Life & Wisdom Quote by Ausonius

Fortune is cast here as a moody woman, and that personification isn’t decorative so much as tactical. Ausonius is writing late in the Roman world, when political careers, patronage, and even basic security could pivot on an emperor’s whim, a bureaucratic purge, or the luck of a border war. By giving chance a face - “she” who “favors” or “frowns” - the line concedes how irrational the system feels while quietly refusing to worship it.

The genius is the double command: don’t get high on good luck, don’t collapse under bad. It’s not just Stoic self-help; it’s social survival advice for a courtly culture where emotional display can be read as entitlement in triumph and weakness in defeat. “Elated” hints at the arrogance that invites correction; “despond” hints at the kind of despair that makes you politically disposable. Ausonius, who moved between provincial teaching and imperial favor, knew that instability first-hand. The quote reads like a polished ethic for anyone living inside an empire of sudden reversals.

Subtextually, it’s also a reallocation of agency. If fortune is fickle, then your dignity can’t be outsourced to her. The line trains you to treat success as contingent and failure as temporary, not because the cosmos is fair, but because your composure is the one resource not fully governed by the state, the crowd, or the dice.