Virtue comes after money.

Horace wasn’t kidding when he exhorted his fellow citizens to pursue money first and virtue second. O cives, quaerenda pecunia primum est, virtus post nummos. And he wasn’t comparing apples and oranges. By money he meant the arts of money making. By virtue he meant the moral virtues such as justice and kindness and generosity. The former skills, he was saying, come first and take pride of place over the latter.

Notice that Horace isn’t saying that virtue, or least the reputation for it, is worthless. On the contrary, he implies that it does have value. But its value is inferior to the skills that acquire wealth and what wealth can buy.

How would we go about examining such a claim as this? And what exactly is Horace saying? That one group of skills is more important than another? More important for what? But we have one easy answer to that question. More important for acquiring the kind of life we desire and aspire to.

Many of you will probably think at this point, why does this even need to be argued? If we aspire to wealth, then the arts of money making are central and crucial. But I don’t think that assumption was behind Horace’s recommendation. That money making is more important only if you wealth above other things. No, I think we should intrepret Horace as commending the arts of pursuing money as the foundation for virtually any kind of life.

So how do evaluate the claim that one set of skills, aimed at money making, is more important than another set of skills, aimed at acting justly and kindly and generously? Well, perhaps we could look at what each set of kills is likely to achieve by itself when practiced well. If we become good money makers, here’s what we can acquire in our life and accomplish. If we become good at the moral virtues, here’s what we can do and accomplish. Horace is saying the gains from the first will be much more important and substantial than anything we get from the second.

That’s still not very clear, but perhaps it give us a way to start. We can looking at what we gain by being good money makers, then what we gain by being good at the moral virtues, and finally compare them. As a first approximation we take Horace’s view to be that we gain much more and more important things with the money making arts.

I hear someone objecting. “So is Horace claiming that money making should be the most important thing in our lives, because I don’t accept that.” And neither do I. And neither, I think, does Horace the poet. Poet, remember, not money lender. Certainly Horace never says that money is THE thing. We look in vain for the line omnia vincit pecunia in his letters and odes. We may pursue money to support our art or our family responsibilities or our recreations or whatever we place at the center of our life. Horace never implies that money is the most important thing or something to be pursued for its own sake. He says only that money making is more important in our lives than virtue.

“But suppose someone is very bad at money making. Does Horace imply that he’s doomed to a bad life?” He does not say that either. Notice he doesn’t say that one set of skills is essential to a good life and the other isn’t. He says only one set of skills is more important, which is not the same thing. We should look at a life that does not know how to make money and see what happens to it. Is it a livable life and life we’d care to live?

“But what about a life that lacks the moral virtues?” Yes, let’s look at that life too. What does it actually lack?

I think we have our work cut out for us, trying to see what place money and virtue should play in our lives, and whether we can agree that one of them is more important than the other.