ose shrill with the tide of emotion, as he passed headlong over the
barriers of logic and of form.

"You ask me about success because you think I have succeeded. Do you
know what the characteristic moment of my life was? It was when,
almost forty years ago, I failed in my first speech before divine
Hadrian and sickened with chagrin. Most of you are young and will
not wonder, as I might now wonder at myself, that I stood by the Danube
that night and nearly threw myself into the oblivious water. Concrete
failure is as palpable a thing as concrete success. The one is like
a golden cup which you turn in your hands and lift in the sunlight
before you test at your lips the wine it holds. The other is wormwood
forced into your mouth. Like wormwood, it may be cleansing. My
'success' in my chosen profession, the fact that I have made great
speeches, held high positions, acquired fame, is due to the inner
sickness that night by the river. You will find that the name of many
a man of my age is in men's mouths because at the outset Defeat became
his trophy, the Gorgon's head, despoiled by his first sword of hiss
and venom. So there, my friends, you have the rule you ask for--fail
once so ignominiously that you wish to die, and you may wrest from
fate a brief name and the cloak of success.

"But beneath the cloak what is there? What, I mean, has there been
for me? If it is true that success is to be measured by the fulfilment
of desires, then through all these years I have but stood by the bank
of the Danube. You know that I am an exemplar, fit for a schoolboy's
rhetorical exercise, of the old lesson of life, that wealth and power
do not bring fruition in the intimate affections and hopes. My son,
my daughter, have died.[3] The only son left to me is a daily torture
to my pride. The disciples I took into their places have died. The
statues of them which I set up at Marathon no longer comfort me. Like
Menelaus, I have learned to hate the empty hollows of their eyes where
'Love lies dead.'

[Footnote 3: It was after the date assumed for this dinner that
Regilla, the Roman wife of Herodes Atticus, died under peculiarly
tragic circumstances. In commemoration of her he built his famous
Odeum on the south slope of the Acropolis.]

"All these things you have been taught by history to discount.
Barrenness in the personal life is the price many a man has paid for
public honours. Fortune must preserve an equilibrium among us. No
man is b