the barriers to be thrown open; and even
then he must use great exertions and great swiftness to catch the other,
who has a start of him.

XXVI. We must now consider what is the main cause of ingratitude. It is
caused by excessive self-esteem, by that fault innate in all mortals,
of taking a partial view of ourselves and our own acts, by greed, or by
jealousy.

Let us begin with the first of these. Every one is prejudiced in his own
favour, from which it follows that he believes himself to have earned
all that he receives, regards it as payment for his services, and does
not think that he has been appraised at a valuation sufficiently near
his own. "He has given me this," says he, "but how late, after how much
toil? how much more might I have earned if I had attached myself to So
and so, or to So and so? I did not expect this; I have been treated like
one of the herd; did he really think that I only deserved so little?
why, it would have been less insulting to have passed me over
altogether."

XXVII. The augur Cnaeus Lentulus, who, before his freedmen reduced him
to poverty, was one of the richest of men, who saw himself in possession
of a fortune of four hundred millions--I say advisedly, "saw," for he
never did more than see it--was as barren and contemptible in intellect
as he was in spirit. Though very avaricious, yet he was so poor a
speaker that he found it easier to give men coins than words. This man,
who owed all his prosperity to the late Emperor Augustus, to whom he had
brought only poverty, encumbered with a noble name, when he had risen to
be the chief man in Rome, both in wealth and influence, used sometimes
to complain that Augustus had interrupted his legal studies, observing
that he had not received anything like what he had lost by giving up the
study of eloquence. Yet the truth was that Augustus, besides loading him
with other gifts, had set him free from the necessity of making himself
ridiculous by labouring at a profession in which he never could succeed.

Greed does not permit any one to be grateful; for what is given is never
equal to its base desires, and the more we receive the more we
covet, for avarice is much more eager when it has to deal with great
accumulations of wealth, just as the power of a flame is enormously
greater in proportion to the size of the conflagration from which it
springs. Ambition in like manner suffers no man to rest satisfied with
that measure of public honours, t