I assure you I had rather be the first man here than the second man in Rome.

On passing through a village in the Alps, as attributed in Parallel Lives , by Plutarch, as translated by John Langhorne and William Langhorne (1836), p. 499<!-- ; also quoted in p. 372 Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1892) by William Shepard Walsh

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First in a village rather than second in Rome.