Time & Perspective Quote by Euripides

Euripides lands the point with the cool cruelty of someone who’s watched fortunes evaporate and reputations stick. The line isn’t just anti-money piety; it’s a warning about what survives when the props are kicked away. Wealth, he says, is a “little moment,” a guest who might not even bother showing up. Character is what remains when the banquet ends, the city turns, or the gods decide you’ve had enough.

That contrast does double duty in a culture where status was both public and precarious. In classical Athens, riches could be confiscated, spent on liturgies, lost in war, or undone by a single lawsuit. Tragedy, Euripides’ home genre, is basically an engine for proving how quickly the external can collapse: kings become beggars, heroes become liabilities, a household’s “security” turns out to be narrative decoration. So the quote reads like stagecraft advice as much as moral counsel: don’t build your life around scenery.

The subtext is sharper than a fortune-cookie version of virtue. “Only our characters are steadfast” suggests a kind of courtroom logic: when everything else is contested, your ethos is the only evidence you carry. It also carries a democratic sting. Gold buys influence, but it can’t buy legitimacy once the polis or the chorus starts judging. Euripides is staking value on the one currency tragedy can’t stop demanding: how you act when you can’t pay your way out.