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Ordinarily M. de Villefort made and returned very few visits. His wife visited for him, and this was the received thing in the world, where the weighty and multifarious occupations of the magistrate were accepted as an excuse for what was really only calculated pride, a manifestation of professed superiority—in fact, the application of the axiom, _Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you_, an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the Greeks, “Know thyself,” a knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous science of _knowing others_.
-- "The Count of Monte Cristo". Alexandre Dumas.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1184
The Master said: "The ancients studied in order to rule themselves. These days, people study in order to rule others."
-- "The Four Chinese Classics". David Hinton. 2013.
The Greeks here are doubtless "Plato, Aristotle, Socrates" (Vizzini, "Princess Bride") or around about 400 BCE, which Confucius predates while pining for an even older Golden Age, one no less hypothetical than the one Ovid would write about some time later.
All pretty much instantaneous in geologic time.