Seneca, Galen, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius all valued this text and thought it deserved not only to be read but its advice to be followed.. The first printed editions of ancient Greek texts featured it probably because it helped sell these incunabula. It was clearly widely admired in the early modern period.
Eventually it dropped out of sight, and was all but forgotten - until Donald Robertson’s book Honk Like a Roma Emperor rescued it. It’s almost as if the sands of Egypt or the dust of a monastic library yielded a lost treasure.
. Give The Golden Verses of Pythagoras a try.. But here’s the trick: You can’t read them like a philosophical treatise or a chapter in a History of Philosophy. Galen gave good advice – read each of them twice, one silently, once aloud. But both readings must be contemplative, part of a reflective process aimed at the development of a better set of mental habits. It takes some time to reflect on these 71 maxims in this way, as if one were learning to read all over again. Give it a try. You may be surprised by what you find.
: PS In an essay in Arion in “Unmasking the Maxim” I tried to view these Golden Verses as part of a minor but very influential literary genre, the maxim..
Eventually it dropped out of sight, and was all but forgotten - until Donald Robertson’s book Honk Like a Roma Emperor rescued it. It’s almost as if the sands of Egypt or the dust of a monastic library yielded a lost treasure.
. Give The Golden Verses of Pythagoras a try.. But here’s the trick: You can’t read them like a philosophical treatise or a chapter in a History of Philosophy. Galen gave good advice – read each of them twice, one silently, once aloud. But both readings must be contemplative, part of a reflective process aimed at the development of a better set of mental habits. It takes some time to reflect on these 71 maxims in this way, as if one were learning to read all over again. Give it a try. You may be surprised by what you find.
: PS In an essay in Arion in “Unmasking the Maxim” I tried to view these Golden Verses as part of a minor but very influential literary genre, the maxim..