I have to vent for a moment at how frustrating it can be to correlate the various translations. For only one example:

Just before the memorable section about Epicurus starting "Humana, ante oculous....." the 1743 edition has this lengthy sentence about the nature of the gods (the graphic above just has the last part). (The full text is "For it must needs be that all the nature of the gods enjoys life everlasting in perfect peace, sundered and separated far away from our world. For free from all grief, free from danger, mighty in its own resources, never lacking aught of us, it is not won by virtuous service nor touched by wrath.")

Munro does not include that.

Bailey's 1926 does not include that.

But by 1947, Bailey has added it back in, and the Loeb Rouse/Smith has it, as does Smith in his most recent Hackett edition.

Smith's Hackett version gives a footnote that says that it also appears at Book 2 line 646, so apparently some people think that this was added in by an editor and should not be there twice.

Who knows for sure, but it does make for frustrations in trying to get the various editions to line up, and it's particularly galling when the same translator (Bailey) takes two different positions in two different editions.

Would we be doing too much of a stretch to infer that calling it the noblest of the books implies that it was in a form similar to the other "books"? Once you get past the initial greeting in the letters, it doesn't read that much differently in my mind from the letters, especially in the way the final doctrines are directed at organizing one's life for the best result, and not lamenting the passing of friends.

Don is there a greek word for "book" there in DL or does it give any hint that it might be a "list" rather than a "book"?

Looks like it is Lucian I am remembering, so the issue would be the word in Lucian's Greek --

I know there's a reference in Cicero, perhaps to Torquatus but might be in Tusculun disputations, where he talks about the Epicureans memorizing his doctrines but it's referrred to as a "book" -- I think that's the "celestial book" referenced.

Edit: Looks like I am thinking about the book on the Canon being the "celestial" one, but I know also there is a reference in Cicero jibing someone about reading his book of doctrines.

Yes I think it's probably as simple as just combining all the sentences into one long document, finding some logical divisions of topic, and then thinking about how the points "flow" from start to finish without thinking that they are somehow isolated theorems.

For example the aspect of 2 referring the death as the absence of sensation seems naturally very related to the following additional points about sensation of pain and pleasure. They're all focused on the role of sensation as the key guiding principle rather than gods, and it detracts from to consider them to be isolated and as if raising pleasure and pain where totally unrelated to the "all good and evil comes to us through sensation" -- all o that together could well be better seen as a big-picture whole.

Quote from Don

Before that they were just the Principal Doctrines with no number attached then it looks like?

It seems to me that i have read it theorized that they were never numbered in the ancient world at all, and that it was read like a book, like the letter to menoeceus, and in fact what we consider the 40 doctrines may well be one of the books of Epicurus that Cicero refers to as -- gosh what was it -- the "celestial book?" This is definitely something that i've always wanted to pursue because I think the numbering is a MAJOR problem for interpretation, especially for what we consider to be 3 and 4, which I think ought all to be read together and probably closely in context of 2. Splitting them apart really adds to the problem with making sense of them

Quote from JJElbert

But Usener evidently had a profound dislike for Diogenes Laertius!

Now THAT i have never heard. Do you gather it was for more than the standard criticism that DL was a gossiper more than philosopher?

Also Joshua I am seeing that Smith adopted a significantly different division of paragraphs than did Bailey. That's good since Bailey often seems to have produced a wall of text, and so I am applying Smith's line/paragraph numbers to Bailey's text and redividing it to produce something more reasonable.

But who is to say that Smith's paragraphs are right and Bailey's are wrong? Is there a way to answer that question?

Don, this applies more to your work with the Greek than it does to the Lucretius, but it really applies to both:

Tonight I have finished adding line numbers to my online copy of Bailey's "Epicurus the Extant remains here: http://epicuruscollege.com/coursematerial…Extant-Remains/

You will see that I have gone through the Bailey edition here and added the page numbers at "approximately" the right place such as this:

What I am wondering is, does anyone here know how to evaluate the line numbers that Bailey is using? I see (I think) that they do match the Loeb edition, so I think his system is consistent with others. However what i can't tell is whether these numbers refer to "lines" of the greek text on the page, or somehow full Greek sentences, or what. Do the lines in the Greek "original" have clearly demarcated sentences with some form of "period" or is everyone reconstructing where sentences stop according to their own view of what makes sense.

I chose to post the PD example above because I've read over the years that the 1-40 numbers are not in the original, and that they were added sometime later (when? by whom?) Can we tell anything about how the PDs were originally divided (if at all) by the Greek line numbers.

We're going to have the same questions about the Lucretius text but I suspect the answers will be significantly different.

Any thoughts?

I will tag Elli here because I suspect she maybe has the best feel for this, at least as to DL.

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i read every page of that - excellent article!

Yes I agree with Don this is an exciting and much-needed project!

Quote from JJElbert

Good question...

Or for that matter, and this may be worse than line breaks, is knowing where to do sentence and paragraph breaks. At some point maybe there's not much choice other than deciding on an authority to copy (smith is latest, but Bailey and Munro are public domain).

I've also noted in some of my transcriptions that even the latin text itself between Munro and bailey and smith is not uniform, so there's that too.

Looks like a great start -- how do we know where to break the lines?

Hello and welcome to the forum @Truthseeker !

This is the place for students of Epicurus to coordinate their studies and work together to promote the philosophy of Epicurus. Please remember that all posting here is subject to our Community Standards / Rules of the Forum our Not Neo-Epicurean, But Epicurean and our Posting Policy statements and associated posts.

