Posts by Joshua

I believe that the man who took over epicurism.info is from the Netherlands. I had an email exchange with him a few months back, I'll check my records.

That is a great one!

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And it's not just people and places: at some point we can look at who we, ourselves, used to be and wonder where we went.

In a way it does feel almost like a kind of small death, presaging the time when the world truly will move on entirely without us. It is useful and instructive to reflect on such things, but also to remember that we are "invited to the dance" for a while longer yet.

Visiting my hometown after a few years away has got me in a reflective mood. It's been wonderful to catch up with friends, stop by and gab (gossip, more like) with my old neighbor, see the family and the sights. But the emotions are frankly more mixed than I was prepared for.

There is the restaurant where I worked once–to all appearances unchanged, and yet the faces and voices are strange to me. All those long nights etched in memory, all those people, coworkers and even friends, all of it so all-consuming once, and now all gone. Just a strange, uncanny husk of memories remaining.

A number of my friends have likewise moved away, and, of course, everyone has in some way moved on.

A week from now I'll be back in Florida. I'll be busy at work, happy to settle in to my routine again, and yet aware on some level that when it comes to my hometown I can never "go back".

Epicurean philosophy gives friendship a place of honor among pleasures. My trip home has me thinking that I want to be more intentional about this going forward. I just don't want to take the people in my life for granted–because life goes by quickly, and leaves very little that lasts.

It's an odd feeling; I can put it no more plainly than that. It's just an odd feeling.

I've been catching up a bit on the podcast during my travels, very enjoyable listening! Thank you all for this!

I tend to agree with an Amazon reviewer who found some of Stallings' choices distracting. Personally the most jarring thing for me was the way she referenced famous lines by prominent English poets. This is a very natural thing to do, but somehow the anachronism doesn't play well for me. Her effort at long lines is admirable and quite rare in English. Whitman proved that they can be made to work in this language, but they are unusually difficult to write–and that's for hexameter. I've never even tried heptameter.

I love Rolfe Humphries' translation, in spite of his liberties, and Charlton Griffin has become the voice of Lucretius in English for me. His delivery has a sticking power and many of the lines from that audiobook occur to me as I go through life.

For a sample of Watson's prose, here is a line from his erstwhile suicide note;

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I have killed my wife in a fit of rage to which she provoked me.

Surpassingly straightforward and direct!

By the by, he survived the attempt–stood trial–pleaded insanity–and had his sentence reduced from execution to life imprisonment. Watson was a Clergyman of the Church of England.

The translation by John Selby Watson (1898, Public Domain), styles itself "literal", and at a glance appears to be exactly that.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.…&view=1up&seq=7

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But the reason I make this post is directed at Joshua: I still don't have a feel for whose translation I really think is "most literal."

You raise an excellent point here. I recall that in the 1743 edition there are strange additions to the text, or cases where something perhaps implied in the Latin is made explicit in the English. An early example is in the Hymn to Venus:

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For when the buxom Spring leads on the year, and genial gales of western winds blow fresh, unlock’d from Winter’s cold [...]

None of those three underlined words can be justified by the Latin. The West Wind (aura Favoni) is indeed described as "free", or "unlock'd", or "unbarred" (reserata), but it is only implied that what Spring has "reserated" Favionius from is Winter's clutches.

And yes, reserated is–apparently–a word!

The argument for throwing it out was in my opinion never very strong. The early critics believed that it involved Lucretius in an unpardonable contradiction, given his preceding appeal to Venus. But an Epicurean (ie. not merely academic) reading of the poem resolves all hint of a problem. In a later book Lucretius explains that invoking the names of the gods metaphorically—Bacchus for wine, Ceres for grain—does not bring trouble so long as it does not lead to confusion about the way things are. To invoke "nurturing Venus" as a muse is to draw one's inspiration from the restless, erotic, generative power of nature herself—a power coexistant with the eternal recombination of the atoms.

And beside all that, Lucretius re-uses text elsewhere as well; most notably in the passage regarding the administration of nauseous wormwood.

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Wow! So not until the late 1800s? That's very interesting. Before that they were just the Principal Doctrines with no number attached then it looks like?

It would take a bit of legwork to find a source for the claim on that wiki. But Usener evidently had a profound dislike for Diogenes Laertius!

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Beginning with Usener, the doctrines are enumerated as forty individual sayings.

http://wiki.epicurism.info/Principal_Doctrines/

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The Greek/Latin edition of 1692 by Marcus Meibomius divided each of the ten books into paragraphs of equal length, and progressively numbered them, providing the system still in use today.

Via Wikipedia.

Sticking this here for lack of a better place. This essay (attached) is the original inspiration for my fitful start at memorizing Lucretius. The proposed Interlinear Edition had its conceptual beginning with Prof. Harris' method. Scroll to section 2 for his ideas on the subject. The seed has been several years in germinating, I'm glad I was able to find it again this evening!

Yes, choosing a Latin text to work with is an ongoing consideration. The text used by Perseus would be easiest, but I'm not sure I want to be tied to their licensing agreement (however free and easy). I believe they use William Ellery Leonard's correction of the text, which should be Public Domain, but since revision is ongoing for all Perseus texts that presents a problem.

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At some point maybe there's not much choice other than deciding on an authority to copy.

Quite so! I'm tempted to go back to Munro, and use his Revised 4th Edition. (1900) If I can find it...

Good question...

I'm downloading LaTeX right now. It has a package (ExPex) built specifically for Linguists. I'm hoping it can solve a lot of the formatting issues that are invariably cropping up. It would be nice to have one long stream of lines for each book and have the code format it while keeping footnotes on the appropriate page.

Here is an example using a table exported from LibreOffice Calc to Writer, and saved as a PDF.

LaTeX is a typesetting mark-up format that's supposed to be great for this kind of thing. There's a learning curve, but I may see if I can get a handle on that before I commit to doing it this way.

For my purposes I want it in print, so the online version will likely have to be a PDF.

Right. The idea is to have a simplified interlinear text at the top of each page, and the extra annotations below the solid line. Sort of a middle path between Draper and NoDictionaries.

Yes, it is Libreoffice.

Here is a page from P.A. Draper's annotated Greek text of Iliad Book 1;

And my Loeb copy of Lucretius, with unsatisfactory results;