Education Quote by Tacitus

Even the supposedly sober-minded, Tacitus suggests, keep a cheap little idol tucked in their robe: the desire to be seen. The sting of the line is how it demotes “learned men” from rational actors to status-chasers with better vocabulary. Fame isn’t painted as a youthful vanity that wisdom outgrows; it’s framed as the final addiction, the one that survives education, discipline, even moral seriousness.

The phrasing matters. “Last thing” turns reputation into a life raft people cling to as other comforts fall away. “Bear to be parted from” implies withdrawal: fame isn’t a prize so much as a dependence. Tacitus isn’t marveling at ambition; he’s diagnosing a weakness that quietly steers behavior while its owner insists he’s guided by truth. The subtext is bleakly institutional: if scholars and statesmen crave applause, then courts, senates, and even histories become stages. Public virtue can be real and still be partly performance.

In Tacitus’s Rome, this is not abstract psychology. Under emperors who rewarded flattery and punished dissent, fame was both currency and danger. The pursuit of renown could mean crouching closer to power, polishing loyalty into spectacle, or competing for distinction in a system designed to ration it. Tacitus writes as someone who knows that “memory” in an empire is political property: who gets celebrated, who gets erased, and who survives as a cautionary tale.

The line doubles as self-indictment. A historian who dissects fame’s grip is also a man writing for posterity, betting that being remembered is worth the risk of telling the truth.