How to be content with Horace

Part IX of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series

[Based on How to Be Content: An Ancient Poet’s Guide for an Age of Excess, by Horace, translated by Stephen J. Harrison. Full book series here.]

Some of you might remember a scene in Dead Poets Society, the 1989 movie directed by Peter Weir featuring a young and brilliant Robin Williams. John Keating, the teacher played by Williams (based on a real person), has brought his class in front of a display of sports trophies and old pictures featuring previous students at the school. Keating has one of his students read out part of a Latin poem, including the famous line:

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

Which translates to: “Harvest the present day, trust minimally in the next.” Though the student in the movie goes for the more common rendition of carpe diem as “seize the day.”

Those lines come from Odes 1.11 by the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, commonly known as Horace. Keating/Williams wants to impress on his young students that even though they are currently full of hormones and feeling invincible, one day soon they will be, as he puts it, fertilizing daffodils. If they want to make a mark, if they want their lives to mean something, they better start right here, right now.