Hermann Usener's 'Glossarium Epicureum'

    During our most recent Wednesday Zoom call, we talked briefly about Usener's 'Epicurea'. I've done a little research on Hermann Usener since I was curious if I could find any translations of his 'Epicurea' (except the one here: http://www.attalus.org/translate/epicurus.html). Unfortunately, there seems to be nothing else available.

    However, I came across something interesting that I wasn't aware of. Usener also wrote 'Glossarium Epicureum'. It's almost a 1000 pages long compilation of Epicurean vocabulary together with definitions, references and quoted passages. To good folks here, who like to go down the rabbit hole of ancient translation (and are versed in Greek and Latin), I imagine 'Glossarium Epicurum' could be as an attractive resource as Willy Wonka's factory to sugar addicted kids without parental supervision.

    I thought I'd mention this in case someone finds it useful.

    This may be difficult to find but I quickly checked ebay and there's one copy on sale right now for around $50 plus whatever shipping cost may be (the seller is from Italy).

    Bryan One more thing I forgot to mention. When I was looking around for Usener's Glossarium I stumbled across this:

    https://cal.byu.edu/macfarlane/herculaneumfriends/assets/Vergara_AFoH2019_ResearchReport.pdf

    I think you mentioned you were working on 'On Nature' recently. Apparently, Claudio Vergara in 2019 tried to create Glossarium for 'On Nature'. I have no idea how far he got with it but there's a contact info at the bottom if you find his work interesting.

    Thank you for those suggestions TauPhi. Sharing info like that is a major use of the forum that I hope will grow over time. If people know they can ask and get help with suggestions, they are more likely to launch off on projects like this.

    Thank you TauPhi! I just purchased a copy from AbeBooks, so I have a copy being shipped from the Netherlands (the ebay version may still be available for someone else here).

    I also sent an email to Claudio Vergara to see about access to his digital version.

    The Glossarium finally arrived. Although most of the work was completed by Usener, he never published the work. In fact it was not published until 1977 in Rome and (as far as I can tell) never published again. Therefore it is in an unfortunate position to be written in the late 1800's but still has a copyright. This is, I suppose, one reason for it's rarity.

    There are some modern edits, for example I was very pleasantly surprised to see a full equivalence table for the old listing of the P.Hercs to the one in modern use. Up to this point when I saw "VH2 I f.149" in Usener I had to do some digital digging in the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (in some cases unsuccessfully), but now we can look at the table as see that VH2 I f.149 = P.Herc. 1005!

    Mostly it is a dictionary of Epicurean terms. This idea itself cannot be copyrighted, we will have to form a digital dictionary of Epicurean terms.

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