The Daily Stoic - Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers: How To Be Content - The Problem of Passion Pt. 1

Episode Date: November 27, 2022

For many people, happiness is associated with contentment: being around family, enjoying work, having enough. But what are the secrets to obtaining a contented life in a world of materialistic excess and personal pressures?One of Rome's greatest and most influential poets, Horace (65-8 BCE) shared his wisdom about this question in his writings. 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.In this episode Ryan presents an excerpt of that book which specifically focuses on the idea of passion, and how the drive to obtain more and more can come between us and the good life.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, from the Stoic texts, audio books that you like here recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to actual life. Thank you for listening. of life. Thank you for listening. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion-forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts.

You know, a friend of mine did this study a long time ago. His name is Cep Canbar, and he looked at like thousands and thousands and thousands of blog posts, and he was able to sort them by the age of the person writing them. And he found that young people associated success with accomplishment, but older people, as they got older, they more and more associated it with contentment, being around family, being happy, having enough, that contentment was really the key. Well, in today's episode, we're drawing from a collection of the poems of Horus, which was published by the Princeton University Press series for Ancient Wisdom, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. I've raved about these series. I carry them with the painting porch. I'll show in today's Princeton University Press series for ancient wisdom, ancient wisdom for modern readers. I've raved about these series, I carry them with the painting porch, I'll show them today,

show them, it's all the ones we used. But I really liked this edition of Forrest. I've read it. I've actually quoted it both in discipline and I have a quote of it in the New Justice book. He was a favorite of the Stokes. He's widely considered one of the greatest poets who ever lived. And I want to bring you this episode today about the problem. We're really going to be talking about passion and how passion, lust, envy, drive, wanting more and more,

more can get between us and that contentment that we want and deserve. And why virtue is to path the freedom, means that his poetry consistently takes a negative view of extreme erotic passion of a romantic kind. This is consistent with most of the philosophical schools of the time, which as we have seen, stress the potentially deleterious effects of such acute emotions on the human psyche and the consequent need to be impassive, rational, or serene in response. Here Horace differs markedly from the melodramatic approach of the elegic love poets of his own time, such as Tibulis, whom we met in Chapter 2 and who will be encountered again.

They presented the lover as a form of play-slave to the beloved, a powerful metaphor in a real slave-holding society, emphasized the emotional highs and lows for the lover of the beloved's typically erotic unreliability, and even suggested that the life of love is an alternative form of war in which the lover should engage as hardily as his Roman contemporaries entered into actual conflict on the battlefield. Horus' more detached approach to love may also reflect his personal experience in avoiding the ties and potential conflicts of monogamy.

Love or passion on the part of the poet narrator is generally temporary and ironized rather than conjugal or committed. There are, however, occasional glimpses of other possibilities. On at least one occasion, as we shall see, a poem presents a pair of lovers who accept one another for all their foibles and look to a lasting relationship with the realism of an enduring married couple. In general, passionate and intense romantic love is seen in Horus' work as a problem to manage rather than a mode of self-fulfillment, and viewed as a form of youthful access that

will be duly tempered in time by the moderation of middle-aged wisdom. Can you see how Sotakte stands deep in snow? A thing of brightness and how the woods are in trouble, no longer able to bear their burden, and how the streams have stopped still with the sharp frost. Melt the cold with a generous deposit of wood on the hearth, and pour the four-year wine more lavishly Tully Arcus from from its two-eared Sabine jar. Leave the rest to the gods who have all at once laid low the winds that battled over the seething sea, and neither Cyprus nor Ancient Mountain Ash is shaken.

For bear to ask what will be tomorrow and count as gain any day fortune grants. And do not my boy reject love's sweetness or dancing's measures, while gloomy grey age stays away from your green glow. Now you should seek at the appointed hour the campus and the squares, the gentle whispers towards nightfall. Now dear to you is the laughter of the hiding girl, which betrays her from the depth of the corner, and the love token rested from her arm or her poorly resisting finger. Ode's book one, Poem 9, complete.

