Life & Wisdom Quote by Aulus Persius Flaccus

A Roman satirist telling you to trust yourself is less a self-help slogan than a provocation. Persius lived under Nero, in a culture where public speech was dangerous, patronage was suffocating, and “good taste” often meant moral compromise dressed up as sophistication. “And don’t consult anyone’s opinions but your own” reads like a clean line of stoic empowerment, but its real edge is accusatory: if you need a chorus of approval to know what’s right, you’ve already ceded your freedom.

Persius is writing in the tradition of satire that treats society as a moral weather system: everyone adjusts their behavior to whatever blows in from power, fashion, or the dinner party. The command to consult only your own opinion isn’t an endorsement of ego; it’s a demand for inner jurisdiction. In Stoic terms, your judgments are the one domain you can govern, especially when politics and status games try to rent space inside your head.

The subtext is also anti-consumerist in the ancient sense: Rome sells you identities. The forum sells you ambition, the theater sells you sentiment, the elite sells you cynicism as intelligence. Persius insists that the only serious consultation is with conscience, not with the crowd’s shifting consensus. The irony is that he’s issuing this order in a poem meant for readers, which is precisely the point: he uses literature not to replace your judgment with his, but to shame you into having one. In an empire of borrowed opinions, originality becomes an ethical act.