For Honor or Money

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides intoned “My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.” In “Pericles’ Funeral Oration” in Book Two, Thucydides accomplishes that, and while Pericles’ acclamation for the honored Athenian dead eschews commerce for nobler topics, his words are as appropriate in this contemporary journal as they were more than two millennia ago:

“One’s sense of honor is the only thing that does not grow old, and the last pleasure, when one is worn out with age, is not, as the poet said, making money, but having the respect of one’s fellow men.”
-from Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book Two, tr. Rex Warner, Penguin Classics 1954.