Vainglory and Pride are Inseparable Brothers

The theatre is filling up, and all the people are sitting aloft presenting a splendid sight and composed of numberless faces, so that many times the very rafters and roof above are hidden by human bodies. You can see neither tiles nor stones, but all is men’s bodies and faces. Then, as the ambitious man who has bought them together enters in the sight of all, they stand up and as from a single mouth and cry out. All with one voice they call him protector and ruler of their common city and stretch out their hands in salutation. Next, they liken him to the greatest of rivers, comparing his grand and lavish munificence to the copious waters of the Nile; and they call him the Nile of gifts. Others, flattering him still more and thinking the simile of the Nile too mean; rivers and seas unsuitable! Instead they liken him to the ocean, and also say that he, in his lavish gifts, is what an ocean is among waters, and they leave not a word of praise unsaid. What next? The great man bows to the crowd and in this way shows his regard. Then he sits down amid congratulations of all his admirers, each of whom prays that  he himself may attain to the same eminence and then die. But after a huge expenditure on gold, silver, horses, costumes, slaves, etc. and the waste of many fortunes, they greet his departure with the same eulogies, though there are no longer many in the crowd; for, as the theatre is ended, each man hastens to his own home. Then in his house there are costly luncheons and much feasting and the brilliance of daylight. In the afternoon, the events of the morning are repeated, and this continues for two or three days. When he has spent all, these words of praise becomes nothing but ashes and dust. As often as he examines the accounts in his household and reflects on the extravagant outlay, he laments. While he is enjoying his heart’s desire, he is possessed by a kind of intoxication of vainglory and would expend himself as well, and he cannot form the smallest notion of his losses. But when he has come home – inside the dwelling of this evil spirit – and sees that his hour of glory has departed as the concourse has dissolved, and he looks at the theatre and finds it emptied of its audience and no man uttering a word, and that his losses are no thing of imagination but have already incurred in hard cash, that is when he perceives the ashes . And if after he has spent beyond his fortune, he is in want, and standing on his feet begs in the center of the market place, and not  one of those who formerly hailed him as their patron attends him or stretches out his hand, nay what is more, they rejoice at what has happened – for at the time when they hailed him, they were consumed with envy and thought it a consolation for their own domestic troubles that the man who had been so glorious was likely to be the most dishonoured of all – When no man attends him or stretches out a hand, can anything be more pitiful than that?

(St. John Chrysostom on Vainglory)