Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
-Robert Herrick, To the Virgins to Make Much of Time
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Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
-Andrew Marvell, To his Coy Mistress
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carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Seize the present; trust tomorrow e'en as little as you may.
-Horace, Odes
"Timor mortis conturbat me" is a Latin phrase commonly found in late medieval Scottish and English poetry, translating to "fear of death disturbs me". The phrase comes from a responsory of the Catholic Office of the Dead, in the third Nocturn of Matins:
"Peccantem me quotidie, et non poenitentem, timor mortis conturbat me. Quia in inferno nulla est redemptio, miserere mei, Deus, et salva me." Sinning daily, and not repenting, the fear of death disturbs me. For there is no redemption in Hell, have mercy on me, o God, and save me.
Specifically, he did not teach in public in the Athenian period of his life; neither in the agora, nor in the Gymnasia (of which the Academy and the Lyceum were two). The Gymnasia were governed by somewhat strict rules, as they were constructed and operated for the training and education of the next generation of male citizens--the very future of the city-state.
Before Epicurus began his brief tenure in Lampsacus (where he developed several lasting and important friendships), he was more or less driven out of Mytilene for his teachings. This must have been an education of a kind, but there was something else to keep him on guard when he got to Athens: the memory of the trial of Socrates, on the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. Sure, that was a century before, and maybe things change. But a century and a half before that, the Athenians sentenced another man to death, a philosopher named Anaxagoras. His crime was also impiety; he was accused of materialism (true enough in his case, though not in Socrates'), and this first thinker to bring philosophy to Athens escaped death only by being exiled from her.
And yet, in the time of Socrates, Anaxagoras' books were circulating widely in Athens and could be had in the market for a drachma. Preposterous? Certainly! But that was the point; what was said in private, or merely committed to paper and circulated, was of little enough concern to the City's elite. A brazen tongue must occasionally be silenced; the idea that animated it was tolerated to persist.
In any case, Anaxagoras (who thought, among other things, that the sun and moon were made of rock) secured his safety by fleeing to, of all places, Lampsacus! Athens went on to become an emblem of free-thought, Lampsacus, to be forgotten. That is the way of things, I suppose.
More adventures of the tortoise and the hare:
"Draw!" [literally, "Draw your weapon!] educe; from educere, to draw or to lead--second person singular present active imperative: and telum; dart, javeline, projectile--accusative singular
"Pew!" Latin "v" pronounced "u", "oo"
"Haha! I am the swiftest of all! celerrimus; superlative of celer, "swift", so "swiftest": omnium; from omnia, all things--genitive plural: sum, I am
"Slow and steady..." adverbs, both are vocative and singular
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This is my translation; feel free to educate me! (late Middle English: from Latin educat- ‘led out’, from the verb educare, related to educere ‘lead out’)
Also: Torquatus section on Mathematics and Geometry (very brief):
[72] Was he the man to spend his time in conning poets as I and Triarius do on your advice, when they afford no substantial benefit, and all the enjoyment they give is childish in kind, or was he the man to waste himself, like Plato, upon music, geometry, mathematics and astronomy, which not only start from false assumptions and so cannot be true, but if they were true would not aid us one whit towards living a more agreeable, that is a better life? Was he, I ask, the man to pursue those arts and thrust behind him the art of living, an art of such moment, so laborious too, and correspondingly rich in fruit? Epicurus then is not uneducated, but those persons are uninstructed who think that subjects which it is disgraceful to a boy not to have learned, are to be learned through life into old age!
And;
Infinite mathematical detail at the subatomic scale;
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1316&context=jhm
I recall reading this article some time back, some parts of it may be worth discussing.
Don, do you think there is a connection between 'elements' in that sense and the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:18?
"For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled."
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.
-Diogenes of Oenoanda
Happy Earth Day!
"I am not the least afraid of death."
Charles Darwin--presiding here in stone over the main hall of the Museum of Natural History in London--died on this day in 1882. His last words were recorded by his children;
I am not the least afraid of death. Remember what a good wife you have been to me.
Charles Darwin was no Epicurean. This thread just...is what it is!
Hmmm...
