Posts by Joshua

I've only just read through it once Charles, but thank you for your hard work! I'll return to it in a day or two for rereading and comments.

I need to get back to work on The Greek Anthology, as he has several epigrams in there.

The difficulty is that he made a name for himself as a satirist, and cleaving to one doctrine or philosophy does not position one well to write good satire. A satirist must float more nebulously. The moment he sets his foot on solid ground, he exposes himself to ridicule and charges of hypocrisy—in other words, to satire. He becomes an apologist, and ceases to be a satirist. Those who believe in the infallible truth of revelation and who attempt satire are for this reason unfailingly absurd.

A more Epicurean literary style at that time was the pastoral, as in Horace's Epodes, or in Virgil's Eclogues. Epic poetry was more generally a civic-minded affair, and in Virgil's case a more stoical one. The Lucretian synthesis of a cultural Epic with rich pastoral imagery and strongly individualistic philosophy is a factor in the success of his poem.

Consider how differently we would look on Shakespeare if he only wrote tragedies. Lucian may well have been an Epicurean through and through, but it would have done him no favors in his satires.

Also for the record, by the words "enquire in vain" I'm inferring that Automedon was being dismissive of Epicurus and his philosophy.

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While I don't endorse the overall sentiment in any way

Ha! Certainly not. A lot of these epigrammatists were very sour. I'll start posting Palladas next week. He has a few good ones but most of his are even worse than this.

Apart from being merely ironic and satirical, I can think of one fact in connection with Menophanes' proverbially tiny field. The Ancient Greeks did not use primogeniture where the eldest son is awarded the estate. Instead they divided the land among all of the heirs. As the generations went by, each parcel was subdivided again and again with every successive death in the family, until they became so small as to be entirely unusable. The Greek solution to this problem was to pack a bunch of smallholders onto a ship and send them off to start a colony on empty land somewhere.

This was, in fact, the fate of Neocles and his family. Neocles was born in Gargettos seven miles outside of Athens, but was sent to the island of Samos where a colony was founded.

But I wouldn't read too much into any of these! Lucilius has dozens like these two, where he satirizes people's stature and appearance.

I think that No. 72 by Menander is an encouraging sign of more fertile fields beyond. He was a comic playwright and a boyhood friend of Epicurus (serving alongside him in the mandatory two-year military training from age 18-20), and some of his works are even still being rediscovered. They were almost entirely lost in the middle ages, but a number of discoveries in the 19th and 20th centuries have brought back a few of his plays. In several instances the sheets of papyrus were found in the paper lining of mummy cases.

I'm finding quotations on the internet attributed to him that are thoroughly Epicurean (it is absurd to think that the gods answer prayers, for instance), but nothing authoritative. If a good online source can be found we will need to look into it.

Book XI - Convivial and Satirical Epigrams

No. 44 - Philodemus

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"To-morrow, dearest Piso, your friend, beloved by the Muses, who keeps our annual feast of the twentieth invites you to come after the ninth hour to his simple cottage. If you miss udders and draughts of Chian wine, you will see at least sincere friends and you will hear things far sweeter than the land of the Phaeacians. But if you ever cast your eyes on me, Piso, we shall celebrate the twentieth richly instead of simply."

Translated W. R. Paton

Book XI - Convivial and Satirical Epigrams

No. 249 - Lucilius

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"Menophanes bought a field, and from hunger hanged himself on another man's oak. When he was dead they had no earth to throw over him from above, but he was buried for payment in the ground of one of his neighbors. If Epicurus had known of Menophanes' field he would have said that everything is full of fields, not of atoms."

Translated W. R. Paton

Book XI - Convivial and Satirical Epigrams

No. 103 - Lucilius

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Epicurus wrote that all the world consisted of atoms, thinking, Alcimus, that an atom was the most minute thing. But if Diophantus had existed then he would have written that it consisted of Diophantus, who is much more minute than the atoms. Or he would have written that other things were composed of atoms, but the atoms themselves, Alcimus, of Diophantus.