Here, as often, the poet narrator takes up the role of an older man who has been through the experiences of love and is addressing a younger person with appropriate advice. The erotic message of the poem does not become clear until its second half. The first half begins with the description of the great isolated limestone ridge, Sorakte, modern Monte Sorakte, which runs laterally for more than three miles and rises to a height of almost 2,300 feet. It dominates the west side of the Tiber Valley at a point about 30 miles north of Rome, from some parts of which it is visible on a clear day. The location of Horus' poem seems indeed to be in the city, even if the view of Sorakte is strictly too detailed for the actual distance involved.

But this is not just an appreciation of landscape. The impressive hill, in fact, bears a message about the life of love. Its snowy appearance reminds the poet that the age of grey hair, his own, is not the age for love, which needs to be pursued in the green age of the boy Taliakus. Just as Saurak De with its cover of forest, still there and protected as a nature reserve, is pleasant and accessible in the green months, but for bidding and hostile in the whiteness of high winter. This personification continues in the trees unable to sustain their burden of snow, like the unsteady limbs of aging man, and the streamwater that freezes, parallel to ancient beliefs

about the chilling of the blood in the old. For the poet narrator himself, the pleasures of the symposium and the consumption of wine very likely from his own say-by-n-a-state, are here prior to the pleasures of love. He seems to be in the position of the trees of the Third Stanza, who have survived unshaken the onslaught of the winds and storms of the past, a common image for human passions. For the boy Taliarkas, his youth puts him in a different position. He can and should engage in Love's commotions now, but in time he will achieve the mellow and measured perspective of the poet's speaker, who can act as experienced observer and non-playing advisor, not unlike a writer-cup captain. Love is presented in this poem as part of the need

to live in the moment that we saw as a central Horatian feature in Chapter 1. The boy should not wait for tomorrow, but follow his passion now, pursuing his beloved in the court yards and corners of the city. The erotic life is here seen as a game and entertainment. The boy and girl engage in hide and seek, with the hideer ensuring that she is found and playfully yielding a love token to her pursuer. This is no drama of sweeping or suffering sentiment, but rather a due exercise of youthful

high spirits that has little significance in the long term. The tempests of love will blow over in time, just as the storm winds blow themselves out over the sea, often visible 30 miles to the west from the hermitage of Sun Silvestro on Sorate Summit, without shaking the mountains mighty forests. This anti-romantic view might strike some as rather detached. But it has an attractive, worldly pragmatism. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up.

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I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet. The poet As Ironic Lover He who is untainted in life and unsullied with crime needs no morish javelins or bow or quiver teaming with poise and arrows, fuzcus, whether he is about to march through the sultry certies or the caucuses hard to strangers or the domains lapped by the high-daspies of story. For a wolf fled from me, all unarmed in a say-bind wood, as I sang of my lology and wandered beyond my boundary stone freed from cares.

Such a monster as the soldierly south does not breed in its broad oak groves, nor the land of Juba, that dry nurse of lions. Set me on the sluggish plains where no tree is refreshed by a summer breeze, on the side of the world oppressed by mists and a lowering sky. Set me under the chariot of the sun where it comes too close in the land forbidden to habitations. I will love my lalogy with her sweet laugh, her sweet voice. Ode's book one, poem 22, Complete. This light-loved poem, Too Lallogy, opens as if it were a rather more serious work, pointing

to the philosophical idea of the imperturbability and hence invulnerability of the truly virtuous and wise man, found for, in an analogous position at the start of Horus' Grand Third Roman ode, Ode's book three, poem three. The list in the second stanza of the distant and difficult locations the man of virtue might reverse, also strikes a grand note. The picture of crossing the certies,

the great deserts of North Africa in modern Libya, recalls a famous desert march in that area by the heroically virtuous Roman general Kato the Younger in 47 BCE during the Civil War of Caesar and Pompey. While another great hero, Alexander the Great, is behind the references to the Caucasus and the River High Dydaspis in the modern Punjab. Both areas were associated with Alexander's extraordinary military career, which so fascinated the Romans with their keen cultural interest in war and conquest. As in a Hollywood Western, the rugged and mysterious character of the landscape reflects the toughness and

