Posts by Joshua

Good grief, this is difficult to watch...

Somehow the idea of workmen burning them in their cookstoves is less ghastly to me than the tortures that were applied methodically by the henchman of the vain and pompous petty-king.

Among the scrolls of (mostly) Philodemus found at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, there is a copy of a play by the (apparently) famous-in-Rome comic playwright Caecilius Statius. I've only just recently discovered that Caecilius was the author of a quote I have always seen attributed to Cicero—for Cicero does quote him directly;

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One plants trees for the benefit of another age.

-Caecilius Statius

I'm struggling to find much in English on this writer. In addition to the above, here are a few quotes attributed to him:

***note; I have not verified these selections***

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Fear created the first gods in the world

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The whole world is a man's birthplace

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Grant us a brief delay; impulse in everything is but a worthless servant.

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Wisdom oft lurks beneath a tattered coat.

I'm wondering whether anybody else has come across him. I know Hiram has delved deeply into Philodemus' scrolls. I'm just wondering if he should be on our radar?

Benjamin Franklin learned to read Italian by "gamifying" his studies with a chess-playing acquaintance. The victor of that day's chess match had the 'right', mutually agreed to, to impose a linguistic task on the vanquished. You might order your opponent, for example, to translate a passage into English, or to memorize a section of Italian grammar. In that way, he writes in his autobiography, "we thus beat one another into the language".

Since I would love to be more disciplined with language study, I would like a local Epicurean group to reinforce classical language studies somehow. Greek and Latin being the obvious choices, although it wouldn't have to end there.

The major business, of course, would be to enjoy in fellowship all of those pleasures that conspire to make a happy life. Shared meals, pleasant walks, the study of local natural sciences, literary discussions, etc.

The dream school would be straight out of Frances Wright; a special 'temple' and garden were there is always something happening, where you can come and go as you please, and where scholars fill the days with their own pursuits while always having time for the broader group project.

And in THAT dream, I don't have a job 😁

Thanks, Cassius.

There was a bill put forward in 2017 in the legislature of my home state of Iowa to put Intelligent Design into the science curriculum. This bill was put forward in the State Capitol building in Des Moines, 35 miles south of Iowa State University where the first computer was invented in 1937.

The bill died mercifully in committee.

(I'm hoping this doesn't strike an overly "political" tone. If it does, Cassius; you know what to do!)

I've been following the Pew survey on religious identification for several years now, and there are several features of interest in the analysis. Here's the new data;

https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-…-at-rapid-pace/

The most salient question that presents itself is this; what's bloody taking so long!? When I was a teenager, and only recently an atheist, Bill Maher made his signature "Mockumentary" Religulous. This film was just the right kind of funny to me, at just the right time in my life. (I bought the DVD, and later bought it again on iTunes.)

In addition to being a reliably rewatchable (if somewhat cheap) piece of mind-candy, Maher's film managed to be instructive. For example, I recall being mortified to discover that out of 30-odd developed nations, only Turkey ranked more pious than the United States. Astonishing! The country that crossed the cold hell of space and set boots on another world was little better in this respect than the corrupt sectarian shadow-puppet of the declined Ottoman Empire.

The intervening decade has brought victories as well as defeats for the religious nones in this country, but at last we seem to be putting space between our secular republic and the burgeoning Islamic Autocracy in Asia Minor; 10 years after Religulous, Turkey spurned the Enlightenment tradition of the West and banned Darwin from all of its textbooks. Americans, thanks in part to the internet and the "New Atheists", seem finally ready to turn a new page. Only 26% are unaffiliated today, but large concentrations of that number are to be found in the younger generations. With any luck, we'll be sidling ever closer to the secular states of Western Europe as the next decades unfold.

This will be the best chance Epicureanism has had in this country since the Enlightenment of the 18th century.

That's EXCELLENT, Elayne! You've handled the subtleties of free verse where I've always struggled.

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Listen and you’ll hear them

unmanned, unarmed, to hell

with fate, to hell with exile

out in the back forty

frying catfish and singing Johnny Cash,

whooping it up and laughing 'til they cry.

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Calls to mind the second ending that Tolkien gave to the tragic story of Beren and Luthien, because he could—and he wanted to.

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Oh yes! For a teenage girl, that was the pinnacle of romance, lol! I grew out of it though 😂

I certainly hope you haven't replaced it with the Agamemnon by Aeschylus

Not sure if this really belongs here or not, but it's one of my favorite Walt Whitman poems;

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When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

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(It very often comes to mind when I'm in discussion with a young-/flat-earth Christian in the family)

I share your reservations, Elayne. Mostly, in my case, because academia is the favored bogeyman among a large group of people for whom the factual age, shape, and making of the world is "just a theory".

I spent four years in a University (undergoing "indoctrination", I have no doubt ), and knew nearly every one of the professors in my acquaintance to have been intelligent, serious, curious, decent and well-meaning.

That being said, I agree with Cassius on the main point. If we can't make headway among the common man, we will have failed of our purpose.

"Known for telling tall tales"...

Also known for multiple fraud convictions in Ohio and upstate New York 😁.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2003JRASC..97..158Z

There's a good article on 19th century astronomy and the "extra-terrestrial" problem.

And one of my favorite Thoreau quotes is relevant;

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We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions.

PD 1 employs "aphtharton", as mentioned above. Perhaps this is Epicurus' preferred word when describing gods?

Vatican saying 78 uses "athanaton", speaking of immortal good.

The Letter to Menoeceus uses "athanatois", a slight variation of the same word. This change reflects the agreement of the word with the plural "agathois" (goods). "Agathon", singular, is used in the previous formulation.

Both relevant words, aphtharton and athanaton, are formed by prefixing the word stem with the negation "a-". Same here as in English; atheist, amoral, abiogenesis.

