August 14, 2026

Skip The Statue

I would rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one.

Cato the Younger served Rome as a senator and provincial quaestor in the first century BC, a world where statues in the forum were the standard proof of a great career. When the people he had governed wanted to raise one in his honor, he turned it down with this line, preferring the harder question to the easier flattery. The remark says that being good and being seen as good are not the same thing, and only the first one is worth anything. Reputation, like wealth or health, belongs to what the Stoics called a preferred indifferent: welcome if it comes, but no measure of a person's worth. Virtue alone made the list of true goods because it is earned entirely by one's own choices and cannot be handed out or taken away by a crowd.

A principle of Stoicism: Virtue Is the Only Good →