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:

Quote

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:

Quote

[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.

My main reasons for wanting to do this are to have a good text, certain to be in the public domain, and free even of Creative Commons licensing. I think Creative Commons is a great project, and I've used those in the past (including my recent video) but nothing anywhere beats public domain.

The great thing about this particular text is that it was last revised in 1922, the year before the ironclad copyright cut-off. From 1923 on is where everything gets complicated.

On most sites that have the text I can't even find where they got it or what it's based on.

I've been unpacking my books and sorting them this evening, and I noticed a 1967 reprint of the second edition of Cyril Bailey's Latin text of On the Nature of Things, published under the Oxford Classical Texts series. I thumbed to the copyright page and discovered that both the first and second (final) editions of this text were published before 1923, and are therefore Public Domain. I will be spending some time in the next few weeks attempting to digitize this volume; hopefully soon we can host the Latin text of Lucretius here on Epicureanfriends.com.

Two key sources on this are Principal Doctrine 39:

"The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can; and those he can not, he at any rate does not treat as aliens; and where he finds even this impossible, he avoids all dealings, and, so far as is advantageous, excludes them from his life."

And in general, the cosmopolitan sentiments of the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda.

Fr. 30

"... time ... and we contrived this in order that, even while [sitting at] home, [we might be able to exhibit] the goods of philosophy, not to all people here [indeed], but to those of them who are civil-spoken; and not least we did [this] for those who are called «foreigners,» though they are not really so. For, while the various segments of the earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country, the entire earth, and a single home, the world."

The inscription is in a very fragmentary form.

That's the line I quoted on the most recent podcast episode, vis-à-vis living things drawn toward pleasure as toward their natural nutriment.

Welcome!

It's been cool to see how far open source software has come since I started using PCs. I used OpenOffice (now defunct) in college and the downgrade from Microsoft Office was pretty undeniable. I use LibreOffice now, a successor to OpenOffice, and I can't even imagine wanting to pay for a software license in that area.

I have also used (or attempted to use):

• Linux Mint and Ubuntu (though I'm currently on Windows)
• TeX family typesetting markup languages (primarily LaTeX)
• Audacity audio editing
• OpenShot video editing
• Blender for animation and 3D modeling

But probably the area in which open source software most clearly impacts my life is in the modding communities of the Steam games I play.

When I search for "text-in-translation" I am finding a few common points across the sources:

• A translated text is a hybrid text, and is as much the product of the life-world of the translator as it is of the original writer.
• A text-in-translation analysis will examine the choices made by the translator, and how those choices affect the appreciation of the source text an of the hybrid text.
• There are three text types:
  • Informative – 'plain' style, topic foregrounded.
  • Expressive – elaborate style, sender foregrounded.
  • Vocative – to induce a receiver's behaviour.
• Possibly some level of comparing translations.

While this is the kind of thing we do around here all the time, I have never heard it labeled as a particular discipline or approach to reading translations. I could also be wrong about all of that.

Kenneth Connally

english.ucdavis.edu

Looks like this might be the scholar hosting it? Maybe?

The text is in the proem to book 6 if anyone wants to get a head start. Bear in my I "verified" this with several word searches of the Latin text, so it's possible I missed any unusual morphology.