Episode 073 - More on the Sun and Moon And Similar Astronomical Issues
Date: 06/04/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2035-episode-seventy-three-more-on-the-sun-the-moon-and-related-astronomical-question/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Martin reads Book Five lines 614–704, covering the sun’s seasonal movements between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, night as either the sun circling beneath the earth or extinguishing its fire, dawn as scattered seeds of fire flowing together at the horizon, and the moon’s phases — possibly borrowed light, possibly its own, possibly a rotating half-lit ball. Don unpacks the Latin peditemptim (“by stretching out the feet, step by step”), giving the frozen-pond analogy for the Epicurean philosopher who advances cautiously but keeps advancing. The panel also examines the rare moment where Lucretius says the borrowed-light theory of the moon “seems right and speaks the truth.”
Discussion turns to why ancient study of nature did not produce industrial technology: Martin explains that enabling technology was missing — ancient iron could not hold the pressure needed for a practical steam engine; James Watt improved an existing device, not invented from nothing. Don raises slavery as reducing the incentive for labor-saving devices and notes how much ancient technology has simply been lost. Cassius connects this to the charge that Epicurean philosophy is anti-scientific or merely aimed at defeating fear of the gods. The episode closes on Matuta (the Roman dawn goddess, identified with Aurora and Homer’s “rosy-fingered Dawn”) and the Chaldean/Babylonian astronomical tradition.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 73 of Lucretius Today. 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. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Norman DeWitt. For anyone who’s not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode 1 for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about those, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In today’s Episode 73, we’ll read approximately Latin lines 614 through 704 from Book 5. We’ll be talking about the rising and setting of the sun and similar astronomical issues. Now let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin:
Nor can one certain reason be assigned why the sun declines from its summer height and bends his winter course towards the Tropic of Capricorn, and then returning reaches the Tropic of Cancer and makes summer solstice; and that the moon in every month finishes the same course through the twelve signs as the sun takes up a whole year in running through. I say one certain reason cannot be assigned for these events.
Or perhaps the cause may be what the venerable opinion of that great man Democritus has laid down, that the nearer the stars are to the earth, they are carried more slowly about by the general motion of the heavens. For the rapid force and celerity of the upper sky are much lessened before they reach the inferior orbs, and therefore the sun, with the lower signs that follow it, is in some measure left, because it is much lower than the high region of the stars. And the moon is much lower still, and the greater distance from the heavens she observes in her course, and the nearer she approaches the earth, the less she is capable of keeping pace with the motions of the signs, and the slower she is in her motion than the sun as she moves below him. And the signs may the more easily overtake her and pass about and beyond her; and therefore the moon seems the sooner to run through all the signs, when in reality the signs return to her.
Or perhaps two several airs may at certain seasons blow from the opposite parts of the world by turns. The one may drive the sun down from the summer signs into its winter course and the extremity of cold; the other may raise it from the cold winter signs into the summer solstice. And for the same reason, the motions of stars which fulfill their periods and revolutions in their long courses may be forced upwards and downwards in the heavens by two several streams of air likewise. Don’t you observe the clouds driven by contrary winds — in the ocean’s face, the lower opposite to those above? What then should hinder that the stars should not be carried on by contrary blasts of air through the great circles of the sky?
And the night we imagine covers the earth with thick darkness, either because the sun in his long course has reached the extremity of the heavens, and being tired has blown out his fire scattered by the swiftness of his motion and decayed by the tract of air he passed through; or the same force that raised his orb and drove it round above compels him to change his course and roll beneath the earth.
And Matuta, the goddess of the morning, at a fixed time leads a rosy blushing light through the regions of the sky and opens the day, either because the sun returning from under the earth attempts to enlighten the world with his rays before he appears himself, or because the seeds of fire that were dispersed abroad in his journey the day before flow together in the eastern sky and illustrate the earth with a faint light before they have kindled up a new globe of the sun. This, they say, is easily discovered from the top of Mount Ida, where upon the rising of the sun we first discover his scattered rays, which are afterward contracted into one orb and make up one ball of light.
Nor are you to wonder that these seeds of fire should flow together constantly every day and repair the splendor of the sun; for we observe many things in nature that act regularly and at a fixed time. The trees look green at a certain season, and at a certain season cast their leaves. Children at a certain time shed their teeth, and the boy grows ripe at a certain time and shows the soft down upon his cheeks. And lastly, the thunder, the snow, the rains, the clouds, the winds are no less certain and fall out in fixed seasons of the year; for the course which things observe from the beginning of the world they pursue the same and continue still to act in the same certain order.
