Life & Wisdom Quote by Virgil

Virgil doesn’t just scold greed here; he stages it as a curse with agency, a hunger that eats through people and then speaks through them. The line is a rhetorical exorcism: “accursed” casts gold not as a neutral tool but as a contaminant, something that enters the bloodstream of civic life and turns ordinary desire into compulsion. And that last verb matters. “Compel” suggests coercion more than temptation, as if the human heart becomes a hostage once wealth is framed as survival, status, or safety.

The subtext is Roman and brutally political. Virgil is writing in the shadow of civil wars, proscriptions, land seizures, and the kind of opportunism that flourishes when a republic is being hollowed out and refitted into an empire. In that world, gold isn’t just money; it’s the accelerant of betrayal, the lubricant of violence, the reward that makes moral exceptions feel “necessary.” By addressing hunger directly, he also shifts blame in an interesting way: individuals are culpable, but the system that sanctifies accumulation is the true predator.

There’s craft in the classical cadence, too. The question “to what dost thou not compel” is a trapdoor: it implies there is no limit, no bottom. Greed is framed as infinite appetite, and that infinity is the real horror. Virgil’s intent isn’t moral self-help; it’s diagnosis. When a culture worships extraction, the heart doesn’t simply weaken - it gets recruited.