Posts by Joshua

Show Notes:

Footnote 22, and why it's easy to relate good news. Dewitt cites Exordium by the Athenian statesman Demosthenes:

Demosthenes, Exordia, exordium 54

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It is just and right and important, men of Athens, that we too should exercise care, as you are accustomed, that our relations with the gods shall be piously maintained. Therefore our commission has been duly discharged for you, for we have sacrificed to Zeus the Saviour and to Athena and to Victory, and these sacrifices have been auspicious and salutary for you. We have also sacrificed to Persuasion and to the Mother of the Gods and to Apollo, and here also we had favorable omens. And the sacrifices made to the other gods portended for you security and stability and prosperity and safety. Do you, therefore, accept the blessings which the gods bestow.

The Grey-Rock method; when honesty is not the best policy

When Dealing With a Narcissist, the “Gray Rock” Approach Might Help

Acting dull and uninteresting can undermine a narcissist’s attempts to control.

www.psychologytoday.com

Lucy Hutchinson on why she translated Lucretius, in her letter to the Earl of Anglesey

Full text | Lucy Hutchinson's letter to Lord Anglesey (1675)

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So I beseech your Lordship to reward my obedience, by indulging me the further honor to preserve, wherever your Lordship shall dispose this booke, this record with it, that I abhorre all the Atheismes and impieties in it, and translated it only out of youthfull curiositie, to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand, but without the least inclination to propagate any of the wicked pernitious doctrines in it.

On Shooting the Messenger;

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 An early literary citing of "killing the messenger" is in Plutarch's 'Lives': "The first messenger that gave notice of [the Roman general] Lucullus' coming was so far from pleasing [the Armenian king] Tigranes that he had his head cut off for his pains; and no man dared to bring further information. Without any intelligence at all, Tigranes sat while war was already blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him".

Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Act 5, Scene 2, on the difficulty of frank speech:

CLEOPATRA

I dreamt there was an emperor Antony.

O, such another sleep, that I might see

But such another man.

DOLABELLA If it might please you—

CLEOPATRA

His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck

A sun and moon, which kept their course and

lighted

The little O, the Earth.

DOLABELLA Most sovereign creature—

CLEOPATRA

His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm

Crested the world. His voice was propertied

As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends;

But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,

He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,

There was no winter in ’t; an autumn ’twas

That grew the more by reaping. His delights

Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above

The element they lived in. In his livery

Walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands

were

As plates dropped from his pocket.

DOLABELLA Cleopatra—

CLEOPATRA

Think you there was, or might be, such a man

As this I dreamt of?

DOLABELLA Gentle madam, no.

CLEOPATRA

You lie up to the hearing of the gods!

But if there be nor ever were one such,

It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff

To vie strange forms with fancy, yet t’ imagine

An Antony were nature’s piece ’gainst fancy,

Condemning shadows quite.

DOLABELLA Hear me, good madam.

Your loss is as yourself, great; and you bear it

As answering to the weight. Would I might never

O’ertake pursued success but I do feel,

By the rebound of yours, a grief that smites

My very heart at root.

CLEOPATRA I thank you, sir.

Know you what Caesar [Augustus] means to do with me?

DOLABELLA

I am loath to tell you what I would you knew.

CLEOPATRA

Nay, pray you, sir.

DOLABELLA Though he be honorable—

CLEOPATRA He’ll lead me, then, in triumph.

DOLABELLA Madam, he will. I know ’t.

"Natural philosophy", at least in the English of the 19th century, did not contain just physics but also botany (Joseph Banks), biology (Charles Darwin), geology (Charles Lyell), astronomy (Edwin Hubble), anatomy and physiology (Henry Gray), and so on.

Here I have fleshed out most of the middle of the pack, but neither the lower end--the inconstant Horace? The youthful Epicurean Virgil contrasted with the grave imperialist Stoic poet of his maturity?--nor, with the exception of Lucretius, the top of the class; Epicurus, Metrodorus, Hermarchus, Polyaenus.

I'll sketch out my thoughts, but I have nothing solid.

