March 27, 2024 - Wednesday Night Zoom Agenda - VS 80 & 81

    Tonight at 8pm ET - Vatican Sayings 80 & 81...This will be the last meeting on the Vatican Sayings.

    Open to Level 03+ members and Level 01 by pre-approval of the moderating team.

    Agenda:

    1. Welcome
    2. Discuss latest popular forum threads & latest podcast
    3. Discussion on Vatican Sayings 80 & 81:

    VS80. The first measure of security is to watch over one’s youth, and to guard against what makes havoc of all by means of maddening desires.

    VS81. The disturbance of the soul cannot be ended, nor true joy created, either by the possession of the greatest wealth, or by honor and respect in the eyes of the mob, or by anything else that is associated with, or caused by, unlimited desire.

    • We will continue with the same Zoom link as previous Wednesday night meetings.
    • Level 03 members who haven't previously attended (and need to get the link) please let us know here in this thread if you are interested in attending or message me.
    • Level 01 members you can message Cassius if you are interested in attending (to be considered for approval by the moderator team).

    Coming up on Wednesday April 3rd - the first night of Usener fragments discussion. We are going through the full Erik Anderson list and pulling out those which will best be suited for the zoom meetings, and if you have any suggestions for additions to or deletions from the list please use the comment feature on the page where we are setting this up. A full announcement on this will go up on the forum soon. A curated list can be found here.

    To say a little more about the plan for the Usener material, I have gone through the material at Attalus.org and Epicurism.info and pulled out from the full set of entries those items which have the most interest and which are not simply cites to Diogenes Laertius or to passing comments that are so short as to not have much meaning standing alone. The result of that so far is here.

    So for example, the first session will be on the collection entitled "testimonials concerning Epicurus' style and language." After that we will do a select a group of U-numbers for each night.

    We'll probably still want to keep the complete version in front of us, but having the most substantive ones pulled out will enable us to cut through the repetitive stuff and be sure we have several significant topics to talk about each week.

    However I am not pleased with the way this material is organized. It's not nearly enough "by topic" for my taste.

    I am also looking at how we can do more organization of the material as we go through this. The topics which Usener and Bailey chose for their organizational scheme are often not particularly interesting to us. Topics like "Letters to Unknown Persons" don't tell us much about the content, and I think we need a better reference system to find things by content.

    I'm looking into how we might implement a "tagging" system here at EpicureanFriends and probably also post the material somewhere in the public domain so that we can develop better reference sources.

Finding Things At EpicureanFriends.com

Here is a list of suggested search strategies:

  • Website Overview page - clickable links arrranged by cards.
  • Forum Main Page - list of forums and subforums arranged by topic. Threads are posted according to relevant topics. The "Uncategorized subforum" contains threads which do not fall into any existing topic (also contains older "unfiled" threads which will soon be moved).
  • Search Tool - icon is located on the top right of every page. Note that the search box asks you what section of the forum you'd like to search. If you don't know, select "Everywhere."
  • Search By Key Tags - curated to show frequently-searched topics.
  • Full Tag List - an alphabetical list of all tags.