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Subsection 14 Self-Love, Vainglory, Praise, Honour, Excessive Applause, Pride…

“I have always devoted myself to you and to fame,” says Trebellius Pollio: I have wholly consecrated myself to you and fame. It is all my desire, night and day; all my study is to raise my name. Proud Pliny supports him: “Although—O!” and so on. And that vainglorious orator is not ashamed to confess, in a letter to Marcus Lucceius, “I burn with an incredible desire,” and so on: I burn with an incredible desire to have my name recorded in your book. From this fountain flow all those boasts and brags,

We hope that poems can be fashioned To be anointed with cedar oil and kept in smooth cypress. —

“On no ordinary or feeble wing shall I be carried—nor shall I linger longer on earth.” “I speak of nothing small or in a humble manner, nothing mortal.” “I shall be spoken of where the fierce Aufidus roars.” “I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze.”

“And now I have finished a work which neither Jupiter’s anger nor fire,” and so on; “when that day comes,” and so on, “yet in my better part I shall be borne immortal above the lofty stars, and my name shall be indelible.” I have paraphrased this passage of Ovid in English.

And when I am dead and gone, My body laid under a stone, My fame shall still survive, And I shall be alive In these my works for ever; My glory shall endure, and so on.

And that passage of Ennius,

Let no one honour me with tears, or weep at my funeral. Why? I fly upon the learned lips of men.

With many such proud strains and foolish flourishes, all too common among writers. Even Democharis, writing on the Topics, must be immortal. Typotius, writing On Fame, must be famous, and well he deserves it, since he wrote about fame! And every trivial poet must be renowned,

And seeks to shine through the applause of the crowd.

It is this self-inflating disposition that has produced so many great volumes, built such famous monuments, strong castles and tombs like that of Mausolus, to make their deeds eternal: “To be pointed out, and have people say, ‘That is the man!’” To see their names inscribed, as Phryne’s on the walls of Thebes: “Phryne made this.”

This causes so many bloody battles, “And compels us to stay awake through clear nights”; Long journeys, “I set out on a long journey, but glory gives me strength”; Winning honour, a little applause. Pride, self-love, vainglory.

This is what makes them take such pains and burst into those ridiculous strains: this high opinion of themselves, making them scorn everyone else “with ridiculous arrogance and intolerable contempt,” as Palaemon the grammarian despised Varro, “boasting that learning had been born with him and would die with him.” It brings them to such a pitch of insolence that they cannot bear contradiction or listen to anything but their own praises, as Jerome observes of such men. Augustine aptly supports him: their only study, day and night, is to be praised and applauded.

Yet in the judgment of all wise men, “whose hearts have understanding,” they are mad, empty vessels, mushrooms, out of their senses, objects of derision. “Like the camel in the proverb, which sought horns and lost even the ears it already had,” their works are trifles, like an out-of-date almanac: “they perish through their author’s chatter.” They seek fame and immortality, but reap dishonour and infamy. They are common objects of abuse, “senseless,” and fall far short of what they suppose or expect. “O boy, I fear you will not live long.”

Of the many thousands of poets, rhetoricians, philosophers and sophists who wrote in former ages, scarcely one in a thousand has works that survive, as Eusebius aptly observes: “their names and books have perished together with their bodies”; their books and bodies have perished together. It is not as they vainly think, that they will certainly be admired and immortal. As someone told Philip of Macedon, exulting after a victory, that his shadow was no longer than before, so we may say to them,

We marvel, but not with the idle crowd: Rather as at Harpies, Gorgons and Furies.

We marvel too, though not as common people do, But as at Gorgons, Harpies or Furies.

Or if we do applaud, honour and admire: “what a small part”—how small a part, compared with the whole world, ever so much as hears our names! How few take notice of us; how narrow a region, as tiny as Alcibiades’ land on a map! Yet every man must and will be immortal, so he hopes, and spread his fame to the other side of the earth, when half—no, not even a quarter—of his own province or city knows him or hears of him.

But suppose they did. What is a city beside a kingdom, a kingdom beside Europe, Europe beside the world, or the world itself, which must come to an end, compared with the smallest visible star in the firmament, eighteen times larger than it? Then, if those stars are infinite, and every star is a sun, as some maintain, and each, like our own sun, has its planets around it, all inhabited, what proportion do we bear to them, and where is our glory?

