The Ancient Guide to Modern Life Quotes

“Not being bothered to exercise your right to vote is a privilege that many women still don't have. Dismissing politicians as all the same is a luxury. Our votes may not seem very important to us, but our lives without them would be immeasurably worse. For we needed universal suffrage to be firmly and unarguably in place before we could demand equal rights. And while it may be tempting for people to mutter that feminism is old-fashioned, boring and a fight already won, we have have to look at the statistics to see that what is true for women is a very long way short of being true for us all.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Classics is, to me, the unicycle of education. It isn’t especially practical or useful to learn Ancient History. It isn’t necessary to learn Latin, or to read Virgil, however much it helps your spelling. It won’t get you a well-paid job in a fancy office, and it won’t necessarily make you attractive to the opposite sex (maybe just to the really good people). But none of that is important compared with the simple fact that studying Classics is brilliant. It’s terrific to know an alphabet you didn’t learn as a five-year-old. It’s amazing to learn about a world far away from your own. It’s wonderful to find a whole new world of literature, history, art, architecture, religion, philosophy, politics and society.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“The Greeks invented almost every literary form: tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, philosophical dialogue, biography. It’s no accident that the names of these genres are all Greek in origin. In contrast, the Romans invented only one literary form: satire.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“The problem is, essentially, a culture clash: religion doesn’t have modern sensibilities. Quite the reverse: all major religions date back to a time when you didn’t need to respect the lifestyle choices of those you didn’t agree with. You could wage war on them, slaughter them or convert them. Or, if they were more powerful than you, you could be a victim of your faith, martyred, a saint. The idea of everyone agreeing to differ and simply getting on with things is, surely, a decidedly modern ambition.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Caesar’s final words, though, were not ‘Et tu, Brute?’, in spite of what Shakespeare would have you believe. He actually spoke his last words in Greek: ‘Kai su, teknon?’ – ‘Even you, my son?”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Perhaps still more disquieting to modern eyes even than the thousands of disenfranchised women and resident foreigners is the fact that Athens could not have had its democratic systems if it hadn’t also had slavery.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Learning something for its own sake – because it is worthwhile to learn it and to know it, rather than because it is useful for another purpose, even if it is also that – is a wonderful thing to do.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“And given the general usefulness of historical learning, you would think it would be a priority for every education system all over the globe. Teach us our past, teach us other people’s pasts, and we will become more rounded, more tolerant and more engaged human beings (there are obviously exceptions to this rule, Holocaust deniers being only the most glaring ones that leap to mind).”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Juvenal is in no doubt: ‘mens sana in corpore sano’ – ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. He goes on: ‘Ask for a brave mind, with no fear of death, which puts a long life last among Nature’s gifts, which can bear any hardship, which doesn’t know anger, and which lusts after nothing.’ Rich or poor, it isn’t bad advice.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“doesn’t hurt to look back to the past and realise how much we’ve achieved. If nothing else, it enables us to look to the future with optimism and courage, instead of a creeping fear that things inevitably get worse as time goes on.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“The classical world is, as I hope you agree, an extraordinary, fascinating place for us to spend our time. Studying the Romans, Carthaginians, Athenians, Alexandrians and Spartans gives us a unique opportunity to understand the way we live today, partly because of the incredible similarities between ancient and modern worlds, and partly because of the huge differences.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“An Epicurean philosopher and physicist, Lucretius wrote his poem for a friend, Gaius Memmius, and urges him not to be afraid of death. ‘Death is nothing to us,’ he proclaims. If Mother Nature suddenly found a voice, she would wonder why we make such a fuss about dying. If we’ve had a good life, she would ask, why aren’t we happy to leave it, like a guest who’s had a lovely time at a party? And if we’ve had a rotten time, why prolong it? We don’t remember what it was like before we were born, and that is Nature’s mirror of how things will be after we die. ‘Surely nothing about dying seems sad. Doesn’t it seem more untroubled than any sleep?”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“So perhaps there is no such thing as a good death. Does it really make any difference if you are forced to slit your wrists or if you die on the battlefield? Is Vespasian’s death – managing a final joke on becoming a god – somehow better than Nero’s? Nero had to commit suicide when it became clear that rebellion had forced him from the throne. He eventually drove a dagger through his throat – with the help of his secretary, Epaphroditus – after wailing repeatedly, ‘qualis artifex pereo’ – ‘Such an artist! But still I die!’ Surely none of us wants to die by being stabbed through the neck by someone who usually does our filing. Yet Vespasian is just as dead as Nero, in the end. The only difference is that he gets a better write-up, which is all any of us can really hope for.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Fatness is a signifier of changed times. It used to mean you were rich enough to eat more than you needed to survive; now, it means you’re poor enough or lazy enough to prize junk food over a media ideal of the perfect body.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“The anger that Juvenal expresses is so pungent it seems impossible to believe it’s manufactured simply for the poem. His fury at a social order that emphasises relative poverty and wealth, and allows the rich to treat the poor like scum, is surely heartfelt. Isn’t it really Juvenal who has been passed over at dinner, ignored by uppity slaves and made to feel every bit the hanger-on?”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“What we are so quick to forget, just as our Roman predecessors were, is that it isn’t a time or a political system that makes people venal. It’s people that make a time or a political system venal, and they are the same whenever and wherever they live.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Socrates’ final words, in Plato’s Phaedo, were to his friend Crito: ‘Crito, we owe a cockerel to Asclepius. Give him his due, and don’t forget.