The days likewise increase and the nights grow shorter, and the nights increase and the days shorten, either because the sun in its course above and below the earth moves obliquely in unequal lines and divides the heavens into unequal parts, and what it takes off from one part of the heavens it adds so much to the opposite part again, till it arrives at that sign in the heavens when it cuts the equinoctial line and makes equal day and night; for this line is equally distant from the two tropics, which are the bounds of the sun’s motions towards the north and south. And this is owing to the obliquity of the zodiac through which the sun finishes its annual revolution and shines upon the earth and the heavens with oblique light. Such is the opinion of those who have marked out all the regions of the heavens and adorned them with twelve constellations. Or because at certain seasons of the year the seeds of light which repair the sun’s fading flame flow together sooner or later and so occasion its rising in different parts of the heavens.
The moon may shine with rays borrowed from the sun and appear to us every day with greater light as she retires further from the sun’s orb, till being directly opposite to him she shines out with full beams and climbing above the earth views him from above to the west; and then goes backwards as it were and hides her light gradually as she passes through the different signs in her nearer approaches to the sun. Thus they explain her phases who conclude her round like a ball and that she moves below the sun; and they seem to be right in their opinion and speak the truth.
But the moon possibly may steer her course by her own light and show different phases and forms of brightness for another body may move below her and attending to all her motions may interpose and hinder her light from being seen. But this body being dark cannot be discovered by the eye. And perhaps the moon may roll around her axis like a ball whose one half only is bright. This ball as it moves around its center will express the different appearances of light, till it turns the whole bright side to us and shines full upon the open eye; and then by degrees it turns backward and takes away its bright side as it rolls, and we see no more of it.
This was a doctrine of the Chaldeans who followed the hypothesis of Berossus, and attempted to overthrow the vulgar astrology of the Greeks; as if the schemes of both could not be true, or you had less reason to embrace the one than the other.
Cassius:
Okay Martin, thank you for reading that. If anybody was confused about whether the Epicureans like to talk about alternative explanations, they should have no further concern about that after reading a passage like this. So where would we like to dig in? It’s sort of similar to the material we discussed last week, and some of the lessons we’ll draw from it are probably similar. But the more we read into it, it’s beginning, at least in my own mind, to sort of gel more about this picture of our world being a more limited area than the universe itself.
Don:
One thing I did want to bring up — it literally just came to me a few minutes before we started today — I wanted to go back to last week’s section and talk about the differences in translations between “the wary philosopher” and then the others translating it as “going step by step.” That bothered me and I didn’t really have a chance to look into it until today. So if you will…
Cassius:
Absolutely. When we noted that last week it was interesting, and I’m sorry we didn’t have time to go into it then. So definitely — what did you find when you looked into it?
Don:
I went back to the Latin, and the word that Lucretius uses is peditemptim. And I looked it up, and it literally means “by stretching out the feet” — pedi is from “feet” and temptim is from “stretch.” Lewis and Short give two separate definitions: one is “step by step and slowly,” and the other is “by degrees, gradually, cautiously.” And that literal meaning of stretching out the feet step by step — the image that instantly came to mind was crossing a frozen pond. You put one foot out and you test the ground and see if that works, and if that does, then you put your next step out and try it again. So I get the impression that they’re talking about someone who is moving along and testing things carefully.
The thing that bothered me with the word “wary” was that whenever I think of somebody being wary, they’re looking for danger or being cautious just for caution’s sake, and it just didn’t seem quite right. Whereas this idea of moving step by step and cautiously testing the veracity of one theory — it’s like okay, that part makes sense, let’s go on to the next part and see if that makes sense — that made more sense to me than just being suspicious and looking for danger.
Cassius:
We were talking this week about DeWitt’s tendency to go further and embellish things than he might. I think you’re right. It sounds like to me that that word is clearly related to steps. And the way you’re moving forward in the ice analogy really seems like a good one. But I guess a word like that could take on its own life and become a synonym for “cautiously” or “warily,” you think?
