Posts by Joshua

Some further considerations: it would be fair to object that it is war, and not disease, that is the province of Mars. This is true--and it's also true that the plague of 430 BCE coincided with a war between Athens and Sparta. Mars was Sparta's patron god, for obvious reasons, and Lucretius could have ended more explicitly with war as Santayana proposes. But disease works better for Lucretius on a moral level. Philosophy was for him a kind of medicine, and it was a medicine that people needed even if they didn't know it. Diogenes of Oenoanda makes it very explicit;

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But, as I have said before, the majority of people suffer from a common disease, as in a plague, with their false notions about things, and their number is increasing (for in mutual emulation they catch the disease from one another, like sheep)

And John Stuart Mill says this of his father:

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As it was, 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 fictitious excellences—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 virtues: 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.

A further objection might be in the use of the word fetus. 'Offspring' or 'child' would be a non-standard usage, but it is justified at least in Horace: Germania quos horrida parturit Fetus. This translates as far as I can tell to Germany gave birth to a horrible child.

Lastly, here is an article which I have not read but which reinforces the connection between the beginning and ending of the poem.

Emily Austin's new book has invited many of us to reconsider how we think about the way in which Lucretius ends the sixth and final book of De Rerum Natura--with a horrific account of the Plague of Athens in 430 BCE. The ending has long been a source of conflicting opinions. George Santayana in his collection of essays called Three Philosophical Poets speculated, like many before and after him, the poem was unfinished--that the conclusion does not seem to satisfy the potential symmetry that Lucretius sets up in the Hymn to Venus, and that, properly finished, Lucretius would have ended with Mars on the warpath. It ends rather morbidly, but Mars never does get his marching cadence.

When I first read Santayana I went looking for clues--clues of the A STILO MV variety. I never found anything; that is, until tonight.

Before I get to that, lets review some of the hymn to Venus.

• Venus is portrayed as a nurturing mother who gave birth to the founding line of Rome.
• She fills the sea with ships and the land with grain
• Her coming dispels the clouds, placates the sea,
• Her generative power passes on the "teeming breeze of the west wind" (aura Favoni)
• She strikes the heart of man and beast and bird, urging them to procreate after their kind
• Lucretius asks her to placate her lover Mars, who lies on her lap and hangs from her lips by his mouth.

Now for the plague in Athens, starting with line 1138

• While Venus brought life to Rome, the plague brought death to Athens
• Under Venus, clear sky and calm ocean "shine with diffused light". The plague traverses "reaches of air and floating fields of foam"
• Venus' breeze carries life and warmth across the land. The plagued air carries foulness and death.
• It settles on the Athens, and human and beast alike lie rotting in the streets.
• Venus "alone governs the way things are". The plague makes Athens ungovernable, with temples and shrines heaped up with the bodies of the dead
• The hymn to Venus sets the stage for Epicurus. The plague ends rather abruptly.

OK! Now for my meaningless Kabbalistic word games! I mentioned that the section on the plague in Athens starts at line 1138 on the Perseus website. Here's the first sentence:

Quote from Perseus website

Haec ratio quondam morborum et mortifer aestus

finibus in Cecropis funestos reddidit agros

vastavitque vias, exhausit civibus urbem.

Quote from William Ellery Leonard

'Twas such a manner of disease, 'twas such

Mortal miasma in Cecropian lands

Whilom reduced the plains to dead men's bones,

Unpeopled the highways, drained of citizens

The Athenian town.

Quote from anonymous Daniel Brown Edition

Once such a plague as this, such deadly blasts, poisoned the coasts of Athens, founded by Cecrops. It raged through every street, unpeopled all the city, for coming from far (from Egypt, where it first began) and having passed through a long tract of air, and over the wide sea, it fixed at last upon the subjects of King Pandion.

Quote from Cyril Bailey

Such a cause of plague, such a deadly influence, once in the country of Cecrops filled the fields with dead and emptied the streets, draining the city of its citizens. For it arose deep within the country of Egypt, and came, traversing much sky and floating fields, and brooded at last over all the people of Pandion. Then troop by troop they were given over to disease and death.

Quote from H. A. J. Munro

Such a form of disease and a death-fraught miasm erst within the borders of Cecrops defiled the whole land with dead, and dispeopled the streets, drained the town of burghers. Rising first and starting from the inmost corners of Egypt, after traversing much air and many floating fields, the plague brooded at last over the whole people of Pandion; and then they were handed over in troops to disease and death.

