Daily Inspiration Quote by Max Beerbohm

Name-dropping is usually a bid for borrowed glamour, but Beerbohm twists it into a joke about borrowed infamy. The line is built like a humblebrag and then poisoned: the pleasure is not that you dined with greatness, but that you can dine with history while it is busy becoming a scandal. The Borgias, Renaissance Italy’s first family of reputational rot, function here as a kind of celebrity shorthand: not admired, not exactly hated, just irresistibly talkable. Beerbohm’s comic aim is to expose the social appetite that confuses proximity with significance.

The specific intent is slyly competitive. “No Roman ever…” implies an entire civilization deprived of a particular modern thrill: the cocktail-party flex of having brushed shoulders with notorious people whose names already come pre-packaged with gossip. Ancient Rome had emperors and tyrants, but it didn’t have the same post-event tourism of anecdote, the curated story you can repeat to raise your own market value.

Subtext: our relationship to the past is unfairly privileged. We get to cherry-pick it. We can dine with monsters safely because they’re dead, their crimes distilled into a brand. The line also hints at the modern invention of “personality” as spectacle; the Borgias are less historical actors than content.

Contextually, it’s pure Beerbohm: an Edwardian master of social satire, pricking the balloon of sophistication by showing how quickly it becomes gossip with good tailoring.