The minor philosophers, contemporaries or successors of the Socratics, present in their extant fragments some ideas on wealth and other economic problems that are worthy of note.
For purposes of convenience, we shall group them all here, though some of them would chronologically precede one or both of the greater philosophers.
The successors of Plato in the Academy, Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Crantor,853 carried forward the teaching of the Socratics on wealth, as opposed to the more extreme doctrine of the Cynics and Stoics.854
There was, however, probably less emphasis on matters economic in their writings, since their prime interest was in practical individual ethics rather than in the political morality of Plato and Aristotle, though Xenocrates is known to have written an Economicus.855
Theophrastus,856 the first and greatest successor of Aristotle in the Peripatetic school, was the author of a treatise on wealth, of which we know only the name.857 He also probably dealt somewhat with economic subjects in his Ethics and Politics, but only slight fragments of either work are extant. He reveals