“Saint Peter is very well at Rome”

“Saint Peter is very well at Rome” is a recurring proverb in Sancho Panza’s speech, expressing contentment with the place and work that suit him. Its clearest meaning emerges when he gives up the governorship: after aspiring to rank and office, he chooses familiar labor and freedom over authority, constraint, and anxiety.

The Proverb and Its Variants

In his resignation speech, Sancho gives the saying as “Saint Peter is very well at Rome” and immediately explains its practical lesson: “I mean each of us is best following the trade he was born to.” The proverb thus serves not as abstract piety but as a compact argument for matching one’s life to one’s capacities and customary work. Its wording shifts when Sancho repeats it later: there it is “Saint Peter is very well in Rome.” The altered preposition does not change the point, but the recurrence makes the phrase a recognizable part of his way of interpreting events.

The idea has an ironic history in Sancho’s hopes. Earlier, he accepts the possibility of becoming a count, reasoning that his status as an old Christian is sufficient, while Don Quixote assures him that royal authority could make him a gentleman. The later proverb marks a reversal: the promised elevation has not erased Sancho’s attachment to the life he knows, and experience of office gives him grounds to prefer that life to rank.

Sancho’s Resignation

The saying appears at the culmination of Sancho’s departure from the governorship. After a staged night attack leaves him bruised and exhausted, he dresses at daybreak and goes to the stable, where he embraces and kisses Dapple. He recalls that, before ambition and pride brought him into office, his chief concerns were tending the donkey’s harness and feeding him. The gesture gives personal weight to the proverb: Sancho turns from an official position toward the companion and ordinary routines he associates with his earlier freedom.

Addressing the majordomo, secretary, head-carver, Doctor Pedro Recio, and others, Sancho rejects the work of defending provinces and kingdoms. Ploughing, digging, tending vines, and pruning, he says, suit him better. He prefers a reaping-hook to a governor’s sceptre and freedom in simple clothing to the restraints of government. His complaint also has a specific cause: Doctor Pedro Recio’s restrictions have kept him from eating as he wishes, and the night’s trampling has left him believing his ribs are crushed. Sancho leaves without money, just as he arrived, and refuses the doctor’s offer of a remedy and better meals. The proverb gathers these concrete disappointments into his decision that office is not worth its costs.

A Repeated Refrain

Later, at an inn, Sancho responds to two gentlemen who criticize a new author’s depiction of him as a heavy eater and a fool, unlike the Sancho in the First Part. He says the author might have left him in his corner instead of writing about him, then invokes the proverb in its “in Rome” form. Here it works as a wry defense of being left alone: Sancho does not answer the criticism by claiming a grander position, but by treating his own place as sufficient.

The two appearances differ in scale. At the governorship, the proverb accompanies a consequential withdrawal from public responsibility; at the inn, it punctuates a brief response to an unwanted literary judgment. In both, Sancho uses it to turn away from an imposed role—governor in one instance, the subject of another author’s account in the other—and toward the modest independence he values. Its recurrence links his rejection of political ambition to his preference for being allowed to remain himself.