Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients

What it is about

Francis Bacon's essays — 'Of Truth', 'Of Death', 'Of Friendship', 'Of Studies' — paired with 'The Wisdom of the Ancients', his allegorical reading of the Greek myths.

Context and history

The essays grew from ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in 1625, and they are a different thing from Montaigne's, from whom he took the name: Bacon does not explore himself but gives counsel, in short and very dense sentences, on how the world works and how to move in it. He called them himself 'counsels for the successful and for life', and much of his prose has ended up in English proverb. 'The Wisdom of the Ancients', of 1609, is a separate work and much older in spirit: it reads thirty-one myths as though they concealed natural and political doctrines. It is worth knowing that these are two separate books with different purposes, joined only by the publisher.

Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.