He had started out as a journalist, a poor, starving artist. A man who loved craft, who didn’t need much provided he had a few pencils and a notebook and something to write about. But after the success of The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway—like so many successful artists—changed.

The editor Samuel Putnam had drinks with Hemingway not long after the book came out. “It did not take long for me to discover that the somewhat shy and youthful reporter whom I had met in Chicago had vanished,” he observed. “In his place was a literary celebrity.” In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes of his worry of something similar happening to him. He had seen what being emperor had done to his predecessors, and he wanted to escape “being Caesarified,” being changed by the purple cloak of absolute power. It was a fight, he said, to be the person that philosophy tried to make him—especially with all the trappings of success and fame around him.

Hemingway remained a talented writer but became more and more of an asshole as his career went on. He cheated on all his wives. He bullied friends. He talked behind their backs. He believed his own myths and legends, became a bloated version of himself.

Nobody wants that. All of us are in danger of being “imperialized,” to use a phrase from one of Marcus Aurelius’ translators (that’s the Gregory Hays version). We need to stay humble, we need to fight to maintain ourselves, even as others puff us up and flatter us. We can’t believe the marketing. We can’t be stained by our success…or corrupted by our power.

It’s a bad look and it’s also a loss. Hemingway lost the better version of himself. Marcus Aurelius didn’t.