Translated W. R. Paton

Book XI - Convivial and Satirical Epigrams

No. 93 - Lucilius

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"Lean Marcus once made a hole with his head in one of Epicurus' atoms and went through the middle of it."

Translated W. R. Paton

Book XI - Convivial and Satirical Epigrams

No. 50 - Automedon

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"Blest is he first who owes naught to anyone, next he who never married, and thirdly he who is childless. But if a man be mad enough to marry, it is a blessing for him if he buries his wife at once after getting a handsome dowry. Knowing this, be wise, and leave Epicurus to enquire in vain where is the void and what are the atoms."

Translated W. R. Paton

Book VII - Sepulchral Epigrams

No. 106 - Diogenes Laertius

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On Epicurus

"Adieu, and remember my doctrines," were Epicurus' last words to his friends when dying. For after entering a warm bath, he drank wine and then on the top of it he drank cold death."

Translated W. R. Paton

Book VII - Sepulchral Epigrams

No. 72 - Menander

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On Epicurus and Themistocles

"Hail, ye twin-born sons of Neocles, of whom the one saved his country from slavery the other from folly."

Translated W. R. Paton

I second what Don said re: singular/plural. Compare with the Hebrew Torah where "God"—clearly singular—is referred to sometimes by the plural.

The Greek Anthology

Anthologia - A Gathering of Flowers

The Greek Anthology is a collection of some 4,500 epigrams, poems, inscriptions, and proverbs of the Greek language, composed by several hundred authors, and compiled over a period of more than a thousand years. The chief feature of this unusual collection is its range and scope, covering as it does a great many people, places, historical periods, themes, and topics. The unifying characteristic of these texts is their brevity; most of the epigrams are only a few lines long. Each epigram is a narrow window onto the lives of antiquity. Altogether, they are an indispensable treasure trove of Ancient Greek thought and culture---the flotsam of a ship wrecked in Time.

The Purpose of This Subforum

There are no epigrams in this collection attributed to Epicurus himself. We are specifically interested in:

-Epigrams that mention Epicurus or his philosophy (including several on Democritus);

-Epigrams that speak to clear Epicurean themes;

-Epigrams that shed further light on their Epicurean authors (in the cases of Lucian and Philodemus).

Epigrams that touch on competing schools of philosophy, and on the rise of Christianity, will also be included.

The preference in all cases will be to include the original Greek text, and a public-domain English translation (e.g. W. R. Paton).

The Epigrams

The word epigram refers literally to an inscription, and many of the earliest texts in the collection are likely to be of that kind. These inscriptions--on statues, tombs, temples, and monuments--developed over time a style of their own, and this style eventually grew into a literary art-form. Most of the epigrams in the Anthology are not inscriptions at all, but merely poems or proverbs that follow the style. As Parmenion writes in book IX, no. 342:

"An epigram of many lines does not, I say, conform to the Muses' law. Seek not the long course in the short stadion. The long race has many rounds, but in the stadion sharp and short is the strain on the wind."

The Epigrammatists

Two of the important authors in the Anthology were Epicureans. Lucian of Samosata was a satirist of the second century, whose most important Epicurean work is "Alexander the False Prophet". Philodemus of Gadara was a philosopher and poet of the first century BCE, most notable as the author whose books survived the eruption of Vesuvius and were preserved beneath the ash in the ancient Roman villa known as the Villa of the Papyri. Both authors speak in this collection on a variety of themes, and not all of them will be relevant to Epicurean Philosophy.

A third author of note is Palladas. While not a confessed Epicurean, his epigrams are tinted with Epicurean themes. He is also important to us as one of the last great classically pagan witnesses to the Christianization of the Roman world--a trend he greatly abhorred.

I've finally just finished listening to this book. Only two or three mentions of Epicurean Philosophy, which I still think is remarkable. So there's nothing good there, but on the whole I very highly recommend it. A truly fascinating story of a grand old city.

