Episode 015 - Recap Two - Reflections On Book One So Far
Date: 04/26/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1512-episode-fifteen-recap-two/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”In this second recap episode, Cassius is joined by Charles and Martin — without Elaine and Julie, who return the following week — for a wide-ranging reflection on the philosophical terrain covered so far in Book One of Lucretius. The conversation opens with Cassius articulating his aim for the podcast: not to survey alternative philosophical viewpoints exhaustively, but to identify where Epicurus would stand on the great contested questions — a priori versus a posteriori reasoning, the role of deduction within empiricism, the nature of truth and knowledge — and to show how the physics of atoms and void provides the foundation for the ethical conclusions. Charles and Cassius also observe that Epicurus was in fierce ideological conflict with virtually every other school, as illustrated by Diogenes Laërtius’s famous catalog of Epicurean insults: Plato called the “Golden Man” and his followers “Flatterers of Dionysus,” Aristotle the “debauchee,” Heraclitus the “muddler,” Democritus the “Judge of Nonsense,” Nausiphanes (his own teacher) “the mollusk,” Pyrrho “the uneducated fool,” and the Cynics “the enemies of Hellas.” This record of sharp denunciation is held up as a caution against any reading that would smooth over the genuine conflicts between Epicurus and the Platonic or Aristotelian traditions.
The second half of the discussion centers on a close comparison of four translations of a key passage from the Letter to Menoeceus on self-sufficiency and desire. Cyril Bailey renders the key Greek term as “independence of desire,” which Charles finds suspiciously close to Stoic or Buddhist language implying the extinction of desire rather than its fulfillment; R.D. Hicks translates it as “independence of outward things,” sliding toward Stoic language about externals; Peter St. Andre uses “self-reliance”; and the Epicurus Wiki gives “self-sufficiency.” The comparison reveals that the Epicurean position is not that desire should be extinguished but that someone capable of finding pleasure in simple things enjoys luxury even more when it comes — pleasure remains the goal, and what is being cultivated is resilience, not renunciation. The panelists note that starting from Epicurus’s foundational commitment to pleasure as the sole intrinsic good is the only reliable way to interpret such passages correctly.
The episode closes with reflections on the danger of presenting Epicurean ethics in isolation from the physics. Charles and Cassius agree that the Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings, read without the framework of atoms, void, the canon, and the natural desires, become mere assertions — one person’s opinion of how to live, stripped of the systematic grounding that gives them their force. Martin observes that he looks forward to Elaine’s return for the coming sections on atomic indivisibility, and Cassius previews the remainder of Book One and the coming transition to Book Two, which in the Stallings translation is titled “The Dance of Atoms.”
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 15 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, author of On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host, Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com Forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. Be aware that none of us are professional philosophers, and everyone here is a self-taught Epicurean. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy, by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. Find out more about the nature and goals of our podcast at LucretiusToday.com, where you can download a copy of the text that we read from each week. In today’s episode, we’re going to take a break from our regular reading, and today Charles, Martin, and I will hold a brief discussion on aspects of where we are in Lucretius so far. Next, we will have more of our panelists back, and we’ll continue in Book One. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy today’s discussion.
Cassius: As far as what we’re doing here and talking about these things, I’d really like us to be able to actually talk about it.
Charles: Yes — produce something that’s helpful for people who are trying to understand Epicurean philosophy and where it fits into other things.
Cassius: And although I have no desire to spend days and weeks and all sorts of time diving into alternative viewpoints, I do think it’s probably possible to summarize what the big issues are and at least point the direction that Epicurus would probably take in each of these issues. For example, in a priori versus a posteriori — it sounds pretty clear to me that Epicurus is going to be following experience, and if you want to call it empiricism, in most things. But also, that’s where DeWitt makes the point that Epicurus certainly uses deductive reasoning as well. Once you’ve established certain points from observation, you then deduce things from the rule that you’ve established. It’s just that the links to empiricism can kind of get mixed up with the importance of the study of nature. This is one aspect, both of philosophy and the text that we would be reading — or perhaps will be reading — in Lucretius, about atoms and them being indivisible. It’s just something I need to brush up on and reinforce. It sounds like an issue of physics, and it is an issue of physics to a large degree, but it may be that the main reason for concern about it is in order to defeat logical arguments like Zeno’s paradoxes and other arguments that would undermine the senses and undermine our connection with reality. This is something that I remember Elaine bringing up in a prior podcast — about whether she was fully with Epicurus in terms of how strong she would be in taking a particular position. And I remember making the point that whether we think that this explanation of the atoms is final or usable or not, the issue of the existence of God and so forth is more of a logic problem than it is a physics issue. We take a position on it based on physics, but in terms of how confident we’re going to be in our conclusion, we’re really moving into logic.
