Posts by Joshua

Here's another way to look at it:

-John Harvard

One thing that is nearly always missing from film and television portrayals of ancient city life is advertising. Fortunately the lost city of Pompeii furnishes many examples:

"AD CVCVMAS"..."This way to the wine jars!"

Goat's milk dairy. Send me a pot of cheese!

...or maybe I'll get some milk for the puppy.

Metalworker's shop

"Salve, citizen! Which way to the---oh, I see it's this way..."

In light of this, we can imagine a prominent statue of Epicurus in Athens with perhaps some useful directions. "The Garden School, Dipylon road, etc." And then at the turning that leads to the garden, a corresponding statue to let them know they found the right place.

Quote from Me

Cicero's letter to his brother does not mention any emending of Lucretius, and he doesn't indicate that he was in any way acquainted with Lucretius as a person.

One thing I should say for the record is that Cicero did write to Memmius, so there could have been some connection between Cicero and Lucretius. But if anyone is emending the text it ought to have been an Epicurean like Atticus, or a sympathetic poet like Virgil, Ovid, etc. Now we're firmly in the realm of conjecture!

Quote from Cassius

Very good question but if so I am not aware of anything to establish that. Isn't one of the only ancient comments someone (a church father?) making the comment about Cicero "emending" it?

This comes from St. Jerome (died 420 AD) perhaps quoting Eusebius (died 339 AD), reporting on Lucretius (died c. 55 BC). So we're dealing with a gap of 450 years.

That would be akin to a hostile source making a claim about Shakespeare yesterday with no corroborating evidence, and in contravention of known circumstantial evidence. Cicero's letter to his brother does not mention any emending of Lucretius, and he doesn't indicate that he was in any way acquainted with Lucretius as a person.

That passage from Virgil is clearly in reference to Lucretius, as most commentators agree, and is important for another reason; if Lucretius really had killed himself, do we think his greatest admirer would have written those lines In Memoriam? It would have been rather callous to write about his "happiness" in that case. That quote is one of two main lines of argument against the suicide claim.

Yeah, it's not so much about bringing the gods into the equation, it's more about expecting that Lucretius would live up to the paradigm that he sets up in the beginning of the poem. To really understand what the Hymn to Venus represents, we need to know what the poet was reading. Lucretius had three principal influences in writing On the Nature of Things. The main influence was of course Epicurus, who provides all of the main content of the poem, which Lucretius translates into Latin, fleshes out, and then casts into verse. Epicurus is always going to be the focus of his loyalty in interpretation.

But Epicurus wrote in Greek and in prose. Poetry, and particularly epic poetry, has its own stylistic, artistic, and literary demands. Homer is always in the background, but Lucretius' two principal poetic influences were the Greek poet-philosopher Empedocles, and Ennius, an epic poet and the "father of Roman poetry".

Empedocles wrote two long-form philosophical poems, On Nature and Purifications, together totalling some 5000 lines. On Nature is for our purposes the more important of the two. In this poem, Empedocles puts forward a cosmology based on the four classical elements of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water. In addition to these two, he proposes two cosmic forces in conflict with one another--Love and Strife--which cause the elements to combine (Love) and separate (Strife). These four elements and the two forces that drive them can neither be created nor destroyed--like Lucretius, Empedocles writes that "nothing comes from nothing".

One thing that separates Lucretius from Epicurus is the metaphor in DRN which views Nature as operating with a restless, erotic energy. Epicurus writes of atoms joining to form compounds and compounds dissolving back into atoms, literally "un-cut-ables". Lucretius is not so technical--for him, atoms are semina rerum, 'the seeds of things', with the connotation of a sexually generative power. This is pure Empedocles. But Lucretius takes the Empedoclean approach more figuratively by using the images of Venus and Mars as stand-ins for Love and Strife. In the hymn to Venus, he presents the "nurturing mother" as metaphorically coming with the Spring, sowing flowers and crops, and filling every animal with an intense procreative lust.

One of the scribes who copied the poem evidently thought that Lucretius was very confused--he (the scribe) copied into the margin a later passage describing the gods living in deepest peace, with no role in creation. Why this appeal to Venus? But Lucretius wasn't confused. He was sticking diligently to a layered and textured metaphor dating back to the 5th century in Greece.

So the quite surprising thing is that Lucretius doesn't complete the analogy--the poem opened with Venus/Love/combination/sexual generation. What Santayana expects is that Lucretius ought to have ended the poem more explicitly with Mars/Strife/dissolution/death, and thereby consummating in his poem a metaphor that was already four centuries old.

Happy Birthday, Onenski!

Just in case it helps, my next plan with the diagram was to take off from "I want to explain this fact" and take that through a Pythoclean treatment of single vs multiple causes, postponing judgment until further information comes to hand, etc. The 'feelings' bubble would pretty quickly branch off into two parts, one interlacing with the "sensations" pathway to inform epistemology and one branching off into a treatment of pleasures (kinetic and katastematic), pains (short if intense, etc), and the limits of each, before coming down to the "desire module", where natural, necessary, etc couple with epistemic outputs to inform decision making. Prolepsis would present considerable difficulties, as I still don't grasp it very well. The result would be like a dense interweaving hedge more than a tree.

And finally, in DRN Book 1, 192-198 Lucretius uses fetus to describe the fruit of plants after rain.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.192-198: From Rain to Letters to Elements

“One must consider too that without a fixed annual amount of rain the land cannot produce its gladdening fruit nor is it the nature of animals bereft of their…

sententiaeantiquae.com

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.