Life & Wisdom Quote by Lactantius

Poverty, Lactantius suggests, is less a ledger of possessions than a condition of exposure. The sting in "unless he stand in need of justice" is its reversal of the usual moral math: it is not the hungry man who is most impoverished, but the person whose society has made fairness scarce. "Stand in need" carries courtroom posture and social dependence at once; you are literally forced to stand before power and ask for what should have been yours by default. That is the humiliation he wants you to feel.

As a Christian writer in the late Roman world, Lactantius is working against an empire that could admire charity while taking hierarchy for granted. Almsgiving can soothe consciences without changing the machinery that produces winners and losers; justice, by contrast, implicates the whole system. The line quietly indicts a culture that treats law as a tool of the strong: if you need justice, it means it is being withheld, rationed, or sold. That scarcity is the real poverty.

The compactness of the sentence does the rhetorical work. "Nobody" is absolute, almost prosecutorial; it denies the audience its favorite escape hatch, the comforting idea that poverty happens only to "other" people with empty pockets. By defining deprivation as vulnerability to injustice, Lactantius universalizes the risk while moralizing the remedy: a society can be rich in coin and still bankrupt in legitimacy.