"Democracy, the worst form of government."

It would be good to collect references like this and compare them with for example Aristotle. Didn't he have some kind of listing of types of government according to how large was the ruling class, and he also had a classification of good and bad forms of each (?).

But the main thing is that it would be helpful to collect the sources, including the reference to Philodemus being sympathetic to Caesar.

I have these two links:

v.23 (1919-1920) - Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences - Biodiversity Heritage Library

Philodemi Rhetorica (trans. Hubbell) OPTIMIZED : Hubbell : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Philodemus - On Rhetoric - Translated by Hubbell BEST COPY

archive.org

Here's the "worst form of government" --- https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/32303#page/385/mode/1up

Excellent work on your website, Twentier, thank you! The only books I have on Philodemus' Rhetoric are Hubbell's translation (that Cassius shared) and Clive Chandler's work on books 1 & 2, did you use/find any other sources?

I am woefully late to the game on this thread, but **finally** feeling well enough to wade (way) back into some of the the threads I missed.

One thought that came to mind reading this thread is that the word "democracy" didn't mean exactly what we take it to mean today in Ancient Rome and Athens. ...although honestly there are some similarities, both postive and negative. Attempting to cleave to the "no politics" rule of this forum, I'll not go into details. But it seems Philodemus is especially concerned about the people - the hoi polloi, if you will - being able to be swayed by the rhetorical abilities of individuals skilled in the art of speech-making. < sarcasm > I'm glad that's not a concern anymore! < / sarcasm>

When it comes to Philodemus, I always like to go back and see what we're physically dealing with -- not just translation, but what physical remains are the translators working with. Toward that end...

Website of Holger Essler

And one example from that page: Philodemus: De rhetorica 1 (PHerc. 232, 234, 247, 250, 398, 426, 463, 1115, 1427, 1601, 1606, 1612, 1619, 1813), encoded by Claudio Vergara, Corinna Lang, Marcel Moser and Vanessa Zetzmann, revision by Vincenzo Damiani and Holger Essler (WCE)...

DCLP/Trismegistos 62474 = LDAB 3650

What I also find fascinating are some of the multi-spectral images of the papyri! fragment right N 1619 fr. 4 (=P.Herc. 1619) (Not a drawing but an actual photographic image. That's cool!)

Just for future planning purposes, after a while here in "General Discussion" we'll move this thread to the Philodemus section. I'll probably also link it or create a version of it for the "Justice" section as well, probably to point up the "Typology Chart" that Bryan linked above, so we can have a "forms of government" discussion. Such discussion is fully appropriate given its discussion in the texts, and it won't violate the "no politics" rule so long as we stay clear of discussion modern historical particulars that still evoke lots of emotion.

Given commonalities with parts of Aristotle at some future point it's probably worth citing to the section of Aristotle where the typology is explained, and then we can compare the full discussion there to the surviving Epicurean material and look for parallels / contrasts.

There are a lot of interesting statements in this Rhetoric that should be explored but it all seems kind of disjointed due to the fragmentation so we'll have to pull it out carefully.

Note - We'll want to correlate that with the Boeri book: Interview With Dr. Marcelo Boeri: Theory and Practice In Epicurean Political Philosophy