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[330c] And that is generally the case with those who have not earned it themselves.1 But those who have themselves acquired it have a double reason in comparison with other men for loving it. For just as poets feel complacency about their own poems and fathers about their own sons,2 so men who have made money take this money seriously as their own creation and they also value it for its uses as other people do. So they are hard to talk to since they are unwilling to commend anything except wealth.”

1 Aristotle makes a similar observation, Eth. Nic. iv. 1.20, Rhet. i. 11. 26, ii. 16. 4. For nouveaux riches, γενναῖοι ἐκ βαλλαντίου, see Starkie on Aristophanes Wasps, 1309.

2 Cf. Theaetetus 160 E, Symposium 209 C, Phaedrus 274 E, with Epaminondas' saying, that Leuctra and Mantineia were his children.

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