Charles: Especially when you start getting into the issues of necessity. Yeah, you brought that up earlier in the discussion — and necessity and the issue of so-called free will are things that also run parallel. We come up with the swerve as an explanation for certain physical events, or certain things that we observe, and yet we don’t maintain that we understand or can explain the mechanism of the swerve. We think that it must exist in Epicurean philosophy in order to explain what we see. But in the end, our confidence in the conclusions that you draw from it are more a matter of logical deductions than they are confidence that we have the mechanism understood.
Cassius: But the deductions are still based on — well, I guess we could call them empirical truths.
Charles: The whole issue of what is truth — that’s possibly one of the biggest issues of what we’ve been discussing so far, as well, in terms of epistemology and what we consider to be knowledge and what’s not knowledge. What is the relationship between knowledge and truth? What is truth? The Pontius Pilate question.
Cassius: I like to stick to my academic references and literary history and the archiving and all this stuff. Less of a headache sometimes.
Cassius: Right. When you said that, the first thing that comes to my mind is: well, why? Why do you like to do that? Is it because you’re searching for wisdom, or is it because you’re searching for a pleasant life? People get tripped up over questions like that because they think it’s really good to say that they’re searching for wisdom, but in the end, that’s one of Epicurus’s insights — why do you do anything? What is the ultimate goal? Wisdom for the sake of wisdom is not very satisfactory.
Charles: No, it’s not. But being willing to say the truth, or being willing to expose or be honest about what you’re really doing.
Cassius: We’ve been discussing also today a presentation about Epicurus in which the relationship between happiness versus pleasure was at issue. Happiness, happiness, happiness — you’ll see people talk about that all the time, because it’s a word that’s not offensive. It doesn’t have the negative connotations that people put on the word pleasure sometimes. But Epicurus is clear that it’s pleasure that’s the guide. And so you have to decide how forthright you’re going to be in terms of explaining that. Are you going to just fall back to discussing happiness so that you’ll be inoffensive and appeal to more people? Or are you going to be more direct and really explain what’s going on by saying it’s the feeling of pleasure that’s the root of happiness? And part of the reason why happiness is so inoffensive is because everybody has different definitions for it.
Charles: And when pleasure is brought up, it’s not different definitions. It’s examples.
Cassius: I think you’re right, Charles. Pleasure is a word that you understand directly in your own life — without, as Epicurus might say, any possibility of misunderstanding — because it’s a feeling. But as you identify it in your own life and you think about the specific examples that you find pleasurable, or things that you know other people find pleasurable, you realize that people don’t agree on those things, and it’s uncomfortable to expose disagreements like that.
Cassius: The Letter to Herodotus: “We must grasp the ideas attached to words.”
Charles: Or what the words mean, yeah.
Cassius: Because if you don’t, then you’re just talking ambiguities and vague floating things that really mean anything to anybody — or nothing to nobody. You know, that’s another thing that we’re observing in some of the recent conversations that we’re having: the issue of Epicurus’s position in relationship to the prior Greek philosophers — Aristotle and Plato and so forth. And there’s a tendency to want to just reconcile them all so that they end up representing Greek philosophy. And yet there are just huge differences between them.
Charles: And fighting among themselves — they would never have wanted to obscure those differences. I mean, it was almost like ideological warfare.
Cassius: Right. It’s not politics like it is today.
Charles: I mean, just think about how bitter politics is today. And yet I’m not so sure it wasn’t almost equally bitter among the philosophers back then. They denounced each other in very strong terms. Diotimus the Stoic is one of my favorite examples of this — the one who wrote the fifty forged letters attributing them to Epicurus. And as a result, he was sentenced to death on a proposal by Zeno of Sidon. It’s pretty serious for philosophy.
Cassius: Right. And of course there’s always that list of insults that’s in the beginning of the Diogenes.
