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With the exception of the Sophists—contemporaries of Socrates, if not of Plato—the best-known presocratic fragments today contain only a few economic considerations relating to the concrete societal organization; obliterated by the nascent physics, metaphysics, and ethics, they seem not to have much preoccupied those early thinkers in the western tradition. It is interesting, in this respect, to note that current studies of economic theories developed by the ancients have devoted scant attention to thinkers from the archaic period. On the other hand, the personal connections of the same Presocratics, as both individuals and citizens, with material goods and social success have drawn the full attention of doxographers, who, somewhere between biography and legend, have produced a rich literary iconography of the sage as a humble man, blindly giving away his possessions to devote himself to the sole domain of theoretical knowledge. A close reading of Fragments A, devoted to the way of life of the major Presocratic thinkers, allows one to bring out at least two trends, one synchronic, the other diachronic: (1) on the one hand, before the Sophists, the Presocratics are generally represented as people not simply indifferent to riches, but, to an ever-greater extent, despising it explicitly, considering intellectual research incompatible with the acquisition or management of a patrimony ; (2) on the other hand, the Sophists represent, in this respect, a break within ancient historiography, since beside their proverbial financial rapacity, they are among the first to have explicitly linked the practice of philosophy—especially as regards teaching—and financial remuneration, the latter then placing the question of upward social mobility at the heart of the field of knowledge. In this article, I will first highlight the life choices pictured, if not fictionalized, by ancient doxographers, and then focus briefly on the dissonance represented, within this ascetic Areopagus, by Empedocles of Agrigento. My point will be articulated in two sections: (1) a brief first section which, based on the research by specialists, will be devoted to the cultural representation of the poor man and the beggar in archaic literature; (2) a second part, more detailed, in which, based on the analysis of the texts, I will show (a) how, within an intellectual tradition still existent today, thinkers of the period were portrayed as sages opposing assets and knowledge, and (b) in what manner this aura of asceticism may have influenced the community in general, and circles of disciples in particular. My discussion will thus not simply try to offer views on the relationship of seventh, sixth, and fifth-century BC thinkers, but also, most importantly, on the role played by the relationship to goods in the cultural development of a then-new discipline: philosophy.