Posts by Joshua

Christopher Hitchens on Hellenized Judaism

Hanukkah celebrates the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness.

High on the list of idiotic commonplace expressions is the old maxim that "it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." How do such...

slate.com

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Jewish orthodoxy possesses the interesting feature of naming and combating the idea of the apikoros or “Epicurean”—the intellectual renegade who prefers Athens to Jerusalem and the schools of philosophy to the grim old routines of the Torah.

Don's video on the location of the garden;

Nate's map of ancient Epicurean communities;

Thread

Epicurean Communities of the Ancient World

epicureanfriends.com/wcf/attachment/2790/

School at LAMPSACUS (modern Northwestern Turkey) Founded by Epicurus

The GARDEN (O KHΠOΣ) of ATHENS (Central Greece) Founded by Epicurus

Community in CORINTH (Peloponnese peninsula, Greece)

Community in CHALCIS (Euboea island, Greece)

Community in THEBES (Boeotia, Central Greece)

Community in THESSALONIKI (Macedonia region, Greece)

Community in KOS (Southeastern island of Greece)

School at RHODES (Southeastern island of Greece)

School at AMASTRIS (Northern…

Eikadistes

June 6, 2022 at 4:34 PM

Correction; Ecclesiastes is not the last book of the Old Testament.

At around 38:40 I accidentally said "Cicero" instead of "Horace". Mea Culpa!

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An educated young Roman could begin military service high in the ranks and Horace was made tribunus militum (one of six senior officers of a typical legion), a post usually reserved for men of senatorial or equestrian rank and which seems to have inspired jealousy among his well-born confederates.[24][25] He learned the basics of military life while on the march, particularly in the wilds of northern Greece, whose rugged scenery became a backdrop to some of his later poems.

-Wikipedia

That is a fascinating story, Godfrey.

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He responded, while noticeably tensing up, that an afterlife was "a line in the sand" for him: he couldn't consider any philosophy as legitimate that didn't include an afterlife.

I also have a line in the sand, which I have called "the principle of the cockroach"; any account of humanity and its fate that fails to take into account other species of animal (of which we are one) must necessarily be incomplete.

I was reading Macbeth last night and was struck by these lines (written about an executed traitor, but never the less);

Nothing in his life

Became him like the leaving it. He died

As one that had been studied in his death

To throw away the dearest thing he [owned]

As ’twere a careless trifle.

To be a student of one's own mortality, and neither dreading the day nor wishing for it, is a consistent theme in Epicurean texts.

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I'm curious what y'all think about this question, "What place do games have in Epicurean philosophy?"

I think that's a very good question, though it may be difficult to answer fully--although I think Don's answer settles the main point.

The Greeks were to a remarkable extent a gaming civilization--so much so that they literally set their calendars by it. They valued their games--Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian, Nemean, and other local affairs--for some of the same reasons we do; in the first place, because they helped to foster a unified and pan-Hellenic cultural identity. They aided in cultivating good relationships between City States.

In a remarkable passage in Xenophon's Anabasis, a mercenary army of 10,000 free Greeks that has just been marching for months overland across the whole length and breadth of hostile Persia finally reaches safety in the Greek colonies on the coast of the Black Sea, and they celebrate their immense good fortune by playing games! Extraordinary! I think if it were me I would have collapsed in a chair and not stirred for three months. The ended a forced march across difficult and dangerous terrain by celebrating with foot races, wrestling, discus and javelin.

So what did Epicurus think about all of this? On the question of Epicurus' alleged rejection of Greek culture Norman DeWitt has this to say;

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This Platonic program consisted of music and gymnastic, inherited

from the Athenian past; of rhetoric, which had been introduced by the

sophists; and of dialectic and mathematics, especially geometry, which

were the addition of Plato himself.

Toward every component of this prevailing education the attitude of

Epicurus was determined by the nature of the objective adopted for his

own program. This objective was not the production of a good citizen

but a happy and contented man. For practical purposes this happiness

was defined as health of mind and health of body. The famous prayer

for mens Sana in corpore sano, “a sound mind in a sound body,” recom¬

mended by Juvenal, is genuine Epicureanism.

