Posts by Joshua

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The Iphigenia story is very significant for how repulsive it shows religion to be. For us the Abraham / Isaac story us more well known. Are there others?

Well, there's a rather important one for Christians!

Of course, an alternative consideration is that the translations are correct and that Diogenes Laertius got something wrong.

I read Frontinus yesterday on The Aqueducts of Rome. The early portions of the text are badly preserved; I continue to marvel that we were so lucky with what survived, and above all with Lucretius.

There are other threads in which we've discussed this that Mike might find interesting. I don't have time this morning to go find them, but I can briefly outline my own argument:

1. The confusion between translations arises because of a wholly reasonable confusion among the translators over the Greek system of conjunctions. It's interesting that a language capable of such nuances as Ancient Greek also has such a poverty of conjunctions. We have a thread somewhere where I explain this problem in depth.

2. The weight of the biographical evidence suggests to me that the Bailey translation is less accurate. It's true that Metrodorus married and had kids. But did Epicurus? Hermarchus? Polyaenus?

3. Whichever translation one prefers, the qualifying clause in the following sentence renders the two translations nearly equivalent logically. Sometimes it is wise to marry; and sometimes it is not.

Yes, Cassius, I hadn't seen that thread. That probably makes this one redundant!

Interesting! I had not read this thread before I posted the other one.

Cassius already covered it, but I consider the proem to Book IV (repeated from book I) to be essential. It contains the essence of his missionary zeal, the pride and pleasure of his work, an encapsulation of the pioneering spirit of the philosophy, his sense of the therapeutic quality of his verse, and the finest indication of what he might have achieved in lyrical (rather than Epic) poetry had he applied himself to it.

Some of the most influential lines are rather pithy, and may not work well in this format;

"Life is one long struggle in the dark."

"So potent was religion [or superstition] in persuading to evil deeds."

An infant thrown up onto the shores of light, etc.

More on the statue:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/ancient-…-lamp-stand/amp

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection….-A.D.+1&pos=21

Regarding the statue;

There is a whole 'grammar' in these old statues that can carry meaning that most of us will miss. The crop of hair and beard, the gesture of the arms, the drape of the cloth, the orientation of the hands and fingers, etc. A general will have a different hand position than a philosopher, as an example.

So I don't know anything about this statue, but an expert might be able to infer quite a lot.

A little thought experiment for the day:

Suppose you were tasked with abridging De Rerum Natura; what criteria would you use to decide what gets left on the cutting floor?

Would you abridge based on the force and power of his poetry, and leave off some of the duller sections on heat and wind and magnets?

Would you select for the finest summary of Epicurean thought?

Would you opt for pith? Or for the choicest Latin? For the Synoptic view, and skip the details?

In another life I once loved the Tao Te Ching. I've heard it described as a book that can be read in an afternoon, or a lifetime. Could you cut Lucretius in such way that you have such a book, but without losing anything essential?

On a personal note, I generally dislike abridgments. I recall how crestfallen I was one high school summer when I had fought my way through The Count of Monte Cristo, only to discover after I read it that, in those lazy afternoons, I had been reading an abridged text.

But the question might give insight into how we all read the text in different ways. To paraphrase Stephen Greenblatt, books always run into the particular fissures of one's psychic life.

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Great to hear from you - post whenever you can. So you've move from truck-driving to surveying? Quite a move there must be a story behind how you picked surveying!

Actually, Cassius, I sort of just fell into it through a family connection. But land surveying was Henry David Thoreau's profession for most of his life—and in fact a handful of his surveys, including the survey of Walden Pond, are still on file at the records office in Concord, Massachusetts. And that pleases me immensely. I love being outside, and the work isn't bad.

As I was setting up the instrument the other day in preparation for a topographic land survey, I found myself thinking back to Plato's dictum;

"Let no one who is ignorant of geometry enter here."

Now, It happens that I am not altogether ignorant of geometry; but working as a land survey rodman is giving me a more thorough education in its practical application than I had ever hoped for. My library (after much shrinking) is beginning to expand in odd directions; I've ordered four books on land surveying and one, an irresistible Loeb edition by the Roman engineer Frontinus, on the engineering of aqueducts. Lucretius in several places makes reference to "boundary marks" and "the shining borders of the light", and I've lately found myself reading those lines with a fresh eye. Perhaps I will bring myself closer to those Epicureans of whom Torquatus said,

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We value the art of medicine not for its interest as a science, but because it produces health. We commend the art of navigation for its practical, and not its scientific value, because it conveys the rules for sailing a ship with success.

