Let me emphasize an interesting question that Kevin brings out around the halfway mark of the episode.
What do you think was Francis Wrights point in the way she elaborated on Metrodorus' portrait of Leontium?
We discuss a number of possible options, but none strike me as totally satisfactory. If you have a position to suggest or support, please post in this thread.
Here is the video recap of our first session on Chapter Three, from February of 2022:
The discussion from Chapter Three where Kevin (who is a philosophy professor) touches on some of the issues we are discussing in this thread.
Welcome to Episode One Hundred Ten of Lucretius Today.
This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world.
I am your host Cassius, and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we'll walk you through the six books of Lucretius' poem, and we'll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book "Epicurus and His Philosophy" by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt.
If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you will find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
At this point in our podcast we have completed our first line-by-line review of the poem, and we have turned to the presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero's On Ends. Today we complete the section on Friendship.
Now let's join Joshua reading today's text:
[66] I see then that friendship has been discussed by our school in three ways. Some, denying that the pleasures which affect our friends are in themselves as desirable to us as those we desire for ourselves, a view which certain persons think shakes the foundation of friendship, still defend their position, and in my opinion easily escape from their difficulties. For they affirm that friendship, like the virtues of which we spoke already, cannot be dissociated from pleasure. Now since isolation and a life without friends abound in treacheries and alarms, reason herself advises us to procure friendships, by the acquisition of which the spirit is strengthened, and cannot then be severed from the hope of achieving pleasures.
[67] And as enmity, spitefulness, scorn, are opposed to pleasures, so friendships are not only the truest promoters, but are actually efficient causes of pleasures, as well to a man's friends as to himself; and friends not only have the immediate enjoyment of these pleasures but are elate with hope as regards future and later times. Now because we can by no means apart from friendship preserve the agreeableness of life strong and unbroken, nor further can we maintain friendship itself unless we esteem our friends in the same degree as ourselves; on that account this principle is acted on in friendship, and so friendship is linked with pleasure. Truly we both rejoice at the joy of our friends as much as at our own joy, and we are equally pained by their vexations.
[68] Therefore the wise man will entertain the same feeling for his friend as for himself, and the very same efforts which he would undergo to procure his own pleasure, these he will undergo to procure that of his friend. And all that we said of the virtues to shew how they always have their root in pleasures, must be said over about friendship. For it was nobly declared by Epicurus, almost in these words: "It is one and the same feeling which strengthens the mind against the fear of eternal or lasting evil, and which clearly sees that in this actual span of life the protection afforded by friendship is the most powerful of all."
[69] There are however certain Epicureans who are somewhat more nervous in facing the reproaches of your school, but are still shrewd enough ; these are afraid that if we suppose friendship to be desirable with a view to our own pleasure, friendship may appear to be altogether maimed, as it were. So they say that while the earliest meetings and associations and tendencies towards the establishment of familiarity do arise on account of pleasure, yet when experience has gradually produced intimacy, then affection ripens to such a degree that though no interest be served by the friendship, yet friends are loved in themselves and for their own sake. Again, if by familiarity we get to love localities, shrines, cities, the exercise ground, the park, dogs, horses, and exhibitions either of gymnastics or of combats with beasts, how much more easily and properly may this come about when our familiarity is with human beings?
[70] Men are found to say that there is a certain treaty of alliance which binds wise men not to esteem their friends less than they do themselves. Such alliance we not only understand to be possible, but often see it realized, and it is plain that nothing can be found more conducive to pleasantness of life than union of this kind. From all these different views we may conclude that not only are the principles of friendship left unconstrained, if the supreme good be made to reside in pleasure, but that without this view it is entirely impossible to discover a basis for friendship.
Ok in less than an hour I will have the third zoom meeting on A Few Days In Athens up and I will post it here. Most of that discussion turned out to revolve around issues similar to what we are discussing here. I don't add much myself that you haven't heard already, but Kevin Guilfoy (the philosopher teacher) has some interesting comments on one and many goods, comparing Epicurus view of the highest good to the Stoics, etc. I am sorry I did not get this posted earlier! Unfortunately this week I had to produce three separate productions, and I am finding that two is about my productive limit.
Maybe I'll rejoin in 2024 when you get to Menoikeus
I am not so optimistic we will get there that quickly!
but it's all I got
I think I am going to suggest to the podcast team that our next stop after we finish Torquatus in the next couple of weeks will be to go back to Epicurus' own letters, Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus, in that order.
Especially Herodotus I don't think we have given nearly the attention it deserves, and we are much better equipped to do that now after going through the last two years of podcasting.
I agree with most of what is written above, but one additional point I would include is that the Latin authorities were much closer to the Greek language and to the Epicurean texts than we will ever be (as to both).
So when we know that someone like Lucretius is trying to be faithful, I think their interpretations are entitled to great deference, even to the extent of considering them to have much more expertise than our own efforts to grasp the Greek.
