Meaning & Analysis
To reject or destroy the means, people, or support systems that helped one attain success after achieving it.
Insights
Ingratitude and Betrayal
The proverb conveys the moral failing of forgetting or discarding those who enabled one’s rise—be it mentors, institutions, or stepping-stone opportunities.
Ambition’s Disdain for Origin
It criticizes how individuals, once elevated, often disassociate themselves from their humble beginnings or former allies in an effort to maintain prestige.
Self-Destructive Arrogance
By cutting down the ladder, one ensures there is no path of return, implying a dangerous pride that refuses to acknowledge interdependence or vulnerability.
Ethical Obligation to Legacy
Implies a moral duty to preserve and honor the tools or people who contributed to one's success, warning against the erasure of one’s roots.
Shakespearean Influence
Shakespeare articulates this theme with poetic precision in *Julius Caesar*, where ambition disdains its origin once power is attained—highlighting timeless concerns about political and personal betrayal.
Historical Examples of Erasure
As in Fuller's account of Polydore Virgil, the proverb has been historically applied to scholars or leaders who erase their sources to secure singular fame—exposing the dark underside of intellectual or political ascent.
Philosophical and Ethical Resonance
Echoes Stoic and Christian ideals of humility and gratitude. Turning one's back on the ladder contradicts the virtue of remembering one's place and dependence.
Sociopolitical Critique
Critiques elitism and class distancing, especially when individuals sever ties with their origin communities to align with higher status groups, revealing systemic dynamics of exclusion.
Rhetorical Devices
Extended Metaphor
The ladder becomes a symbol for the entire process of advancement, creating a vivid image of betrayal through abandonment or destruction of one's path.
Irony
Turning one’s back on the ladder suggests not only ingratitude but shortsightedness, since one may need that very ladder again—making the action self-defeating.
Allusion
Shakespeare’s adaptation gives the phrase literary authority and dramatic poignancy, embedding it within broader discussions of ambition and moral decay.
Transcription
Quotations
[Polydore Virgil] is said to have burned all those rare authors, which he could compass into his possession. Thus . . he cut down those stairs whereby he ascended the throne of his own knowledge.
Shakespeare Citations
Lowliness is young ambition’s ladder, Whereto the climber-upward turns his face; But when he once attains the upmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back.
Cross References
- See Sm., p. 524.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.