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.

I should also note that this is very timely, since our podcast discussion on Epicurus and His Philosophy will turn to "The New Piety" after we finish "The New Hedonism".

*Obbink

I should hate to be guilty of Norman DeWitt's unforgivable sin--amending the text!

I'm posting this as food for thought, and because I don't see it suggested elsewhere:

Perhaps we're reading it wrong? The usual reading is that the gods are "unaffected by [hypothetical] anger [that they might otherwise feel] and [hypothetical] gratitude [that they might otherwise feel]."

Could it be credibly inferred that the anger and gratitude that the gods are immune to is our anger and gratitude?

It doesn't matter whether your words are "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" or "into thy hands I commend my spirit"; the result is the same. The gods, by virtue of being gods, are necessarily deaf to human griefs, as well as human joys.

Under this new reading, the first Principal Doctrine falls in line with the recurring literary devices that mark the whole series; the Chiasmus, and the Antimetabole. I can summarize a few examples, with the caveat that brevity is the mother of misinterpretation.

1. Do not trouble about the gods, for the gods do not trouble about you.

2. When we are, death has not come. When death has come, we are not.

3 and 4. What is good is easy to get, what is terrible is easy to endure.

5. It is not possible to live pleasantly without living [x], and it is not possible to live [x] without living pleasantly.

6. Take courage from other men, or at least from men who can give courage.

11. If suspicion of nature did not trouble us, we should not trouble to study nature.

I write these merely to isolate the main point--that the literary devices are constantly repeated, and are there for a reason.

From Wikipedia;

Quote

Chiasmus derives its effectiveness from its symmetrical structure. The structural symmetry of the chiasmus imposes the impression upon the reader or listener that the entire argument has been accounted for.[13] In other words, chiasmus creates only two sides of an argument or idea for the listener to consider, and then leads the listener to favor one side of the argument.

As I say, food for thought. And thanks to my old copy of Walter Harding's edition of Walden for alerting me to these literary devices.

Quote

When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.

-Henry David Thoreau