Ever since Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, people have been trying to grasp the scale of his incomprehensible fortune.

自从埃隆·马斯克成为世界上第一位万亿富翁以来，人们一直试图理解他那令人难以置信的巨额财富究竟有多庞大。

Some have noted that a stack of $100 bills amounting to $1 trillion would extend 679 miles high. The economist Steven Durlauf has observed that John D. Rockefeller’s wealth at one point equaled about 1.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product and that Mr. Musk’s wealth now amounts to at least twice as much, at more than 3 percent. It may not escape New York Knicks fans that even Jalen Brunson, who makes about $39 million per year, would need to play more than 25,000 seasons to accumulate that kind of money.

有人指出，1万亿美元的百元美钞叠起来约有1092千米高。经济学家史蒂文·德劳夫观察到，约翰·洛克菲勒的财富一度相当于美国国内生产总值的约1.5%，而马斯克现在的财富至少是其两倍，占比超过3%。纽约尼克斯队的球迷可能也会注意到，即使是年薪约3900万美元的杰伦·布伦森，也需要打上超过25000个赛季才能积累出这么多的钱。

But of all the numbers I’ve seen, the one that struck me most forcefully was a calculation in The Times that Mr. Musk’s net worth is five million times as large as that of the average American family.

但在我看到的所有数字中，最让我感到震撼的是《纽约时报》的一项计算：马斯克的净资产是美国普通家庭净资产的500万倍。

As a historian of political thought, I immediately thought of Plato, the first Western philosopher to really grapple with economic inequality. In his “Laws,” through the character of the Athenian Stranger, Plato contended that in a thriving republic, if anyone acquired more than four times the wealth of the poorest citizens, he should donate the surplus to the city. Not five million times the wealth of the typical family — four times the wealth of the poorest.

作为一名政治思想史学家，我立刻想到了柏拉图，他是第一位真正深入探讨经济不平等问题的西方哲学家。在他的《法律篇》中，柏拉图借“雅典来客”之口提出，在一个繁荣的共和国里，如果任何人的财富超过了最贫穷公民财富的四倍，他就应该把多余的部分捐给城邦。不是普通家庭财富的500万倍——而是最贫穷公民财富的四倍。

To be sure, it is difficult to imagine how a modern economy would operate with Plato’s proposed constraints on wealth acquisition. But it is not hard for a modern reader to understand the concerns that led him to his radical proposal.

 诚然，我们很难想象现代经济在柏拉图提出的财富获取限制下会如何运作。但对于现代读者来说，并不难理解促使他提出这一激进建议的担忧。

Plato grew up in Athens, a city that once was nearly torn apart, as Plutarch wrote, by the “disparity between the rich and the poor.” It was saved by a heroic lawgiver, Solon, who canceled all the debts of the poor, to the great chagrin of the rich. And in Plato’s youth, as the city fought the Peloponnesian War, it suffered three successive class-based civil wars — an oligarchic revolution of the rich against the poor, followed by a democratic revolution of the poor against the rich, followed by yet another oligarchic revolution.

柏拉图在雅典长大，正如普鲁塔克所写，这座城市曾经几乎被“贫富悬殊”所撕裂。后来英雄般的立法者梭伦拯救了它，他取消了穷人的所有债务，让富人懊恼不已。而在柏拉图年轻时，随着雅典卷入伯罗奔尼撒战争，它连续遭受了三次基于阶级的内战——先是富人反对穷人的寡头革命，紧接着是穷人反对富人的民主革命，随后又是一场寡头革命。

It’s no wonder that when Socrates reflected on inequality in Plato’s “Republic,” he observed that a state characterized by significant wealth disparity is not a state at all but rather “two states, the one of poor, the other of rich men, and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.”

难怪在柏拉图的《理想国》中，当苏格拉底反思不平等时，他指出，一个以巨大财富悬殊为特征的国家根本不能算作一个国家，而是“两个国家，一个是穷人的国家，另一个是富人的国家，他们生活在同一片土地上，却总是阴谋颠覆彼此。”

For Plato, the source of inequality was a disease of the soul that the Greeks called pleonexia — a kind of insatiable greed. In Plato’s “Gorgias,” Socrates likened this condition to a leaky jug: No matter how much water one pours into it, it will demand more. For some, the desire for money extends only so far as is necessary to cover their needs; for others, the desire is infinite. Plato likened those insatiable souls to slaves who are ruled by their desires.

对柏拉图来说，不平等的根源是一种灵魂的疾病，希腊人称之为“pleonexia”——一种贪得无厌的贪欲。在柏拉图的《高尔吉亚篇》中，苏格拉底将这种情况比作一个漏水的罐子：无论往里面倒多少水，它都会渴求更多。对于一些人来说，对金钱的渴望仅限于满足基本需求；而对于另一些人来说，这种渴望是无止境的。柏拉图将那些贪得无厌的灵魂比作被自身欲望统治的奴隶。

Someone consumed with his unquenchable desires comes to love himself far beyond what he can feel for the rest of humanity. He was, for Plato, “a poor judge of what is just and good and noble,” because he would always treat his desires as more valuable even than the truth. As a consequence, Plato wrote, “it is impossible that those who become very rich also become good.”

一个被无法满足的欲望所吞噬的人对自己的爱会远远超过对全人类的关爱。在柏拉图看来，他“无法很好地判断什么是公正、善良和高尚的”，因为他总是把自己的欲望看做比真理更宝贵的东西。因此，柏拉图写道：“那些变得极其富有的人，不可能同时也是善良的。”

Plato’s fears about insatiable greed have been vindicated by Mr. Musk, who has already set his sights on $10 trillion. He has confirmed Plato’s concerns about the moral failures of the superrich by characterizing empathy as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” With his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, he put the U.S. Agency for International Development program “into the wood chipper,” as he gleefully put it, contributing to the deaths of an estimated 600,000 people. Such carnage is a predictable outcome of a society that has chosen to place no upper limits on wealth.

柏拉图对贪得无厌的担忧在马斯克身上得到了印证，他已经将目光投向了10万亿美元。他将同理心描述为“西方文明的根本弱点”，这证实了柏拉图对超级富豪道德败坏的担忧。马克斯用他所谓的“政府效率部”将美国国际开发署的项目“送进了碎木机”——正如他得意洋洋地描述的那般——导致了估计60万人的死亡。这样的惨剧是一个选择对财富不设上限的社会必然招致的结果。

Plato was acutely aware that ideal solutions, such as his 4-to-1 wealth ratio, are impossible to carry out where great inequality already exists. But he did not encourage legislators and citizens to throw up their hands in surrender. Rather, he urged citizens (including the few rich ones with a “sense of fairness”) to do what they could to level society, starting by shaming those with excessive fortunes. He stressed that true poverty “consists not in a lessening of one’s property but in an increase of one’s avarice.”

柏拉图敏锐地意识到，在已经存在巨大不平等的地方，像他提出的4:1财富比例这样的理想解决方案是不可能实现的。但他并没有鼓励立法者和公民因此举手投降。相反，他敦促公民（包括少数具有“公平感”的富人）尽其所能来拉平社会差距，首先要让那些拥有过剩财富的人感到羞愧。他强调，真正的贫穷“不在于个人财产的减少，而在于个人贪婪的增加”。

Only by teaching the evils of extreme greed can society begin to restore the healthy balance of wealth necessary for a thriving republic.

只有通过教导人们认清极端贪婪的罪恶，社会才能开始恢复一个繁荣共和国所必需的健康财富平衡。