• Polyaenus: "a kindly and just man" (D. L.), and a mathematician. The scales of justice, and the Canon, or measuring rod, for the geometer gone "rogue"?
• Hermarchus: the rooster and the archway; the rooster was the Greek symbol of the island of Lesbos where Hermarchus was born, and in mythology was once a young soldier whom Ares had posted at the door of the room where he and Aphrodite were otherwise occupied (some Lucretian imagery there). When Hephaistos found them out, Ares cursed the young soldier by turning him into a rooster, to raise the alarm forever at the coming of day. Hermarchus was the successor to Epicurus in the garden--the sentinel posted during a period of transition, as represented by a garden archway.
• Metrodorus: the guttered candle and the double herm. Metrodorus was born in Lampsacus on the Hellespont, the same strait of water made famous in the story of Hero and Leander, who lived on opposite sides. Every night Hero would light her lamp, and Leander would use it as a guide to swim across the sea. One night the wind guttered the lamp, and Leander lost his way and drowned. The double-herm of Epicurus and Metrodorus represents their close connection, and the guttered candle his untimely death.
• Horace: the pig and goblet. "Fat and sleek", wine-sodden poet....you get the idea.
• Plotina: the dove and the diadem. The dove as a symbol of both Venus and peace (her intercession on behalf of the Epicurean school), the diadem signifying royalty

Epicurus himself. The trickiest of the lot. Personally I like ⟐ as previously proposed here on the forum (not by me), representing atoms (the dot), void (the empty space), and the tetrapharmakos (the four sides of the diamond, and the four surviving letters of the man himself--Herodotus, Pythocles, Menoeceus, and Idomeneus). Coins of Samos often featured a lion, but more typically a bull and peacock (symbols of patron goddess Hera), and an amphora of their legendary wine.

A boat or ferry, not to shepherd souls to the underworld, but to a life beyond fear of death; a skull or memento mori, a mortar and pestle, a piglet or wild boar, a fig tree or the myrtle of Aphrodite, an Ionic column, the shattered fetterlock, or the eye raised to the heavens as in Lucretius.

The greatest symbol of all was his own portrait.

Philodemus of Gadara

Proposed Emblems: Vesuvius and Papyrus

(Papyrus plants)

"To-morrow, dearest Piso, your friend, beloved by the Muses, who keeps our annual feast of the twentieth * invites you to come after the ninth hour to his simple cottage. If you miss udders and draughts of Chian wine, you will see at least sincere friends and you will hear things far sweeter than the land of the Phaeacians. But if you ever cast your eyes on me, Piso, we shall celebrate the twentieth richly instead of simply."

If Leontion's pencil in the metaphor came silver from the fire, it is all the more remarkable that Philodemus' scrolls survived it intact--the largest library of its kind to survive in one great lump from the ancient world.

Diogenes of Oenoanda

Proposed Emblems: Hammer, Chisel, Carven Stone

"Now, since the remedies of the inscription reach a larger number of people, I wished to use this stoa to advertise publicly the medicines that bring salvation. These medicines we have put fully to the test; for we have dispelled the fears that grip us without justification, and, as for pains, those that are groundless we have completely excised, while those that are natural we have reduced to an absolute minimum, making their magnitude minute."

As a Roman-era evangelist of Epicureanism, Diogenes is second only to Lucretius in the scale of his ambition; but where the latter drew on his experience of nature to compose an intricate poem in the small hours by candlelight, the former staked out the contours of his project in the public square, hiring stonemasons to carve his inscription into a wall of rock.

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On a more prosaic note: is "dissolved" the most accurate English word? It's in most of the translations, but I keep associating it with dissolving something in water. Resolved into its elements, dispersed, dispersed into elements, broken down into atoms seem to work. Especially "dispersed into elements".

"Who ever saw his old clothes--his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less?" -Thoreau, Walden

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What is X 77?

He's referring to the "paragraph" numbers in the (modern) text of Diogenes Laertius

That is a very good point, Godfrey!

The Hymn to Venus at the top of the 'cup' is full of sweetness, and the Plague in the bottom full of bitterness.

