The Daily Stoic - How To Be Content: The Search For The Good Life Pt. 1

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

Today’s episode is an excerpt from Stephen Harrison’s How To Be Content: An Ancient Poet's Guide for an Age of Excess published by Princeton University Press. In this chapter Horace talks about being content with what you have, the different philosophical ideas that lead us to living “the good life.” and more.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 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. Thankoic Podcast. The Stoics loved poetry. You can't help but see this,

especially in Marcus Aurelius, where he quotes regularly from Rome and agrees his great poets. A Clienti's in an early stoke actually said that there's sort of a metaphor even inside poetry that proves the ideas of stosis. And he talks about how the constraints of the medium create the great art, create the insights.

Well, today we're gonna look at a little bit of poetry, but we're gonna look at some poetry that teaches some philosophical lessons, both in the form that Clienthese is talking about, but also in the message, because we're going to be talking about the Roman poet Horus, famously the creator of the expression, Seize the Day or Carpe Diem, along with a bunch of other fascinating ideas. This is all drawn from another of the fantastic Princeton University Press editions of ancient wisdom for modern readers. This one is specifically translated by Stephen Harrison. It's called How to Be Content, the search for the Good Life. I devoured this little book of Horus's poems quite quickly when I read it a few years

ago. We carry it at the Painted Porch in the physical form, and you can pick up, I'll also link to it in today's episode page. But I thought I'd bring you the audio because there's something about listening to poetry that's extra special. In this excerpt, Horace talks about being content with what you have and not worrying about the future. And he explores how contentment, peace, satisfaction, enoughness is the key to living the good life.

He himself was a big fan of country life. He talks about that quite a bit in this collection of poetry, which I think you will quite enjoy. So here is a wonderful excerpt from how to be content from the Princeton University Press, ancient wisdom for modern reader series. Thank you to Princeton University Press for Wisdom for Modern Reader Series. Thank you to Princeton University Press for allowing us to draw on this. Thank you to Stephen Harrison for his wonderful translation.

And enjoy some of these poets from Horace. I recommend the physical edition, which you can pick up in the link below at thepaintedporge.com. But if you want to grab it in an audio, here's what it sounds like as well. But if you want to grab it in an audio, here's what it sounds like as well. CHAPTER 1 The Search for the Good Life Horse'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 roots 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 own time. This chapter considers this complex of related themes in various parts of the poet's output. Being content with one's lot How does it come about Messinus? That none of us can live, content with the lot that choice has accorded, or chance has cast an R-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 wins, 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 inequity and statute when it 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 garriless 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 are just now a soldier will be a traitor. 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 any 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 laffer from truth-telling, just as sometimes insinuating instructors give pastries to boys to make them want to learn their earliest letters. satires. Book 1, satire 1, lines 1 through 26. This, the opening of Horus' earliest poetry book, satire's book 1, criticizes the vice called by the Greeks, Memsimiria, criticism of one's own lot in life and concomitant envy of the lot of others. As often, Horus makes his moralizing 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 a 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 say-buying 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. Humor is also effectively deployed. The jib at the garrilous Fabius wittily attacks a stoic moralist for long-windedness when the stoic's prized brevity is 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 anthropomorphizing 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 illusions to literary traditions. The God who intervenes in human affairs is a recognizable descendant of the Deus-Ex-Makina. 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 participery, is an entertaining transformation of a famous simile of Lucretius, the great Epicurian 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 Horus says here, presents moral truth with greater impact through the strategy of laughter. This is his mode of making the medicine palatable. Stop thinking about tomorrow and enjoy today. Don't search for its forbidden to know, Leokonowe. What end 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 has given you further winters or this one as your last, which is now wearing out the Terranian Sea with pebbles in its path, be wise, strain your wine and cut back long

springing hope within a small space. As we speak, time the Envius will have fled away. Harvest the present day. Trust minimally in the next. Oath's Book 1, poem 11, complete. The emphasis in Horus's poems on accepting one's present situation with equanimity is matched by an equal concern not to worry about the future. For a post-Christian Western society, this is a familiar notion. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus exhorts His followers,

take therefore no thought for the Morrow. For the Morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Matthew 6.34 In this complete lyric poem from the first book of Oads, which has an epigrammatic brevity and pithiness, the poet asks a woman who has a Greek name and may be imagined as a freed woman-girlfriend, not to use the means of horoscope astrology, traditionally associated with Babylon and the East, and here presented as ineffectual and perhaps disreputable to calculate the length of her own or his future life.

