Posts by Joshua

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1. compare

2. equal

3. level, make even/straight

4. reach as high or deep as

Don Latin-Dictionary.net has these four variants under aequo. The poet in me rather likes number 4, for the 'reach' double-entendre I mentioned above.

Edit;

I had a long-suffering English professor in college who I think grew somewhat tired of my etymological leaps (reaches? ); but even he was impressed when he put me on the spot in a close reading of Milton's Paradise Lost, and I was able to furnish a connection extemporaneously between "malice" and "apple" in the scene in the Garden of Eden.

Malus is the Latin word, and still the scientific name for the "malicious" fruit.

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As I write this I can't remember if I had a source for that particular version or just mashed them together in a way that seemed logical at the time

I suspect it was this! When I searched for the exact wording of the quote the only two results are this thread and NewEpicurean.

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Aequo = level, equal

And also "plane" or "plain". In the Hymn to Venus "Aequora Ponti" is usually translated "waves [i.e. surface] of the sea". In English another word for this would be "reach", as a noun. "Sailing over a broad reach", and so forth.

Perhaps "reach the stars" is not so far out of place?

Cassius , are you certain you have the translation right?

I just received a copy of the Humphries translation in the mail this week, and my version has it;

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Religion, so, is trampled underfoot,

And by his victory we reach the stars.

I remember the audible version vividly enough to know it is the same there. And I would have remembered it anyway, as his is my favored translation of this passage!

I keep writing strictest sense, but I haven't actually defined my terms. I understand humanism (lowercase) in the strictest sense to be not a philosophy, but an orientation of interest or inquiry. Art can be humanist; it needn't have anything to do with philosophy at all. I vaguely remember studying the great cathedrals of Europe in college and learning that even the hidden tops of the roofs were ornamented. "God sees the top" being the motivation. The humanist motivation in modern construction might call instead for an HVAC system up there.

I haven't read all the material here, but I will say that I think Epicurean Philosophy is definitionally humanist in the very strictest sense. Similarly, I'm nominally registered in the selective service program under the United States Government.

But I haven't reflected much on that since I turned 18, and it has no influence whatever on the way I live my life. If I was introducing a bit about myself to someone, it would be fruitless and quite odd–not to say counterproductive–to open with that fact. It just has nothing to do with who I am.

Humanism in Epicurean Philosophy (again, in the strictest sense) might well be a trivial fact, but it's not a particularly helpful or informative one. It would be strange to dwell on it. It definitely wouldn't make it into the Epicurean précis or "elevator pitch".

It does have a certain poignancy.

I actually found this because of a poem I was workshopping; I was going to use the Sarno River that flows into the Bay of Naples as a metaphor for Epicurean philosophy. Starting out muddled under the ash of Vesuvius and then slowly, and by degrees, tending toward clarity and wholesomeness.

That was until I discovered that the Sarno is the most polluted waterway in Europe...

XLIV. ON MOUNT VESUVIUS.

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This is Vesuvius, lately green with umbrageous vines; here the noble grape had pressed the dripping coolers. These are the heights which Bacchus loved more than the hills of Nysa; on this mountain the satyrs recently danced. This was the abode of Venus, more grateful to her than Lacedaemon; this was the place renowned by the divinity of Hercules. All now lies buried in flames and sad ashes. Even the gods would have wished not to have had the power to cause such a catastrophe.

He was perilously close to stumbling upon a real point in that last sentence.

Welcome Philia! Took a detour through Buddhism myself, by way of the New England Transcendentalists (mostly Thoreau) and their obsession with Eastern quasi-profoundities.

When I could not reconcile the attitude of Western Zen or the claims of Secular Buddhism with the plain reading of the sutras, especially on the question of Rebirth, I began to realize I had tarried too long "East of Suez" (metaphorically speaking). I needed to find my way home. It was Lucretius who brought me back, and Stephen Greenblatt; but above all Lucretius.

Try this on for size;

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There's use within

A cooper's barrel,

But beauty more

In oak and ash–

The poet's verse

Was fine and subtle—

Translated in

A leaking cask.

You're spot on Don, the last line gave me by far the greatest struggle.

