How to Be Content

An Ancient Poet's Guide for an Age of Excess

Horace, Stephen Harrison, Stephen Harrison

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780691182520
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691208497
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

What the Roman poet Horace can teach us about how to live a life of contentment

What are the secrets to a contented life? One of Rome's greatest and most influential poets, Horace (65–8 BCE) has been cherished by readers for more than two thousand years not only for his wit, style, and reflections on Roman society, but also for his wisdom about how to live a good life—above all else, a life of contentment in a world of materialistic excess and personal pressures. In How to Be Content, Stephen Harrison, a leading authority on the poet, provides fresh, contemporary translations of poems from across Horace's works that continue to offer important lessons about the good life, friendship, love, and death.

Living during the reign of Rome's first emperor, Horace drew on Greek and Roman philosophy, especially Stoicism and Epicureanism, to write poems that reflect on how to live a thoughtful and moderate life amid mindless overconsumption, how to achieve and maintain true love and friendship, and how to face disaster and death with patience and courage. From memorable counsel on the pointlessness of worrying about the future to valuable advice about living in the moment, these poems, by the man who famously advised us to carpe diem, or "harvest the day," continue to provide brilliant meditations on perennial human problems.

Featuring translations of, and commentary on, complete poems from Horace's Odes, Satires, Epistles, and Epodes, accompanied by the original Latin, How to Be Content is both an ideal introduction to Horace and a compelling book of timeless wisdom.

Chapter 1

THE SEARCH FOR THE GOOD LIFE

Horace’s poetry consistently advocates being content with one’s lot in life, being satisfied with a small sufficiency of possessions, and not worrying about what the future may bring. These are seen as the key strategies to combat mental stress and discomfort in an anxious and acquisitive society, and the prime routes to the peace of mind that was the central goal of most of the important philosophies of the poet’s own time. This chapter considers this complex of related themes in various parts of the poet’s output.

BEING CONTENT WITH ONE’S LOT

Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo, quam sibi sortem

seu ratio dederit seu fors obiecerit, illa

contentus vivat, laudet diversa sequentis?

“o fortunati mercatores” gravis annis

miles ait, multo iam fractus membra labore;

contra mercator navem iactantibus Austris:

“militia est potior. quid enim? concurritur: horae

momento cita mors venit aut victoria laeta.”

agricolam laudat iuris legumque peritus,

sub galli cantum consultor ubi ostia pulsat;

ille, datis vadibus qui rure extractus in urbem est,

solos felicis viventis clamat in urbe.

cetera de genere hoc—adeo sunt multa—loquacem

delassare valent Fabium. ne te morer, audi,

quo rem deducam. si quis deus “en ego” dicat

“iam faciam quod voltis: eris tu, qui modo miles,

mercator; tu, consultus modo, rusticus: hinc vos,

vos hinc mutatis discedite partibus. eia,

quid statis?” nolint. atqui licet esse beatis.

quid causae est, merito quin illis Iuppiter ambas

iratus buccas inflet neque se fore posthac

tam facilem dicat, votis ut praebeat aurem?

praeterea, ne sic ut qui iocularia ridens

percurram: quamquam ridentem dicere verum

quid vetat? ut pueris olim dant crustula blandi

doctores, elementa velint ut discere prima.

How does it come about, Maecenas, that none of us can live

Content with the lot that choice has accorded or chance has cast in our way,

But rather praise those who follow different paths?

“Happy are the traders,” says the soldier weighed down with years,

His limbs now shattered with many a struggle;

The trader, for his part, when the storm winds shake his ship, says:

“Military service is better: what is there to it? There’s a charge:

In the brief space of an hour there comes rapid death or the joy of victory.”

The farmer is applauded by the expert in equity and statute,

When at cock-crow his client knocks on his door;

But the farmer, when dragged from country to city after standing surety,

Proclaims that only those who live in the city are happy.

All the other complaints of this kind, so many are there,

Would wear out even the garrulous Fabius. Not to hold you up,

Let me tell you where I’m taking my topic:

If some god were to say, “Here I am, I’ll do what you want:

You, who were just now a soldier, will be a trader:

You, just now a lawyer, a countryman; go off here,

Go off there, and change the parts you play. Hey!

Why are you standing around?” they would not comply:

And yet they have their chance to be happy.

What reason is there to stop Jupiter puffing both cheeks at them

In anger, and saying he won’t be so affable in future

In lending an ear to their supplications?

But aside from this, let me not run through my material

In the spirit of one who laughs at what is amusing:

Though what prevents the laugher from truth-telling?

Just as sometimes insinuating instructors give pastries to boys,

To make them want to learn their earliest letters.

(Satires 1.1.1–26)

This, the opening of Horace’s earliest poetry book (Satires 1), criticises the vice called by the Greeks mempsimoiria, criticism of one’s own lot in life and concomitant envy of the lot of others. As often, Horace makes his moralising more palatable to his readers by implying that he is as deficient as everyone else and in equal need of correction (note “none of us” in the opening line). He also brings it vividly home to his original readers by his list of examples; there must have been few of his elite Roman readers who had not had personal contact with war, trade, farming, or the law, and the poet himself (as we have seen) came from a trade background, had been a soldier, and was soon to be a Sabine farmer. Likewise, the particular situations evoked of the instant moment of battle and chronic veteran pains, high-risk storms at sea, the early rising required of lawyers, and the reluctant city business trips of the farmer are familiar Roman features and anchor the moral precept in a contemporary social context. Humour is also effectively deployed; the jibe at the “garrulous Fabius” wittily attacks a Stoic moralist for long-windedness when the Stoics prized brevity as one of the main literary virtues, while the picture of the supreme god Jupiter puffing out his cheeks in anger and speaking in highly colloquial mode (“Hey!”) is an amusing anthropomorphising of the deity commonly thought of as the stern arbiter of destiny.

This immediate appeal to contemporary Rome is matched for more sophisticated readers with subtle allusions to literary traditions. The god who intervenes in human affairs is a recognisable descendant of the deus ex machina, the “god from the crane” held suspended above the stage who often appears to sort out an apparently impossible situation at the end of a Greek tragedy. Likewise, the image of teachers bribing their pupils with patisserie is an entertaining transformation of a famous simile of Lucretius, the great Epicurean moral poet of the previous generation, who had compared his poem to a cup of medicine tinged with honey given to the young; in both cases sweet products are deployed for philosophically pedagogic purposes. These features from more elevated literary sources are appropriately lightened for the context of the Satires, which as Horace says...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1.   The Search for the Good Life
• 2.   The Importance of Friendship
• 3.   Love—The Problem of Passion
• 4.   Death—the Final Frontier
• Index