Education Quote by Sophocles

Money isn’t just a tool here; it’s a hostile force that “grows among mankind” like an invasive weed, thriving off human weakness. Sophocles loads the line with a grim irony: currency is supposed to enable exchange, cooperation, civic life. Instead, he frames it as the anti-civic substance, the thing that can sack cities and unhouse people with a quiet efficiency armies envy. The verb choices are doing heavy lifting. “Sacks” and “drives” make money an aggressor, not a neutral medium. It’s not that people commit crimes for money; money commits crimes through people.

The subtext is Greek tragedy’s obsession with contamination: once the wrong value enters a household or polis, everything that looked stable rots from the inside. Sophocles doesn’t stop at the poor or desperate. He goes after “the worthiest minds,” implying that intelligence and virtue aren’t safeguards but higher-grade instruments for rationalizing “base deeds.” Corruption isn’t a fall from innocence; it’s a reinterpretation of morality under pressure. The smart learn to call self-interest necessity, greed pragmatism, betrayal strategy.

Context matters: Athens in Sophocles’ era is a society where wealth, war, and public life are tightly coupled. Empires expand, cities fall, people are displaced, and money becomes the bloodstream of power. The line reads less like a rant against commerce than a warning about what happens when value gets unmoored from justice: the polis becomes legible in prices, and the human becomes negotiable.