Artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscapes…with her never-ending platitudes the old crone has exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible. (À rebours, chapter 2) It was to him that this voice, as mysterious as an incantation, was addressed; it was to him that it spoke of the feverish desire for the unknown ..read more

‘He’s a mouthy, brazen individual. Maybe he’s a philosopher.’ (Zeus commenting on Timon the Misanthrope’s rantings, in the dialogue of that name, page 112) Introduction Lucian of Samosata was the ancient world’s king of sarcastic humour. He lived from about 125 to about 200 AD, under the Roman Emperors: Antoninus Pius; Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus; Commodus; and perhaps Pertinax (193 AD). He was born at Samosata on the River Euphrates in the Roman province of Syria. Although his native language was probably Syriac, all of his extant works are written entirely in ancient Greek. Although his ..read more

Walter Pater Walter Pater was born in 1839 in the East End of London where his father was a doctor. At the age of 14 he was sent to private school in Canterbury where he was influenced by the soaring beauty of the cathedral and the stylish art criticism of John Ruskin. Aged 19 he went up to Oxford where he took a degree in Literae Humaniores in 1862. Within a few years he began writing essays about poets and artists, including ground-breaking essays about Leonardo da Vinci (1869), Sandro Botticelli (1870) and Michelangelo (1871). He gathered these in his 1873 volume, Studies in the History of ..read more

In his ‘Letters to Lucilius’ Seneca expounds his version of Stoic philosophy. As I explain in my review of the letters, I think they consist more of a mix of moral exhortation and self-help advice than a fully worked-out ‘philosophy’. But on the occasions when he does set out to argue from first principles I find myself quite strongly disagreeing with just about every assertion and every argument Seneca makes. Letter 76 lays out the premises of Seneca’s philosophy with particular clarity (a ‘premise’ being defined as “a statement taken to be true and used as a basis for argument or reasoning ..read more

Michel de Montaigne (1533 to 1592) was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, famous for popularising the essay as a literary genre. The final edition of the Essays was published posthumously in 1595. It was divided into three books containing 107 essays, featuring some of the most influential essays ever written. The first edition, published in 1580, was quickly translated into English and some scholars have detected the influence of Montaigne’s thoughts and phrasing in Shakespeare’s plays. Essayer I’ve always loved the fact that our English word, essay, comes dir ..read more

Michael Ignatieff (born 1947) is a public intellectual, academic, journalist and, at one point, back in his native Canada, a high profile politician. Back when I was a student in the 1980s he was all over the British media, fronting thoughtful documentaries and high-end discussion programmes on Channel 4. Ignatieff’s written a lot – novels, memoirs, histories, countless articles. One consistent strand of his output has been a series of books meditating on the nature and meaning of contemporary warfare. This began in 1993 with Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism and was follo ..read more

‘Friendship is the noblest and most delightful of all the gifts the gods have given to mankind.’ (On Friendship, section 5) On Friendship is a treatise or long essay by Marcus Tullius Cicero, 50 pages long in the Penguin volume titled On The Good Life. The setting is a little convoluted. It is set in the year 129 BC a few days after the death of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Aemilianus, also known as Scipio Aemilianus or Scipio Africanus the Younger, and referred to in the text simply as Scipio. This is the same Scipio who is the lead character in Cicero’s dialogue De republica. He was on ..read more

The best possible political constitution represents a judicious blend of these three types: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. (De republica by Cicero, fragment of Book 2) De republica was written by the Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosophical populariser Marcus Tullius Cicero between 54 and 51 BC. It is variously translated into English as The Republic, A Treatise on the Commonwealth, On the state or On government. Cicero was not himself a philosopher or political theorist of note. This work was one among nearly twenty in which he translated the best of Greek philosophy into ..read more

I try to learn about the way things are And set my findings down in Latin verse. (Book IV, lines 968 and 969) This is a hugely enjoyable translation of Lucretius’s epic poem De rerum natura which literally translates as ‘On the nature of things’. Fluent, full of force and vigour, it captures not only the argumentative, didactic nature of the poem but dresses it in consistently fine phrasing. It has an attractive variety of tones, from the lofty and heroic to the accessible and demotic, sometimes sounding like Milton: Time brings everything Little by little to the shores of light By grace of ar ..read more

‘Of what immense worth is it for the soul to be with itself, to live, as the phrase is, with itself, discharged from the service of lust, ambition, strife, enmities, desires of every kind!’ (On old age by Cicero) Cicero wrote De senectute or ‘Of old age’ to disabuse people of their negative stereotypes about old age, to defend old age, to make it less feared. It’s a relatively short treatise by Cicero’s standards. It is dedicated to his good friend Titus Pomponius (who gave himself the nickname ‘Atticus’ because he loved Athens so much). Cicero sets it, like De republica and De amitia, ba ..read more