichment. It’s a quiet indictment of systems where extraction is continuous, routine, almost domestic. The image of a “treasury” matters, too: not a household pantry, not a market stall, but a hoard. Wealth becomes something centralized, guarded, and compounding.

Terence wrote comedy, but Roman comedy often smuggled class critique through the side door: slaves outwitting masters, debts driving plots, money dictating marriages. In the mid-Republic, Rome was awash in spoils, land consolidation, and a widening gap between elites and everyone else. The line’s subtext is that exploitation isn’t an accident of bad luck; it’s institutionalized habit dressed up as destiny. Terence’s “unfair” is doing double work: it’s moral outrage, and it’s stagecraft, inviting the audience to laugh, then notice they’re laughing inside the machine.