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The article investigates the deliberate erasure of inscriptional honours of two individuals in the first century: Augustus’s ‘friend’, the infamous Gaius Cornelius Gallus, and the famous orator of Isthmia, Nikias. The public dishonouring of rivals by their enemies was common in antiquity. The author explores how this phenomenon illuminates Paul’s conception of glory in Romans and his attack on boasting in oratorical performance in the Corinthian epistles. Paul sets forth a different understanding of honour based on the shame of the cross, God’s election of the socially despised, and the elevation of the dishonoured in the Body of Christ.