Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients

About the book

Bacon's essays compress observations about ambition, friendship, truth, power, and everyday judgment into short, carefully balanced arguments. They rarely behave like a systematic moral code; an insight may be followed by a qualification that changes how it can be used. The Wisdom of the Ancients takes a different route, reading mythological stories as allegories of nature, politics, and human conduct. This edition combines the two works with a biographical notice, a preface, and notes assembled from earlier editors. Its advertisement distinguishes the English rendering of the originally Latin mythological work from another historical translation. Readers can compare the direct counsel of the essays with the more circuitous reasoning of the fables, and notice how both depend on finding patterns within complicated experience.

• Judgment and conduct
• Power
• Myth and interpretation

Why read it

For compact prose that invites testing and disagreement rather than passive collection of memorable sayings.

English essays and translated Wisdom of the Ancients · annotated 1884 edition