Posts by Joshua

Here is one potential solution to the confusing matter of the "annual" feast of the Twentieth:

Which I find in this JSTOR article;

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24519291?read-now=1&seq=6

Did you know Vergil signs his name in the first four lines of the Aeneid?

In 2012, the classicist Cristiano Castelletti discovered that Vergil included a boustrophedon acrostic in the first four lines of the Aeneid. An...

www.reddit.com

There ^ is interesting food for thought!

I'll look into Horace's Ars Poetica this evening, and see what I find. He has quite a lot to say about meter and style. There are many other grammatists from the ancient world to look into, but for me the Virgil/Horace connection clinches it. The allusion seems very clear.

My own suspicion is that the confusion here comes in because logic is rather 'slippery'. It is a very powerful tool of cognition. It is absolutely critical to the field of computer science:

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A computer is a digital electronic machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically.

We know that it works. But that is a separate question to the one we're really asking: Is logic a source of direct knowledge?

That's the question that it is difficult to get a hold on. Logic is amazingly flimsy stuff when it doesn't rest on something solid--which is to say, something known. When Thomas Aquinas set out to prove the existence of a god, he could not rest his proof on the evidence of his senses; his senses furnished no evidence of god. So he employed instead the twin vacuous pillars of faith and logic; his Five Ways to prove the existence of god do not stand up to even slight scrutiny, as some honest Christians will admit. He started with nothing, and logic took him nowhere fast.

Epicurus was neither strictly an empiricist, nor anything like a rationalist; but he was far closer to the former than to the latter, which is part of the reason he rejected geometry. This chart does a fair job, I think:

It's not likely to be a coincidence, if that's the implication of your question! Virgil has a well-known acrostic in his Georgics in the terminal characters of four lines, spelling out O-T-I-A. He was followed by Horace in his Satires, who employed the same acrostic in the first characters of four lines.

Otium was an important word for upper-class Romans with good educations: it signified for them the kind of dignified leisure that they praised most highly; managing (perhaps directing is a better word for it) the cultivation of their country estates, maintaining personal libraries, collecting statuary, frescoes and fine furniture, playing host to the convivium, and, of course; reading and writing Greek and Latin literature.

Ask someone on the street to describe poetry, and the first thing they're likely to say is that 'it rhymes'. But poetry in the ancient world did not rhyme; like Milton and Shakespeare, they wrote in strictly metered blank verse. Also like Shakespeare, they continued to avail themselves of many other literary devices to ornament their work: Alliteration, assonance, dissonance, cacophony, chiasmus, asyndeton, onomatopoeia, metonymy, synecdoche--and probably a hundred others that I never even learned the names of!

There is a bawdy epigram in the Greek Anthology whereby the epigrammatist, a noted παίδἐραστής, observes that: (spoiler...)

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The numerical value of the letters in πρωκτὸς (anus) and χρυσὸς (gold) is the same. I once found this out reckoning up casually.

Perhaps not the most helpful example of wordplay I could furnish, but certainly one I won't soon forget...

Very interesting! I'll need to read that again more attentively, thank you for sharing that!

We had a bit of a slog through this very question during the podcast recording on Sunday. I was 'off my game' Sunday morning...hopefully with Cassius and Martin engaged in the discussion we managed to produce something intelligible

I still haven't read anywhere near enough of David Sedley's work, so I won't be much help here either!

"Now, whoever will be sure to eat good fruit, must do it out of a garden of his own."

Oddly enough, I'm finding his opinions on gardening to be more interesting than I expected!

I don't expect I will go much further into this book at present, which is more of a gardening handbook, or so I gather; but a few interesting passages present themselves.

The text is available in digitized form here:

Sir William Temple upon the gardens of Epicurus - Biodiversity Heritage Library

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I think Joshua mentions he thinks that DeWitt indicates Menoeceus might have been written first, but the main reason I am posting this is that we probably ought to check that in case we need to have a correction to the sequence here in this thread.

