From The Consolations of Philosophy (Alain De Botton, 2008) pp 19-20
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates was again in conversation with someone supremely confident of the truth of a common-sense idea. Meno was an imperious aristocrat who was visiting Attica from his native Thessaly and had an idea about the relation of money to virtue, In order to be virtuous, he explained to Socrates, one had to be very rich, and poverty was invariably a personal failing rather than an accident. We lack a portrait of Meno, too, though on looking through a Greek men’s magazine in the lobby of an Athenian hotel, I imagined that he might have borne a resemblance to a man drinking champagne in an illuminated swimming pool. The virtuous man, Meno confidently informed Socrates, was someone of great wealth who could afford good things. Socrates asked a few more questions:
SOCRATES: By good do you mean such things as health and wealth?
MENO: I include the acquisition of both gold and silver, and of high and honourable office in the state.
SOCRATES: Are these the only kind of good things you recognize?
MENO: Yes, I mean everything of that sort.
SOCRATES: Do you add ‘just and righteous’ to the word ‘acquisition’, or doesn’t it make any difference to you? Do you call it virtue all the same even if they are unjustly acquired?
MENO: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: So it seems that justice or temperance or piety, or some other part of virtue must attach to the acquisition [of gold and silver]. . . In fact, lack of gold and silver, if it results from a failure , to acquire them … in circumstances which would have made | their acquisition unjust, is itself virtue.
MENO: It looks like it.
SOCRATES: Then to have such goods is no more virtue than to lack them.
MENO: Your conclusion seems inescapable.
In a few moments, Meno had been shown that money and influence were not in themselves necessary and sufficient features of virtue. Rich people could be admirable, but this depended on how their wealth had been acquired, just as poverty could not by itself reveal anything of the moral worth of an individual. There was no binding reason for a wealthy man to assume that his assets guaranteed his virtue; and no binding reason for a poor one to imagine that his indigence was a sign of depravity.
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