Snakeskin handbags. Eighteen-course feasts. Yachts the size of cities. In the twenty-first century, many point to such conspicuous consumption as reflecting the moral failings of a rampant capitalism that sacrifices community values on an altar of greed. Television shows such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians illustrate the folly of wealth without responsibility even as they elevate their subjects on pedestals of desire. Our discomfort with extravagance is not new. Ancient Greeks and Romans fretted over the ideal relationship between morality and luxury. Politics, religion, and economics influenced the debate, with the concept of luxury as a moral question becoming a core issue in Christian theology and even a cornerstone of the founding of America. People feared luxury's evil influence. Society publicly and privately extolled the virtues of moderation and restraint and condemned luxury as a breeding ground for vice and sin. After capitalism and the consumer revolution removed its stigma, the concept of luxury underwent a radical transformation, from a vice to be feared to a marketing tool of the new capitalist era. In this lively and unexpected narrative, William Howard Adams shows how this simultaneous distrust and embrace of luxury has pervaded Western thought for three millennia, leading us to the question, what price the soul? AUTHOR: William Howard Adams is the author of Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life (Yale University Press, 2003), The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (Yale University Press, 1997), The French Garden: 1500-1800 (George Braziller, 1979), and Jefferson's Monticello (Abbeville Press, 1988). As a senior member of the staff of the National Gallery of Art, he curated the landmark exhibition "The Eye of Thomas Jefferson." He has also been a fellow of the International Research Center for Jefferson Studies at Charlottesville, Virginia, and served for sixteen years as a trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. Adams has served as a senior fellow of the Garden History Library at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University.