It would be fair to say that I have an ascetic streak--for part of my twenties I was a car-free vegetarian who commuted by bicycle and drank more tea than anything else, after much reading in Thoreau, Edward Abbey, Frank Herbert and Buddhism. Some of this I found to be impractical in a small Midwestern city. The vegetarianism I found to be a strain on interpersonal relationships. It made dining with others very troublesome.

The thing is I couldn't let philosophy in general go even if I wanted to. I think for some people the questions arise unbidden. When Salman Rushdie went into protection after the fatwa, Susan Sontag told him "Salman! It’s like being in love! I think of you night and day: all the time!" It's like that with philosophy.

Death, life beyond the grave, ethics, morality, the nature of human life; even without Epicurus I should spend much time turning these things over in my mind.

Welcome!

I've been listening to an audiobook by Matthew Stewart called "Nature's God; The Heretical Origins of the American Republic."

I am still in the early chapters, but his project is to trace the Deism of Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, etc--and the list is quote long--back through Charles Blount, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, and finally through Lucretius and back to Epicurus. I cannot really review it at this time (although I might recommend a paper copy as easier to read carefully), but I am finding it very interesting.

Too kind as usual, Pacatus !

Thank you.

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All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

This is an excerpt.

That clears that up! Thank you, I was trying to work out how he could have managed that.

Speaking of manuscripts, I watched this video on the digitization of the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad and found it really fascinating. It's amazing how many different specialists it takes to undergo this kind of project.

That being said, please do report back with your impressions!

I might be thinking of a video where Greenblatt cites Ada Palmer and not his book, but either way he holds her work in high regard.

I have that book. It's a history and document analysis of the surviving manuscripts, and goes into detail studying scholia and marginalia with a view to understanding how Renaissance readers like Montaigne were receiving the poem as they read it.

It's a great book, for the information it contains, and Greenblatt cited Ada Palmer's work pre-publication. Many readers will find it rather dry compared to the The Swerve, which continues to be a favorite of mine.

I mentioned it to Cassius Sunday evening as part of the question we unfortunately didn't get to for lack of time.

"Ixion was expelled from Olympus and blasted with a thunderbolt. Zeus ordered Hermes to bind Ixion to a winged fiery wheel that was always spinning. Therefore, Ixion was bound to a burning solar wheel for all eternity, at first spinning across the heavens,[18] but in later myth transferred to Tartarus.[19][20] Only when Orpheus played his lyre during his trip to the Underworld to rescue Eurydice did it stop for a while."

Regarding the difficult quote from Theophrastus that "The happy man cannot mount the scaffold to the wheel," I found this confession of a 19th century Parisian: "I demand to expiate it; — I accept the responsibility; — I wish to mount the scaffold." This indicates at least to me that 'mounting the scaffold' to be hanged connotes volition on the part of the condemned. Theophrastus might well be saying that it is impossible to willingly undergo torture, and Epicurus responds by saying that one might well undergo torture willingly to save a friend.

Also relevant are these lines from Shakespeare's Richard II:

“O, who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite

By bare imagination of a feast?

Or wallow naked in December snow

By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?

O, no! the apprehension of the good

Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:

Fell sorrow's tooth doth never rankle more

Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.”

And also the poem I wrote in response to that passage from Horace:

______________________________________________

Firewood

While walking in the woods, I am at pains

To pause at each cold circle of burnt stone.

A totemic blending of the profane

And sacred: a human altar where none

So human live—where memory and time

Are sacrificed in their concentric rings,

The ageless for the transitory. Each

Ring is a dolmen, or a stele of lime,

And tells of the past in a varied speech.

It gives me pause, this strange chaleur vitale¹.

I think on sacred groves—such that deterred

Thoreau², and Horace, with that old Ital-

ic saw: Do you think Virtue naught but words,

A forest only firewood? For though

The greater mass goes up in flame, pile

Upon pile of charcoal lying near

Sighs at this loss; of what, I do not know—

But that it pleases me to wander here.

______________________________________________

¹French, Vital Heat

²Walden; "I would that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would believe that it is sacred to some god."

And we also briefly discussed a passing reference to the 6th epistle of the first book of Horace:

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If your lungs or kidneys were attacked by cruel disease,

You’d seek relief from the disease. You wish to live well:

Who does not? If it’s virtue alone achieves it, then

Be resolute, forgo pleasure. But if you consider

Virtue’s only words, a forest wood: then beware

Lest your rival’s first to dock, lest you lose Cibyra’s

Or Bithynia’s trade. Cleared a thousand, and another?

Then add a third pile, round it off with a fourth.

Surely wife and dowry, loyalty and friends, birth

And beauty too are the gifts of Her Highness Cash,

While Venus and Charm grace the moneyed classes.

Don’t be like Cappadocia’s king, rich in slaves

Short of lucre. They say Lucullus was asked

If he could lend the theatre a hundred Greek cloaks.

‘Who could find all those? he answered, ‘but I’ll see,

And send what I’ve got’. Later, a note: ‘It seems at home

I’ve five thousand: take any of them, take the lot’

It’s a poor house where there isn’t much to spare,

Much that evades the master, benefits his slaves.

If wealth alone will make you happy, and keep you so,

Be first to strive for it again, and last to leave off.

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I cited a passage from Thomas More's Utopia:

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[Utopus] therefore left men wholly to their liberty, that they might be free to believe as they should see cause; only he made a solemn and severe law against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature, as to think that our souls died with our bodies, or that the world was governed by chance, without a wise overruling Providence: for they all formerly believed that there was a state of rewards and punishments to the good and bad after this life; and they now look on those that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so noble a being as the soul, and reckon it no better than a beast’s: thus they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society, or to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth; since a man of such principles must needs, as oft as he dares do it, despise all their laws and customs: for there is no doubt to be made, that a man who is afraid of nothing but the law, and apprehends nothing after death, will not scruple to break through all the laws of his country, either by fraud or force, when by this means he may satisfy his appetites.

I see that μέρος (along with ὁμοῖος) is part of the word homeomeria, the idea that everything that exists is made of little particles like itself. Bone is made of bone particles, fire of fire particles, wood of wood particles, etc.

This in contrast to the ideas of the atomists, who thought that a finite set of atomic types, with an infinite number of each type, made up everything and granted their attributes to the compounds they were part of.

It was this latter idea that George Santayana described as "perhaps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon."

I need to get back to work on my presentation on that Lucretius cameo. Good find!

Welcome! Definitely an honor to see you around here!

Very moving, thank you Don !

To take that one step further, Don, hospitality is essential in a seafaring civilization. Ships wreck, lose their course, and wind up on distant shores. It's no accident that the Odyssey is one long story of a guy trying to get home on a boat--the Aeneid, one long story of a war refugee looking for asylum.

My favorite story in this vein is Xenophon's Anabasis, where the Persians kill the generals of the mercenary Greek army under flag of truce, and the remaining 10,000 Greeks trek north to the free Greek cities on the Black Sea with the whole might of the Persian cavalry behind them.

The palpable relief in the shouted words "Θάλαττα! θάλαττα! — The Sea! The Sea!" is nearly sufficient to tell the whole story. The sea means fellow Greeks, and passage home.

I am now looking for a Public Domain Latin/English Dictionary.

I have Cassell's Latin Dictionary, originally published 1854, but revised in 1977 and reprinted far more recently.

It appears that Perry T. Jennings has gone to considerable trouble in manually correcting an OCR digitization of the 1924 edition, which can be found here.

A comment describing his process and progress can be found under "Reviews" here.