Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers - Horace & Seneca

How To Be Content: An Ancient Poet’s Guide for an Age of Excess
Horace
Selected & translated by Stephen Harrison
Princeton University Press, 2020

How To Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving
Seneca
Selected & translated by James S. Romm
Princeton University Press, 2020

The “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” series by Princeton University Press is an encouraging but decidedly odd thing. It consists of neat little palm-sized hardcover volumes presenting the aforementioned modern readers with the writing - and the claim of wisdom - of writers from Ancient Greece and Rome. There’s a volume of pickings from “Twelve Caesars” author Suetonius assembled under the title How To Be a Bad Emperor, for instance, and one by famous suicide Seneca titled How To Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life. There’s a volume by indefatigable leader-profiler Plutarch called How To Be a Leader, a volume called How to Grow Old by “On Old Age” author Cicero (whose readers might not want to follow his own specific example to the letter), and military historian and ex-general Thucydides on How to Think about War, and so on. 

It’s not a gambit that should work, since it tends to impose narrative intents on authors who didn’t have them and might have disavowed them if they’d seen these little books for sale in shops at the foot of the Janiculum. Suetonius, for instance, at least in public, would probably have contended that his biographical profiles were lessons in how to be a good emperor (and who might have asked in any case where the emperors are in 2020). And the Roman senator Lucius Sergius Catilina might have raised a hand against the Princeton volume How to Run a Country by (him again) Cicero.

And yet, there’s an undeniable charm and utility to these volumes. It’s not just that it’s incredibly enheartening to see Plutarch and Suetonius piled on New Release tables at the front of bookstores rather than tucked far, far away in the cobwebs of the Classics section. And the possibility, however faint, that some of those New Release browsers might sample the arctic eloquence of Thucydides or the juicy readability of Suetonius or even the windy profundity-lite of Cicero and want more? Well, that’s a spine-stiffening possibility in any case.

There are worrying ideological clashes, inevitably. In the Introduction to his Horace volume, How To Be Content, Oxford classicist Stephen Harrison writes, “In his slave-owning, chauvinistic, imperialistic and often brutal society, Horace, like other enlightened Romans such as Cicero and Seneca, nevertheless managed to engage instructively with issues which we still confront today.” And classics historian James Romm goes even further when introducing his Seneca volume How To Give: 

Like his contemporaries, Seneca addressed himself largely to males, on the assumption that, since males dominated politics and statecraft, it was their moral improvement that mattered most. His exemplars and hypothetical actors are invariably male, to judge by the the masculine gender of associated Latin words. It seemed wrong to me to perpetuate this gender bias, but also wrong, or at least anachronistic, to introduce female pronouns where Seneca and his age would never have used them. I have dealt with this problem by pluralizing many of Seneca’s singular pronouns, converting “he” either to “they” or “we,” or by using “you say” in cases where Seneca introduces an unnamed opponent with inquit (“he/she says”).

This is admittedly dire, but these two latest installments in the “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” series largely manage to side-step the near-ubiquitous 21st century pressure for cringing woke apologetics. Instead, they energetically dig in to the life-experiences of their respective authors. Romm’s examination of Seneca’s De Beneficiis is laid out in the standard format of the series, with the original language and the new English-language renditions on facing pages, and his translation is clean and engaging:

How sweet and precious is the gift given by one who won’t allow any thanks, or who forgets, even as he gives, that he has given! But to carp at a person just as you give something is madness; it mixes reproach with kindness. Gifts and good deeds must not be made bitter or mixed with anything unpleasant. Choose a different occasion if there’s anything you want to reprove.

Less traditional (no facing-page Latin) but even more enjoyable is Harrison’s fantastic Horace volume, which is full of Horace’s poetry both in the original and in translation but which excels mainly in Harrison’s roving commentary on the whole breadth of the poet’s work. The ruling characteristic of the “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” series (hinted even in its title) has always been a kind of entertainingly controlled anachronism. These authors, however wise (and thanks to Romm, Seneca in particular has seldom seemed wiser), were gadflys of an alien world; most of the “wisdom” from their writings that can still be applied with any specificity to the 21st century will typically be so broad and bland that you could just as readily find it inside a fortune cookie. 

But Harrison’s Horace volume is much less a distillation of the poet and much more a long and wonderfully informed conversation with him. And it’s unavoidable that certain echoes of modern life (and maybe modern Presidential politics?) will work their way into some of these discussions, as when Harrison brings up Epistle 1:

Once again the details look to the lifestyle of the Roman elite, but also fit our modern context: a fine city house, a delightful country residence, deep monetary holdings, or an extensive art collection cannot help those who are fundamentally unhealthy in soul, just as they cannot alleviate their bodily pain. The opening of the passage again contains the key solution in memorable one-liner form: he who has enough need not strive for more (quod satis est cui contingit, nil amplius optet).

Fundamentally unhealthy in soul … yes indeed: timeless.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.