The Roman Search for Wisdom

Kellogg reprises the digest format of The Greek Search for Wisdom in reintroducing the most impactful ancient Roman authors to popular audiences. Profiling 10 writers in detail and many others in passing, Kellogg vividly represents the Roman corpus through poets Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid; playwrights Plautus, Terence, and Seneca; biographers Plutarch and Suetonius; historians Livy, Tacitus, and Sallust; and philosophers Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Readers encounter Horace’s lovely dictum to “scatter roses” and moderate commitment to a “middle way”; Ovid’s love-affirming tale of “halcyon days” and hopeful insight that “every moment’s occasion is a renewal”; Tacitus’s moral purpose and “special duty... to see that virtues are not left unrecorded”; Sallust’s insightful suggestion that words outdo deeds by preserving them for posterity; and the Stoic prescriptions of slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus, for whom “the arena of freedom is within our own souls.” To orient readers, Kellogg provides a chronology of his subjects and reviews the mythology of Rome’s founding and the history of the Republic and Empire. Towards his aim of countering the conventional belief that Roman intellectual thought pales in comparison to that of the Greeks, Kellogg makes substantial progress; it’s a well-organized, accessible work that will serve as both introduction and lodestar to these elements of classical wisdom, philosophy, and history. (May)