Leontion

Proposed Emblems: Lion and Stylus (or Reed Pen)

250px-Stylus.jpg

Leontion's writing was commemorated in the Greek anthology, Planudean appendix #324:

ANONYMOUS: I, THE pencil, was silver when I came from the fire, but in thy hands I have become golden likewise. So, charming Leontion, hath Athena well gifted thee with supremacy in art, and Cypris [Aphrodite] with supremacy in beauty.

Cicero complains that Leontion took to writing a scroll against Theophrastus, successor to Aristotle, but revealingly reports that "she wrote well and in good Attic style". Our word 'style' comes from the Latin stylus, an instrument for writing in reusable wax tablets.

Lucretius

Proposed Emblems: Wormwood and Honey

Lucretius' lines on honey and wormwood appear twice in De Rerum Natura, most memorably in the proem to Book IV:

For as physicians, when they seek to give

Young boys the nauseous wormwood, first do touch

The brim around the cup with the sweet juice

And yellow of the honey, in order that

The thoughtless age of boyhood be cajoled

As far as the lips, and meanwhile swallow down

The wormwood's bitter draught, and, though befooled,

Be yet not merely duped, but rather thus

Grow strong again with recreated health:

So now I too (since this my doctrine seems

In general somewhat woeful unto those

Who've had it not in hand, and since the crowd

Starts back from it in horror) have desired

To expound our doctrine unto thee in song

Soft-speaking and Pierian, and, as 'twere,

To touch it with sweet honey of the Muse-

In Matthew Arnold's dichotomy between Hellenism and Hebraism, the honeybee gives us the symbols of the best of Greek culture--"sweetness and light", honey and wax candles. Wormwood has a somewhat darker history; it is the central ingredient in absinthe, the green muse or green fairy, the infernal drink of poets.

In Lucretius these two emblems symbolize his entire project--the sweet golden honey of his beautiful verse, graced by the muse's touch, masking the bitter but healthful draught of true philosophy.

Feel free to share your suggestions! For Leontion I'm thinking the Lion and the Κάλαμος, or Reed Pen. I'll share my reasons for that tomorrow!

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What is blessed and imperishable that is not a god?

mellis dulci flavoque liquore..."the sweet yellow liquor of the honey"...

Well, it's imperishable anyway. Depends what we mean by blessed I suppose!

I really am impressed with Bailey here though! I like it more each time I read it.

I give Bailey the palm for clear and concise English, well written and very readable.

I like DeWitt's translation for sound philosophy; the gods are "incorruptible" as opposed to "immortal", blissful by their own lights rather than blessed by something else. I quibble only with that word "creature". What is it doing there? Since it literally means "created thing" it seems out of place in what is otherwise very careful diction.

I feel the same way about the word "divine" in Strodach.

Then there is this question of 'movements' vs 'feelings' vs 'emotions' vs something else.

I voted DeWitt. I would only change two things about his translation. Replace 'being' with 'nature', and replace 'a weak creature' with 'what is weak'.

Thank you Don for all of your work in bringing the information here!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubricati…script%20making.

Red lettering in manuscripts is called Rubrication, more at Wikipedia.

Florilegium seu gnomologium Epicureum

"Epicurean anthology or collection of sayings"

Fascinating that they translated ἀνθολογία (anthologia)--"Flower words"--directly into Latin as Florilegium--"Flower words" again. In both cases really meaning a collection of poems, epitaphs, maxims or sayings.

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Could it be for Dis (the name of Pluto?)?

That's very likely part of the equation!

Note the word potuit, used here as well as in Lucretius: Tantum potuit religio suadere malorum. "So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds."

So that the power or ability to know the causes of things--a power given by philosophy--is balanced against the power we give to superstition through fear and ignorance. The power of knowledge allows us to trample fear, fate, and the dread of death.

It is the gift of Epicurus to the world, as Lucian indicates:

"The fellow had no conception of the blessings conferred by that book upon its readers, of the peace, tranquillity, and independence of mind it produces, of the protection it gives against terrors, phantoms, and marvels, vain hopes and inordinate desires, of the judgement and candour that it fosters, or of its true purging of the spirit, not with torches and squills and such rubbish, but with right reason, truth, and frankness."

Thoreau saw the figure of Epicurus in Lucretius as a kind of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man.

That's the whole significance of the Rosetta stone, being carved in two languages and in three scripts (going from memory).