Wearing the Mask

I’m rereading Seneca’s De Beneficiis, using Kaster’s shiny new OCT edition, and came across this crunchy line:

hanc personam induisti: agenda est.
—Seneca, De Beneficiis 2.17.2
“You’ve put on this mask; you have to act out the part.”

Seneca’s line is almost a baseball conditional. Although, since I don’t keep track of baseball, my favorite examples aren’t from sportswriters.

For instance, in Kornbluth and Pohl’s Gladiator-at-Law (a minor work of midcentury satire, but nonetheless on my “always reread” list). In it a minor character tells the main character, “You mess with the big boys, they punish you.”