“The victorious Roman held the whole world,” as he boasted in Petronius: the whole world was under Augustus. So, too, in Constantine’s time, Eusebius boasts that he governed the whole world: “he ruled the entire world most splendidly—and all the nations of the earth were subject to the emperor.” The same is said of Alexander, the four monarchies, and so on, though neither Greeks nor Romans ever possessed a fifteenth of the world now known, or half of what was then described.

3289.Burton prints “Marcus Lucceius”; the letter requesting literary commemoration is Cicero, Letters to Friends 5.12, to Lucius Lucceius. Pliny’s “Quanquam O!” in Letters 5.8.3 is itself a broken-off quotation. It is translated as a fragment, with the continuation left unsupplied.

3291.Horace, Ars Poetica 331–332. Cedar oil and cypress storage protect a book physically; Burton uses them to suggest literary survival. Horace asks whether such poetry can be expected from minds absorbed in money. Burton removes that question’s framing and presents the words as a boast. The print reads “leni,” gentle, where the comparison text has “levi,” smooth; the modern version follows the contextual sense of the cypress surface. The BSB 1651 copy, p. 122, also reads leni; the contextual translation is retained as an explicit editorial choice.

3293.A sequence of Horatian claims to poetic distinction: Odes 2.20.1–3, 3.25.17–18 and 3.30.10, 1. The Aufidus is a river in southern Italy. Burton gathers separate poems into a single catalogue of self-praise and prints “loquor,” I speak, for Horace’s “loquar,” I shall speak.

3295.Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.871–876. Burton quotes selectively and changes “cum volet, illa dies,” when that day wills, to “cum venit illa dies,” when that day comes. His own English paraphrase follows the fresh translation separately. The next source page is misnumbered 113; its sequence position is 123, PDF page 223.

3296.The epitaph ascribed to Ennius is quoted by Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.15.34. Cicero also inserts the question “cur?”, why, but has “vivos,” alive, where Burton prints “docta,” learned. The modern verse translates Burton’s version.

3298.“Democharis” is the name as printed; the identification of the commentator on the Topics remains uncertain. Typotius is Jacobus Typotius, cited for a work on fame. Burton’s praise of him is pointedly circular and ironic.

3299.Mausolus’s tomb supplied the word “mausoleum.” The pointing finger echoes Persius, Satire 1.28. The Phryne story concerns an offer to rebuild Thebes’ walls in return for an inscription; Burton compresses it into an accomplished inscription. The full historical source chain remains to be collated.

3300.Burton’s short quotations interrupt the syntax, with “gaining honour” resuming the catalogue of motives. “Et noctes…” echoes Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 1.142; the journey sustained by glory adapts Propertius 4.10.3, changing “ascendo,” I climb, to “intendo,” I set out or direct my course. Exact intermediary texts remain to be checked.

3305.Suetonius, On Grammarians 23, says Palaemon called Varro a pig and claimed that learning was born and would die with him. Burton compresses the passage. “Scorn” is amplified by the marginal proverb about throwing someone off a bridge.

3309.“Funges,” mushrooms, disparages these men as insubstantial or worthless growths. The camel’s request for horns loses it the ears it already possessed: ambition causes a loss instead of a gain. The final phrase is Horace, Satires 2.1.60, a warning about the dangers of satirical writing; Burton turns it against hopes of literary survival.

3311.Harpies, Gorgons and Furies are terrifying figures of classical myth. The point is astonishment at a monster rather than admiration for achievement. The Latin couplet’s author remains unlocated; Burton’s English couplet is retained separately.

3312.Burton prints “never so much as hears,” which conflicts with the small minority intended by “quota pars” and the following “how few.” The modern column gives “ever,” an explicit contextual emendation; the original is unchanged. The Alcibiades allusion makes great private estates too small to find on a map. “Antipodes” means the opposite side of the earth. Audit pass 14 rechecked never against McGill p. 124; this is a retained source reading, not a transcription error.

3313.The stellar sizes and inhabited planetary systems belong to Burton’s historical cosmological argument. His “if” and “as some maintain” matter: he invokes a speculative vastness to diminish human fame, rather than establishing these propositions as fact.

3314.The Roman-world line occurs in Petronius’s civil-war poem in the Satyricon. Burton juxtaposes it with Augustus, Constantine, Alexander and the traditional four world monarchies. His fractional estimates of imperial territory are rhetorical and are not independently established here.