The Sixteen Satires

By Juvenal

★★☆☆☆

I wanted to be super clever and start this off by saying, “Juvenal is juvenile,” but that’s not exactly the right word. What’s a word for “inflammatory, self-righteous, ranting, bitter old man*”? If you think of one, let me know.

Juvenal’s satires are a commentary on what he characterizes as the degradation of Roman society, for which he holds all his contemporaries responsible while upholding the moral and political purity of his forebears. He’s poisoned with nostalgia and thinks the golden age of Rome has come and gone; observing his city makes him feel the way I imagine I would if I were stuck in front of a TV with no remote and forced to watch MTV or South Park 12 hours a day. Or if I were trapped in a modern art museum.

Part of me almost pities Juvenal, because at times his tirades come off sounding more like those of an aging man unable to let go of his glory days or keep up with a fast-paced and transforming society than those of a sanctimonious blowhard. But then Satire VI came around relentlessly ragging on women and with its cruel pettiness cured me of any sympathetic twinges.

What I take from these satires is that, just as human nature has remained constant throughout history, we perceive our societies to be in a constant state of decline. Why is that? It seems that every generation balks at the behavior of the next while glorifying that of their predecessors. But are really we in a downward spiral of corruption that began when Eve bit into that infamous apple? Or are we simply skittish of change? Is this a phenomenon of degradation or evolution?

*Okay. So I don’t actually know if he was an old man. But that’s how I picture him.


Books Read This Year: 7
Top 100 Progress: 38/100

The Love Poems

By Ovid

★★☆☆☆

The Love Poems is another example of me opening a book with the wrong set of expectations. Call me crazy, but from a book with both ‘love’ and ‘poetry’ in the title, I expected some romance. And the cover! The cover’s pretty, no? But it was not to be. Ovid is probably one of the least romantic poets I’ve ever read, if you consider an opposite of love to be a vulgarization of romance. Ovid could be described as the Roman man’s guide to Getting Girls, and the Roman woman’s guide to Getting Guys to Like Them. Forget truth or romance; according to Ovid love is all about pretense. And by all appearances, you'd think he's right. The implementation of his advice is still rampant today! Ovid's strategies for wooing women can be observed in frat houses and crude comedies across America on a daily basis, and the contrived charades women employ in their effort to be men’s “ideal” could have been pulled straight from Cosmo’s “25 Ways To Get Him Thinking About You.” A common theme is starting to emerge from all these books* for me: human beings aren’t as dynamic as we think we are. Yeah, we have more advanced technology, take up more space, and live longer than we used to, but our drives and the ways we interact with one another haven’t changed much at all.

In conclusion, I think The Love Poems is a misleading title. All ye romantics, be wary. I’d recommend Ovid only to those who identify with the serial-dating stock male lead in cruder romantic comedies (in need of the reforming powers of blossoming love for the female lead), or perhaps think ‘that’s what she said’ jokes are hysterical. I will concede, however, that although it wasn’t for me, Ovid did have a serious knack for writing poetry.** I just wish he’d channeled his talent into, you know, romantic love poems.

* The ones I’m reading for my J-term class on Romans and Christians, I mean.

** And apparently, so do I. Nice accidental rhyme, eh?


Books Read This Year: 7
Top 100 Progress: 38/100

On The Good Life

By Cicero

★★★☆☆

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Cicero’s one of those names everyone seems to recognize even if most people haven’t a clue what he’s known for (see: Plato, Socrates, Aristotle…). I was no different. Cicero, Socrates… what’s the difference? But in actual fact Cicero is nothing like Socrates.* (Thank God.) Nor Plato, aside from a minor use of monologue disguised as dialogue.

A good chunk of this book is devoted to Cicero’s essays On Duties and On Friendship. On Duties is kind of an ancient version of How To Win Friends and Influence People. Cicero claims that one must be well-liked in order to achieve much of anything, which ties in with his overarching philosophy that the human beings are inexorably intertwined with one another. We’re symbiotic, if you will. On Duties outlines how to earn and maintain popular favor, and what to do with it once you’ve got it. I’ve never been very comfortable with the whole idea of self-marketing, so I wasn’t super keen on this section, though it was interesting to read. I did like his theory that our symbiosis can be an agent for the greatest good and the fiercest detriment, however, which sort of segues into his ideas in On Friendship, where he cites friendship as the best thing one can achieve in life, but friendship gone bad as one of life’s greatest failings and dangers.

For the most part I enjoyed On Friendship – it tiptoed into the territory of social psychology, which I love – but I thought Cicero’s adamant ideals of wholly genuine friendship verged into a sort of platonic take on True Love. It’s beautiful in theory, but I’m not sure I buy the idea that there are any friendships entirely devoid of the occasional falsity and pretense. We are only human, after all. Cicero’s talk about the sincere, unpretentious, and unambiguous institution of friendship felt reminiscent to me of how Ayn Rand speaks of the Self, and I question whether it's any more practical in real life. That being said, I did enjoy his distinctions between different types of friendship, and his theories on what brings friends together and what catalysts start fraying the threads that bind. College is notoriously a period of social upheaval, and I found myself identifying with much of his commentary on these shifting dynamics. In fact, that’s the major thing that sets Cicero apart from some of our other readings in my mind – he’s relevant to modern society in a more manifest way than the Greek philosophers and their more abstract conjectures. You can underline passages and apply them verbatim to our present society, as though human beings haven’t changed as much as we think they have in the past 2,000 years. And that’s just plain cool. 

* Interesting Fact: We have no published works by Socrates. He only exists in other philosopher’s characterizations of him! Nuggets like this are why I go to college, truly.


Books Read This Year: 4

Top 100 Progress: 38/100

The Rise of Rome

By Livy

★★★☆☆

I addressed the “secret” clause in my tagline a couple entries ago, and today I address the “under duress” clause with the first in a series of books I’ve read for class in the past week. I’m in a program at school that studies the development of Western civilization by reading and discussing its great works, which inevitably includes several histories. Last semester the focus was on Ancient Greece and our major historians were Thucydides and Herodotus. This semester it’s all about the Romans. Livy does for Rome what Thucydides and Herodotus did for Greece. Of the three, Livy is my favorite. Yes, he’s a historian like the others, but unlike them he’s firstly a writer, and you can tell. Having about 100 pages of him to read a night, this was something I was very grateful for, as it made the convoluted and sometimes corrupt lineage of Romulus more compelling than it might have been in other hands. In fact, several times the English student in me took over from the student of critical thought and started underlining passages that I just plain liked, even if they weren’t otherwise significant. Which, coming off a tide of Plato, Biblical texts, and the odd appearance by Socrates,  was a nice and somewhat novel feeling. So, verdict on Livy’s Rise of Rome? Not bad. 


Books Read This Year: 4
Top 100 Progress: 38/100