emphasizing its temporary nature as compared with virtue.24 Pythagoras and his followers have often been given a prominent place in the history of communism, but this is probably due to a false interpretation.25 It is likely, however, that he opposed the evils of luxury, and moralized on the relation between wealth and virtue.26 Democritus wrote a work on agriculture.27 Like the other philosophers, he taught that happiness was to be sought in the gold of character, rather than in material wealth.28 To his mind, poverty and wealth alike were but names for need and satiety (κόρου).29 Wealth without understanding was not a safe possession, depending for its value on right use.30 The amassing of wealth by just means, however, was good,31 though unjust gains were always a source of evil.32 Excessive desire for wealth was worse than the most extreme poverty.33 It is possible also that Democritus held to a mild form of the social contract theory of the origin of society.34 Heraclitus complained bitterly of the unwisdom of the masses and their merely material view of life.35 He made the common antithesis between material and spiritual wealth,36 and observed the fact that gold is a universal medium of exchange.37 Hippodamas of Miletus and Phaleas of Chalcedon proposed new plans for the distribution of wealth, but we have the barest outline of their theories from Aristotle.38 Their systems will be discussed in a following chapter.
The Sophists, true to their character as philosophers of extreme individualism, developed a new theory of the origin of society. The already current term φύσις, “nature,” which had been accepted as a sufficient reason for the state’s existence, was now opposed to “law,” νόμος, as natural to artificial. The Sophists argued that, in a primitive state of nature, perfect individualism was the rule. Men did injustice without restraint. The weaker, however, being in the majority, and finding it to their disadvantage to compete with the strong, agreed neither to do nor to suffer injustice, and constrained the stronger minority to co-operate in their decision. Thus arose the social contract whereby nature gave up its real instinct for an artificial convention