Home › Glossary › Letter A

ars vivendi

Latin Phrases
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The art of living; a philosophical concept describing the skill and wisdom required to live a good and meaningful life.

Detailed Definition
Ars vivendi is the counterpart to ars moriendi, addressing not the end of life but its ongoing practice. In poetry, it connects to Horace's philosophy of balanced living, the golden mean, and carpe diem. Poets use it to celebrate the pleasures, disciplines, and reflective practices that constitute a life well-lived. It appears in verse epistles, odes, and lyric meditations on friendship, nature, pleasure, and wisdom, making it a central concept of humanist poetry.
Example
Example in poetry:
Horace's Odes are the foundational texts of ars vivendi in Western poetry — the philosophy of the golden mean, the cultivation of friendship, wine, and verse, lived as a complete aesthetic and moral practice; The Georgian poets of the early twentieth century attempted an ars vivendi poetry — celebrating the English countryside, rural life, and traditional pleasures as a complete way of being; A poet writing about the daily rituals of a good life — cooking, walking, reading, friendship — is practicing ars vivendi, finding poetry in the disciplines of conscious living; Montaigne's essays, which profoundly influenced poets from Shakespeare to Emerson, are the great prose expression of ars vivendi, and their spirit pervades reflective lyric verse; Mary Oliver's nature poetry constitutes an ars vivendi for the contemporary reader — a daily practice of attentive walking and observation presented as a complete philosophy of life
Additional Notes
Ars vivendi is the philosophical counterpart and companion to ars moriendi: if one tradition asks how to die well, the other asks how to live well. The phrase connects to the Hellenistic philosophical schools — particularly Epicurean, Stoic, and Sceptic — that defined their philosophy precisely as an ars vivendi, a practical art of living rather than merely an abstract theory. Students should note that Horace is the supreme poet of ars vivendi in the Latin tradition, and that his influence runs through the English tradition from Jonson and Marvell through Pope to the Georgian poets and Mary Oliver. The ars vivendi tradition in poetry tends toward the moderate, the balanced, and the celebratory: it values friendship, natural beauty, moderate pleasure, and philosophical acceptance of mortality. Related terms include aurea mediocritas (the golden mean), carpe diem, and the Epicurean summum bonum (highest good) of ataraxia (tranquility).
Also Known As
the art of living art of living well living well
Skip to main content