This being the case, there was no reason for rejecting physical training,

and approval of it was the easier not only because the laws required

it — and Epicurus recommended obedience to the laws — but also for the

reason that the amateur athlete and the citizen soldier were being

replaced by the professional athlete and the professional soldier. Thus

the rigors of the required exercises could be relaxed.

As for music, there need be little doubt that the approval of Epicurus

was enthusiastic. His own capacity for appreciating good music seems to

have been keen. It is told of him that he would arise early in the morning

and trudge to the theater to enjoy the performance

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And then are there the tabletop games of Ancient Greece, most of which were distinguished by the common feature of gambling on chance. I suspect that Epicurus would have cautioned against gambling, though of course I don't know that.

In any case, playing a game for the game's own sake is a very human pasttime, enjoyed among friends, and yielding pleasure--and for those reasons is very much worth doing. Play like the Greeks!

DeWitt can be intentionally classicizing in his prose, as here in his description of Canada:

Since he published this article in The Classical Weekly his intended readers cannot have failed to notice the allusion. It is to Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico, "Of the War in Gaul":

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All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in our Gauls, the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws.

What exactly did he mean to convey by this? Perhaps that Canada and its partially French (i.e. Gallic) heritage stand in relation to a southern empire governed as a republic, and that both province and empire are removed from the real seat of culture--for Rome, Greece; for North America, Europe.

The University of Toronto from which he writes is then a frontier outpost of Classical studies with only a nominal connection to the old ways, and has a decision to make about its future. Much like the New England of the preceding century--the New England of Emerson and Thoreau and their classically trained fellows.

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Are the Latin translations varying dramatically such as modern translations of Lucretius into English do, or do they tend to be largely latin word for latin word consistent?

That's a good question that I don't have an answer to. In one of Poggio's letters to Niccolo Niccoli, the writer apologizes for his style--he was stuck in England reading Ecclesiastical Latin and did not, at the time, have access to the high Classical Latin of Cicero, Varro, Lucretius, Virgil, etc. So a Poggio or a Niccoli at the height of their powers would have attempted as far as possible to consciously imitate the style of the Late Republic, while many of their contemporaries will have written in a less polished register. This difference would affect everything from grammar and sentence structure to diction and spelling.

Montaigne, whose native language was Latin due to an unusual upbringing, complained that the Latin of the Renaissance had fallen so far below that of its antecedents.

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When I consider this, reiicit, pascit, inhians, molli, fovet, medullas, labefacta, pendet, percurrit, and this noble circumfusa, mother of gentle infusus, I am vexed at these small points and verball allusions, which since have sprung up. To those well-meaning [ancient] people there needed no sharpe encounter or witty equivocation: their speech is altogether full and massie, with a naturall and constant vigor: they are all epigram, not only taile, but head, stomacke, and feet. There is nothing forced, nothing wrested, nothing limping; all marcheth with like tenour.

He was referring to this passage from Lucretius:

-----belli fera munera Mavors

Armipotens regit, in gremium qui saepe tuum se

Reiicit, aeterno devinctus vulnere amoris:

Pascit amore aridos inhians in te Dea visus,

Eque tuo endet resupini spiritus ore:

Hunc tu Diva tuo recubantem corpore sancto

Circumfusa super, suaveis ex ore loquelas

Funde.

Mars, mighty arm'd, rules the fierce feats of armes,

Yet often casts himselfe into thine armes,

Oblig'd thereto by endlesse wounds of love,

Gaping on thee feeds greedy sight with love,

His breath hangs at thy mouth who upward lies,

Goddesse thou circling him, while he so lies,

With thy celestiall body, speeches sweet

Montaigne continues:

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This is not a soft quaint eloquence, and only without offence; it is sinnowie, materiall, and solid; not so much delighting, as filling and ravishing, and ravisheth most the strongest wits, the wittiest conceits. When I behold these gallant formes of expressing, so lively, so nimble, so deepe, I say not this is to speake well, but to think well.

