Horace: Life Lessons in Verse
By: Steven Gambardella
Tags: Life Lessons, Philosophy, Psychology, History, Culture

We can be turned off by complicated ideas. We want it easy.

Philosophers are damned like the mythical Cassandra, who could see the future and warn people of the dangers before them but never be believed. They have advice for us that can save us plenty of trouble, but the advice rests on complicated ideas.

Epicurus (b. 341 B.C.E.) was seen by a multitude as a saviour. His followers preached that his philosophy brought sustained tranquillity. But his style of writing was wilfully boring.

The spartan-living philosopher believed that poetic or flowery writing does important ideas a disservice. He actively warned against enjoying arts like music, poetry and theatre.

But if you’re the bearer of good news, you want to share it as best you can. Roman poets defied the teachings of their long-dead guru by setting his life lessons to verse. It’s the ancient equivalent of singing Nietzsche to a pop beat.

Lucretius was first. It’s thanks to the rediscovery of his first century B.C.E. masterwork On the Nature of Things during the Renaissance that we know many interesting details of Epicurus’s philosophy.

Lucretius justified his putting philosophy to verse with the metaphor of the sick child, who refuses medicine unless the rim of the cup is sweetened with honey. It’s by ruse that profound life lessons can be learned:

“[since] This philosophy’s a bitter pill to swallow, and the throng

Recoils from it, I want to coat this psychic in rich song,

To kiss it, as it were, with the sweet honey of the Muse.”

(Book 4, Trans. A.E. Stallings)

A few decades later Quintus Horatius Flaccus — known to us as Horace — became the most celebrated poet during the reign of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor in the 30s B.C.E. A new book on Horace’s poetry by Stephen Harrison, How to be Content: An Ancient Poet’s Guide for an Age of Excess, shines a light on the philosophical core of the great poet’s writing.

Horace was well-schooled in Athens in both Stoic and Epicurean philosophy. Despite being the son of a freedman (ex-slave), and fighting for the losing pro-Republican side in the civil war after Julius Caesar’s death, the poet found himself in the circles of the imperial court.

Along with Virgil — the other great poet of Rome’s golden age of literature — Horace was patronized by the ultra-rich and powerful Gaius Maecenas, a lieutenant and close friend of Augustus.

Harrison paints a fascinating portrait of a low(ish)-born poet teasing his extremely rich and powerful friends with lessons that ran against the grain of their lifestyles. Poets in the ancient world were given some licence to shame the powerful into living up to their moral obligations.

Horace’s philosophy is an amalgam of Epicurean and Stoic thinking, though it seems the poet favoured the teachings of Epicurus.

Stephen Harrison translates excerpts beautifully in modern English, giving us the historical and philosophical context in detail. Here are just a few ideas put to verse, using Harrison’s translations.

Don’t indulge in materialism, even when you’re wealthy

“The man who has been over-pleased by fortune’s favour

Will be shaken when it changes.

Avoid great surroundings: in a humble house

You can surpass kings and kings’ friends in living.”

(Epistles 1.10)

According to Epicurus, any desire that does not lead to physical pain when unfulfilled is unnecessary. For example, if I desire water I am thirsty, I will suffer and eventually die if I do not quench my thirst.

But owning a 12-bedroom mansion is not a desire that when fulfilled will save me any pain. Our happiness is not in externals, but in our own minds. As long as we have the means to live free of natural sufferings like hunger, thirst and cold, we have the means to be happy.

The world around us tells us that happiness comes from ever-bigger homes, ever-fancier cars, clothes and gadgets. All this serves to make us unhappy with what we actually have.

When our career is going well, or we come into money through luck, we’re tempted to indulge in unnecessary purchases and indulgences. These will likely make you take wealth for granted, only to start to fret and worry about keeping — or adding to — what you have.

A modest home is a sufficient abode for good living, and if our business or our career does hit the rocks, we’ll not have to suffer as much. The higher you climb the harder you fall.

The more you possess the more you’ll worry and stress. Luxury will not save you from anxiety.

“He who longs only for what is enough

Is not stirred to fear by the sea’s tumult,

Or by the fierce force of the falling

northern star or of the rising Kid”

[…]

“Fear and Threats can climb

As high as the master and dark Care

Stays on the copper-sheathed trireme,

And takes her seat behind the horseman.”

(Odes 3.1)

Our anxieties multiply with our possessions. Horace puts this beautifully in verse by demonstrating how the course of nature stressed the Roman wealthy. The rich would have been terrified of storms wrecking their cargo ships, or droughts shrivelling their crops.

The person content with what is sufficient to live undisturbed is not worried by external matters. A person content with little wouldn’t gamble with risky investments.

