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I was listening to Episode 9 in my car on my way to work this morning and found myself desperately wanting to chime in as you all were discussing the jealous/envious aspect of vision. My take on that line was that it is our faculty of vision itself that is greedy, envious, that is wanting, etc. There's no outside agency that's jealous. Inanother sense, it is we, through our sight, who feel we are entitled to see everything! Nothing should be hidden from us. Who is nature to hide something from o…

Fair points, Cassius Allow me to rephrase my thoughts. By using "wanting" I wanted to convey that if you're envious, you want something. You're lacking something you want, something you feel that you deserve. From my perspective, Lucretius is saying our vision is jealous in the sense that it "wants" to see all of Nature's secrets, greedy to see everything hidden from view... but it can't. But our vision just isn't capable of seeing atoms, so Lucretius is telling us how we can perceive them by an…

I can see your perspective (Oops, no pun intended there). These kinds of ambiguous or hard-to-interpret lines reinforce facts like we're dealing with: a language in which no one alive today can really be 100% fluent (Latin as it was spoken and understood by actual Romans) a manuscript transmission for which it is impossible to know if it was 100% accurately transcribed. a philosophy for which we've lost so much primary source material and have to rely on fragments and so much secondhand and ofte…