To Donatus 12

But those too whom you think rich, joining woodland to woodland, and, shutting the poor out of their borders, extending their estates ever more widely without end or limit, who have the greatest weight of silver and gold and huge sums of money either heaped up in piles or buried in hoards: these, even amid their riches, trembling, are tortured by the anxiety of uncertain thought, lest the robber lay waste, lest the assassin attack, lest the hostile envy of some richer man trouble them with slanderous lawsuits. Neither food nor sleep comes to him in security; he sighs at the banquet, though he drink from a jewel, and when a softer couch has buried his body, weakened with feasting, in its deep folds, he lies awake on the down; nor does the wretch understand that these are splendid torments for him, that he is held bound to gold, that he is possessed rather than possesses; and (O detestable blindness of minds and deep darkness of insane greed!) when he could unburden himself and lighten himself of his weights, he goes on rather brooding over his growing fortunes, goes on stubbornly clinging to his penal heaps. From them there is no largesse for clients, no sharing with the needy; and they call it their own money, which they guard, shut up at home with anxious toil, as though it were another's, from which they give nothing to friends, nothing to children, nothing, finally, to themselves. They possess only so that another may not possess; and (O how great a difference of names!) they call 'goods' the things from which they have no use but for bad things.