Posts by Joshua

That's one of the more frustrating aspects of the response to Greenblatt's book. They downplay self-flagellation, which admittedly probably was restricted to the real hardliners, but take no account of the persecution of Heretical sects, the torture and murder of apostates, the relish of punishment of the damned in hell, the culture of fear and inquisition, the conversion of "heathens" at the point of a sword, the anti-Jewish pogroms, the hunting and burning of accused witches, and the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

One reviewer actually wrote this with a straight face;

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Indeed the Middle Ages are considered Europe’s most bookish era, a time when books — Christian, Greek and Roman alike — were accorded near totemic authority. Medieval readers and writers (not just clergy — lay culture was widely influenced by texts and documents, especially following the 10th century) were apt to believe anything they read in an old book just because it was old and from a book.

As if to say that that were a sign of literacy. Well I'm sorry, but a literate and literary society does not believe something just because they read it in a book. A literate society knows enough about books not to take them blindly or at face value. It is only credulity and ignorance and illiteracy that views books as 'totemic'.

But imagine someone saying or writing that in the middle ages--and about one book in particular--and then try pretending that we don't all know what would be done to them.

Well wide of the mark, Bishop.

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His aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies - belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind - and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtue: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful.

-John Stuart Mill, on his father

I had almost forgotten that Bishop Barron did a video on The Swerve several years ago:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_cha…20to%20minerals.

The Wikipedia page for the Scala naturae or "Great Chain of Being" is worth glancing at as we continue to talk about the place of the gods in Epicurus' universe.

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So he,

The master, then by his truth-speaking words,

Purged the breasts of men, and set the bounds

Of lust and terror, and exhibited

The supreme good whither we all endeavour,

And showed the path whereby we might arrive

Thereunto by a little cross-cut straight,

And what of ills in all affairs of mortals

Upsprang and flitted deviously about

(Whether by chance or force), since Nature thus

Had destined.

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I guess the problem at least in Lucretius is that "life itself" does not answer the question of "whither [do] we all endeavor?" Whither? To pleasure.

And (why not?) Edward Abbey, from his journal;

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My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.

He writes at length about this in his essay On Fairy Stories.

I also quite like George R. R. Martin on fantasy:

On Fantasy | George R.R. Martin

See page two of my Interlinear Lucretius thread for that conversation.

Danish scholar Marcus Meibomius

An increasingly appealing option to me at the moment is to use Leonard's Latin text from Perseus instead of Bailey's, and proceed with the view that my interlinear text will serve as a Creative Commons companion to the Perseus Project as well as Smith's commentary. I could work quite rapidly under those terms and still produce something very useful.

Prepare to be underwhelmed! I have finished a draft of lines.....

...

1-5.

I stand now at a crossroads. The biggest obstacle right now is trying to verify the grammar notes, which sources disagree on, and which I am ill-equipped to offer any opinion on. One of the books I am consulting is Leonard and Smith's Lucretius from 1943, which is an extensive commentary on the Latin text of Lucretius. It lacks only two things; an interlinear translation, and grammar notation. My options at the moment are to:

• Keep things as they are. I do find this work rewarding, but progress is very slow.
• Double down on the Interlinear side and leave out grammar notes and all but the most basic commentary. This would be easy and I could work more quickly, but the process is fairly dull and mindless.
• A third option would be to find an existing public domain English language commentary, and import that wholesale into my interlinear text.

Regardless of anything I do, this monumental commentary by Stanley Barney Smith on Leonard's Latin text of Lucretius is excellent and very interesting. He downplays interest in the grammar in order to focus on linking passages in Lucretius to other sources in Classical literature for comparative purposes.

De Rerum Natura: The Latin Text of Lucretius (Latin and English Edition)

De Rerum Natura: The Latin Text of Lucretius (Latin and English Edition)

www.amazon.com

(The Amazon sample shown in "Look Inside" is of a different book entirely)

Show Notes:

Claudius Ptolemy, Almagest:

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“I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia

Ptolemy - Wikiquote

en.wikiquote.org

John Tyndall, Belfast Address

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Is there not a temptation to close to some extent with Lucretius, when he affirms that 'nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods?' or with Bruno, when he declares that Matter is not 'that mere empty capacity which philosophers have pictured her to be, but the universal mother who wrings forth all things as the fruit of her own womb?' Believing as I do in the continuity of Nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life.

Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast, With Additions (1874)

Philip Larkin, Church Going

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A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

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Church Going, by Philip Larkin

Once I am sure there’s nothing go… I step inside, letting the door th… Another church: matting, seats, an… And little books; sprawlings of fl… For Sunday,…

www.poeticous.com

Lucretius, Book V, Line 1200

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nec pietas ullast velatum saepe videri

vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras

nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas

ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo

spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota,

sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.

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Bailey:

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Nor is it piety at all to be seen often with veiled head turning towards a stone, and to draw near to every altar, no, nor to lie prostrate on the ground with outstretched palms before the shrines of the gods, nor to sprinkle the altars with the streaming blood of beasts, nor to link vow to vow, but rather to be able to contemplate all things with a mind at rest.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Act 1, Scene 5

Love to learn it.

myshakespeare.com

Excellent point, Godfrey .

Stephen Greenblatt also argues against a seventh book, on the grounds that the end of Book VI sets up a test for the reader to see how well they've grasped the main points of the philosophy.

George Santayana suggested that the poem was unfinished because he anticipates that Lucretius would have ended the poem with Mars to complete the symmetry of beginning with Venus.

Here is a thread on the plague at the end of the book, with a probably meaningless anagram I discovered: Mortifer aestus: "A deadly fever" -> Fetus ore Martis; "Offspring from the mouth of Mars."

A statistical analysis of Lucretius' meter:

Hexameter | Lucretius

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Just so I understand your message, would not Leonard and 1743 in line 1 get a "1" because they used "Rome" and not the literal "Aeneas" or "Aeneads"?

Taking only these four translators, two of them went one way and two of them another making it a wash. Actually that row should be thrown out from the final calculation; no mode word.

Voluptas certainly does have pleasure as one of it's meanings. It occurs to me now that this analysis doesn't really test for "literality", but instead tests for "eccentricity". Just because 3 others translate a word one way and one translates it another way, that doesn't mean that the eccentric word choice is less literal. It could be more literal!

It occurred to me today that it would be possible to use some basic statistical analysis to evaluate which translations are, on the whole, more literal and which are idiosyncratic.

You might, for example, take the Latin text of Book I. Go through it and isolate all of the root nouns and verbs (for simplicity's sake), and put them in the first column of a spreadsheet under "Latin". For the second column, Perseus; whichever definition the Perseus Project suggests for that Latin word goes in column 2. Then Munro. Then a column for numerically representing the deviation from the mode; 0 for using the mode word, 1 for using an idiosyncratic word, 2 for not translating the word at all. Then Bailey and deviation, and so forth.

Then add up the deviation for each column and divide by the number of words. This value is that translator's eccentricity. A higher eccentricity for that data set suggests a less literal translator. Because Perseus cites dictionary entries including multiple translations, it will not count toward modality, nor be included in the final tally.

Eccentricity = (X/7) where X equals the number of words for which there is a mode. Larger numbers signify more consistent outliers.

1743: 0

Bailey: 0.14

Munro: 0.14

Leonard: 0.43

This data set is obviously so small as to be meaningless, and the project is probably not worth doing with a proper set: say, the whole of book one. It could prove interesting to sample passages throughout the book, or perhaps from the beginning of each book.

...but I'm not going to do it!

And now with that understanding of piety vs religion in mind, we can look at Lucian of Samosata with fresh eyes:

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My object, dear friend, in making this small selection from a great mass of material has been twofold. First, I was willing to oblige a friend and comrade who is for me the pattern of wisdom, sincerity, good humour, justice, tranquillity, and geniality. But secondly I was still more concerned (a preference which you will be very far from resenting) to strike a blow for Epicurus, that great man whose holiness and divinity of nature were not shams, who alone had and imparted true insight into the good, and who brought deliverance to all that consorted with him.

My recent comment in this thread on pietas (piety) may be relevant for this chapter.

I was just listening to an unread book in my Audible library called Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini. This is part of a review of that book, from the Los Angeles Review of Books, written by Will Boast.