"Mortal Miasma", "Deadly Blast", "Deadly Influence", "Death-fraught miasm"--these are translations of the mortifer aestus, the killing fever of the plague. I'll stick with deadly influence. These are the last two words of the first line of the plague. Aeneadum genetrix are the first two words of the first line of the hymn to Venus. So we have the life-giving mother of Rome contrasted with the deadly influence of the plague.

I found a strange little anagram.

FETUS ORE MARTIS

Fetus, n., nominative singular, "Offspring"

Ore, n., ablative singular, "[from] the Mouth"

Martis, n,. genitive singular, "[of] Mars

A deadly disease-the 'offspring from the mouth of Mars.' In the beginning of the poem Venus restrains him, and Mars hangs pacified from her mouth.

In the end, they are irreconcilable. Venus breaths life, and Mars death. Love and Strife, generation and destruction, the two Empedoclean forces vying with one another in a struggle without end, and each made possible by the other.

So what do you think?

That's the mosaic I found recently! This might be the kind of thing that would interest me.

Richard Dawkins proposed a line of thinking several years ago that might shed light on the whole "different levels of reality" issue. He suggested four different 'worlds' that living organisms might model for themselves in order to be better suited for their own size and speed;

• Atomic Scale (hypothetical)
• Microbe/Insect scale
• Animal Scale
• Cosmic Scale (Hypothetical)

Essentially what he's doing is extrapolating from the two middle scales outward in both directions to get to the hypothetical edges. The edges are hypothetical not because the don't exist in reality, but because there are no known organisms that operate in such a way as to require them to successfully model physics at those scales. In reality, there are more "worlds" modeled than the ones above--for example, blue herons model movement under water far better than humans do, because herons stand above the surface of water and hunt fast moving prey below it. Another example; creatures that live in ocean depths would model their world differently to those on dry land, or to those floating on air currents high above land. And further; the strange ability of hive insects to find their way back to the hive by 'recording' distance and estimating angles. There are apparently ants that can do this, or something very much like it.

Here's the general idea; at different scales, different physical forces interact in interesting ways. Here's one example; humans can't stand on water, but some insects can. At the insect scale, the forces of surface tension and air friction "outweigh" the force of gravity. They can walk on water, fall from high places without injury, etc. The result of this is that insects will be better fit for survival if they can successfully model surface tension, and humans will be better fit for survival if they can successfully model gravity. Nature is the same at each scale, but its implications for living things are different. If you were to imagine a whale-like animal the size of an asteroid that could live in space, the whale would need to successfully model things like the two body problem, inertial movement in a frictionless environment, how to use gravity wells as 'slingshots', and how to avoid falling into them--precisely the kinds of things that NASA needs to model when sending out probes and shuttles.

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For more information:

• A short Wikipedia page on this topic.
• This TEDtalk starting around the five minute mark.

We also have to consider the motives of the early translators. Most of them in their frontmatter went to great lengths to disavow the main tenets of the poem. One published anonymously, another vowed that she would feed it to the fire if she still had it in her hands. Delight is a gray area. Pleasure is subversive.

"DELIGHT of Humane kind, and Gods above,

Parent of Rome; Propitious Queen of Love,

Whose vital pow’r, Air, Earth, and Sea supplies,

And breeds what e’r is born beneath the rowling Skies:

For every kind, by thy prolifique might,

Springs, and beholds the Regions of the light."

John Dryden translation in heroic couplets; rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. Dryden is already taking liberties with the meter in the second line, bit he nails the first line and that sets the tone.

Voluptas was also a goddess, signifying sensual pleasure, granddaughter of Venus--alternatively, an aspect of Venus herself--and her Greek equivalent was Hedone.

Delight makes for a good English translation in part because it is 'higher in tone'--more suited to an archaic form like Latin epic verse. It has the same Latin root as 'delectable', and there are also metrical considerations. "de-LIGHT of GODS and MEN" is iambic, the standard English poetic foot. Delight of gods and men...the darling buds of May.

Pleasure breaks up the flow. This is true even in prose, though it wouldn't be as strongly felt.

My memory is that Gellar-Goad also describes the relevant passages as being grammatically uncertain--full of nesting subordinate clauses, hedging language, and so on. Epicurus and Lucretius were hesitant to draw any firm conclusion on this point.

I've listened to that episode twice already, I agree that it's a good one.

My first nominee would be this:

Episode One Hundred Twenty-Nine - Letter to Pythocles 03 - The Implications Of the Epicurean Position On The Size of the Sun

And also the first episode of the Letter to Menoeceus. I think Kalosyni has pointed to this as one she enjoyed.