Translated into English by John Florio, 1603.

Yeah, the transmission of Greek texts from the Arab world back into Europe where Latin was the lingua franca of the educated meant that there was a great desire to translate Greek into Latin.

The great printer and book maker Aldus Manutius (c. 1450 to 1515) wrote that part of his goal was to "inundate the reading public with Greek" and not settle for Latin translation. He felt that too many people were relying on Latin translations.

Regarding suavity, Lucretius uses it in reference to 'sweet flowers'.

tibi suavis daedala tellus summittit flores, tibi rident aequora ponti placatumque nitet diffuso lumine caelum.

My rough translation:

"For you the clever Earth sends forth sweet flowers, for you laugh the waves of the sea, and the calm sky shines with diffuse light."

It was Pietro Redondi who put forward the thesis that atomism was at the center of the Galileo Trial because of its inherent challenge to the Eucharist. As I said, it is a very controversial claim. It is known that Galileo got into trouble with the Jesuits over atomism before his trial.

Good questions! I usually quote Johnston because it's easy to search for key-words and copy/paste. Perseus is a great resource but the chunks of text are often too small and it can be difficult to select text on mobile (although there are workarounds).

I also find Stallings to be a bit distracting, but some people are drawn to her style. My favorite verse translation is Rolfe Humphries, but he admits in his introduction that his focus was to capture the flavor of the poem rather than a literal rendition, which I think he succeeds at.

My best general advice for reading Lucretius is that contextualizing the poem can stave off boredom--we're so familiar with the idea that the earth is extremely old, that the universe is incomprehensibly large and ancient, that matter is made of little particles, that other worlds might potentially harbor life, and that nature is capable of sustaining a vacuum that reading about them in an old poem can seem rather dull. But if keep in mind how revolutionary these ideas really were, I think we can still capture a little bit of the magic.

I agree with your interpretation, Eric, and that's also what I get out of the letter I quoted above re: Shelley.

Although as it happens, Shelley was expelled from University College, Oxford, for disseminating a tract he wrote called "They Necessity of Atheism", by which he actually meant Deism.

Edit; we've been talking a lot lately about the Areopagus in Athens and it's relationship with Parrhesia, candor or frank speech. John Milton chose it for the title of his own tract, a defense of free expression called Areopagitica.

epicureanfriends.com/wcf/attachment/3991/

Yes, that's this one. All three have the forest fire as an important motif.

The above translation is from Ian Johnston.

Piero di Cosimo, A Hunting Scene, c. 1500

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

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This picture and its companion (also in The Met's collection) reimagine the early history of humankind and are among the most singular works of the Renaissance. Their inspiration was the fifth book of De Rerum Natura by the Epicurean poet and philosopher Lucretius (ca. 99–55 B.C.). A manuscript of Lucretius’s work was discovered in 1417 and published in Florence in 1471–73. Lucretius believed that the workings of the world can be accounted for by natural rather than divine causes, and he put forward a vision of the history of primitive humanity and the advent of civilization that was much discussed in Renaissance Florence—and beyond.

And so now,

in what remains, my train of argument

has now brought me to this point, where I must

set down an explanation how the world

is a mortal substance and was born,

how a collection of materials

established earth, heaven, sea, stars, sun,

and the moon’s globe, then what living creatures

sprang from earth, as well as those never born

at any time, how the human race began

to employ among themselves various words

by giving names to things, and ways in which

that fear of gods slid into human hearts,

which preserves sacred places on earth’s sphere—

shrines, lakes, groves, altars, images of gods.

...

They could not look toward the common good

and did not know how to make for themselves

any laws or customs. A man would take

whatever prize fortune might throw his way,

with each one trained to look out for himself

and get by on his own. And in the woods,

Venus would join bodies in sexual acts,

for each woman was either overwhelmed

by mutual lust, or by the violent force

and reckless passion of the man, or else

by some reward—acorns, or strawberries,

or fine pears. And trusting in the power

of their hands and feet, which was amazing,

they went after wild beasts in the forest

by throwing rocks and with large, heavy clubs.