This appeals to contemporary fashion, as astrology was popular at Rome Roman Horus' time and recurs elsewhere in his work, for example in Ode's book Two, poem 17. Further domesticating elements reinforced the poem's location in the Roman present and bolster the vividness of its appeal to the original reader. The pebble beaches of the Torinian Sea evoke the long west coast of Italy. While the metaphors of strain, cut back, and harvest, the famous Carpe Diem, perhaps more familiar in the form, sees the day. The motto of Robin Williams' Mr. Keating in Peter Wears 1989 film, Dead Poet Society, look to the Roman culture of wine and vines. Roman wine needed to be strained before drinking to filter out impurities, and earlier in the

wine-making process, then as now, vines needed pruning and grapes picking. This is one of the many poems in the Odes where the implied setting is at a symposium or drinking party. This context is an important background to Horus' presentation of friendship, as we will see in the next chapter, though here Le Okonoe seems to be characterized as a lover urge to enjoy both wine and the poet's presence as her guest. Like the tranquil location of the country, the symposium for Horus is a space of relaxation, albeit of a rather more active kind than quiet contemplation.

The stress on enjoying the pleasure of the moment neatly fits this poem's main ethical point. Relish what you have now and do not be anxious about the future, where anything can happen and which you cannot control. This is recognizably akin to the modern therapy of mindfulness, where we are invited to fix our attention on the details of the moment in order to shut out anxieties about the present or the past. Is this thing on? Check one, two, one, two. There y'all! I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo. I'm just the name of you.

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Hey Prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. The virtues of a moderate and peaceful life. Horus' own preferred quiet residence on his Sabine country estate is the material symbol of his moderate mode of living. This secluded rural existence is especially consistent with the ataraxia, freedom from disturbance, and tranquil life of the mind cultivated by Epicurian philosophy.

Like the symposium, the country can provide an escape from the cares and pressures of urban living. If we are meant to live in accordance with nature, and we are to begin by seeking a site for building a home, do you know any place to be preferred to the Blessed countryside? Is there somewhere where winters are warmer, where more pleasing breeze tames the madness of the dog-star and the influence of the lion so wild once it has received the piercing rays of the sun? Is there a place where envious care disrupts sleep less? Does the grass have less scent or shine than floors of African marble?

Is the water that on city blocks, strains to burst the lead piping, purer than that which hurries along in a downward stream? Of course, Sepharest can be cultivated amid many colored columns, and that house is praised which has a distant prospect of fields. But though you thrust nature out with a pitch-fork, it will always return. The man who does not know how to make the fleeces that have drunk the die of Italian Aquino compete with the purple of Siden, will incur no loss that is shorter or closer to his inner self than the man who cannot distinguish true from false. The man who has been overpleased by fortunes favor will be shaken when it changes. Avoid great surroundings. In a humble house, you can surpass kings and kings' friends in living.

Epistles Book 1 Epistle 10 Lines 12-33 In this poem, presented as a letter written from country to city, Horus teases his friend the schoolmaster Fuscus about the latter's taste for urban life, contrasting with the poet's own rural preferences. He argues that if we ought to live according to nature, as the Stoics famously pronounced, then the country existence, not Fuscus' city life, is the right natural choice. This is likely to play on Fuscus' own stoic interests and to imply amusingly that he is not living up to his own chosen philosophy.

