Master of Lake-town

And between them, these two endings are the entire argument of this episode.

The first is the master of Lake Town, and I'd never properly noticed him until I went back to this book as an adult.

After the battle, Bard, now a king and a decent one, gives the master a great deal of gold for the relief of the town, the town that burned, the people who have nothing.

And here's Tolkien again narrating in the very last chapter of the book, being of the kind that easily catches such disease, he fell under the dragon's sickness and took most of the gold and fled with it and died of starvation on the waste, deserted by his companions.

And then Seneca adds a sentence of his own to it, and his sentence is the one that I want.

It's not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more that is poor.

That is the master of Lake Town in a single line, a man who starves to death on top of a fortune because the wanting doesn't stop when the having starts.

Those two things are simply not connected.