argument that a condition can be conceived in which our bodily needs might be supplied without silver or gold, in which case these metals would be worthless.976 However, the necessity of intrinsic value for international currency is recognized,977 and it seems hardly probable that the purpose of the dialogue was to contend that money is never wealth, since the very implication of the argument is that current money is wealth.978
TELES
The fragments of Teles exhibit the same extreme asceticism of the Cynics in relation to wealth.979 His main thesis is that the possession of money does not free from want and need.980 Many who have great possessions do not use them, because of stinginess and sordidness.981 But if wealth is not used, it is useless, and cannot free from need or want.982 Here we meet a different application of the criterion of “use” from that with which we have become familiar in the Socratics, the Eryxias, and Ruskin. It is based on refusal, rather than inability to use, though the other idea is in the background. The author argues further that wealth does not free from need, because the wealthy life is always insatiate (ἄπληστος),983 and wealth does not change the disposition,984 by which change alone the life can be freed from need and slavery.985 To try to accomplish this by wealth is like attempting to cure a patient of dropsy by stuffing him with water until he bursts.986 Counsel is given, therefore, not to turn one’s sons to the acquisition of wealth, but to study under Crates, who can set them free from the vice of insatiety.987
Poverty, on the other hand, does not change the disposition of the temperate man for the worse988 There is nothing distressing or painful about it,989 for Crates and Diogenes were poor and yet passed their life in ease.990 It is no harder to endure old age in poverty than in wealth, but all depends upon the disposition.991 Poverty deprives the life of no positive good, but furnishes the opportunity of gaining good,992 since it is