Posts by Joshua

I say "peculiar interest of mine" because, for one thing, I am a land surveyor and these statues in their original forms were boundary stones. But I'm also beginning to think of Epicurean philosophy as, in a lot of interesting ways, a radical reinvention of limitations. There is Lucretius and his "deepset boundary stone" (alte terminus haerens), showing what can be and what cannot; there is the atom, a lower limit on the size and scale of the material; there is matter itself, without expiration and eternal; there is the void, infinite, without boundary; there is the limit of the scope of pleasure in the removal of all pain–not the highest pleasure, not the telos in itself–but the limit of its magnitude; there is the circumscription placed around the gods, bundled up and bounded off-oh, somewhere.

There is the utterly final boundary line of death, beyond which there is nothing. There is nothing itself, limited in its own way–for nothing can come from nothing.

These and many others have engaged my thinking for the last several weeks. Epicurus' philosophy is the result of his boundary survey of the whole of nature. He established new boundaries, removed those that were set wrongly before him, and rediscovered even older lines that were set rightly by others but had been forgotten or overlooked since.

When Thomas More in his Utopia wanted to explore Epicurean philosophy, he flung it out onto the very margins of the New World, at the far tip of the spear of human knowledge. He seems to have intuited what we know in any case: that it doesn't matter much where you put him, because Epicurus and his students are "at home" in the universe. Diogenes of Oenoanda grasped this plainly;

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Not least for those who are called foreigners, for they are not foreigners. 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.

You're treading on a peculiar interest of mine, Cassius! The double herm was the reason I bought Bernard Frischer's book.

"Herm" in this case is short for Hermes, who was the figure chiefly represented in early herm statues. The typical herm was a standing stone with a bust carved into the topmost portion. In the case of Hermes in particular, the rest of the statue would be left squared off all the way down, apart in some cases from a conspicuous set of genitals at the appropriate location.

Hermes was the patron god of messengers, merchants and travelers, and–by extension–roads, highways, and crossings. The herm statue was in some places used to mark roads, in some places to mark milestones, and in others to mark boundaries (The Romans had their own patron god of boundaries, Jupiter Terminus, a statue of whom would be placed on property lines and propitiated by both neighbors in a special ritual on Terminalia every spring).

How the herm statue came to be sculpted with two heads facing opposite is an interesting question. There was another god, Janus, with a face on either side of his head–he presided over the new year, with one aspect facing to the future and one to the past. In Hermes' case, there was a cultural boundary line just as important as those of time and property; the diad between male and female. Aphrodite was often chosen as the figure to complement him.

In other statues the twin figures are an old man and a youth; the key feature in all of these artistic expressions is the curious interplay of limitation and continuity.

Metrodorus, who would certainly have succeeded Epicurus had he survived him, represented continuity–the master/student relationship, the succession of the scholarchs, etc.

I disliked the double herm at first sight, but I'm beginning to grasp its meaning better by seeing it through Greek and Roman eyes.

Where is the "Udders and Chian Wine" multimedia award? I, for one, would like "to hear things far sweeter than the land of the Phaeacians"!

If they can figure it all out on their own, well...

Leave it to beavers, ay?

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The pig may have to yield some of its place as an Epicurean symbol if this keeps up.

Off topic, but I discovered recently that Samos was one of a handful of Ionian cities that used flying boars on its coinage. I've searched widely, but nobody seems to know exactly why. Predates Epicurus by centuries.

I don't know if this is an example of the "uncanny valley" or not, but when I look at this picture it's just–it's just odd somehow...

In lieu of the ability to perform large-scale multi-generation experiments on these animals and their instincts, one thing we can do is study novel cases where nature herself (metaphorically, of course) laid out the experiment for us. In the case of birds, the classic example is to study isolated populations on remote islands. It's no accident that Darwin discovered the mechanisms of evolution after studying birds in the Galapagos.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/e…me%20flightless.

But possibly this only restates the same question; do island birds stop nesting in trees because they "forgot" the model, or do they start nesting on the ground because they "learned" a new model?

The central problem, as I see it, is that what we observe in individuals seems to argue for some kinds of uncanny innate 'knowledge'–but what we observe across populations seems to indicate the opposite.

And the further problem is that with individuals born in captivity and released into the wild, they don't survive long enough to furnish any useful data. The ideal experiment would be to take a large-ish population of beavers, raise them in captivity for successive generations where dam building is not possible, and then release them as a group into an environment where there are no other beavers to learn from except each other. Then wait for the dams.

I looked that over Godfrey, thank you for posting it!

Fascinating! Abiqur is, apparently, the Arabization of 'Epicurus'.

This is what came up for me as the reference image.

I can definitely try. Do we know the artist?

A bit off topic!

😄 Reminds me of this scene from my favorite cartoon

It's also a Roman copy of a Greek original. The Romans were skilled at many things, but in statuary they were hardly fit to carry the Greeks' chisels.

Oh, goodness, definitely software! it's a pretty quick process.

Cassius' Preferred Bust

Top: Sketchified

Bottom: Sketchified and Vectorized

I quite like that second one, I think I might try to edit the vector file to clean it up a little while keeping the strong bold lines.

My monogramed leather keychain fob broke off a few weeks ago, and I'm looking for an alternative. Thinking about having a laser engraving done in either metal or wood, with maybe a quote on the back. This is something I've just put together as an idea. I also a vector version of the same image--I see from Cassius' post above that I'll have to compress that to a .zip to upload it, which I will certainly do if anyone is interested!

To illustrate Don's point, a little thought experiment; how many male names could I produce from the ancient world off the top of my head? Easily a hundred. How many women? Thinking now, I start to struggle after five or six. And how many of those are duly famous in their own right? Sappho...Hypatia...Cleopatra...