I actually cannot find my copy of DeWitt right now, but Wikipedia cites page 9:

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Epicurus's Letter to Menoeceus, possibly an early work of his, is written in an eloquent style similar to that of the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates (436–338 BC), but, for his later works, he seems to have adopted the bald, intellectual style of the mathematician Euclid.

Godfrey, yes I certainly did find that worth reading! Thank you.

I have several impractical ideas; Big Ben striking 20; blue smoke from the Sistine Chapel; a searchlight signaling the face of Epicurus on the clouds over New York City...

Suppose I don't want to create profiles on a whole bunch of social media applications that I will otherwise never use; is there a way to simplify all of this, perhaps with RSS?

I suspect there are quite a lot of people like me. We don't want to manage more apps, we don't want more notifications to ignore, we don't want a cluttered email inbox with stuff we've already seen on the website, but we might want that one all-important doomsday notification when the site goes down.

Also, we'd like it to be quite simple

As we are finally getting into the Letters of Epicurus himself, I want to take this opportunity to plug Don 's Translation and Commentary on the Letter to Menoikeus, which work I have cited in this recording, and which, if you have not looked into it, is well worth your time.

Show Notes:

On Epitomes

• We talked quite a lot about the practice of epitomes, summaries and outlines, for more information on which it will be useful to review Epicurus and his Philosophy by Norman DeWitt.

• For contrast, one may look at the Enchiridion, or Handbook, of the sayings of Epictetus. The Stoic handbooks of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius deal quite extensively with practical advice for day to day living, but do not spare much time for metaphysics. In contrast, Epicurus was quite happy to devote an entire epitome to an overview of the physics, which he discussed at length in his Magnum Opus "On Nature". DeWitt suggests (as does the first paragraph of this Letter) that there were really two epitomes, and that this is the 'little epitome'.

David Allan Coe

• David Allan Coe is, apparently, an American Singer-Songwriter. If I had known who he was, perhaps I could have corrected Cassius sooner, but alas!

David Allen

• David Allen is an American consultant on efficiency in life and business, whose wildly popular book Getting Things Done has become a standard for organization and time management using checklists, outlines, notebooks and a master calendar or diary.

Since a major theme of our conversation today was on effective and useful outlines and summaries, we invite you to consider making your Personal Outline of Epicurean Philosophy, on the model of Epicurus himself as well as Thomas Jefferson.

And not just summing the hedons and the dolors, but submitting the decision to the test of 7 other variables!

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To be included in this calculation are several variables (or vectors), which Bentham called "circumstances". These are:

• Intensity: How strong is the pleasure?

• Duration: How long will the pleasure last?

• Certainty or uncertainty: How likely or unlikely is it that the pleasure will occur?

• Propinquity or remoteness: How soon will the pleasure occur?

• Fecundity: The probability that the action will be followed by sensations of the same kind.

• Purity: The probability that it will not be followed by sensations of the opposite kind.

• Extent: How many people will be affected?

Interesting question, Godfrey! Here are a few of the many potential answers I can think of;

"The poorest person in the world is the person with the..."

1. Lowest net worth in U.S. dollars.
2. Lowest net worth and worst prospects for future wealth.
3. Largest negative cash flow relative to purchasing power.
4. Lowest net worth, living in a country with the worst score on the Human Development Index.
5. Least remaining time, and with the most troubles and the least blessings.
6. Most disagreeable personality, and who has spurned all friends, family, and loved ones.
7. Darkest secrets, and the most to fear from being found out.
8. The greatest degree imaginable of human suffering.

The pecuniary answers are the most obvious, but for many may turn out to be the least important.

I immediately thought of Shakespeare:

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Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York son of Neocles!

They drilled in the same cohort for the requisite two (I think?) years of military training! Menander is the author of one of the epigrams in the Greek anthology;

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Hail, ye twin-born sons of Neocles, of whom the

one saved his country from slavery the other from folly.

The former was Themistocles, and the latter was Epicurus.

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But I would check out "The Sculpted Word"...

I've just looked at Frischer, nothing helpful there I'm afraid.