Episode One Hundred Thirty-Four - The Letter to Menoeceus 01- Context and Opening of the Letter

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I'm also curious of how you account for dreaming when the senses are not tuned to external stimuli. The sensations are not active. Only the faculty of the mind is active.

This is a legitimately difficult issue, but one trope often used in film about dreaming is how the content of dreams becomes affected by external stimuli.

Here's one example;

My own own view of dreams is that they are the product of a mind distanced from external stimuli but not severed from it, and turning its attention from a stream of sensation to a memory bank of the residue of sensation, while also functioning with decreased emotional inhibition. Lucretius and Shakespeare both vividly describe dreams as consisting primarily of daily experience, though jumbled together in strange ways. But who knows. I don't hang my much by dreams.

Regarding "the mind aware of itself" I think DeWitt makes this explicit by highlighting the paradox that it requires reason to pass judgment on reason.

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I mean, at the risk of sounding too extreme, I suspect that Epicurus is even open to the possibility that drinking to excess can be beneficial under some bizarre, even common, circumstances.

I don't think I've ever related a tale with so much vigor as when I was sitting with friends at my sister's wedding reception, describing a pleasant morning on I-24 south of Nashville when the resident of a hot air balloon floating over the interstate gestured for me to pull the air horn. The wine rather added something, I think.

Ha! There's nearly an hour gone looking for the Greek text. Found 45 minutes after Don...

Since I've found it, I can record for the record that this is fragment 93 from the 4th century b.c.e middle comedy poet Eubulus, thought to be from a comic play titled Semele or Dionysus, and preserved by the 2nd-3rd century c.e. Greek grammarian Athenaeus.

Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, Book II., chapter 3

Quote from Fragment from the Greek Playwright Euboulos

"For sensible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health (which they drink first), the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is not mine any more - it belongs to bad behaviour; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness."

Perhaps primordial is not so much a time, as it is a state or condition. An uncoupled atom, a "first beginning" or "seed of things" in Lucretian terms, is the atom in its primordial state. It 'falls' along an inertial path in whatever direction, swerves unpredictably, 'falls' again, couples with another atom, joins other couplings to form a body, dissolves, and falls away in an endless cycle of accretion and dissolution.

Quote from Don

And my take is that this was the primordial situation with all atoms falling in parallel "straight down." However, once a couple collisions happened, the order was interrupted by collisions and conglomerations in parts of the cosmos. In other parts, the parallel falling continued. And so on.

I've never been able to reconcile a 'primordial' downward movement with the concurrent claim that there was no beginning.

I didn't find it too harsh. Probably most of the people I know and love hold to some variant of that idea, and I never want to come across as callous or cruel when talking to or about them, but if we cannot speak frankly about ideas then what's it all for?

canon

noun (1)

can·on ˈka-nən

1 A: a regulation or dogma decreed by a church council B: a provision of canon law 2 [Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin, from Latin, model] : the most solemn and unvarying part of the Mass including the consecration of the bread and wine 3 [Middle English, from Late Latin, from Latin, standard] A: an authoritative list of books accepted as Holy Scripture B: the authentic works of a writer; "the Chaucer canon" C: a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works; "the canon of great literature" 4 A: an accepted principle or rule B: a criterion or standard of judgment; "the canons of good taste" C: a body of principles, rules, standards, or norms

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I'm rethinking the various usages of the word "canon" as compared with Epicurus' Canon of Epistemology, and I'm beginning to think that we haven't been very clear on this point in previous episodes. I think the word test gets at the heart of all of these disparate applications. For example:

• Canonized saint (Catholic Church); a person by whom a Catholic is to test their life.
• Western Canon; A collection of writings against which to test the aesthetic and literary value of new writings.
• The Epicurean Canon; the three sources of knowledge by which we test what is true or knowable.

I could probably go on, but it seems to me that what separates the Epicurean canon is not that it is a test or measuring stick, and the others are not: what distinguishes the Epicurean canon is that it is a test of epistemology--other uses of the word canon are also tests, but they test different things by different criteria.

I also need to read that article!

I should add that the way the "square tower" issue is explained by some commentators, it does reduce to a tautology as you suggest--'sense organs sense'. But no inferences can be made from that, so I take it for granted that that wasn't it's proper application.

I've never experienced psychedelics, but going by report I would analyze them under the rubric I outlined above. Only in this case, instead of the brain 'involuntarily adding a layer of interpretation', it cakes it on so thickly that the reported sensation is altered completely before the conscious mind has time to act upon it. Here's a thought experiment: suppose you had one optic nerve simultaneously grafted to two different brains. One brain is high, the other is clear--what does the clear brain see?

...I've been up since 5 pm.