Life & Wisdom Quote by Ausonius

Silence, Ausonius suggests, is not a neutral virtue but a social dead end: it earns you no credit because it offers nothing to hold on to. The line’s bite comes from its refusal of the pious ideal that quietness automatically signals wisdom. In late Roman public life, reputation was made in rooms where talk was currency - courts, salons, classrooms, imperial bureaucracies. A poet and professor like Ausonius knew that eloquence could open doors, but he also knew the danger of too much of it. Speaking “briefly” is his tightrope: not the mute stoic, not the bore.

The subtext is tactical self-portraiture. Ausonius frames brevity as both charm and discipline, implying he’s learned the audience’s real threshold for genius: give them something and then stop. It’s a canny move in a culture that prized rhetoric yet punished overreach. Brevity reads as respect - for listeners’ time, for the limits of argument, for the fact that most speech is self-advertising.

There’s also a sly inversion of power. “Many I please” hints at a writer’s quiet authority: he can win more people with a controlled sentence than others can with grand speeches. The intent isn’t anti-speech; it’s anti-waste. Ausonius isn’t praising minimalism for its own sake. He’s describing a social technology: say enough to be remembered, not so much you’re resented.