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Thank you for posts like this Don! No way that one person can do all this by themselves and it is very helpful to have your looking at these issues so closely.

(Quote from Don) Don do you have a sense of how much of the confusion is due to the material itself being difficult vs how much is due to it being fragmentary?

(Quote from Don) That is perhaps the ultimate question -- and that's where I think DeWitt / Velleius is correct and Diogenes Laertius is wrong, and that the primary meaning of proplepsis cannot be "a concept formed after repeated exposure to a thing." "Prolepsis" might involve some unrational process that plays into, or describes, the procedure by which the ultimate result is reached, but I think a focus on "after repeated exposure" improperly deprecates the "Pro-" or the "pre-" or the "anticipa…

THANK YOU for all that work Don! And yes the point about Epicurus not being inactive toward the city is very helpful. Also the point about 'virtue-hating' and "all-harassing" -- I would suspect that might hint toward criticizing 'cynicism' or "nihilism" and that's a very interesting topic in itself.

Yes I think we are together. I can easily see the Epicureans criticizing attitudes that are excessively or improperly "virtue hating" and "all-harassing" while still agreeing with the criticism of Socrates, since the Epicureans considered Socrates to have been very defective in his teaching and therefore probably worthy of the ridicule he received.

Lots of good stuff there. In addition to the main point on divinity, there are peripheral points of interest such as: Metrodorus having a child, which bears on the marriage / children issues. The advice to be obedient to parents, which might be relevant to issues of reverence / respect for teachers. The reference to slaves, which bears on attitudes towards individual slaves as well as slavery itself (probably one of the best examples for remembering how morality is relative to circumstances) I g…