They brought down many, but there were a few

they avoided in their hiding places.

...

And just in case, while dealing with these things,

you are perhaps quietly wondering,

it was lighting which first carried fire down

to mortal men on earth—with that all heat

from flames is generated. For we see

many things ignite and burn up when struck

by fire from heaven, once the bolt transmits

its heat. Then, too, when a tree with branches

is lashed by winds, sways back and forth, presses

and rubs the branches of another tree,

the violent force of rubbing brings out fire,

and while trunk and branches chafe each other,

sometimes the flaming heat of fire ignites.

Either of these two could have provided

fire to mortal men. And then sun taught them

to cook their food, using the heat of flames

to soften it, because out in the fields

they would see many objects getting soft

once beaten by sun’s heat and lashing rays.

The Return from the Hunt, also at the Met.

That is a very interesting take, Pacatus! Certainly one I'd not heard before.

What it turned into in my Catholic High School religion class was a nun very eager to share with us the manifold dangers of masturbation...

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I wonder what you think about the next sentence--all is permitted.

You mean the one I was trying to avoid? 😅

Of course it too deserves a response. In a letter of Horace Smith to Cyrus Redding, dated 1822, the author has this to say in reference to the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley;

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Though Shelley is my most particular friend, I regret the imprudence of his early publications on more points than one, but as I know him to possess the most exalted virtues, and find in others who promulgate the most startling theories, most amiable traits, I learn to be liberal towards abstract speculations, which not exercising any baneful influence on their author’s lives, are still less likely to corrupt others. Truth is great, and will prevail—that is my motto, and I would, therefore, leave everything unshackled—what is true will stand, and what is false ought to fall, whatever be the consequences. Ought we not to feel ashamed that Lucretius could publish his book in the teeth of an established religion, while martyrs are groaning in perpetual imprisonment, for expressing a conscientious dissent from Christianity?

If by "all is permitted" we mean something like "leave everything unshackled" in its above usage, then I am fully on board. St. Augustine wrote that the church permitting the spread of heresy was like the state allowing the sale of poison bread. Aquinas in his Summa Theologica preferred the metaphor of counterfeit money, and in either case the result is the same--the punishment for counterfeiting was mutilation or death, and Dante has King Philip IV of France tortured in hell for adulterating the coinage.

By contrast, what I find in Epicurus is a thinker for whom questions of justice and morality are approached with measure and care, as in Vatican Saying 51:

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I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclination as you will, provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked by one or more of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not receive harm.

Set aside Epicurus' final advice here; the point is that in lieu of a stark prohibition, and without any threat of torture or death, he simply leads the coorespondant to examine carefully the consequences of a given course of action, in the particular context in which he finds himself. In another time and place, law and custom might be different. The crime of Onan in the book of Genesis was failing to impregnate his widowed sister-in-law; such a proscription would be unthinkable and grotesque in our age.

Of the 10 commandments, only three are current law; prohibitions against murder, theft, and perjury.

Should literally everything be permitted by law? No, I don't think so. I can't imagine Epicurus did either. But the sope and compass of personal liberty should far exceed the scope of what is forbidden.

The following scene from Robert Bolt's play "A Man for All Seasons" catches the flavor of what I mean to convey;

Thank you, HsiehKW, that is a very thorough response and I will have to read it again more carefully tomorrow!

In response to your last paragraph, I agree that plants are not cognitive; I cite them merely in a thought experiment, in order to outline the operation of prolepsis as non-cognitive. The inclusion of prolepsis in the Canon seemed to require a process linked to sensation and rooted in physiology, which I tried to take as nearly as I could to its hypothetical extreme.

Your division of prolepsis into two adaptive orders is particularly interesting to me. As I said, I will return for a more careful reading!

Thank you again!