The Means to Attain Happy Life
translated from the Latin by Henry Howard
Martial, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:—
The richesse left, not got with pain,
The fruitful ground; the quiet mind;
The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;
No charge of rule nor governance;
Without disease the healthful life;
The household of continuance;
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
True wisdom join’d with simpleness;
The night dischargèd of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress;
The faithful wife, without debate;
Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Contented with thine own estate,
Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 31, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The Means to Attain Happy Life” is a translation of the Roman poet Martial’s “Epigram 10.47.” About the poem, literary critic T. K. Whipple writes in Martial and the English Epigram: From Sir Thomas Wyatt to Ben Johnson (The University of California Press, 1925), “I quote Surrey’s lines in full, because they are apparently the first English rendering of Martial, because they are felicitous and at the same time almost literal.…” He continues, “It is easy to see why Surrey, who had little in common with Martial, should have chosen this one epigram for translation. It falls in with the contemporary taste for general reflection; and it expresses that love of country simplicity as opposed to the corruption of the court which was a fashionable and no doubt sincere sentiment of the time. It also illustrates the wider range allowed the Latin epigram, for Surrey’s poem could scarcely be called an English epigram.”
Martial