determination of the pioneering heroes who conquer it. The certis are, sultry, making men sweat. The Caucasus is inhospitable, unwelcoming to those who come to it, and the river high daspies is so distant it is known only from stories. This elevated opening is then characteristically deflated in Stanza's 3 and 4 by Horus' Anacdod about himself, the first surprise of the poem. The scene shifts from exotic foreign locations to Horus' say-by-n-a-state, an intimate and domestic Italian location, and to a much less heroic scenario. Horus is singing of his latest girlfriend, Lallagy, and consequently wanders absent-mindedly beyond

the boundaries of his own small property. This accidental local expedition of Horus clearly parallels and parodies the great pioneering marches of the poem's opening. The poet's mind is focused on the frivolous topic of love, not the serious business of military action and world conquest. The main idea linking the first two sections of the poem is that of travel free from worry. The philosophical and military hero marches purposefully to the ends of the Earth without fear, owing to his great courage and virtue. But Horus' unintended mini-march is also fearless.

This situation is owed not to his outstanding personal qualities, after all he is only moaning around, but to the convention that all lovers have the protection of the gods wherever they go, an idea found in the contemporary Latin love elegy of propersius and tibulus. That all is far from serious here is confirmed by the story about the wolf, frightened off by Horus' singing of lalogy. We may recall the unmalodious bard Cacophonics of the Astoric's stories. Though there were and still are wolves in the hilly or regions of Italy, the point of this episode is not to log a zoological encounter but to make a symbolic point.

The incident asserts that the poet is special, to be miraculously respected even by the fiercest creatures. But the wolf, like the fish who gets away from the angler, is built up into the most extraordinary creature. Bigger than any creature in the forests of Donios, the area of Apulia in Italy where Horus grew up, and larger even than the proverbially large and ferocious lions of North Africa, the land of Juba, its contemporary king. This is surely protesting too much, and of course there is no actual confrontation with

this fabulous creature which flees the poet's advance. The world of Horus' eroticodes is not the world of virtue and heroism, though that is what the first two stanzas let us to expect. Having compared his local ambling with famous military expeditions, Horus now does propose foreign journeys of his own to equally tough landscapes that in their different ways differ dramatically from the temperate climate naturally preferred by the Mediterranean Greeks and Romans. climate naturally preferred by the Mediterranean Greeks and Romans. The vast and misty steps where summer never comes, perhaps evoking Central Asia, and the sun-baked lands where summer never stops, perhaps evoking Africa. But these travels are purely hypothetical. The poet has not the least

intention of changing location. He is not a Cato or an Alexander, merely a poet amusingly describing his supposed love sickness. And it is with love and the beloved Lallogy mentioned for the second time that the poem closes. But the poet's promise to love her is interestingly empty. Lallogy, with whom the poet is here apparently so smitten, reappears in no other poem, and even here she seems a sketchily described character. The only personal trait she is allocated is that of a pleasant voice and laugh, a characteristic mirrored in her name which in Greek suggests chatterer. Lallogy is simply yet another in the catalog of different erotic partners that the poet of the Ode's presents.

The erotic world of these poems is a world of many loves, an explicit and obvious contrast with the contemporary world of Roman love-eligie, where the poet presents himself as having a single, obsessive, passionate love affair. In this poem we find a brief, almost flippant characterization of a girl who appears only once in Horace for this cameo role. This poem thus sets out a highly ironic view of love, undermining with its wit both ideas of philosophical virtue and notions of intense erotic passion. Though the poet presents himself as the dedicated lover,

the poem's fantastic elements, unlikely scenarios, and casual treatment of the beloved, suggest that love is a frivolous and lighthearted activity, not to be taken as seriously as the philosophy and conquest set out at the poem's beginning. Lallogy is in fact a momentary dalliance, who takes her place alongside the many other figures for whom the poet of the Oads claims as objects of his passion and is conjured up for the purposes of writing a well-crafted and amusing poem. Overall, this ode suggests that the truly wise man will in fact make light of passion and avoid erotic access in the cultivation of calm and equanimity, which are the preferred

goals of life. This may not be bad advice. Thanks for listening to The Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The app goes away. You go as the enemy, still in this is the key. The leatherbound edition of the Daily Stoke. We have them all in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com.

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