The “copper-sheathed trireme” was the private 747 or super-yacht of the Roman world. Decommissioned navel warships were bought by the rich as their own vessels to travel the Mediterranean in luxury.

But, as Horace warns, the most luxurious surroundings are no refuge from worry. For as long as we place our self-worth in the things we own, worry will follow us closely no matter how much we run, as if taking the seat behind us on a horse.

Those who long for ever more lavish luxuries or fears for their ever-growing possessions will never be pleased by their wealth. “If the vessel is not clean,” Horace warns, “whatever you pour in goes sour.”

Don’t postpone enjoyment for the future holidays

“Grasp every hour god has kindly bestowed on you

With grateful hand, and don’t postpone

Pleasure for another season:

This way you can say that wherever you were

You lived most gladly: for if reason and good sense,

Not a place that commands a wide spread of ocean, banish cares,

Those who speed across the sea change their climate, not their temper.” “We seek for the good life. But what you seek is here,

Here at Ulubrae, if you have sufficient steady mind.”

Epistles (1.11)

Horace’s super-rich friends loved to travel. Tourism was hugely popular among the Roman elite, who would tour the empire to see the sights of beautiful places they read about as children.

How many of us long for that next holiday to the extent that we seem to postpone our happiness till the day we pack up and head to that sunnier place? Horace is fine with travel, but warns us not to think our lives at home are drab in comparison to our holidays.

We are capable, according to Epicurean philosophy, to be happy no matter where we are if we take pleasure in the necessities of living.

He chose a boring location, an Italian Nowheresville called “Ulubrae”, as a place where we can be just as happy as on a beach or the ski slopes if we’re of “steady mind”. We can change our surroundings, he tells us, but that will not change our disposition — that needs to be changed from within.

You’ll be truly happy if the simple things in life please you.

“If all is well with your stomach, your midriff, and your feet

A king’s wealth will add nothing more.

If you happen to live on a frugal diet of herbs and nettles

Though surrounded by ready-made dainties

That way you will lead a smooth course of life

Even though Fortune’s clear stream suddenly gild you,

Either because you cannot change your nature

Or because you think that everything is inferior to virtue supreme.”

Epistles 1.12

Central to the Epicurean philosophy is the idea of “ataraxia”, which means being free from mental disturbance or feeling unperturbed. For Epicurus happiness is the default state of well-being that all human beings have. As long as we desire things we are not in that state of mind.

The philosopher taught that we should only do as much to satisfy the simple desires we have to eat, drink and keep company to regain ataraxia.

Beyond that, we risk losing our calm disposition. Desires for luxuries that are not essential to be fulfilled will multiply, and we’ll suffer turmoil for our longing. Any additional luxuries beyond a simple diet will not make you any happier.

Epicurus wrote, “Nature’s wealth is restricted [to what is sufficient to live] and easily won, while that of empty convention runs on to infinity.”

Horace reminds his ultra-wealthy friends that while their table may be covered in lavish foods (“ready-made dainties”), only contentment with simple food (“frugal diet of herbs and nettles”) will give them a “smooth course of life”.

Live for today, don’t ruminate on the future

“Amid your hopes and cares, amid your fears and passions,

Believe every day that dawns your last;

Sweet is the hour that comes that’s not expected.”

(Epistles 1.4) “Don’t search (for it is forbidden to know),

Leuconoe,

What ends the gods have given me, given you, and don’t resort

To the calculations of the Babylonians.

How much better it is

To endure whatever will be! Whether

Jupiter [God] has given you further winters

Or this one as your last,

[…]

be wise, strain your wine and cut back

Long-springing hope within a small space: as we speak, time the envious

Will have fled away. Harvest the present day, trust minimally in the next.”

(Odes, 1.11)

The famous “Carpe diem” appears in the last line here. “Harvest the present day”, is a more accurate translation than the more common “seize the day”.

It’s easy to worry about your future. We wonder if we’ll find love, or if we’ll come into money, or if we’ll live a long life. All those things are desirable. But for as long as we ruminate on the future, we are not enjoying the present.

The Romans were much the same. Romans often consulted soothsayers, oracles and astrology — “the calculations of Babylonians” — to try to glean some insight into their future.

In both poems above, Horace reminds us to just live without the expectation of a long life. This is not to say you should cash out your savings to go out and party like there’s no tomorrow, it’s to say that you should enjoy the moment you are in.

Epicureanism was a hedonistic philosophy, but not in the way that we expect “hedonism” to entail. Pleasure to the Epicurean is the absence of pain, not a positively quantified pleasure like getting drunk or having sex.

The wise Epicurean takes pleasure simply in being — in study (because to understand the world, is to not fear it), socialising or exercising — rather than in any activity that could entail later suffering (like getting drunk).