Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.

Publilius Syrus was a 1st‑century BCE Latin writer famed for his sententiae—compact moral maxims excerpted from his mimes and later collected for rhetorical and ethical instruction. This saying reflects the practical, worldly tone of many of those maxims: it treats “worth” not as an inherent quality but as something established in exchange and social agreement. In Roman public life, where patronage, commerce, and status-display were intertwined, such a line would have resonated as a shrewd observation about markets and human desire—how price often follows appetite, fashion, or need rather than any objective measure of value.

The maxim argues that value is ultimately determined by willingness to pay: an object’s “worth” is not fixed, but contingent on the buyer’s preferences, urgency, and perception. It can be read as an early statement of subjective value—anticipating the idea that prices emerge from demand rather than intrinsic merit. The line also carries a moral edge: it cautions against confusing price with true excellence, since what people pay may reflect vanity, scarcity, or manipulation. In that sense, Syrus both describes how valuation works in practice and hints at the folly of letting money become the sole measure of what matters.