Don:
And that’s what it looks like. From what I could figure out looking at Lewis and Short, it was originally sort of a literal thing where you’re going step by step, going slowly. I even saw a reference to elephants — it was used in reference to elephants because they go sort of step by step and check their steps and go at a slower pace sometimes. And then it took on the figurative definition of going by degrees, gradually, cautiously. Which makes perfect sense. And I think having those two definitions in mind is important, because whenever they just said “the wary philosopher wouldn’t do this” — well, what exactly does that mean? I think “wary” has a somewhat different connotation in English. It may be an allowable synonym for the Latin term, but it takes on a different shade of meaning when you read it.
Cassius:
I think that’s a great tangent that we went back to catch, because I totally agree with everything you’re saying. Is the technical word for that an idiom?
Don:
Yeah. I was thinking to myself, I think that’s the word “idiom.” I’d love to just throw out another example of a word that turns into an idiom, but I don’t think I can come up with one. But what you just said makes perfect sense — it would be easy to stylize an idea of somebody walking carefully across a hazardous area, and then that becomes an idiom for everything you’re doing cautiously.
And I thought it was interesting that the word that comes right after peditemptim is progredientis, which does mean advancing, proceeding, progressing. So you are moving along and you are moving step by step, but you’re taking each step cautiously. It’s not like you’re standing in one place and looking for danger coming at you. You are progressing or advancing, going step by step, but being cautious as to what you accept.
Cassius:
That’s a hugely important point too. And as you say that — is it the end of Book One where he uses the analogy of proceeding step by step, the light of each step illuminating the next? I kind of connect that in my mind with what you’re talking about right now.
Don:
I believe that’s the very end of Book One. That’s almost the conclusion of it — where he talks about if you know these things that we’ve discussed in this first book, then you’ll be able to step by step proceed to learn the rest.
Cassius:
There you go. If life were just longer and I had more time, I would have definitely jumped back to check the Latin on that, or I would do it right now, but time is short. Okay, that’s great. That’s a great observation. What’s the next observation for this first passage?
So Democritus apparently was one of their reference points. They had the same view of the stars and everything in the sky moving in relatively close proximity to the earth. Don, you’re probably thinking about what I’m about to say. That reminds me of a discussion we had this week on the forum, and I don’t think Martin weighed in on it. But Martin — going back to the issue of the size of the sun — when you think back to last week and having read what you read today, would you say that Lucretius thought the sun was the size it appears to be? Would that formulation allow for the sun to be larger than the earth? Because you know that the mountain ranges at a distance are huge, and the sun looks pretty large as it sets behind them. So it seems to be larger than a mountain. Do you think it’s possible that Epicurus thought the sun was actually larger than the earth?
Martin:
In principle, yes. The thing is that he definitely stated that the normal proportionality between distance and the size it makes on our eye is not valid for active light sources. So this is in some way wrong, but as I explained last time, there are exceptions from this proportionality which are caused by diffraction, and probably he was not aware of that. He was going more for the explanation that light sources don’t change as much in apparent size as we are distant from them — like a fire seen from a distance still appears essentially the same, even though a non-active light source would not be visible at that distance. But based on that reasoning, it can still be argued that the sun is just the size of a basketball. So it’s not clear enough. He might have thought it’s big, and he just wanted to affirm it. And because he goes by the senses, and he sees no reason why the sun should not be the size as it appears to be — but then what does “as it appears to be” actually mean? It’s big enough that it’s not excluded from being larger than us, but it’s also not excluded that he actually meant it as just the size of a basketball.
Cassius:
Right. There’s no doubt there’s a lack of ability to be really sure what he thought. But what I’m trying to do, at least when I talk about explaining things to other people — you often run into contentions that Epicurus certainly thought the sun was relatively small, maybe a basketball. I’m not comfortable saying that’s a fair characterization. I don’t think it’s certain that he thought it was no bigger than a basketball.
Don and Nate were talking back and forth about that on the forum this week too. And Nate was throwing out some good examples, if I recall — about when Epicurus or anybody else would see the sun setting behind the mountains and appearing pretty large as it goes behind them. And of course you know the mountains are huge, so how could the sun be otherwise than bigger than the mountains? That’s one way of arguing it. Don, anything new to add?
Don:
No, I definitely agree with what you’re saying too, because Epicurus wasn’t an idiot. He knew that the mountains were huge and that the moon and the sun set behind them. I really like the way that you’ve been trying to bring up that “as big as it appears” can mean any number of different things, and so you should not jump to the conclusion that it means something that would indicate that he’s an idiot, to put it bluntly.
