"It well becomes a young man to be modest"
About this Quote
Modesty, in Plautus, isn’t a wholesome personality trait so much as a social survival tactic - and a joke with teeth. “It well becomes a young man to be modest” lands like advice from an older generation that knows exactly how quickly youth curdles into nuisance when it gets loud. The phrasing matters: “becomes” is about appearance, not inner virtue. Modesty is costume, good manners as wardrobe, a look that flatters a young man by making him seem less threatening to the hierarchy he’s entering.
Plautus wrote for a Roman audience trained to read status at a glance. Youth sits in an awkward zone: old enough to want autonomy, not yet entitled to it. The line encodes a familiar civic bargain. Young men are permitted ambition, appetite, swagger - as long as they perform restraint in public and defer to elders. Underneath the polite surface is a warning: your confidence will be interpreted as insolence, and insolence gets punished. Modesty becomes a prophylactic against humiliation.
Because Plautus is a playwright, the maxim also carries theatrical subtext. His comedies thrive on brash sons, anxious fathers, clever slaves, and the constant churn of schemes. A line like this can be earnest counsel from a character who wants order, or ironic commentary when the “young man” is about to do something spectacularly immodest. Either way, it works because it exposes how morality often doubles as etiquette: not a timeless rule, but a social technology for keeping the young legible, manageable, and, ideally, amused enough to comply.
Plautus wrote for a Roman audience trained to read status at a glance. Youth sits in an awkward zone: old enough to want autonomy, not yet entitled to it. The line encodes a familiar civic bargain. Young men are permitted ambition, appetite, swagger - as long as they perform restraint in public and defer to elders. Underneath the polite surface is a warning: your confidence will be interpreted as insolence, and insolence gets punished. Modesty becomes a prophylactic against humiliation.
Because Plautus is a playwright, the maxim also carries theatrical subtext. His comedies thrive on brash sons, anxious fathers, clever slaves, and the constant churn of schemes. A line like this can be earnest counsel from a character who wants order, or ironic commentary when the “young man” is about to do something spectacularly immodest. Either way, it works because it exposes how morality often doubles as etiquette: not a timeless rule, but a social technology for keeping the young legible, manageable, and, ideally, amused enough to comply.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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