Noblesse oblige

In Pope's translation, Sarpedon exhorts Glaucus thus: 'Tis ours, the dignity they give to grace The first in valour, as the first in place; That when with wondering eyes our confidential bands Behold our deeds transcending our commands, Such, they may cry, deserve the sovereign state, Whom those that envy dare not imitate!

During the Hellenistic period, a similar practice of benevolence and benefaction in funding public institutions and distributing wealth, known as euergetism, used private, focused urbanization and investment to engineer a reciprocal relationship predicated on tradition and established societal norms.

On a larger scale, this mutual interdependence can be observed in the symbiotic relationship between a tributary state and its overlord: Alexander the Great formalized this policy in seeking to portray his conquests and subjugations as a form of liberation by directing funding into recently acquired polities.

[7] In Le Lys dans la Vallée, written in 1835 and published in 1836, Honoré de Balzac recommends certain standards of behaviour to a young man, concluding: "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!

The phrase is carved into Bertram Goodhue's Los Angeles Public Library on a sculpture by Lee Lawrie as part of Hartley Burr Alexander's iconographic scheme for the building.