09 Dec That We Ought Not to Borrow (Plutarch) | Part B’
Being unable to carry the burden of poverty you put the money-lender upon your back, a burden difficult for even the rich to bear. “How, then, am I to live?” Do you ask this, when you have hands and feet and a voice, when you are a man capable of loving and being loved, of doing favours and being grateful for them? Live by teaching letters, by leading children to school, by being a door-keeper, by working as a sailor or a boatman; none of these is so disgraceful or disagreeable as hearing the order “Pay up.”
Swallows do not borrow, ants do not borrow, creatures upon which nature has bestowed neither hands, reason, nor art; but men, with their superior intellect, support through their ingenuity horses, dogs, partridges, hares, and jackdaws in addition to themselves. Why, then, have you come to the poor opinion of yourself, that you are less persuasive than a jackdaw, more dumb than a partridge, less well-born than a dog, so that you can obtain no help from any human being by waiting on him, entertaining him, guarding him, or fighting for him? Do you not see how many opportunities are offered on land and on the sea?
Lo, even Miccylus I beheld,says Crates,Carding the wool, and his wife too carding he wool along with him, Striving in terrible conflict to ‘scape from the onslaught of famine.
King Antigonus asked Cleanthes, when he met him in Athens after not seeing him for a while, “Are you still grinding corn, Cleanthes?” “Yes, Your Majesty,” he replied; “I do it in order not to be a deserter from Zeno’s instruction, nor from philosophy either.” What a great spirit the man had who came from the mill and the kneading-trough, and with the hand which ground the flour and baked the bread wrote about the gods, the moon, the stars, and the sun! But to us such labours seem slavish. And therefore, in order to be free, we contract debts and pay court to men who are ruiners of homes, we act as bodyguard to them, dine them, make them presents, and pay them tribute, not because of our poverty (for no one lends to poor men), but because of our extravagance. For if we were content with the necessaries of life, the race of money-lenders would be as non-existent as that of Centaurs and Gorgons; but luxury produced money-lenders just as it did goldsmiths, silversmiths, perfumers, and dyers in gay colours; for our debts are incurred, not to pay for bread or wine, but for country-seats, slaves, mules, banquet-halls, and tables, and because we give shows to the cities with unrestrained expenditure, contending in fruitless and thankless rivalries. But the man who is once involved remains a debtor all his life, exchanging, like a horse that has once been bridled, one rider for another.
And so “one after another takes over” the borrower, first a usurer or broker of Corinth, then one of Patrae, then an Athenian, until, attacked on all sides by all of them, he is dissolved and chopped up into the small change of interest payments. For just as a man who has fallen into the mire must either get up or stay where he is, but he who turns and rolls over covers his wet and drenched person with more dirt; so in their transfers and changes of loans, by assuming additional interest payments and plastering themselves with them, they weigh themselves down more and more; and they are much like persons ill with cholera, who do not accept treatment, but vomit up the prescribed medicine and then continue constantly to collect more disease. Similarly these borrowers refuse to be purged, and always, at every season of the year, when painfully and with convulsions they cough up the interest while another payment immediately accrues and presses upon them, they suffer a fresh attack of nausea and headache. What they ought to do is to get rid of debts and become healthy and free again.
Hear the tale of the vultures: One of them had an attack of vomiting and said he was spewing out bowels, but the other, who was there, said “What harm is there in that? For you are not spewing out your own bowels, but those of the corpse we tore to pieces a little while ago.” So any man in debt sells, not his own plot of land, nor his own house, but those of his creditor whom by law he has made their owner. “Not so, by Zeus,” he says; “why, my father left me this field.” Yes, and your father left you your liberty and your civil rights, which you ought to to value more.
Well, then, is it not a tempest that arises about debtors when the lender after a while comes up to them saying “Pay”?
Thus having spoken he gathered the clouds and stirred up the great waters; East wind and South wind and West with furious blasts raged together, as interest rolled upon interest; and the debtor, overwhelmed, continues to clutch them as they weigh him down, for he cannot swim away and escape; no, he sinks down to the bottom and disappears along with the friends who have endorsed his notes. Crates the Theban, when he was not pressed for payment and did not even owe anything, because he disliked the mere administration of property, its cares and distractions, abandoned an estate valued at eight talents and, donning cloak and wallet, took refuge in philosophy and poverty. Anaxagoras also left his land to be grazed over by sheep. But what need is there of mentioning these men, when Philoxenus the lyric poet, who shared in the allotment of lands in a colony in Sicily, which ensured him a livelihood and a household furnished with abundant resources, when he saw that luxury, indulgence in a life of pleasure, and lack of culture were prevalent there, said, “By the Gods, these good things shall not make me lose myself; I will rather lose them,” and leaving his allotment to others, he sailed away. But people in debt are content to be dunned, mulcted of tribute, enslaved, and cheated; they endure, like Phineus, to feed winged harpies which carry off their food and devour it, buying their grain, not at the proper season, but before it is harvested, and purchasing the oil before the olives have been plucked.
Moralia
That We Ought Not to Borrow
Plutarch
