"Even victors are by victories undone"
About this Quote
Triumph, Dryden implies, is a solvent: it dissolves the winner from the inside out. "Even victors are by victories undone" lands with the compact cruelty of a moral epigram. The sting is in the grammar. "Victors" should be agents, doers, the people history crowns. Instead they become objects, acted upon by the very thing that supposedly proves their strength. Victory isn’t a reward in Dryden’s line; it’s a force with consequences, a kind of recoil.
The subtext is less about sympathy for the defeated than suspicion of power’s aftertaste. Victories breed habits: entitlement, overreach, a taste for domination that must be fed. They also invite narrators - courtiers, propagandists, even poets - to mythologize the win until the victor has to live inside the myth. Once your legitimacy rests on winning, you’re trapped into repeating the performance. The line quietly argues that success can become a regime, and regimes require enemies.
Dryden’s era makes that skepticism feel earned. Seventeenth-century England was a carousel of civil war, regicide, Restoration, and shifting allegiances; "winning" was provisional, and yesterday’s triumph could be tomorrow’s indictment. Dryden himself navigated those reversals, writing in a culture where power demanded celebration and punished honesty.
What makes the line work is its bleak economy: it refuses the clean moral of "pride goes before a fall" and instead suggests something colder. Victory isn’t a peak you stand on. It’s a mechanism that keeps turning, grinding down the hand that pulled the lever.
The subtext is less about sympathy for the defeated than suspicion of power’s aftertaste. Victories breed habits: entitlement, overreach, a taste for domination that must be fed. They also invite narrators - courtiers, propagandists, even poets - to mythologize the win until the victor has to live inside the myth. Once your legitimacy rests on winning, you’re trapped into repeating the performance. The line quietly argues that success can become a regime, and regimes require enemies.
Dryden’s era makes that skepticism feel earned. Seventeenth-century England was a carousel of civil war, regicide, Restoration, and shifting allegiances; "winning" was provisional, and yesterday’s triumph could be tomorrow’s indictment. Dryden himself navigated those reversals, writing in a culture where power demanded celebration and punished honesty.
What makes the line work is its bleak economy: it refuses the clean moral of "pride goes before a fall" and instead suggests something colder. Victory isn’t a peak you stand on. It’s a mechanism that keeps turning, grinding down the hand that pulled the lever.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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