Originally I was going to read Metamorphoses by Ovid but I realized that I didn’t have the time. So I decided to listen to the audiobook of How to Get Over a Breakup instead. I hope that Metamorphoses was a better read.
This book was a disappointment. It did however get me to think about how little human nature has changed over time. Unfortunately Ovid provides horrible advice and I hope that it was written in jest and not as serious advice.
Mixed in with his morally bankrupt ideas there were some suggestions that were better. I will give one example of each. As a morally bankrupt idea he suggests before being intimate with your chosen partner to go have sex with someone else first so you will last longer with your partner. One of his better suggestions was to fill your time with activities after you break up so that your mind will not have the time to wander back to thoughts of your former love interest.
Overall this was not a book I would recommend.
Thomas Aquinas is credited as one of the greatest proponents of natural law. During his time in Cologne he was taught by Albertus Magnus. Magnus used the teachings of Aristotle in his mentorship of Thomas Aquinas.
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
Edmund Burke