Please understand that the leaders of this forum are well aware that many fans of Epicurus may have sincerely-held views of what Epicurus taught that are incompatible with the purposes and standards of this forum. This forum is dedicated exclusively to the study and support of people who are committed to classical Epicurean views. As a result, this forum is not for people who seek to mix and match some Epicurean views with positions that are inherently inconsistent with the core teachings of Epicurus.

All of us who are here have arrived at our respect for Epicurus after long journeys through other philosophies, and we do not demand of others what we were not able to do ourselves. Epicurean philosophy is very different from other viewpoints, and it takes time to understand how deep those differences really are. That's why we have membership levels here at the forum which allow for new participants to discuss and develop their own learning, but it's also why we have standards that will lead in some cases to arguments being limited, and even participants being removed, when the purposes of the community require it. Epicurean philosophy is not inherently democratic, or committed to unlimited free speech, or devoted to any other form of organization other than the pursuit by our community of happy living through the principles of Epicurean philosophy.

One way you can be most assured of your time here being productive is to tell us a little about yourself and personal your background in reading Epicurean texts. It would also be helpful if you could tell us how you found this forum, and any particular areas of interest that you have which would help us make sure that your questions and thoughts are addressed.

In that regard we have found over the years that there are a number of key texts and references which most all serious students of Epicurus will want to read and evaluate for themselves. Those include the following.

1. "Epicurus and His Philosophy" by Norman DeWitt
2. "A Few Days In Athens" by Frances Wright
3. The Biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius. This includes the surviving letters of Epicurus, including those to Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus.
4. "On The Nature of Things" - by Lucretius (a poetic abridgement of Epicurus' "On Nature"
5. "Epicurus on Pleasure" - By Boris Nikolsky
6. The chapters on Epicurus in Gosling and Taylor's "The Greeks On Pleasure."
7. Cicero's "On Ends" - Torquatus Section
8. Cicero's "On The Nature of the Gods" - Velleius Section
9. The Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda - Martin Ferguson Smith translation
10. A Few Days In Athens" - Frances Wright
11. Lucian Core Texts on Epicurus: (1) Alexander the Oracle-Monger, (2) Hermotimus
12. Philodemus "On Methods of Inference" (De Lacy version, including his appendix on relationship of Epicurean canon to Aristotle and other Greeks)

It is by no means essential or required that you have read these texts before participating in the forum, but your understanding of Epicurus will be much enhanced the more of these you have read.

And time has also indicated to us that if you can find the time to read one book which will best explain classical Epicurean philosophy, as opposed to most modern "eclectic" interpretations of Epicurus, that book is Norman DeWitt's Epicurus And His Philosophy.

Welcome to the forum!

Do you foresee this as primarily printed or online?

but that isnt interlinear right?

You using Libreoffice? I strongly think its a good idea to use the free stuff like that when possible

Yes i can understand as an aid in memorizing!

Also I sent an email to Lee at No dictionaries to see if he would add the rest of the poem to his site.

Quote from Don

multiple connotations

That would appear to be a strength of the nodictionaries format. I wonder if there is some way to use that engine, but I am sure that would be a major headache to figure out.

1 - JJ I gather that it is possible to add text into nodictionaries, and/or the website owner says he will do that upon request, if that proves helpful.

2 - I suspect you are right that google docs is a good option. Would a spreadsheet perhaps work better, or does Brill suggest a format? I would not think "CSV" would be good enough but something like that which is text-based might work.

3 - You've probably seen my recent comments on GITHUB in regard to working with it on the "Epicurus College" materials. I am pretty much getting to the point where it's not quite as intimidating as it used to be to me, but it has great advantages if the material you're working on can be "text-based" instead of binary like Google docs or spreadsheets would be.

The tremendous benefit I see is that it allows VERY fine-grained collaboration, which is apparently what "merging" and "pulling" and similar terms are all about. The benefit is that the master-overseer (you) can get help from others with the others submitting "pull requests" (I think that's the term) with the material that they have typed and/or corrected. You as project leader get to see a "differential" view of each line in text format, so you see EXACTLY what is being proposed for addition or corrected, and then you "merge" the corrections/additions that meet your approval. It might be that such fine-grained supervision might not be necessary, but that's a factor that has stopped me in several efforts at collaboration in the past. It's pretty disconcerting to think that multiple people are editing the document without the main coordinator knowing what they are doing and approving their contributions. Github and similar "git" services were designed to meet those challenges and it seems to work pretty well. Here's a screenshot showing how the review system works, highlighting the original vs changed lines:

It may seem like overkill, and it might be, but the more I get familiar with it the more I see how it's a really good fine-grained collaboration tool for multiple contributors.

Hard to say if it would be worth your time but wanted you to be aware of it.

PERHAPS one approach would be to start with getting all six books into no-dictionaries, generating some kind of rough draft, and then creating markdown (text) files for each book, posting them to github, and then editing them in collaborative fashion as you have time.

Not sure, but I would dearly love to have an interlinear Lucretius. Like you, I've looked and I haven't found one, and don't believe one exists.

Similarly I was looking for an interlinear of the DL bio of Epicurus, or Cicero's "On Ends" and haven't found any of it.

Here is a discussion of how a text-based table looks using the markdown format that would work in a git collaboration system:

https://riptutorial.com/markdown/examp…reating-a-table