Three Books on Gold

thirty thousand beasts of burden. Let us conclude, therefore, that while mortals did agree to value gold excessively, why they agreed is not clear, nor was it always a settled and established fact that it pleased all nations in common that gold should be the measure of other things.

THAT GOLD IS NOT TO BE VALUED SO HIGHLY AS IT IS, BASED ON UTILITY DERIVED FROM THE NATURE OF THE THING. CHAP. II.

I held in very low regard the argument by which some have attempted to persuade the common people: that gold is of the greatest utility to mortals. For against this, I myself opposed iron, without which neither agriculture—an art no less necessary than common—can subsist; and as Xenophon says, the mother and nurse of all arts. Nor is building sufficiently carried out, nor is nautical [craft] clearly maintained, not to omit the military, which even though it harms some, does not nevertheless fail everyone. We are immediately supported by that hemistich: "Gold more harmful than iron," and another saying, not unlike it: "Iron more pleasing than gold among wars."

And next to this followed the point that this eulogy was stripped of its claims by all the best men, [who argued] that gold was discovered for the destruction of life. Furthermore, I also remembered that antiquity both marveled at and at the same time felt indignation for the value that gold previously held, when it strove to mock it under the fable of Midas, for whom the accumulated mass of gold offered absolutely no solid assistance for life.