Feeling fed up with the state of the world is not a new experience. Ancient Greeks and Romans voiced the same mix of anger, helplessness and longing for escape that people feel today, and they offered a few clear responses: withdraw, fight, or find another way to live with it.
The Roman playwright Terence captured the mood succinctly in The Brothers: his speaker laments being trapped by “violence, poverty, injustice, loneliness, disgrace.” Faced with such pressures, ancient figures took different routes.
Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher of Ephesus, grew disgusted with public life. He scorned political arrogance and the poor defense of law by the masses, and when friends were exiled he denounced his city for rewarding fools and driving away the worthy. Asked why he spent his time playing with children rather than joining civic debates, he replied that public affairs were unworthy of a thoughtful person. Eventually he withdrew entirely, living in the hills on simple fare; later, after falling ill, he tried eccentric remedies and died around sixty. His story is a portrait of withdrawal born of contempt and exhaustion.
Quintus Sertorius took a different kind of escape. A Roman commander who settled in Spain during Rome’s violent 90s BCE, he built an autonomous power base—complete with his own senate of Roman exiles and local allies—and cultivated an aura of divinely favored leadership. Yet constant danger and political strife wore on him. Tales of warm, fertile Atlantic islands off Africa—perhaps Madeira or the Canaries—tempted him with the idea of a quiet life beyond Rome’s reach. He never made it there; he stayed fighting and was murdered by conspirators in 72 BCE. Sertorius shows how the dream of removal can persist even amid determined resistance to the old order.
Philosophers offered more systematic advice. Epicurus counseled obscurity—his famous counsel amounted to “live unknown”—arguing that a private life of simple pleasures and freedom from public anxieties leads to contentment. Critics like Plutarch saw that stance as defeatist: withdrawing from civic engagement is a renunciation of life’s potential and a symptom of bitterness. Poets such as Horace struck a balance. Horace celebrated the contented farmer, far from politics and military alarms, who finds security in modest property, hard work, family, and freedom from debt and the city’s pressures.
Others looked for practical fixes or used satire to cope. Aristophanes, in his comedy Acharnians, has a protagonist who, sick of lying politicians and self-interested voters, negotiates a private peace with Sparta for his own household so he can farm and drink in peace. The premise is absurd, but the play channels authentic frustration and the temptation to seek personal solutions when collective remedies fail.
So what can someone do when overwhelmed by politics and public life? The ancients point to three enduring choices: withdraw from the fray and cultivate a private, simpler life; stay and struggle to change things; or adopt distance and humor to survive the absurdities. Each response has risks and merits, but across centuries comedy and a sense of perspective have often been the most resilient tools for enduring the world’s frustrations.
