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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: lawgiver placed so effectual a check upon the desire of riches for the
sake of luxury? What inducement, for instance, would there be to make
money, even for the sake of wearing apparel, in a state where personal
adornment is held to lie not in the costliness of the clothes they
wear, but in the healthy condition of the body to be clothed? Nor
again could there be much inducement to amass wealth, in order to be
able to expend it on the members of a common mess, where the
legislator had made it seem far more glorious that a man should help
his fellows by the labour of his body than by costly outlay. The
latter being, as he finely phrased it, the function of wealth, the
former an activity of the soul.
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