My original wording was:

The poet's verse

Was fine and subtle—

The translator's,

A f***ing joke!

I then switched "ash and oak" and rhymed it 'trash'...

I'll keep 'tinkering', as you like to say

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I still think the topic of the poem has merit, but I'm wondering if I need another structure...

Well, I can offer my...erm...tongue-in-cheek submission 😋

___________________________

Note; on the Translator

Good friend beware

this slack apparel;

It once wore well

But no more does;

The wine is old,

But not the bottle–

T'will serve, but is

Not what it was.

There's use within

A cooper's barrel,

But beauty more

In ash and oak–

The poet's verse

Was fine and subtle—

The translator's

Is rancid yolk!

One of my favorite poems in college was Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson, and there's a great line presumed to have been drawn from Lucretius;

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Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

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Is that apple or Android

Android...I'm sure it was free, but probably not open source. I'll give AntennaPod a try!

Oh, yes. I probably just searched 'Lucretius' way back whenever, and it came right up.

I originally downloaded it for a podcast called Hello Internet, now sadly defunct, and it says I've listened with the app for nearly 500 hours altogether. So it works just fine, but possibly there are better options?

I used to follow Sam Harris with some regularity since he occupies the intersection of the so-called 'New Atheism' and Buddhism, and I had at that time a foot in both camps. Denying Free Will was a regular subject in his mental universe, and I also have friends who are of that opinion. I never really fell in line with it.

For one thing, the denial of Free Will is useless to me in trying to figure out how to live. Indeed, it appears to reduce the question to something like nihilism.

My course has been to accept Free Will based on the observation of lived experience (like Chomsky), but to assume at the same time a diminished capacity for it in other people. This is a purely consequentialist and an entirely fanciful assumption; if I assume that others in some degree lack Free Will, it opens the door to compassion and forgiveness rather than anger, and hatred. It allows me to refrain from attributing motive to others for choices I see as wrong, which is always risky, and it prevents me (to a degree) from putting myself above others.

Every decision we do make is subject to a kind of 'force-diagram', where culture, habit, education, knowledge, experience, peer pressure, preference, risk, and reward all cooperate to indicate a likely response—but it is not, in my view, a necessary response.

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VS9. Necessity is an evil, but there is no necessity to live under the control of necessity.

It's been wonderful to see how many new members found us through the podcast. You and the panelists are clearly doing great work in filling a particular content void!

I use Castbox as my podcast app (for no particular reason that I can remember now), and the only thing that irks me is that when I finish an episode it jumps next to the lowest (i.e. earliest) unplayed or unfinished episode in the list. Obviously what I want it to do is play the next episode in sequence, moving forward in time. This is possibly something I can change myself, but I can't figure out how.

Here's something completely irrelevant; when the Romans got hold of the word ἀγρός, they used it in one of the two principal words they had for "land-surveyor". The Gromatici were those skilled in the use of the groma, a tool for laying out roads, camps and new settlements, in the classic Roman way of straight lines and right angles. But the Finitors, or Agrimensores, were responsible for settling boundary disputes between parties, replacing lost boundary stones, and the like. Other types of unofficial mensores or 'measurers' were employed in the various tasks of laying out orchards, vineyards, grain fields and such.

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I think the limit "boundary-stone" idea and the limit "end/purpose" idea are not as far apart as might seem.

Lucretius does use the exact phrase "deep-set boundary stone" (alte terminus haerens, I think) in Book I.

There's something to all of this, but I haven't been able to crack it. I've written here before about the English and Colonial practice of Beating the Bounds. The ritual is thought to have had a Roman origin.

So a boundary stone is a definer of limits; but it is also (or was) the subject of ceremony and ritual, a focal point of collective memory, something agreed upon and quite literally "settled"...

I don't know. It's uncanny how often the words 'borders' and 'boundaries' and 'limits' come up in Lucretius. But I don't have a satisfactory resolution.

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Looks like our resident poet JJElbert must be taking a sabbatical!

Don't go putting all my stuff in the yard just yet

Don, I see you're getting well-acquainted with the particular difficulties of short lines! Let me sit with it a bit, I'll try to circle back.