Daily Inspiration Quote by Max Beerbohm

"No Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias'"

Max Beerbohm, Actor

About this Quote

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.

Quote Details

Topic	Witty One-Liners
Source	Verified source: And Even Now (Max Beerbohm, 1920) Text match: 95.00% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: I maintain that though you would often in the fifteenth century have heard the snobbish Roman say, in a would-be off-hand tone ‘I am dining with the Borgias to-night,’ no Roman ever was able to say ‘I dined last night with the Borgias.’ (Essay: "Hosts and Guests" (dated 1918); exact page unknown from the free HTML text). This is Max Beerbohm (the English essayist/caricaturist, often mis-labeled online as an “actor”) in his essay “Hosts and Guests,” collected in And Even Now (1920). The commonly-circulated shortened form (“No Roman ever was able to say…”) is a trimmed fragment of this longer sentence. The Gutenberg text does not preserve original print pagination, so a page number cannot be reliably given from this source alone. For earliest appearance: Wikisource’s bibliographic listing for Beerbohm indicates “Hosts and Guests” was published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine (Aug 1919) before being collected in the 1920 book; that magazine publication is likely the first publication of the line, but I have not pulled a scan of the Aug 1919 Harper’s issue here to extract a page number from the original magazine printing. Other candidates (1) New York Magazine (1986)95.0% ... Max Beerbohm thought not. In his landmark essay "Hosts and Guests," he wrote, "To offer hospitality, or to ... no...
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