Phtharton is defined in the "Middle Liddell" (a scholarly lexicon of Ancient Greek) as "corrupted; decaying". Aphtharton, then, is uncorrupted, and undecaying.

Thanaton (-os), as Hiram mentions above, is death. Athanaton is immortal, or deathless. So there are evident shades of meaning between the two.

Well as for Joseph Smith, he was living (and composing, to select a term advisedly) in the period during which it was generally suspected that the other immediate planets of the solar system might harbor life. Astronomy was sufficiently advanced by then to know what a planet was, but not advanced enough to know about what Mars and Venus were really like on their surfaces. This is the century that gave birth to science fiction (Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley)—unless we count Lucian and his True Story, which was 16 centuries ahead of its time.

Not "autharton" but "aphtharton". Incorruptible turns up in most entries, but so does immortal. In the New Testament the adjective is applied to God.

In the main I don't think I find fault with those objections, Hiram; and at any rate, the value in such beings is not in their being, per se, but in the human frame of mind that allows for their being.

I, like Godfrey, am an atheist as I understand the term. I deny the existence of the God of theism, since by definition that God is creative and supernatural (an impossibility), intercessory (a contradiction with lived experience), and revelatory (a gross offense against the intellect of the common man).

And what is the desirable frame of mind I mention above? Simply this;

1. An alert and healthy sense of perspective.

While it is mean and petty and narcissistic to suppose oneself the exclusive beneficiary of divine revelation, and to announce oneself thereby as the inheritor and disposer of creation, it is cautious and magnanimous to imagine a rung of natural intelligence still higher up the ladder. Compare the Hymn to Venus in Lucretius with the following verse in Psalms; "The heaven, even the heavens, are the LORD’s; But the earth He has given to the children of men." And behold whither this leads, in the following contemptible utterance of Anne Coulter; "God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours." Well, the earth is not ours. It was here for billions of years before our ancestors, and others will inhabit it for aeons after the last of our kind has died. We should not be nihilists, forever moaning the smallness of man in the dead emptiness of space. Neither should we be megalomaniacs.

2. A becoming and genuine intellectual modesty.

This is a related problem, and finds its distinction in the difference between Pyrrho and all Prophets. One claimed to know nothing; the other, to know everything. They were both playing false.

3. A reverence for life and its contingencies.

This goes a long way toward explaining why Epicurus attended the sacred rites. To express gratitude to Demeter is not to grant any meaning to the silly and fatuous myths that surround her; it is merely to recognize that our own common social existence depends upon the fecundity of Nature. As for the attendant virtue of civility, it is expressed best by Christopher Hitchens; "When I go into a Mosque, I take off my shoes. When I go into a Synagogue, I cover my head."

And why is this frame of mind desirable? Because it encapsulates the spirit of inquiry that is best able to delve into the nature of physics and ethics, as typified by the figure of Epicurus. That spirit of inquiry is essential to probing the nature of the good (pleasure), and the foundation of human happiness.

This subject is always pleasant to contemplate, for its power to suggest something of grandeur and perspective, apart from anything else. I proposed a few months back in another thread that an advanced artificial intelligence might fit the description of an undying and untroubled divinity figure.

And other figures present themselves for consideration. There is in Utah, for instance, a clonal colony of a single quaking aspen tree, called Pando (I spread out, in Latin) all sharing one individual's DNA, whose branching grove spans 106 acres. An extremely venerable tree, the root system of this trembling giant is said to be 80,000 years old. To call Pando a god would require us to expand our conception of pleasure and happiness, and there are other problems besides. But this patriarch among trees does serve to illustrate the point; there are natural marvels even in this world. Surely in the infinite reaches of space greater wonders await discovery.

In supersaline lagoons in Australia there are ancient colonies of cyanobacteria quietly bubbling away on the same pillared altars of sediment that they began to wrought when the earth was young. These stromatolites are sustained by the finest viands, drinking a little sunlight in each single photo-synthesizing cell, and splitting off an O² molecule here and there as if in compensation. Without their kind, the atmosphere of this planet would have remained oxygen-poor and unable to sustain higher life. These structures were ancient beyond memory even when Pando was a sapling; the two elders have been trading oxygen and carbon dioxide with each other for over a thousand lifetimes of men.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman…is/Vergil*.html

I've found the relevant passage in Seutonius.

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Vergil spent his early life at Cremona until he assumed the gown of manhood, upon his fifteenth birthday, in the consulship of the same two men who had been consuls the year he was born; and it chanced that the poet Lucretius died that very same day.

Most of Seutonius' De Poetis is lost, or else we might have quite a lot more to go on with Lucretius.

I'll add for those curious, just as I was, that this is not the same Donatus who St. Augustine polemicizes in Ad Donatum. This Aelius Donatus was a teacher of Rhetoric, although he happens to have been the tutor of St. Jerome.

And strange coincidences with birth and death dates do happen all the time, of course. There are only 365 days in the calendar. It's well known that both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died in their beds on Independence Day, July 4th, 1826, a few hours and several hundred miles apart. And Mark Twain was born just after Halley's comet, and wryly predicted that he would die when it came back around. He was right!

Alright, upon review I see that the Loeb edition mentions the possibility that Lucretius died on October 15th, on Virgil's 17th birthday (the very day he assumed the toga virilis). The editor cites "4th century grammarian Donatus, probably following Seutonius", while remaining himself skeptical of the connection. There's no mention of the birth date.

There's certainly no harm in picking a date to honor him, and we don't have any other candidates! The rediscovery of the manuscript by Poggio was in January of 1417, but no day is known.

Your Loeb copy of Lucretius discusses the possibility in the introduction, if I remember correctly. We don't have very firm dates for Lucretius on either end; actually, we know almost nothing about him.