Auditing the assessors. The third memorandum of the «Περὶ …» series. The first move against the thirst for fame is not "fame is empty" but look at the cashiers: ἴδε τὰς διανοίας αὐτῶν — "look at their minds": what they themselves are, what they flee, what they chase. Fame is the sum of other people's judgments; inspect the quality of the judges, and you discover the currency in which you meant to be paid. The same manoeuvre — 9.18 ("go down into their souls, and you will see what judges you fear") and 6.59 ("look at the souls of those whose praise men court"); cf. also 7.3: each is worth what he is busy about.

The dunes. The second move targets posthumous fame: the image of drifting sands (θῖνες) — layer settles upon layer and "hides the former ones"; so in life "what came before was very quickly covered" (ἐκαλύφθη — a gnomic aorist: so it was and will be) by what is carried in after. Events, names, reputations are not buildings but depositions, and each new drift buries the last. The same verb closes Book VI (06-59: "how quickly αἰών will cover all — καλύψει") and works in 7.10 (memory "buried under" in eternity — ἐγκαταχώννυται): oblivion has a settled funerary lexicon in the corpus. The kindred image is the river of time, but here the material is drier and truer to fame: the river sweeps away, while the dunes precisely occlude — the new does not destroy the old, it merely makes it invisible, and for δόξα that is death. The discipline is desire.