Here was my original thread on the subject:
Here's a secondary source:
https://www.vqronline.org/%E2%80%98-very-human-portrait%E2%80%99
And a passage from that source:
In 1790, on a cold and windy day some time before the French Revolution had turned on liberal nobles such as the due, William and his love were out canoeing on a pond by the Seine when Short dove overboard and nearly lost consciousness in saving a boy from drowning in rapids. The hero had then returned to the due’s chateau, dined, “quaffed old Malvoisie & other wines to a degree that astonished everybody,” and played chess “with great success,” before drifting into a sweet sleep.
Thank you for all of this, Marco! A while ago I posted something to the forum written by one of Stephen Greenblatt's critics. She (a Christian interested in medieval theology) wrote that Epicureanism was never widespread after the Renaissance, or even before it.
Never widespread in antiquity!? This can only be attributed to a failure to examine the evidence. Thank you for providing some of it here!
Born on this day in 1743, in the same year as Daniel Brown's anonymous publication of an early English translation of Lucretius.
And I continue to think that it makes sense to situate Epicurus as particularly Ionian. Among the Pre-Socratics, Aristotle called the Ionians physiologoi---"those who study nature".
Lucian was also Syrian, but has long been noted for his command of the Greek Language.
Diogenes was Lycian or Anatolian.
The films/images coming *from* things *to* our eyes or minds was a direct refutation of the competing ancient theory that our eyes beamed out some kind of ray. To me, it's a lighthouse metaphor (Epicurean theory) vs a flashlight metaphor (Platonic et al metaphor)
That was going to be my main angle into this issue on the podcast, but we didn't get that far yesterday. I've been scooped!
The Dawkins quote that I got somewhat wrong:
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
That's a good point, Don, and it raises an interesting problem in theology; while Christianity in the main stream has abandoned the injunction against 'making graven images', Islam still adheres to it. In the Charlie Hebdo case, this meant that western cartoonists were 'deserving of death' for their portraits of Mohammed. In one of the attacks against that magazine, twelve people were killed.
From a ban on physical images, it is but one more step to a ban on mental images:
“It is not permissible at all to imagine how the Entity of Allah or any of His Attributes is.”
-The late Shaykh Ibn ‘Uthaymeen, a prominent scholar of Islam
By way of contrast, we may look into Bernard Frischer's argument from The Sculpted Word: the early Epicureans were not only noted for their dedication toward portraits, but actually used them as a method for advocating the philosophy.
That's a good point, Don, and it raises an interesting problem in theology; while Christianity in the main stream has abandoned the injunction against 'making graven images', Islam still adheres to it. In the Charlie Hebdo case, this meant that western cartoonists were 'deserving of death' for their portraits of Mohammed. In one of the attacks against that magazine, twelve people were killed.
From a ban on physical images, it is but one more step to a ban on mental images:
“It is not permissible at all to imagine how the Entity of Allah or any of His Attributes is.”
-The late Shaykh Ibn ‘Uthaymeen, a prominent scholar of Islam
By way of contrast, we may look into Bernard Frischer's argument from The Sculpted Word: the early Epicureans were not only noted for their dedication toward portraits, but actually used them as a method for advocating the philosophy.
Two other points to make by way of preface:
1.) Martin has been kind enough on a number of occasions to correct me when I use the phrase "many worlds". "Many-worlds" is an interpretation of modern quantum mechanics that is neither empirical nor falsifiable, and has nothing to do with Epicurean physics.
What we will be talking about is Cosmic Pluralism, which is simply the understanding that Earth, or the bodies of Solar System, are not the only celestial bodies in existence.
2.) The use of the word "idol" in 46 should not be construed to carry its religious connotations. Epicurus uses the Greek word εἴδωλον, eidolon, which is the root of the English word but means:
Noun Edit
εἴδωλον • (eídōlon) n (genitive εἰδώλου); second declension
1. phantom, ghost
2. shape, figure, image
3. image of the mind: idea, fancy
4. representation, statue, idol
We appear to be dealing with some combination of definitions 2 and 3.
Further, we must not assert `up' or `down' of that which is unlimited, as if there were a zenith or nadir.
Nor will their upward or their lateral motion, which is due to collisions, nor again their downward motion, due to weight, affect their velocity.
It seems to me that he is drawing a distinction between "down" in the sense of a direction that does exist, and "down" in the sense of a terminal position in that direction, which does not exist.
