The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

prudence is a virtue 261Because aristocratic and slave-owning members of city-states first discussedthe pagan virtues systematically, the pagan four of courage, temperance, justice,and prudence are often supposed to be especially suited to the ancientpolis, and irrelevant therefore to the sick hurry of modern life. But the suppositioncuts economics off from virtue, which is a mistake.In view of the highly commercial character of Greek culture from at thelatest the seventh century on, the anticommercial construal of the Greeklabeledvirtues seems strange. After all, the urns from which we learn somany details of Greekness contained olive oil bound in profit for a startlingarray of places, from Phoenicia’s strand to where the Atlantic raves outsidethe western straits. The old idea that the aristocracy of Greece and the senatorialclass of Rome were nobly landholding, and wouldn’t think of lendingmoney at interest or investing in a scheme of apartment building forprofit, is of course nonsense. 29 Athens and Rome were great commercialempires. When Aristotle is struggling to make justice fit his formula forvirtue as a mean between deficiency and excess, he turns with enthusiasmto the marketplace for examples. 30 As Thomas Carney observes, “The historyof antiquity resounds with the sanguinary achievements of Aryan warriorelites. But it was the despised Levantines, Arameans [for example, Jesusof Nazareth], Syrians, and Greeklings who constituted the economic heroesof antiquity.” 31The aristocracy, however entangled in the economy, affected to disdainit. Plato’s Socrates declares in The Republic that “the more men valuemoney-making, the less they value virtue.” 32 Aristotle says of retail tradethat it is “justly to be censured, because the gain in which it results is notnatural made, but is made at the expense of other men.” 33 By “naturalmade” he means grown from plants and animals. Aristotle is exhibiting herea hardy physiocracy that views only agriculture as “productive.” Late in thePolitics he says that, of course, “the life of mechanics and shopkeepers ...isignoble and inimical to goodness.” 34 In 44 BC Cicero declares to his sonMarcus that “trade, if petty, is to be considered vulgar; but if wholesale andon a large scale . . . it is not to be greatly criticized....But ofall the gainfuloccupations none is better than cultivation of the soil, none more fruitful,none more sweet, none more appropriate to a free man.” 35It was such aristocratic, or wannabe-aristocratic, snobbishness abouturban production in the ancient world, rehearsed in the Hellenic revivalof nineteenth-century divines and schoolmasters, that made the threenonprudence pagan virtues of justice, temperance, and courage seem