Starting A Collection to Remaining Fragments from "On Nature"

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    Seeing how much progress that Eikadistes has made on collecting the various translations of the Principal Doctrines makes me realize that it would truly be a worthy project to work on collecting the surviving excerpts from "On Nature." The only form in which I understand them to be accessible is in articles by David Sedley and a few others, but I don't even have a list of those articles, much less the core excerpts cut and pasted into a usable list.

    Of course we can't and should not try to duplicate those full academic articles, but it would certainly be useful to produce a collection of the translated excerpts, noted as to the article/source from which they come, and listed (as best we can tell) in the right order.

    This thread and subforum can be used to make notes on that by anyone who is interested in helping with this, and perhaps at some point someone like Nate can perhaps produce a PDF with the collection in better form.

    A big one

    Epicurus, On nature, book 28
    Epicurus, On nature, book 28
    www.academia.edu

    On Nature, Book 28

    "Do Animals Have Freewill? Epicurus, On Nature XXV, 20 B and 20j Long–Sedley”,
    The view of P. Huby and D. N. Sedley that animals according to Epicurus have freewill is discussed and rejected
    www.academia.edu

    Do Animals Have Free Will: On Nature, Book 25 excerpts

    If we could get our hands on issues of the Cronache Ercolanesi (Herculaneum Chronicle)! https://cispe.org/cronache-ercolanesi/

    Hiram also laid out the Books as outlined in Les Epicuriens

    Epicurus’ On Nature
    I am currently re-reading Epicurus’ Books On Nature in Les Epicuriens, which is based on lectures given by Epicurus. We know that they were given late in…
    epicureandatabase.wordpress.com

    And there's always Sedley's The Transformation of Greek Wisdom for the topics covered in each Book. I can't remember whether there are excerpts or not off-hand.

    Another source to consider is David Sedley's book Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom. As I recall, in that book he constructed an outline of On Nature and compared it with De Rerum Natura. It's been a while since I read it but at the time it seemed to be something of a treasure trove: maybe not so much for specific translations but as an overall guide to review before starting to compile the fragments.

    Yes Godfrey, by chance I pulled that out again this morning, remembering not only your comment but also Don's regular citation of how valuable this work is.

    Chapter 4 of the book is devoted to "On Nature," and according to the table of contents you are correct - Sedley devotes some 40 pages and 13 sections to examining what we know about the book and its likely outline.

    To this moment I still have not read anything but pieces of it but this looks to be a likely place to start for an overview of the situation.

    Sedley's footnote 2 on page 97 of Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom lists a number of sources and says "In the meantime, Arrighetti (1973) offers a comprehensive collection of the Nat. papyri, based on what at the time were the best available editions plus, in some cases, Arrighetti's own further readings.

    No doubt that's not in English.

    So that was apparently the situation in 2004 when Sedley published LATTOGW, and we need to know if that situation has changed in the last 17 years.

  • Cassius March 13, 2024 at 9:26 AM

    Changed the title of the thread from “Starting A Collection to Remaining Excerpts from "On Nature"” to “Starting A Collection to Remaining Fragments from "On Nature"”.

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