Charles: Right. You couldn’t get a stronger listing. I mean, you’ve got Plato — he called the Academy the “Flatterers of Dionysus,” and Plato himself the “Golden Man,” and called Aristotle the “debauchee,” saying that he devoured his inheritance and then enlisted and sold drugs.
Cassius: I don’t know if there’s any other historical basis for that statement. I’ve looked into it. There’s not much known about Aristotle’s life.
Charles: Yeah, that one immediately stuck out to me when I first read chapter 10 of Laertius. I mean, presumably there’s some nub of fact behind it, or it wouldn’t have been recorded by Diogenes Laërtius either.
Cassius: And then Heraclitus — “the muddler” — and even Democritus. He called Democritus “the Judge of Nonsense.” He also called Nausiphanes, his own teacher, “the mollusk, the illiterate, the cheat, and the harlot.”
Charles: I think there’s a lot to be learned by that list of criticisms. Especially with what he calls the Cynics: “the enemies of Hellas.” I think that one’s actually really important, because it means that Epicurus held this sort of Hellenist or Pan-Greek identity.
Cassius: Right.
Charles: And so he held the identity — that’s one important fact. The next one would be: what is that identity? How do we describe what it is that Epicurus was defending?
Cassius: Well, I wouldn’t take it to that length. I think the importance lies in that he held some sort of national or cultural identity, when so much of the criticism says “oh, avoid all culture” — and people take that to extremes.
Charles: Right. I think that’s where it’s important.
Cassius: And then, of course, the logicians — he called “the destroyer.” Good grief. That’s a very strong denunciation. Now, who are these logicians? What were they teaching? Were they teaching logic?
Charles: I think he might just be referring to something like sophistry.
Cassius: Well, you’ve got so many different references — later on in the letter, it says “dialectical logic.” He rejected that when he starts talking about epistemology. So there’s clearly a number of references where he attacks certain types of so-called logic. It’s hard to understand exactly what is meant. And then calling Pyrrho “the uneducated fool” — supposedly Epicurus was an admirer of Pyrrho in certain respects — but calling him an uneducated fool is pretty strong. And Antidorus he called “the maniac.”
Cassius: Well, who was Antidorus? What did he espouse that Epicurus would react against? Those are fascinating things that I’d love to pursue.
Charles: Oh, Antidorus — I’ve read about that before. He was a grammarian.
Cassius: What is a grammarian? He was focused on developing grammar. “Gramma” is a rule of language, right?
Charles: Yeah. It meant a student of literature, especially of poetry. So in that sense, it could be just a cultural critic or cultural historian.
Cassius: Mm-hmm. It says here: “They say that Antidorus of Cumae was the first person to call himself a grammarian. He wrote a treatise about Homer and Hesiod.” So that sounds kind of like a cultural or literary critic, because those two were both poets. I don’t know what he wrote for Epicurus to call him a maniac.
Cassius: I think we started talking about this just because we were making the observation that Epicurus differs strongly from many of the other Greek philosophers, and as we read and study, we have to keep that in mind and not presume that he has gone along with them and taken the same position that we’re familiar with. Because he called Aristotle the “debauchee” and said those things about him, it’s likely that he probably did not agree with many of his positions. And because Epicurus wrote so strongly and often about pleasure and happiness — to an extent — we can probably also assume that we shouldn’t be referring to “flourishing” or “blessedness” when we talk about Epicurus, as a lot of people often do.
Charles: Yeah, I might consider those two words separately. “Flourishing” is one that I always associate with Aristotle, and I’m not sure that it has a very easy-to-define meaning to it. “Blessedness” — I remember in talking with Elaine that the word is more complicated in the Greek, and maybe Epicurus could have used that word in relationship to the gods, and so maybe there’d be an analogy to humans. But I could see it relating to virtue and things like that.
Cassius: And I know in modern reading, when I see the word “flourishing,” it means one of two things. It means that they’re talking about the age in which someone lived — because “he flourished” is a classical way of discussing the approximate time when somebody was living. But then the word “flourishing” as a verb is almost like a trademarked Aristotelian term.
Charles: I was going to say, I could also see it as some sort of synonym or other word for self-actualization.
Cassius: Well, the next section of text — which I guess we may not read today — is going to continue down the line of talking about the indivisibility of atoms, so we’re still heavily into physics, and we’ll be through the rest of Book One. I was going to say, we must be getting close to the end of Book One.
