Latest Threads (Previews)

Recent Threads From The General Discussion Forum

  • As per our Wednesday discussion, eat drink and be merry shows up in a couple of places in the bible. One is in Ecclesiastes:


    Bible Gateway passage: Ecclesiastes 8:15 - Living Bible
    Then I decided to spend my time having fun because I felt that there was nothing better in all the earth than that a man should eat, drink, and be merry, with…
    www.biblegateway.com


    >>Ecclesiastes 8:15

    Living Bible

    15 Then I decided to spend my time having fun because I felt that there was nothing better in all the earth than that a man should eat, drink, and be merry, with the hope that this happiness would stick with him in all the hard work that God gives to mankind everywhere.<<


    And then there's Paul. 1 Corinthians is considered one of his authentic letters, unlike about six others in the New Testament :


    Bible Gateway passage: 1 Corinthians 15:32 - Living Bible
    And what value was there in fighting wild beasts—those men of Ephesus—if it

  • Here's what is happening on the r/Epicureanism on Reddit...found their introductory description:

  • Today we are launching a new feature for the front page of the forum - a "Navigation Map" with clickable boxes to take you to the relevant sections of the forum. This is only a first version and will no doubt go through lots of iterations, but this is intended to be a help for everyone (old and new here at the forum) in finding some of the most important subforums and seeing their relevance to each other.


    The version below is not clickable or well zoomable, but the version on the front page is an SVG graphic that is fully zoomable to any size and remains sharp. Click over to that one and you can zoom in and out to your heart's content.


    It is formatted in "portrait" since most people are using phones and devices of similar format to access the forum. We can probably do a "landscape" version as well if we can figure a way to display the correct one for the correct screen size.




  • For as long as we continue with the front page greeting and footer referencing the traditional calendars, we can plan to use the calculations from Wikipedia in the links below:


    Thank You For Visiting EpicureanFriends.com, Where We Are Pleased To Be Alive In September Of The Year 2776 AUC And The 3rd Year Of The 700th Olympiad!


    If someone thinks these calculations are not correct please let me know. Those Wikipedia links will stay in the footer version so they will always be easy to find.


    Also, it may be tricky to know when to change the Olympiad year calculation, so if someone knows a good way to keep track of that, or sees that we fall behind in updating, please post about that too.


  • Here's an article (unfortunately not fully readable) on Lucy Hutchinson:


    Lucy and Lucretius | History Today


    I am really not familiar with the Puritan period and Cromwell, but in closing out DeWitt's book I note that he focused on this time as the end or submergence of a period of interest in Epicurus.


    Probably there is a lot of interest in the works of that period and if we eventually develop enough material on it maybe we should have a subforum on Epicurus vs The Puritans.

  • We have a good topic for discussion that unfortunately may not be appearing in everyone's updates because it is in the form of comments to a lexicon entry.


    Don has pointed out some concerns about the wording by Bailey and I think it would be good to be sure that it is easy to find and add to the discussion.


    Please check out the thread here and comment either there or in this current thread. It presents interesting questions of translation choices and dealing with issues that may need (at least for us today) explanation beyond the words of an original text.


  • Here's something far-fetched for you; in 54 BC, plans were made and construction began on a temple dedicated to Venus in the Forum of Caesar in Rome. Then in 46 BC Julius Caesar himself vowed the temple to Venus Victrix on the eve of the Battle of Pharsalus. However, two years later he re-dedicated it;

    Quote

    He eventually decided to dedicate the temple to Venus Genetrix, the mother of Aeneas, and thus the mythical ancestress of the Julian family. The Temple was dedicated on 26 September 46 BC, the last day of Caesar's triumph. The forum and temple were eventually completed by Octavian.

    It is thought that Lucretius must have died sometime in the late 50's BC. At any rate a letter from Cicero to his brother from February of 54 BC mentions Lucretius' poem. Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, and Piso died in 43 BC.


    I'm suggesting that there is a remote possibility that Caesar's Epicurean friends and relations (like Piso) might have helped to sway

  • Quote

    “The greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin... The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes, or Pagans, a sense of guilt. (That this was common among Pagans is shown by the fact that both Epicureanism and the mystery religions both claimed, though in different ways, to assuage it.) Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.


    The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man, the roles are quite reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge; if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and

  • Next week for our final episode of our podcast series on Norman DeWitt's book we what to close with a discussion on the reasons the Epicurean movement crested around the time of Lucretius and began a long decline. We also want to cover the obstacles to the resurgence of an organized Epicurean movement in the intervening years up through today.


    There are probably many causes of each, and we would like to know your thoughts so we can consider including them in the final episode.