It is not just 21st-century Americans who feel pulled in separate directions by narratives like these: People have been trying to reconcile the tensions between them for hundreds, even thousands, of years.

That is the most rudimentary takeaway of Emrys Westacott’s new book, The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More—More or Less, a roughly 2,000-year intellectual history of the concept of the simple life. Westacott, who calls himself “certifiably tightwaddish,” is a professor of philosophy at New York’s Alfred University. He explains in his book’s acknowledgements section that the idea for The Wisdom of Frugality originated in a class he taught more than a decade ago called “Tightwaddery: The Good Life on a Dollar a Day.” In that seminar, Westacott led discussions of philosophical texts but also taught his students to live more cheaply, having them learn to do things like cutting each others’ hair.

There are no hair-cutting lessons in The Wisdom of Frugality, which focuses on a group Westacott calls “the frugal sages,” a disparate collection of philosophers and thinkers whose ideas have accreted to form today’s received wisdom about money and happiness. Westacott employs an expansive definition of “frugality,” using the word not just to indicate financial prudence, but as a stand-in for a wider body of lifestyle choices and values: Frugality is about appreciating simple pleasures and generally easing up in a society that encourages materialism and competitiveness. One of Westacott’s central preoccupations in the book is why, if so many smart people have championed frugality, it hasn’t become the global norm.

The Wisdom of Frugality is not organized chronologically, but by concepts, as Westacott breaks down the various cases for and against frugality into their component parts. Reading it is like watching a sort of reality show in which celebrity contestants buzz in whenever they have something wise or pithy to say. Here is Epicurus suggesting that it’s difficult to make a lot of money without becoming subservient to an employer or a crowd of fans; there is Ben Franklin arguing that “he that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing.” Even if it is rather disproportionately peppered with dead white men, it’s a pleasant intellectual tour that usefully blows a layer of dust off of old writings. Westacott tells readers, for instance, that if Epicurus, a frugal sage who scorned excess but embraced pleasure, were alive today, he would balk at trading gastronomical contentment for the sawdusty texture of Soylent, much like plenty of aesthetes today.

Westacott’s eye for detail allows his survey of the frugal sages to transcend a mere assembly of aphorisms. Take the Spartans, who, if they were alive now, would likely find Soylent to be, if anything, too indulgent: Westacott writes that they were renowned for serving at their communal tables a “notorious black broth made of pork, blood, vinegar, and salt,” which was so unappealing that one visitor reportedly remarked, “Now I know why the Spartans don’t fear death.” Spartan laws and culture, Westacott explains, were fine-tuned to make citizens courageous, disciplined, and uninterested in wealth. At those same tables, Westacott writes, “The rations were meager to keep the young men lean and supple and accustomed to functioning on an empty stomach.” He goes on to describe a detail that suggests Greeks are more familiar with austerity than they typically let on: Spartan boys, who ate alongside the men, were purposely served too-small portions so that they’d cultivate the wiles to steal more food.