Posts by Joshua

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.

I don't think we lingered long on the "peace and safety" bit, and I can't remember making any strong claims about it. The context of that passing reference was in the relationship between friendship and security--and security is certainly peppered all over the key texts.

If there are no other takers, I will suggest that this section at the end was perhaps the most passionate and intense portion of my reading of the whole text.

I was, however, rather running out of breath after a long recording session. So if necessary, I can probably record these passages again separately, and hopefully will better quality!

Today, February 17th, is the anniversary of Giordano Bruno's burning at the stake in the Campo de Fiori in Rome.

The following is an excerpt from The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.

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During his stay in England, Bruno wrote and published a flood of strange works. The extraordinary daring of these works may be gauged by taking in the implications of a single passage from one of them, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, printed in 1584. The passage—quoted here in Ingrid D. Rowland’s fine translation—is long, but its length is very much part of the point. Mercury, the herald of the gods, is recounting to Sofia all the things Jove has assigned him to bring about.

"He has ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Father Franzino’s melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won’t be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat. He requests that at the same moment, on the jujube tree at the base of Monte Cicala in the house of Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that several shall fall to earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms. That Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl the hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won’t burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox two hundred and fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio’s foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim’s progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random."

This is by no means all that Mercury has to arrange.

"Laurenza, when she combs her hair, shall lose seventeen hairs and break thirteen, and of these, ten shall grow back within three days and seven shall never grow back at all. Antonio Savolino’s bitch shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble Polidoro’s dog. In that moment a cuckoo shall be heard from La Starza, cuckooing twelve times, no more and no fewer, whereupon it shall leave and fly to the ruins of Castle Cicala for eleven minutes, and then shall fly off to Scarvaita, and as for what happens next, we’ll see to it later."

Mercury’s work in this one tiny corner of a tiny corner of the Campagna is still not done.

"That the skirt Mastro Danese is cutting on his board shall come out crooked. That twelve bedbugs shall leave the slats of Costantino’s bed and head toward the pillow: seven large ones, four small, and one middlesized, and as for the one who shall survive until this evening’s candlelight, we’ll see to it. That fifteen minutes thereafter, because of the movement of her tongue, which she has passed over her palate four times, the old lady of Fiurulo shall lose the third right molar in her lower jaw, and it shall fall without blood and without pain, because that molar has been loose for seventeen months. That Ambrogio on the one hundred twelfth thrust shall finally have driven home his business with his wife, but shall not impregnate her this time, but rather another, using the sperm into which the cooked leek that he has just eaten with millet and wine sauce shall have been converted. Martinello’s son is beginning to grow hair on his chest, and his voice is beginning to crack. That Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants…."

Conjuring up in hallucinatory detail the hamlet where he was born, Bruno staged a philosophical farce, designed to show that divine providence, at least as popularly understood, is rubbish. The details were all deliberately trivial but the stakes were extremely high: to mock Jesus’ claim that the hairs on one’s head are all numbered risked provoking an unpleasant visit from the thought police. Religion was not a laughing matter, at least for the officials assigned to enforce orthodoxy. They did not treat even trivial jokes lightly. In France, a villager named Isambard was arrested for having exclaimed, when a friar announced after mass that he would say a few words about God, “The fewer the better.” In Spain, a tailor named Garcia Lopez, coming out of church just after the priest had announced the long schedule of services for the coming week, quipped that “When we were Jews, we were bored stiff by one Passover each year, and now each day seems to be a Passover and feast-day.” Garcia Lopez was denounced to the Inquisition.

But Bruno was in England. Despite the vigorous efforts that Thomas More made, during his time as chancellor, to establish one, England had no Inquisition. Though it was still quite possible to get into serious trouble for unguarded speech, Bruno may have felt more at liberty to speak his mind, or, in this case, to indulge in raucous, wildly subversive laughter. That laughter had a philosophical point: once you take seriously the claim that God’s providence extends to the fall of a sparrow and the number of hairs on your head, there is virtually no limit, from the agitated dust motes in a beam of sunlight to the planetary conjunctions that are occurring in the heavens above. “O Mercury,” Sofia says pityingly. “You have a lot to do.

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I don't often listen to these (I was there, after all!), but I wanted to listen to this episode because of the importance of the subject matter.

First (and I am aware that I say it myself...)---this is a good one! I can see this being good reference material on skepticism.

Second, I think this is the kind of episode that demonstrates why this text is so valuable. Cicero's Epicurean material was deliberately 'off my radar' for a long time, but I really have to credit him with doing justice to our school. I am continually impressed with how rich and thorough this stuff is.