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A dead or “useless” language like Latin is not constantly shifting under your feet, asking you to change your habit of speech and thought every five minutes, or burning the ad man’s latest jingle into your brain. Latin can be more logical, less vividly debased. It can offer, Gardini tells us, both mental quiet and exuberance. “There’s something sacred about discovering Lucretius,” he says with no apparent irony. “It feels like stepping into heaven.”

Lucretius’s long poem, De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”), is an atheistic tract on the principles of atomism. In Lucretius, it isn’t ritual and superstition that delineates and describes the world but clearly reasoned thinking and discourse. It’s ultimately Lucretius’s “faith in words,” their attempt at the “reeducation of mankind,” that Gardini finds exalting. For Gardini, the promise of Latin is that getting to the root of words, understanding what they meant before they got into Italian or English or any other Romance language, is getting at what underlies and defines our vexing Western culture. “A word’s meaning is history itself,” Gardini says. “[I]t’s our responsibility and our privilege to live it.”

Nearly every chapter of Gardini's book focuses on one aspect of the Latin language by exploring it's use in a particular ancient author. He begins each author with an overview, and then follows with a choice selection of that author's vocabulary; just a few words and their etymology, their later use, and their influence on modern languages and thought.

After that he quotes several passages in Latin from the author's work and explains their importance.

The book was originally published in Italian, but was translated and read by Todd Portnowitz. His reading of the Latin seems good to my ear; slow enough for a novice to pick out the words, but still quite beautiful.

One of the words he chooses from Lucretius is pietas.

Lucretius, Book V, around line 1200;

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nec pietas ullast velatum saepe videri

vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras

nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas

ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo

spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota,

sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.

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Bailey;

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Nor is it piety at all to be seen often with veiled head turning towards a stone, and to draw near to every altar, no, nor to lie prostrate on the ground with outstretched palms before the shrines of the gods, nor to sprinkle the altars with the streaming blood of beasts, nor to link vow to vow, but rather to be able to contemplate all things with a mind at rest.

1743;

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Nor can there be any piety for a wretch with his head veiled, to be ever turning himself about towards a stone, to creep to every altar, to throw himself flat upon the ground, to spread his arms before the shrines of the gods, to sprinkle the altars abundantly with the blood of beasts, and to heap vows upon vows. To look upon things with an undisturbed mind, this is Piety.

Munro;

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No act is it of piety to be often seen with veiled head to turn to a stone and approach every altar and fall prostrate on the ground and spread out the palms before the statues of the gods and sprinkle the altars with much blood of beasts and link vow on to vow, but rather to be able to look on all things with a mind at peace.

Leonard;

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Nor, O man

Is thy true piety in this: with head

Under the veil, still to be seen to turn

Fronting a stone, and ever to approach

Unto all altars; nor so prone on earth

Forward to fall, to spread upturned palms

Before the shrines of gods, nor yet to dew

Altars with profuse blood of four-foot beasts,

Nor vows with vows to link. But rather this:

To look on all things with a master eye

And mind at peace.

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Pietas, then, is not a synonym of religio but its true opposite. Religio is a kind of madness born of superstition; it is attended by fear, traffics in well-worn lies, and delights in obscurantism and servility. Pietas is the spirit of understanding born of inquiry; it brings peace, "reveals darkly hidden things", and delights in clarity and the health of the unburdened soul.

The presence of mage in the Latin is interesting. Leonard translates it as "master" from magus, which word also has the meaning of magician or sorceror. The rest translate "sed mage" as "but rather", deriving mage from magis.

Perhaps the pun is Lucretius': that while there is nothing supernatural or superstitious in true piety, the study of nature through philosophy transforms life (in the words of Joseph Conrad) into "an enchanted state". A life, indeed, worthy of the gods.

Here's something slightly horrible that I didn't know existed. In the late 19th century a series of interlinear texts were published with the Latin "reduced to the natural English order", meaning that they rearranged the words of the Latin (usually subject->object->verb) to match the word order of English sentences, which is typically Subject->Verb->object.

Horace Complete Interlinear : Horace : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Horace Complete Interlinear

archive.org

I shall have to track down more information. What strikes me immediately is that this process would utterly ruin poetry and the "Latinity" of good prose; I wonder if contemporary reviewers had the same misgivings.