How to Have Willpower: An Ancient Guide to Not Giving In
How to Have Willpower brings together two profound ancient meditations on how to overcome pressures that encourage us to act against our own best interests鈥擯lutarch鈥檚 essay On Dysopia or How to Resist Pressure and Prudentius鈥檚 poetic allegory Psychomachia or How to Slay Your Demons. Challenging the idea that humans are helpless victims of vice, these works鈥攊ntroduced and presented in vivid, accessible new prose translations by Michael Fontaine, with the original Latin and Greek texts on facing pages鈥攅mphasize the power of personal choice and the possibility of personal growth, as they offer insights and practical advice about resisting temptation.
In the spirit of the best ancient self-help writing, Plutarch, a pagan Greek philosopher and historian, offers a set of practical recommendations and steps we can take to resist pressure and to stop saying 鈥測es鈥� against our better judgment. And in a delightfully different work, Prudentius, a Latin Christian poet, dramatizes the necessity to actively fight temptation through the story of an epic battle within the human soul between fierce warrior women representing our virtues and vices.
Plutarch and Prudentius insist that we allow pressure or temptations to get the best of us. But they also agree that we can do something about it. And their wisdom can help.