The passage picks out the advantages of the simple rural life. Milder weather, true of the Sabine hills, acquired her environment, Rome then as now was notoriously noisy. the attractive traditional elements of an ancient ideal landscape or locusts aminos, grass flowing water, trees. The city cannot compete with this, though it tries to with its factitious forests of stone columns, its artificial lead water courses, and its mere distant views of greenery. Nature will always reassert itself, an idea expressed in the memorable one-liner, a frequent erasuren mnemonic technique, Natura mexpel esforca, Tamenusque recurret.

Though you thrust nature out with a pitchfork, it will always return. Here we have glimpses of Horace as a proto-environmentalist. The arguments for the superiority of country life continue. The capacity to tell true from false in ethics, reinforced by rustic meditation, is more important than expert discrimination in urban commerce. Here represented by dying wool for clothes, a key industry in Rome, Fuller's vats were evident at its crossroads. Moreover, the material opportunities of the city may be only temporary. The wise man must

always be prepared for a change of fortune, a common and salutary heratian message. The end of the passage perhaps presents a little self-irony on the poet's part. This is, after all, the Horus who had regularly enjoyed the luxurious dinners of Messinus in great surroundings in his patrons' far from Humble House on the Roman Eskwelline, and is in a sense himself a King's friend, and in another poem in the same book, he presents himself as, in fact, unable to decide between urban and rural living. The same kind of debate is conducted in another poem from the first book of Epistles, in which

the poet addresses, again from the country, a young friend, Lollius, who seeks to rise in society. At the end of the poem, Horus encapsulates his ethical message to the young man alongside a commendation of his own modest rural life on the Sabine estate. Amidst it all, read and interrogate the wise about the way to get through your life without friction. Whether unfulfilled desire is always to harass and vex you, and panic and the hope for things of modest use, whether learning leads to virtue or heredity confers it, what reduces your cares, what reconciles you to yourself, what gives you real contentment, office and sweet looker, or the road of retirement and the path of life that passes unknown.

Every time the cool stream of DeGensia refreshes me, that Mandela drinks of, that hamlet shriveled with cold. What do you think I feel my friend? What do you believe I pray for? May I have what I have now, less even, and may I live for myself what remains of my days if the gods grant any remainder. May I have a good supply of books and corn plan for the year, and never hang and float in waiting for an uncertain hour.

But it's enough to pray to Jupiter who gives and who takes away to give me life and resources. A steady mind I will acquire for myself. Epistles Book 1 Epistle, lines 96 through 112. Here, the young Lollius is advised to study ethics and perhaps cross-examine philosophy professors available in Rome, seeking answers to fundamental moral questions. How to lead a tranquil life, how to deal with desire, whether virtue is acquired or inherited, how to reduce anxiety, how to be happy with oneself, whether the public or the private life is better.

Most of these are still key considerations for the good life. The poet's own perspective is then immediately made clear. His say-by-n-a-state, here identified by its name, stream, and local village, provides pretty much all his modest needs. Though as for the modern intellectual, a supply of reading matter, presumably from the city, is a key element. He would not be troubled even if he had even less to live on, and the important things are not to worry about the all-too-unpredictable future and to maintain mental steadiness. As in Ode's book 1, poem 11, one should accept what life and resources the gods give.

The key task is to cultivate the right kind of mind independently of external resources. This emphasis on relative indifference to material circumstances is found again in the first poem in the third book of Odes, once more presenting the Sabine estate as the specific paradigm of the modest and moral life. You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pocule, the painted porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space, but we have made a special digital version of the Stoa we're calling it daily Stoic life.

It's an awesome community you can talk about like today's episode. You can talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using stoicism to be better in their actual real lives. You get more daily stoke meditations over the weekend, just for the daily stoke life members, quarterly Q&A's with me, cloth bound addition of our best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts, and this is the best part. All our daily stoke courses and challenges, totally for free hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our new year, new

you challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial, totally for free. Check it out at dailystokelife.com. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.