I haven't been as active here as I'd like to be, but I do remain dedicated to the study of Epicurus and the pursuit of pleasure.

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Great thoughts hallow any labor. To-day I earned seventy-five cents heaving manure out of a pen, and made a good bargain of it. If the ditcher muses the while how he may live uprightly, the ditching spade and turf knife may be engraved on the coat-of-arms of his posterity. —The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

You know, after I posted that this morning Cassius I got to think about the similarity between voluptas and voluntas ("wish" or "desire").

That's an excellent note on "voluptuousness". The Latin for pleasure used by Lucretius is "voluptas".

Update:

The use of Iphianassa for Iphigenia was not related to meter, as the two names rendered in Latin are metrically equivalent. The mystery remains!

This is a treasure trove unlooked-for, Charles. Much pleasure to you in the mining—and should you double it by bringing forth gems, we'll treble it with fellowship!

I do mean to check up on my hexameter theory when I get home. It never occurred to me before this thread. There's certainly a lot of precedence; Homer wrote in hexameter, and his two Epics draw on all of the major Greek dialects in order to make the meter come out right.

Cassius

Cicero never claimed to have emended the text, but he did praise the poem in a letter to his brother.

I believe they do know where Jerome got his "information", but I can't recall which author it might have been. Lactantius, possibly?

Edit; I keep cross-posting you, Cassius! I don't mean to sound so pedantic

There was a claim to that effect reported by St. Jerome, Charles. The meaning of the word "corrected" (or "edited" or "revised") in that context is uncertain—does "corrected" mean slight copy-editing, or does it mean thorough revision? And in any case the provenance of the claim is highly suspect for two reasons: first, because Cicero and Jerome were against the Epicurean tradition themselves; and second, because Jerome also reported the claim that Lucretius "wrote the poem in the intervals of his insanity" and finally killed himself. Personally I don't believe any of it.

Master Latinists will also tell you that there's textual evidence that the poem was never thoroughly revised by Lucretius. They base that claim on certain irregularities in the text, such as hypermetrical lines. I don't know how they can determine that those lines aren't the result of copying errors, but there we are. There are some answers we'll never have with these old texts.

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Why did Lucretius choose Iphianassa?

I don't have concrete evidence for this, but here's a lazy answer;

Because it fits the hexameter. Lucretius is often using neologisms (eg. frugiferentis), elision (eg. divomque instead of divorumque), and uncommon use cases of morphology, at least partly because those were the words that best made the meter of the poem work. William Blake called a similar phenomenon in English "The bondage of Rhyme".

-josh

Good evening, Lee.

Regarding your question about indeterminacy and free will, I'll offer an explanation. But Caveat Emptor—I do consider myself to be less well-versed in the technical side of the philosophy than most who post here. I've read all the really relevant literature, but sadly the better part of learning is trying to remember what you already know

It can be difficult to approach Epicurus without an understanding of the mental universe of the Greeks with whom he argued. Cassius, and by no means he alone, has observed the degree to which the philosophy of Epicurus is simply a systematic dismantling of Platonism. It's not much different here.

In the case of free will, the necessary thing to engage with is the objection to free will that was current in Epicurus' time. There are two that come to mind. First, in Greek religion and literature the idea of fate was well-entrenched. The Oedipus Cycle, known to secondary school students everywhere, presents the case memorably.

The second objection was philosophical and metaphysical. If you take the view as Democritus did that the cosmos was perfectly material and mechanical, then the mechanical universe would push you around like clockwork. In an ancient metaphor, your mind would jostle about in the chariot of your body with no one at the reins.

Epicurus dismisses the first objection as a corollary to dismissing fate and the participation of the gods. He dismisses the second objection by proposing the Swerve. An indeterminate cosmos is to that extent non-mechanical. Instead of lifting your arm against the full tide and current of atomic motion, there is enough 'play' in the system to allow you to lift your arms through the atomic matrix.

This doesn't exactly answer your question. Nor have I explored modern objections to free will. But my eyelids are drooping, and this much will be enough to get things started.

Josh