Cassius:
You don’t have to necessarily be Norman DeWitt or somebody who wants to put the best possible gloss on everything. You can certainly admit that there were some observations that were not as accurate or well thought through as we might prefer. But you don’t have to jump to the conclusion that makes him look in absolutely the worst possible light every time.
Don:
Exactly. That’s almost like a Stoic thing to do — that’s something somebody who’s not sympathetic to Epicurus would do. And there just doesn’t seem to be any reason in my mind to take a negative viewpoint like that.
Cassius:
That’s definitely a situation where I can see multiple plausible explanations in the Epicurean sense that we’ve been talking about here. So yeah, by picking the worst one, you’re just, maybe not.
Martin:
The one point in favor of the basketball argument, I think, is that Lucretius and probably also Epicurus’s works that Lucretius used for the poem went into quite some detail to try to explain why a rather small sun can emit so much light. And if the sun was greater than the earth, this would not be an issue. If this whole big object is on fire, it would be trivial to expect that it can light the whole atmosphere around the earth.
Cassius:
Right. That’s a very good point, because in what we read last week, he talked about that the sun isn’t necessarily just one object — he used the analogy of a fountain of light coming out of it and spreading out over the whole world. So it could be small but a source of a lot of energy coming out of it, like a fountain of water, in the case of the sun.
We probably end up jumping around too much to say what I’m about to say, but isn’t that one of the things discussed today? He was also saying it’s not possible to exclude the possibility that the sun extinguishes itself at the end of each day. Is that in today’s reading?
Don:
In the second paragraph, I think. Let me try to find it. Yes — “being tired has blown out his fire.” I find it interesting that he’s using those kinds of metaphors, when he went into so much detail saying that the celestial objects did not have their own animus or were not living beings, and then he starts using metaphors like, well, it’s tired. I’d have to go back and look at the original Latin to see if he’s actually giving those objects agency, or whether it’s the translator giving them a sense of being tired and taking on human qualities.
Cassius:
Right, because in that same paragraph he talks about kindling up a new globe of the sun. And he talks in here about the globes and the balls, so I mean, we are talking about spheres and not flat disk things. So I did think it was interesting in the section about the moon that he actually goes so far as to say “they seem to be right in their opinion and speak the truth.” It’s like, oh my heavens — you’re going to pick one over the other?
Don:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he goes on to say “or it could be this, or it could be that.” Still hedging his bets. But that line really jumped out at me. I’m like, oh my heavens, you’re making a decision — you think one of them has more veracity than the other ones.
Cassius:
I guess there’s always that tension between saying something is certain versus saying something is more probable. Even though it certainly sounds like he’s — and I use the word “certainly” myself too much. It seems like every time I use the word “certain,” I immediately realize I should not be using it, because it’s not certain at all. But nevertheless, he seems to be taking the position that as long as you don’t say it’s certain, you could still say that something may be more probable than another.
Don:
There you go. Exactly. Statistically speaking, this is more probable than that one. But I’m going to stretch my feet out and test the waters on that one, and then we’ll go on.
Cassius:
Well, before we go too far — I’m still sort of in the second of our paragraphs today. One of the things I see at the end of that second paragraph, that I think about when I compare it to the Letter to Herodotus, is the very last sentence: “for the course which things observe from the beginning of the world, they pursue the same and continue still to act in the same certain order.” So I’m just highlighting that as another reflection of that position that even though we have the swerve and the potential for atoms themselves to change direction and do things at no fixed time and no fixed place, we still see lots of things that go on in ordered, regular, repetitive motion — which he’s describing from the beginning of the world as opposed to the beginning of the universe, which would not have a beginning, frankly.
Don:
Yeah, that section caught my eye too, and I think it’s interesting because at least in my mind it goes back to the idea that the atoms tried every possible permutation and they finally settled on this particular one, and this particular order of things worked — and that’s why we see them repeat over and over again, because that’s the one that finally brought order to this corner of the universe. This is just the way things happen to be because this is the way things happen to be.
Cassius:
Was Martin trying to find a section he wanted to talk about?
Martin:
I think, Cassius, you found it already. By then I had already stopped searching for it.
