Since the November elections gave Democrats a lift and Republicans a jump scare, politicians and their campaign teams are likely looking with nervous excitement toward the 2026 midterms. Where might they look for advice? How about 64 B.C.? That's when Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was running for election to the Roman senate, received a letter from his brother Quintus with some advice that rings a 21st-century bell: Consider dirty tricks. Make hopeful promises you may—or may not—keep. Find dirt on your opponents.
As the 2012 presidential election loomed, Pepperdine University Humanities professor Philip Freeman and his agent, Joelle Delbourgo, thought a fresh translation of Quintus’s letter would be a fun and topical gift to readers. They brought the idea to Rob Tempio, Princeton University Press's acquiring editor for books on the ancient world, philosophy, classics, and political theory.
Tempio thought the book, How to Win an Election: An Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians by Quintus Cicero, would be a one-off. But he was, happily, wrong. The title drew such wide attention that Freeman and Tempio followed it up in 2013 with How to Run A Country by Marcus Tullius Cicero.
Soon, Tempio was chatting with classics scholars about more timeless topics, leading to an ongoing series of titles Princeton has dubbed Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. Each is formatted with an introduction by the translator, the Latin or Greek text and the contemporary translation on facing pages, and a classical sculpture on the cover.
While How to Win an Election continues to sell well, Tempio says, the most popular title in the series to date is the 2018 title How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life. In it, Seneca writes about the how the living should always study death, recognizing "life's final rite of passage, and its ability to liberate us from pain, slavery, or political oppression," according to the publisher. (Epilogue: Seneca died by suicide.)
"I really wanted to do something with Seneca," Tempio recalls, "so I called Seneca scholar James S. Romm to hash out ideas. We came up with death. I told my wife about this at the time and she said, 'That's a fantastic idea. The possible audience is everyone.'" The book has sold 60,000 copies to date, according to Tempio. The series's second-bestseller, at the 55,000 sales mark and counting, is a 2016 title with James May's translation of the practical techniques deployed by Rome's greatest orator, Cicero the senator, in How to Win an Argument: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Persuasion.
The series, which has grown to 10 to 12 titles a year, will likely add up to 50 titles by 2027. It also has branched out to include a global array of great thinkers and texts, with the series now featuring several titles drawn from the Buddhist and Aztec traditions.
While every title goes through the peer review process expected of a university press, Tempio says their audience is based on "a general reader who is keen to find sources of wisdom that are secular in a sense, or outside of religious traditions, and that have an interest in ancient history, in the ancient world, and who just find the topics themselves attractive."
The titles and topics announced so far for 2026 vary from athletics to the apocalypse, spanning the Greek satirist Lucian's witty jab at the gym rats of yore, the meaning of fitness, and the civic value of competition in How to Compete: An Ancient Guide to the Virtues of Sports (Feb., translated by Heather L. Reid and Phillip Mitsi) to How to Face the End of the World: An Ancient Guide for Apocalyptic Times, an anthology with work by Hesiod, Plato, and other Greek and Roman philosophers (Sep., edited and translated by Christopher Star).
Other forthcoming titles in the series include advice from Plutarch, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius as well as an anthology of travel writing by Herodotus and other philosophers such as Homer.
"People ask me all the time if the series has an end point," Tempio says. "I aways say the last one I'm going to publish will be called How to Stop."
