Hiero

And, moreover, you will find that even poverty is rarer among private citizens than among despots. For much and little are to be measured not by number, but in relation to the owner’s needs; so that what is more than enough is much, and what is less than enough is little.

Therefore, the despot with his abundance of wealth has less to meet his necessary expenses than the private citizen. For while private citizens can cut down the daily expenditure as they please, despots cannot, since the largest items in their expenses and the most essential are the sums they spend on the life-guards, and to curtail any of these means ruin.

Besides, when men can have all they need by honest means, why pity them as though they were poor? May not those who through want of money are driven to evil and unseemly expedients in order to live, more justly be accounted wretched and poverty-stricken?

Now, despots are not seldom forced into the crime of robbing temples and their fellow men through chronic want of cash to meet their necessary expenses. Living, as it were, in a perpetual state of war, they are forced to maintain an army, or they perish.