Michael Fontaine is professor of classics at Cornell University.

His books include the Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman comedy, funny words in ploutine comedy, and six books, I think, in a series

from Princeton Press, two of which are our topic today. One of them is how to get over a breakup,

an ancient guide to moving on, a translation of Ovid by Professor Fontaine with an introduction.

The other is How to Tell a Joke, an Ancient Guide to the Art of Humor.

This is a text by Cicero.

Welcome, Professor Fontaine.

Thank you so much, Mark.

It's a real pleasure to be here.

First thing is tell us about this how-to series at Princeton Press.

This is sort of ancient wisdom, right, for modern times.

They're very handsome little cloth volumes, you know, like five by six inches or so. Whose idea was this? This series has been

one of the real pleasures to suddenly break out in the last six or seven years. It's the

brainchild of an incredible editor at Princeton University Press, Rob Tempeo. And they started with one volume on, I think it was called How to Run a Country.

And this was a treatise from the ancient world on, you know, how to, how to bribe your

way into power or promise things and not deliver, whatever you need to do.

And so it came out as a one-off translation with a fantastic designer for the book. They put the Latin on the side, the English on the other, and it took off. And from there, we've gone, I think it's 35 volumes out now, 37 will be out by next year. Yeah, yeah, I should tell everyone that you do have the Latin and the English on on facing pages so I think I think

these are great little books to assign and you know classical education high schools in 12th grade

let's let's get to some practical you know not not so much high philosophy that we have

so often assigned but again the practical practical wisdom of the Greeks and Romans.

So good. Good. Okay. The first one here, how to get over a breakup. Now, why wasn't this book

around when I was 19? Well, it was. They've been trying to censor it since the day it came out.

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