Charles: I think we’re about two-thirds of the way through it. Martin, any other general thoughts that we could wrap into a recap here?
Martin: Oh, not at the moment — not anything regarding the section on atoms. I think I prefer Elaine to be here for that.
Cassius: Right.
Martin: I am more versed in Books Four and Five.
Cassius: Right. My eye falls on one of the items that I listed. I do think that the issue of properties and qualities of things is something that is really important and has a lot of different implications, because it’s kind of like the bridge between the atoms — which we never experience directly — versus the things that we do experience directly. And it’s easy for us to talk in abstract terms about atoms and the properties of indivisibility and so forth on sort of a logical basis. And then it’s easy for us to just talk about our daily lives. But the bridge between the two, the way they’re connected, is something that I don’t know that we spend as much time talking about, but it’s pretty important. Otherwise, the discussion of the physics and the atoms becomes just sort of a disconnected scientific discussion that doesn’t seem to have as much immediate implication to it.
Charles: Again, that kind of scientific discussion just sort of reinforces the idea that Lucretius only wrote about science.
Cassius: Right. Also, I recently saw a presentation of Epicurean philosophy that amounted to basically combining together a series of statements that Epicurus had made about a lot of different ethical and other issues. And so, taken together, all of these statements being placed in this presentation are certainly valid presentations of Epicurean philosophy. But to me, when I saw them together like this, they become mere assertions that anybody could make, if you don’t also present the underlying reasoning and the underlying evidence behind them. You can spend all of your time dealing with the details of atoms and get bogged down in the physics. But if you go to the other extreme and spend all of your time just stringing together ethical statements about happiness and pleasure and things that are kind of generic unless you talk about them with specifics — then I think that’s the other problem.
Charles: Was it that Medium article that came out the other day?
Cassius: Actually, it’s the excerpt from the play that we were talking about earlier. Because all of the dialogue is almost taken directly from statements of Epicurus in the Letter to Menoeceus, or in the different parts of Diogenes Laërtius in terms of how to live.
Charles: As well as the Vatican Sayings.
Cassius: As well as the Vatican Sayings, right? That’s the issue in just going immediately to the Vatican Sayings or immediately to the Principal Doctrines and just reading them and expecting people to understand the context. They’re just assertions unless you have some reason to believe that the person saying them knows what he’s talking about. And we don’t know the context behind the Vatican Sayings, but the Principal Doctrines were intended for students of Epicurus — not for teaching people completely unfamiliar with the philosophy.
Charles: I think that’s true. But they were being read by people who also understood the Epicurean physics and who were being presented the whole Epicurean philosophy. If you take the ethical statements out of the context of the rest of the philosophy, they become just one person’s opinion of how to live. You know, some people will identify them and say, “Hey, yeah, that’s great — the things that are necessary are easy to get, and the things that are hard to get are generally not necessary.”
Cassius: Yeah, good thing you brought that up, because I wanted to get back to you on that. That is mentioned in the Letter to Menoeceus.
Charles: Yeah, you have to read exactly what it says. Because clearly he is saying that those things that are necessary in life are not difficult to get, and we give thanks to nature that that’s the case. I have the Cyril Bailey translation here. And again — “independence of desire we think a great good; not that we may at all times enjoy but a few things, but that if we do not possess many, we may enjoy the few; and the genuine persuasion that those have the sweetest pleasure and luxury who least need it; and that all that is natural is easy to be obtained, but that which is superfluous is hard.” Which I think is important. And it’s a part of the Letter to Menoeceus that I often glance over. It’s a soft refutation of the bread-and-water approach or interpretation, as well as providing the source for that line of the tetrapharmakon that so many people put faith in. Because in here, Epicurus isn’t saying we have to enjoy bread and water because they’re easy to get — it’s saying if we don’t have the luxury, then we would be accustomed, or we should be accustomed, to appreciating something else in its absence. But that also isn’t to say that luxury is required or by any sort of necessity. And I’ve mentioned this before a few times — there’s no real extant source, and the segments of Philodemus I have not been able to access — but we do know that Metrodorus favored wealth over Cynic poverty. And I think a part of this, we can see a semblance of where Metrodorus got that idea within this letter — or rather, where Metrodorus got that idea from Epicurus, and how we know that based on this letter that Epicurus wrote.
Cassius: You know, the part that you quoted there, Charles — we could just go through the details of the way that Cyril Bailey has translated it. But the part that we’re discussing at the moment was the issue of, at the end of the passage, he says: “All that is natural is easy to be obtained, but that which is superfluous is hard.” So the first part — “all that is natural is easy to be obtained” — and “that which is superfluous” — now that’s a different word. I guess people are translating that as “unnatural.” Superfluous, if that’s a good translation, means “unnecessary.” An antonym of it is “necessary.” So that’s kind of a clipped version of the natural-and-necessary categories that maybe are expanded a little bit in Cicero’s On Ends, because here he’s only referring to “natural” and “unnecessary,” if you want to translate “superfluous” as “unnecessary.” But what is he really saying? What is this translation really saying? Because it says: “we may enjoy the few in the genuine persuasion that those have the sweetest pleasure and luxury who least need it.” “Independence of desire” — it’s tricky language, because that could both mean pleasure through the removal of desire, or pleasure through the fulfillment of desire. “Not that we may at all times enjoy but a few things.” Let’s double-check with R.D. Hicks.
Cassius: I’ve never been a fan of R.D. Hicks’s translations before, because they’re so short and they miss so much. But sometimes the choice of words is important to get another perspective. So that entire line in the R.D. Hicks translation reads: “Again, we regard independence of outward things as a great good; not so as in all cases to use little, but so as to be contented with little if we have not much; being honestly persuaded that they have the sweetest enjoyment of luxury who stand least in need of it; and that whatever is natural is easily procured, and only the vain and worthless hard to win.”
Charles: Yeah, that’s significantly different.
Cassius: Well, maybe. Maybe it’s just an extrapolation of what Bailey says.
Charles: I do think the Hicks translation is super interesting in comparison. It provides a lot of clarity where Bailey doesn’t. But if you were to read this on your own, you would be confused as hell. Because there’s no mention of desire here. “Again, we regard independence of outward things as a great good.” I mean, if you knew the letter was talking about desire, “outward things” would sort of imply that desire is extrinsic.
Cassius: Or Charles — this discussion of desire starts leading you in a Buddhist direction of saying you should get rid of desire. You’re saying Hicks does not even talk about desire in his translation?
Charles: No — he says “we regard independence of outward things as a great good.” So maybe instead of desire, it’s referring to external factors contributing either to fear or pain or whatever. But that’s not the general consensus among the other translations of the Letter to Menoeceus.
Charles: Yeah, this might be an example of where I’m very suspicious of Cyril Bailey in general, because the phrase “independence of desire” to me just strikes me as Stoic or Buddhist. Maybe — regardless of whether you think Epicurean philosophy is bread-and-water or hedonism, as I defend — desire, at the end of the day, unless it’s unobtainable, should still be fulfilled. It’s when it is unobtainable and brings pain that it has to be eliminated. Which is where the whole thing of “taking pleasure in bread and water,” or appreciating the few when you don’t have the many — as this translation implies — comes from. So, within the Epicurean system, it makes sense why people who are not getting the bigger picture would look at that, remove desire, and think of Buddhism or Stoicism.
Cassius: Yeah. And we know that the Letter to Menoeceus is the most frequently cited source of Epicurean philosophy.
Charles: But we’ve also established that the physics are — to borrow the language — necessary to learn the ethics.
Cassius: Necessary to take a position on what the ethics would mean. Yes.
Charles: Maybe we should make a combination of the Bailey and Hicks translations. We can certainly point to both of them at the same time, like we’re doing now, and point to how these people who have apparently spent a lifetime studying Greek come to such different conclusions — so we have to reach our own.
Cassius: It’s like every word has been changed in this one. Peter St. Andre?
Charles: Yeah.
Cassius: Yeah, can you read it? Because I don’t have it at hand. While you’re looking for that, Charles, the Epicurus Wiki translation of it says: “We also regard self-sufficiency as a great virtue.”
Charles: I just found it before you said that — it is the self-reliance section in Peter St. Andre. So here it is. I’ll just read the whole paragraph. “Fourth, we hold self-reliance as a great good, not so that we will always have only a few things, but so that if we do not have much, we will rejoice in the few things we have, firmly persuaded that those who need luxury the least enjoy it the most, and that everything natural is easily obtained, whereas everything groundless is hard to get. So simple flavors bring just as much pleasure as a fancy diet if all pain from true need has been removed, and bread and water give the highest pleasure when someone in need partakes of them. Training yourself to live simply without luxury brings you complete health, gives you endless energy to face the necessities of life, better prepares you for the occasional luxury, makes you fearless no matter your fortune in life.”
