Book 4
36
The vain on the other hand are foolish persons, who are deficient in self-knowledge and expose their defect: they undertake honorable responsibilities of which they are not worthy, and then are found out. They are ostentatious in dress, manner and so on. They want people to know how well off they are, and talk about it,A variant reading is talk about themselves. imagining that this will make them respected.
37
Smallness of Soul is more opposed than Vanity to Greatness of Soul, being both more prevalent and worse.
38
Greatness of Soul then, as we have said, is concerned with great honors.
1
It appears however that honor also,i.e., honor as well as wealth is the object of both a major and a minor virtue: see 2.7.8. as was said in the first part of this work, has a certain virtue concerned with it, which may be held to bear the same relation to Greatness of Soul that Liberality bears to Magnificence. This virtue as well as Liberality is without the element of greatness, but causes us to be rightly disposed towards moderate and small honors as Liberality does towards moderate and small amounts of money;
2
and just as there is a mean and also excess and deficiency in getting and in giving money, so also it is possible to pursue honor more or less than is right and also to seek it from the right source and in the right way.
