How to Be Content: An Ancient Poet's Guide for an Age of Excess (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers)

Everything arrived on time and as advertised

This book functions on two levels --- it is indeed a book on Horace's Roman advice on acceptance of the vicissitudes of life, on one level, but also an excellent introduction to the poetry of Horace for those of us learning Latin. It has good translations of several odes and a couple satires, with the Latin first and the translation directly after. The discussion of each poem is scholarly and fascinating.It is startling to see here first, lines we've lived with all our lives --- puluis et umbra sumus, we are dust and shadow. I ended up buying two different Loeb copies of the Odes and a copy of the Satires, always a good sign for an introduction, that it leads us to read further.

In this book we listen to Harrison far more than we listen to Horace.This small-sized book contains, by my count, approximately:42 pages of Horace in Latin60 pages of Horace in English132 pages of Stephen Harrison's commentary and adviceThe hand-picked Horace selections (16 out of 32 are portions, not complete) are chosen and ordered to fit into Stephen Harrison's plan for explaining to us why we need to listen to Horace.

This is a great introduction not only to Horace's poetry but also to the wisdom of the ancients. Ochlan's reading of the text for the audiobook, while better than Grindell's reading of Epictetus' "How to be Free," is not as good as Roger Clark's more conversational reading of Cicero's "How to Grow Old." For some reason, many readers in the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series for audiobooks have not mastered the art of dramatic reading. Roger Clark is the exception and should have been used more often.

The four other volumes I have in this excellent Ancient Wisdom series have the original Greek/Latin either on the opposite page, facing the smooth-flowing modern English translation, or tucked discreetly at the end of the book. That the original language should at no time obtrude on the reader’s attention is an essential feature of the series. But not in Stephen Harrison’s volume. Why the editor gave in (kowtowed?) to the translator and allowed an interposing, stop-start presentation of the translation is a mystery, but the continual interruptions by the original text seriously blight the entire reading experience.Harrison is also another of those haughty authors who don’t deign to cite the scholarly editions they use and thereby unwittingly imply that they have memorised perfectly all the Latin texts they quote, which would be an astonishingly impressive achievement. Or am I missing something? I certainly feel a tad discontented that there’s no index to the poems he discusses.

Good book but late arriving