Welcome Marabrabant (whose post above is I think their first). I usually get around to posting a "Welcome" thread more quickly, but I was unusually tied up today. Again Welcome and I hope you will let us know a little about your background in Epicurus. Welcome Marabrabant!
I suppose I have been around too many hunters or something so when I heard the term "scattershot" i was immediately taken back as I interpret the term as generally negative. I should have had more confidence in Joshua and I wouldn't have been alarmed and had to backtrack. 
I have been really tied up today and not able to keep up so trying to do that now. At the moment my primary thought is:
I really like Post #83
Welcome Marabrabant
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Welcome to the forum!
Yes.
Well if it is, that is what we need to work to explain, and we haven't even cracked the book on beginning to describe a tentative elaboration on that, or on what its implications are, or on how something very real and concrete relates to something abstract and conceptual like a "greatest good."
As I wake up this morning it strikes me as potentially obvious at least from our modern biological point of view that all pleasures are the same in at least (1) the way we define them as pleasure and (2) in the biological way that the sensation registers within our brains. What I mean there is, and I am not up on modern terminology, is that whatever the electro-chemical process is by which or minds recognize pleasure, that electro-chemical process likely functions in the same way for all pleasures. So in that sense the way in which we perceive pleasures internally likely IS pretty much the same for all pleasures. Is *that* what Epicurus was talking about?
How do you parse his calling "practical wisdom" as the "greatest good"
I could definitely see this observation as part of the whole list of examples we are assembling that indicate that Epicurus was challenging conventional non-Epicurean notions of the greatest good.
It seems possible that he was not just in contrasting Pleasure vs Virtue vs Piety as concepts, but emphasizing that what's important (practical wisdom) is much more a moment to moment process than some kind of state that falls under normal "greatest good" terms.
In regard to "the same thing"....
When i was editing the podcast this afternoon I became pretty dissatisfied with some of my formulations on "the same thing." I know that we can talk in categories and hierarchies as well, and that pleasure could be in the category of good or virtue, or virtue in the category of pleasure or good, or whatever, so I don't mean to obsess over whether pleasure and virtue and good are entirely the same thing in every respect.
But if they are not the same thing in every respect, but they share something, then we need to be clear about what it is they share, and what that thing is, and describe that thing in a way that makes clear that it isn't either a "Platonic ideal" or an "essence" in Arisotelian terms.
So to get back to sex and filing fingernails, they certainly are not the same thing in every respect, and what they share in common is probably describable only as "a feeling of pleasure." However does that answer whether there are two pleasures, or is it more proper to say two activities that "bring a feeling of pleasure." Is the "feeling" part of those two things really exactly the same though? We might call both feelings pleasure, but I have a hard time believing that both things are identical in every respect. They seem to me to differ at least in intensity, and maybe even in time or other qualities.
This is that vexing "one and many" issue, or "universals" issue. I am not ever sure that we are clear on what Epicurus' position was on whether "universals" exist, or whether he held that there are only discrete experiences which we choose to call by the same names.
I tend to think that Epicurus did not believe in "universals" as having any kind of independent existence apart of the atoms and void involved, so when we start talking about something as High-level (or so it appears to me) as "good" then we really need to understand what it is that unifies "things that are good."
Plato and Aristotle clearly had views of what makes something "good" that differ dramatically from Epicurus, and on their framework it made perfect senses that there are ideals or essences that unify all "Goods" into the category of "good."
But does it make sense to say that Epicurus held anything to be good at all unless it is directly associated with bringing pleasure or avoiding pain? Is frances wright correct that we (speaking as Epicureans to Epicureans) can boil all this down to very simple statements that there is nothing good but pleasure, and nothing bad (or evil) except pain?
I'm probably not advancing the ball in this post but I wanted to note that I realize that there are different perspectives in looking at things, and just because two things like virtue and pleasure cannot be dissasociated from each other, which seems to be the point of PD5, does not mean that they are themselves identical. (Or at least I don't think at this moment that it does!)
That was in The Swerve? How in the world did I miss that.... Thank you!
Nate thanks for that info! If anyone has not read the article by Nikolsky on the kinetic katastematic distinction, this would be a good time.
The premise of that article, which I believe is persuasively argued, is that later writers were forcing Epicurus improperly into their own paradigms, and that seeing this error explains much confusion.
It is easy to argue that that is what is going on here - that Cicero and later writers through today are insisting on viewing Epicurus through the paradigms of hostile and incompatible philosophic frameworks, and that this leads to major errors.
Remember too that in addition to Nikolsky that probably the longest and most detailed work on the topic, The Greeks on Pleasure by Gosling and Taylor, reaches much the same conclusion and was the foundation for Nikoloskys conclusions.
Finally I have got the latest Lucretius Today posted and anyone who has braved the length of this thread so far will want to catch it at some point. It doesn't solve any of the issues raised here but might articulate them differently. I wonder how many ways I contradicted myself between there and here after questioning from Don! All he had to have done was appeared with us on the podcast and we'd have cleared all this up last weekend!
Episode 109 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. In this week's episode we discuss the Epicurean View of Friendship:
