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– DRAWN FROM LIFE – beautiful, rich, noble and exceedingly learned youth than to stay fixed in those qualities.) Ambition is doubtless a pardonable malady in a strong and full soul such as Alexander’s. But when petty, dwarfish souls start aping them, believing that they can scatter their renown abroad by having judged one matter rightly or for having arranged the changing of the guard at the town gate, then the higher they hope to raise their heads the more they bare their arses. Such petty achievements have no body, no life; they start evaporating on the first man’s lips and never get from one street-corner to another. Have the effrontery to talk about them to your son or your manservant, like that old fellow who had nobody else to listen to his praises or to acknowledge his worth and so boasted to his chambermaid: ‘Oh, what a gallant and clever man you have for a master, Perrette!’ If the worse comes to worst, talk about it to yourself, like a King’s Counsel I know who, having (with extreme exertion and extreme absurdity) disgorged a boatload of legal references, withdrew from the council-chamber to the court piss-house, where he was heard devoutly muttering through his teeth: ‘Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomine tuo da gloriam.’ [Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy Name be the glory.] If you cannot get it from somebody else’s purse, get it from your own! Fame does not play the whore for so base a price. Those rare and exemplary deeds to which fame is due 182
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– On Restraining Your Will – would not tolerate the company of such a countless mob of petty everyday actions. Marble can boast your titles as much as you like for having repaired a stretch of wall or cleaned up some public gutter, but men of sense will not. Renown does not ensue upon anything done well unless difficulty and unusualness are involved. Indeed, according to the Stoics, simple esteem is not due to every action born of virtue: they would not even faintly praise a man for having abstained from some sore-eyed old whore for temperance’ sake! Those who already knew of the astonishing qualities of Scipio Africanus rejected the ‘glory’ which Panaetius gave him for refusing bribes: that glory was not his alone but belonged to his entire age. We have pleasures appropriate to our station: let us not usurp those of greatness: ours are more natural and are the more solid and certain for being more humble. Let us reject ambition out of ambition, since we do not do so out of a sense of right and wrong; let us despise that base beggerly hunger for renown and honour which makes us solicit them from all kinds of people by abject means, no matter how vile the price: ‘Quae est ista laus quae possit e macello peti?’ [What kind of praise is it that you can order from the butcher’s?] To be honoured thus is a dishonour. Let us learn to be no more avid for glory than we deserve. Boasting of every useful or blameless action is for men in whom such things are rare and unusual: they want them to be valued at what it cost them! The 183

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– DRAWN FROM LIFE –

beautiful, rich, noble and exceedingly learned youth than to stay fixed in those qualities.)

Ambition is doubtless a pardonable malady in a strong and full soul such as Alexander’s. But when petty, dwarfish souls start aping them, believing that they can scatter their renown abroad by having judged one matter rightly or for having arranged the changing of the guard at the town gate, then the higher they hope to raise their heads the more they bare their arses. Such petty achievements have no body, no life; they start evaporating on the first man’s lips and never get from one street-corner to another. Have the effrontery to talk about them to your son or your manservant, like that old fellow who had nobody else to listen to his praises or to acknowledge his worth and so boasted to his chambermaid: ‘Oh, what a gallant and clever man you have for a master, Perrette!’ If the worse comes to worst, talk about it to yourself, like a King’s Counsel I know who, having (with extreme exertion and extreme absurdity) disgorged a boatload of legal references, withdrew from the council-chamber to the court piss-house, where he was heard devoutly muttering through his teeth: ‘Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomine tuo da gloriam.’ [Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy Name be the glory.] If you cannot get it from somebody else’s purse, get it from your own!

Fame does not play the whore for so base a price. Those rare and exemplary deeds to which fame is due

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