“Latin avaritia named a Roman civic failure before the church made it a sin.”
The Latin noun avaritia derives from avarus, meaning greedy or covetous, which comes from the verb avere, to crave or long for. Cicero used avaritia in his ethical writings of the 60s BCE, treating it as a corrupting force in Roman public life. Sallust, writing in 41 BCE, blamed avaritia and ambitio together for the decline of the republic: the two vices, greed and ambition, fed each other and hollowed out the civic character. For the Roman moralists, avaritia was first a political diagnosis, a disease of the governing class, before it was anything else.
Pope Gregory the Great formalized avaritia as one of seven deadly sins around 590 CE, drawing on earlier monastic lists by John Cassian and Evagrius Ponticus. In Gregory's framework, avarice was not merely antisocial behavior but a spiritual disorder: the misdirection of love toward material things rather than toward God. Thomas Aquinas refined the category in the Summa Theologiae between 1265 and 1274, distinguishing between avarice as a general term for any disordered desire and its specific sense as greed for money. The theological treatment gave avarice a weight that the Roman moralists had not assigned to it.
The word passed into Old French as avarice by the 12th century and reached Middle English by around 1290. Geoffrey Chaucer placed it at the center of the Pardoner's Tale in the 1390s, where the Pardoner preaches against avarice while openly practicing it. His sermon quotes from 1 Timothy: Radix malorum est Cupiditas, the love of money is the root of all evils. Chaucer used avarice as the named vice and cupiditas as its Latin shadow, both words doing the same moral work across two languages simultaneously.
The word's relatives trace the same craving across centuries: avid, from Latin avidus meaning eager, entered English in the 18th century carrying the positive valence of the same root. The French cognate avarice remained in modern French. Spanish uses avaricia. The chain from Cicero's civic criticism to Gregory's deadly sin to Chaucer's ironic preacher to modern financial journalism is unbroken. Avarice has named the same organizing principle of a life, accumulation as an end in itself, for at least 2,100 years.
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Avarice belongs to the oldest continuous moral vocabulary in English. The Romans named the vice before Christianity gave it cosmic stakes; Gregory the Great assigned it a numbered place among the seven deadly sins; Chaucer built a tale around its irony; and the word arrived in the 21st century intact. It is now slightly formal compared to greed, but it appears in legal texts, financial journalism, and moral philosophy with the same meaning Cicero gave it. Nothing about the concept has required updating.
What separates avarice from ordinary greed in the classical tradition is scope: avarice is not wanting more than you have but organizing your whole life around accumulation. The ancient moralists treated it as a disease of the will, not just a lapse of judgment. The word still carries that diagnosis. When greed becomes avarice, it has become a way of being.
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