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“vir mediocri ingenio’ – ‘a man of mediocre genius’.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“It isn’t because they are pathologically unable to feel emotion and use humour to disguise it, it’s because jokes on negative subjects need to be made. No one needs jokes when their day is all flowers and kittens. They need jokes when things are difficult. This gallows humour is part of how we cope with horrible events and circumstances. Someone should make jokes about senseless loss of life, because otherwise we would all simply weep at the futility of existence, and that doesn’t get anything done. Aristophanes knew perfectly well that a risky joke on a painful subject was an important thing to include in his huge, ridiculous play. Jokes shouldn’t always be simple and painless, precisely because the world isn’t simple or painless either. If art imitates life, even low art like cheap jokes, it can’t just pick the nice bits.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Like Dick Whittington, who set off with his possessions in a handkerchief and a surprisingly well-trained cat at his side, young ambitious people flock to cities to live a different life from the one they grew up with. They want the construct, just as much as those who dream of a bucolic ideal want theirs. City-dwellers have museums, restaurants, cinemas, theatres: they get everything when it’s new and they can decide whether they like it before anyone else does. They can see artists, hear musicians, buy groceries in the middle of the night and books on their way home from the pub. The city, for all its failings, so carefully enumerated by Juvenal, is still wonderful. So those of us who live in one should enjoy it for what is is, and always has been: a glorious, grubby, industrial, gastronomical, cultural, social mess.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“It is, of course, in Juvenal’s nature to mock everything. Ordinary people might hate the city and love the country, or they might feel the opposite way. It takes the spleen of Juvenal to loathe the city over several hundred lines of verse, and then mock the only alternative he offers. It is a very urban cynicism, and perhaps that is what the city really offers. A sense of having seen and done it all. Sophistication or jadedness, depending on one’s perspective. If the construct of the countryside is a charming, small-scale, olde-worlde innocence that it doesn’t really possess, then the city is also as much myth as it is reality. The construct of cities is that they are the only places where dangerous, important, society-changing things can happen. Governments sit, law courts judge, traders sell, thugs maraud, all of humanity eventually jostles each other in a city.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“is, of course, in Juvenal’s nature to mock everything. Ordinary people might hate the city and love the country, or they might feel the opposite way. It takes the spleen of Juvenal to loathe the city over several hundred lines of verse, and then mock the only alternative he offers. It is a very urban cynicism, and perhaps that is what the city really offers. A sense of having seen and done it all. Sophistication or jadedness, depending on one’s perspective. If the construct of the countryside is a charming, small-scale, olde-worlde innocence that it doesn’t really possess, then the city is also as much myth as it is reality. The construct of cities is that they are the only places where dangerous, important, society-changing things can happen. Governments sit, law courts judge, traders sell, thugs maraud, all of humanity eventually jostles each other in a city.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Rome’s migration problem as Juvenal perceived it, therefore, was very similar to what we see in our time. The arguments haven’t really changed: migrants are deemed to take more than their fair share of scant resources, to cheat their way to the best jobs and perks, to bow and scrape in the presence of a superior, but to stick the knife in the second you turn your”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“What else was wrong with Rome, in Juvenal’s eyes? The same things that town-dwellers complain about today: noise, overcrowding and crime.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Perhaps the cause of this bigotry, ancient and modern, is always quite simple: we resent those who do what we cannot. We are ashamed of our inability as a society to produce enough doctors, teachers or engineers, so we blame the incoming professionals for their capacity to make up for our shortcomings. And if we can find a way to blame them without admitting to those shortcomings in the first place, so much the better. So we focus on someone’s poor English, religious enthusiasm or unusual dress, rather than the issues we are really bothered about.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Poor Juvenal: he and his friend even lack what it takes to be truly popular authors. He could at least have tried the technique Nancy Mitford employed, when asked what she thought of a terrible novel. She would invariably give the double-edged reply ‘Good is not the word!”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“Perhaps our natural state is to live in a city and complain about it; to get the criticisms in before anyone else can.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“In other words, do we construct a countryside myth because we’re dissatisfied with real, urban life, or do we simply dabble in a bit of beekeeping and vegetable-growing as a way of affirming that our sophisticated city really does include everything, countryside and all?”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“He goes on to contrast his country-bumpkin client with the city-slickers who are trying to frame him, and draws an explicit contrast between the morality of the country and the lawlessness of the city: the kind of crime (patricide) that Roscius is accused of doesn’t fit with a rural lifestyle. ‘Every type of crime doesn’t come from every type of life. Luxury is created in the city. Of necessity, luxury creates avarice. From avarice, recklessness bursts out. And from that comes every type of crime and wickedness. But the country life – which you call uncultured – teaches thrift, conscientiousness and justice.’ Cicero, we should remember, loved Rome; the politics, the law courts, the power-brokers, the back-stabbers, he was born to rise through them all. But he knew perfectly well that a jury of Romans might well see the city/country divide rather differently, and he played to the crowd accordingly.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

“But Horace’s most renowned phrase, quoted extensively in the movie Dead Poets Society, appears in Ode 1.11. ‘Carpe diem’, says Horace in the last line: pluck the day, trusting as little as possible in the next. Life is short, in other words, and don’t you forget it. His two-word phrase is almost invariably translated as ‘seize the day’.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life