The role of wealth and the value of poverty in Socratic literature: a reading of Aeschines’ Callias and Telauges

The paper focuses on Socrates’ views on wealth and poverty in Aeschines’ dialogues. The theme is first addressed from a ‘biographical’ perspective (section 2), by tackling a feature that all sources ascribe to Aeschines, and which proves to be connected to his relationship with Socrates: his life of poverty. The close analysis of a set of texts dealing with a certain ‘Aeschines son of Sellus’ – who, though poor, presented himself as a rich man – will pave the way for the examination of some fundamental accounts of Socrates’ attitude towards wealth, which represents a sort of topos in the Socratic dialogues. This will allow me to shift, in the following part of the paper (section 3), from the biographical level to a philosophical discussion regarding the problem of wealth. Socrates’ ‘boasting’ about his poverty – and his distinctive view of the relationship between πενία and πλοῦτος – is based on a specific, non-material conception of wealth that is expounded in some of Aeschines’ dialogues, namely in the Callias and the Telauges. Given the fragmentary status of both works, I will examine the scanty surviving testimonies in relation to some parallel passages by other Socratics. Indeed, the arguments presented by Aeschines’ Socrates bear a close resemblance to those found in other Socratic dialogues, particularly in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and Memorabilia. In the last part (section 4) I will briefly examine these further accounts, so as to enrich the understanding of Aeschines’ lost dialogues and to reconstruct, at least in part, the wider debate about the problem of wealth raised within the logoi Sokratikoi.