Cassius: And Charles, to emphasize the first part of what you read — the Epicurus Wiki says: “We are firmly convinced that those who least yearn for luxury enjoy it most, and that while natural desires are easily fulfilled, vain desires are insatiable.” To me, these have huge differences in meaning. Going back to the issue of “independence of desire” — that tells me that he’s trying to get rid of desire. But that’s not what these other translations say. “Self-sufficiency” is not getting rid of desire; it’s just being able to supply your desires yourself. And Hicks goes an even different route with “independence of outward things.”
Charles: Yes, to me that one may have less meaning. “Independence of outward things” — what is an outward thing? An external factor that — what would you want to be free of from an external?
Cassius: Okay — that leads you towards Stoicism.
Charles: Exactly, exactly. I’m glad you picked up on that.
Cassius: And then the Epicurus Wiki says “those who least yearn for luxury enjoy it most.”
Charles: Well, it’s “need” — like Peter St. Andre.
Cassius: Yeah — “enjoying it most” tells me that he’s valuing the enjoyment. He’s not trying to get rid of desire; he’s savoring desire by enjoying it the most. And then this version has the last part of the phrase: “vain desires are insatiable.”
Charles: Now that’s not a statement that vain desires aren’t pleasant.
Cassius: Well, yes — not right.
Charles: It’s not a statement that they’re hard. It’s also not a statement that they’re not pleasant. I mean, vain desires may be vain and still be very pleasant.
Cassius: Well now — “insatiable.” “Insatiable” could mean “without end,” or it also could mean “incapable of being…”
Charles: Of producing pleasure.
Cassius: Well, yeah — or incapable of being satisfied. So in that sense, it could mean “hard,” but “insatiable” to me could mean “hard,” or it could mean “without end.” And I don’t know about the Greek as to which is the best of those translations, but I can certainly tell that these scholars who have apparently spent a lifetime studying Greek come to such different conclusions that we have to be very, very careful about accepting any one of them as the last word, without integrating it into the full understanding of the philosophy. That pleasure is the only thing that is intrinsically desirable in itself — that seems to be very clear in Epicurean philosophy. So when you interpret a passage like this, you start from the position that pleasure is desirable. You don’t start from the position that you’re trying to extinguish desire.
Cassius: Why don’t we start talking about some concluding comments? What we’ve generally been doing is trying to show how the physics can be used to illustrate and derive a better understanding — or a closer understanding — of what Epicurus was arguing on the ethics. And we’ll continue to do that as we go each episode into the discussion of Lucretius.
Charles: It’s a good break as well. Sometimes we can get so bogged down in the physics.
Cassius: Right. And I don’t think that’s what they would have done. I think they would have understood that the physics and ethics and epistemology are all so closely related to each other that we’re really discussing them all at the same time. Martin, concluding thoughts for the day from you?
Martin: No — but interesting to listen. Thank you.
Cassius: I guess I don’t have any concluding thoughts other than — well, actually, no, I don’t. Okay, well, hopefully we’ll try to have Elaine or Julie or both with us next week. And we’ll go on to the next section of Lucretius and continue to try to derive helpful thoughts on how to live our lives more pleasantly and understand Epicurus better.
Charles: Yeah, the next book in the Stallings edition is called “The Dance of Atoms.” So we all kind of know what’s in store.
Cassius: Yeah, there’s a lot of discussion in the next book about the soul and how death is the end and how it has to be the end.
Charles: Mortality in the soul, yeah.
Cassius: Right. But I think there’s a lot left in Book One as well. We’re still right now in some details about the nature of the atoms, but I believe before we finish Book One, we go back to some important conclusions about the endlessness of the universe, the eternality of the universe, and some things like that.
Charles: This Epicurus Wiki — their Letter to Menoeceus translation is pretty good. They have line by line of the Principal Doctrines and the Vatican Sayings. This one’s kind of passage by passage.
Cassius: Well, it also has the original Greek right next to it.
Charles: All right. Okay, well, we’ll wrap up and we’ll talk next week. Thanks everybody for being here. Thanks a lot to both of you. And we’ll talk next week. Bye.