In a world awash with wellness gurus and lifestyle manuals, it is refreshing to be reminded that the ancients had already written the most enduring self-help book of them all. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is not a manual for quick fixes but a deep exploration of how one might live a life worth living. Susan Sauvé Meyer’s How to Flourish: An Ancient Guide to Living Well, part of Princeton’s ‘Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers’ series, offers a fresh translation and commentary that opens this demanding text to students, teachers, and the curious reader.
Meyer’s aim is straightforward: to distil Aristotle’s complex and sometimes technical arguments into an accessible guide without losing their philosophical bite. She succeeds admirably. The book presents key sections of the Ethics, on virtue, the mean, pleasure, friendship, and contemplation translated into clear and graceful English. Each excerpt is accompanied by Meyer’s commentary, which explains Aristotle’s arguments and brings them into dialogue with contemporary concerns. The result is a volume that is both a reliable introduction to Aristotle and an engaging invitation to live more thoughtfully.
One of the book’s chief strengths is its balance between fidelity and accessibility. Aristotle’s prose can be notoriously dense, and his concepts are often abstract, but Meyer manages to render them with clarity without oversimplification. For instance, the famous doctrine of the mean, virtue as a balance between excess and deficiency, comes alive through examples that resonate with modern readers. Students encountering the Ethics for the first time will find that what once seemed forbidding suddenly feels intelligible, even practical.
Meyer is also particularly strong on the theme of friendship, which occupies such a large place in Aristotle’s ethics. Her commentary highlights how Aristotle’s distinctions, between friendships of pleasure, of utility, and of virtue, speak to enduring human experience. This is material that immediately sparks classroom discussion: students recognise themselves in Aristotle’s categories, and teachers can use these passages to prompt reflection on what friendship means in an age of social media and shifting loyalties.
The book is also notable for the way it connects Aristotle’s ethics to broader questions of flourishing. Aristotle is not offering rules, but a vision of a life shaped by rational choice, moral growth, and the cultivation of character over time. Meyer repeatedly draws out this aspect, showing how the Ethics is as much about the texture of a whole life as it is about individual choices. For students accustomed to seeing philosophy as either remote abstraction or a collection of sound-bites, this is a welcome corrective.
For teachers of classics, the pedagogical value is obvious. The translation is approachable enough for use in school classrooms or introductory university modules, while the commentary provides a scaffolding that can support discussion without overwhelming it with technicalities. One can imagine using Meyer’s translation in a Latin or Greek class to complement study of Aristotle’s influence, or in philosophy and ethics courses where the original Ethics would be too forbidding. For pastoral or well-being sessions, selections on anger, friendship, and pleasure would provide lively points of discussion.
Students, in particular, will appreciate how Meyer frames Aristotle as a conversation partner for modern life. Rather than treating him as a relic of antiquity, she shows how his questions remain our questions: What does it mean to live well? How should we order our desires? What role do friends and communities play in happiness? Aristotle emerges not as an austere lecturer but as a guide, sometimes demanding but always humane. This is exactly the sort of encounter with the ancient world that draws students into further study.
That said, two gentle criticisms are worth mentioning. The first is that Meyer’s commentary occasionally risks smoothing over Aristotle’s more alien aspects. His ethics is embedded in a world of male citizens, hierarchical households, and a polis-based conception of human life. While Meyer does acknowledge these contexts, she sometimes underplays how distant Aristotle’s assumptions are from our own. Teachers will need to provide this critical context if students are to understand both the continuities and the differences between Aristotle’s world and theirs.
Second, while the volume succeeds in accessibility, it is sometimes a little light on scholarly apparatus. There are few notes to direct the interested reader toward secondary literature, and those teachers or advanced students who want to dig deeper may find themselves wishing for more. This is, of course, a feature of the series: the aim is to make ancient texts inviting, not to weigh them down with references. But for classroom use, teachers may wish to supplement the book with a more traditional companion or textbook.
These quibbles aside, How to Flourish excels at what it sets out to do: to present Aristotle as a living voice on the art of living well. It rescues him from the reputation of arid abstraction and shows him as a thinker deeply concerned with the choices and habits that shape a human life. For the teacher, it provides a resource that can animate lessons across classics, philosophy, and ethics. For the student, it offers an introduction that is both challenging and encouraging, demanding reflection but rewarding it with insight.
One of the most appealing aspects of the book is its ability to invite personal reflection. A student might read Aristotle on courage and ask whether their own habits tend towards rashness or timidity. Another might encounter his account of friendship and see new light shed on their own relationships. A teacher might reread Aristotle’s insistence that virtue is cultivated by practice and see in it an echo of their own vocation: the formation of character through repeated engagement with texts, ideas, and communities. The book thereby models what classics can at its best achieve: an education not only of the mind but of the person.
Meyer writes with grace and good humour, qualities that make the book a pleasure to read. She is neither ponderous nor patronising, and her prose often has the effect of drawing the reader in gently before challenging them with Aristotle’s demands. In this way she mirrors her subject: Aristotle, too, was not content with vague encouragements but insisted on rigour, practice, and the disciplined pursuit of virtue. The book therefore manages to be both inviting and exacting, a rare balance.
How to Flourish is an excellent resource for classics teachers and students. It makes Aristotle intelligible without diluting him, it encourages reflection without becoming preachy, and it provides a bridge between ancient philosophy and modern life. If one of our chief tasks as teachers is to show that the classics are not merely antiquarian curiosities but living conversations, then Susan Sauvé Meyer has given us a powerful ally. Aristotle, as she presents him, remains one of the best guides to what it means to live well.
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