I read Man's Search for Meaninga number of years ago. It's been long enough that I don't remember much; here's what I do remember.

The book is split into two parts. One is a Holocaust memoir from a man who lived it. The other is a philosophical discursion by way of an inquiry into Meaning.

Frankl opens the book by sharing an anecdote of his experience in the early days of Hitler's Austria. After a Synagogue had been razed as part of a spiraling anti-Jewish oppression, Frankl found his father seated at the kitchen table with a piece of the rubble. A part of the Decalogue, his father told him. Which one? The 5th. "Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the Earth." Victor Frankl was an academic who had acquired a work visa to teach abroad—In America, I think. It was a golden ticket to refuge and freedom. But when he heard those words, he decided to stay in Austria and face what was coming. He spent three years in the living hells of Auschwitz and Dachau. His father, mother, brother and wife were all killed.

Here are a few of my own thoughts.

The murdered Jews of Europe were subjected to torments that no human should ever be made to endure. The survivors emerged with the worst kinds of psychological trauma, which most of them must have borne the scars of until the end of their days. What these people were in need of was therapeutic psychiatry. Frankl was unusually placed in both circles. He was a survivor of Hitler's final solution, and also a psychiatrist. An inquiry into the meaning of life might well be indicated in cases of profound trauma; I do not know. I am far too ignorant both of psychiatry, and of horrific suffering to formulate an opinion on this point.

But speaking philosophically, I must say that I think that Frankl was asking entirely the wrong question.

What is it about human life that makes us think there is any value in asking about its 'Meaning'? You wouldn't ask, "what is the meaning of a rock? What is the meaning of a grasshopper? What is the meaning of a Lipizzaner pony?" Nothing of interest or use is ever likely to be resolved by these questions. People, like rocks and grasshoppers and ungulates, simply are. There's no justification to be speaking of meaning or purpose. When Lucretius said that "No bodily thing was born for us to use", he was hitting upon a real point:

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Nature had no such aim, but what was born creates the use. There could be no such thing as sight before the eyes were formed. No speech before the tongue was made, but tongues began long before speech were uttered.

Edward Abbey said that "From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm." I would strike even closer to the bone than that; I would point to the "appetite" of that great infinitesimal 'worm' that lies at the nucleus of every one of our cells, and whose sole ambition is to replicate. Through a series of random environmental pressures and selected adaptations, the worm of our DNA has arrived at the point where the whole architecture of the mind and body is necessary for the genetic code to reproduce itself. Good luck finding meaning or purpose there!

I cannot speak for any survivor of trauma, but for my own part I noticed that when I stopped asking fruitless questions about meaning and purpose, I was no longer asked to settle for bad answers.

Around the time I read this book, I also read The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell. I don't remember much of that either, but I seem to think that I found it far more useful and refreshing.

And now for something completely different! Walt Whitman, as read and interpreted by Robin Williams.

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At first I was thinking that taking the original seemed a little overboard, but I suppose in that day they were actually doing the owner a favor by giving them a newer version that might last longer?

Ha! No.

The Ptolemy's were very unscrupulous and underhanded about how they "acquired" books. In one instance they gave the city of Athens a large sum of silver as collateral to 'borrow' the original copies of several great Athenian playwrights. Upon receipt of the scrolls, they sent a message back—you keep the silver. We're keeping the books. Copying in the ancient world was often done by educated slaves, and was always prone to minor errors. Alexandria wanted to make sure it had the best and most accurate version of every text. I saw an article yesterday that referred to the practice as "reverse-copyright". The state 'owned' all writings from the moment of composition.

Crosspost; thank you Don!

Galen wrote this in the 2nd century AD; I don't know whether he is the only ancient source.

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Ptolemy the king of Egypt was so eager to collect books, that he ordered the books of everyone who sailed there to be brought to him. The books were then copied into new manuscripts. He gave the new copy to the owners, whose books had been brought to him after they sailed there, but he put the original copy in the library with the inscription "a [book] from the ships"