There’s no evidence … that greed or miserliness or self-interest was new in the sixteenth or the nineteenth or any other century. Auri sacra fames, “for gold the infamous hunger,” is from The Aeneid, book 3, line 57, not from Benjamin Franklin or Advertising Age. The propensity to truck and barter is human nature. Commerce is not some evil product of recent manufacture. Commercial behavior is one of the world’s oldest professions.

Deirdre McCloskey (2006). The Bourgeois Virtues. Ethics for an Age of Commerce, p 2