drive a hard bargain, to

To  exact  as  much  as  possible  from  a  transac- tion. Drive in this expression is in the sense of vigorously carrying through something.  It  was  so  used  as  long  ago  as  the  sixteenth  century,  when  Sir Philip Sidney wrote, “There never was a better bargain driven” (My True Love Hath  My  Heart,  1583).  Hard,  in  the  sense  of  “unyielding,”  is  coupled  with bargain  even  earlier, in  a  translation  from  the  Greek  of  Suidas  (Lexicon,  c. A.D. 950): “A hard bargainer never gets good meat.”