Cassius:
Yeah, we were talking about the possibility that the sun extinguishes itself and then kindles itself anew, and that is the opening of that second paragraph there.
Don:
One thing I did find interesting in reading this — all of the possibilities he gives are more or wildly less correct than how things actually go. But it still surprises me, the level of observation that he brings up — that he’s able to give all these different possibilities just from sheer observation. The one that struck me specifically was talking about how in the morning you can see the whole horizon is red and then the sun sort of rises out of that. It’s just one of those things you would sort of look at and not really give it any thought. But the idea that you notice the phenomenon and come up with an idea about where it came from — and then here’s another possibility — all these tiny little details that he finds: children lose their teeth, boys finally get their beards. And I’m assuming these come from Epicurus’s volumes of On Nature, because that’s what he’s using. But it’s hard to separate out between what observations Epicurus had made and what observations Lucretius had made and how they came together. But the fact that there are so many detailed observations of physical phenomena and nature always strikes me.
Cassius:
When you say that, Don, what that reminds me of is the issue that some people will talk about: they had a good solid collection of observations. You know, people want to say that Aristotle is the first scientist, or that he was much more scientific than some of the other guys. But obviously the Epicureans too had a good collection of information and were working on it. They weren’t just speculating on things without observation. But none of these guys really made the transition into more applied science of the type that, for example, Martin does — he takes his science and has a laboratory, and ultimately a factory to produce things.
I don’t know that we’ve really ever discussed it before, but there’s this issue in the minds of at least some people about why the ancients never moved forward from their observational studies into more applied science. Why didn’t they come up with steam engines? And that’s a terrible example, because I guess they did have a steam engine. Why didn’t they come up with electricity? Maybe they even had some electricity too. But why didn’t they come up with the different things of modern technology? What’s the difference between our approach that makes us focus on technological issues as opposed to the ancient mind, which doesn’t seem to have been as interested in that? Martin, I bet you’ve heard that kind of discussion before. Do you have any comment?
Martin:
Yeah. For us it’s easier because we have elaborated scientific theories which are proven. At the time, there was much less certainty in the models — as here, all kinds of different models are presented. And it’s much more difficult to build things from that.
But actually, the ancient Greeks and Romans did come up with things. They certainly knew how to apply the theorem of Pythagoras. They knew how to use the laws of the lever in very ingenious ways. So they knew a number of these more simple things, which we can grasp intuitively. But what we have with more complex technology requires both a more solid scientific base and existing enabling technology. With the type of iron they produced in ancient times, I don’t think they would have been able to produce a vessel that could hold enough pressure to make a workable steam engine. They had a predecessor of the steam engine, but it didn’t hold much pressure and would release the pressure immediately. With that old type of iron, if they had tried to seal it and heat it up and bring the steam out, it would have exploded — it would have been a bomb. They also were not able to make the safety valves that were fitted when steam engines were built several hundred years ago.
Let’s take James Watt as an example. He is often credited with inventing the steam engine, but actually he improved it dramatically. He didn’t start from scratch — there were existing engines. He was a university technician, taking care of one of these old machines. By working with them, he got the ideas for where he could make critical improvements, which made the steam engine much more useful for far more than just pumping water out of coal mines.
Cassius:
That is an excellent point. I never thought of the whole idea of a steam engine having to have a pressure vessel and safety valves. Everybody goes back to the steam engine they used to open the doors of the temple when they lit the fire and that sort of thing. I’m like, well, yeah, they were right there, they could have done it. But you’re absolutely right — they didn’t have the technology to produce the pressure needed to actually drive a train or something like that, or the safety valves to let off the pressure. I never thought of it that way before, but you’re absolutely right. They had the rudiments of the theory and a practical application to open the doors when you lit the fire on the altar, but they just did not have the ability to do that in an industrial sort of way. Thank you. That really opened my eyes on that.
Don:
The one thing that keeps coming to my mind is that a lot of technology is used either to scale up production or to be a labor-saving device. And both the Greeks and the Romans and most of the ancient world had a large enslaved population. They didn’t have to worry about labor-saving because they had people to do it.
Cassius:
That’s the first thing that comes to my mind too — one of the things people throw out there. I’d be interested to know, Martin, what do you think about that? Don and I are both Americans coming from the same background. What do you think?
Martin:
I mean, there’s certainly a point to it. But it’s not the whole story. For example, I recall there was even some idea in the ancient world — it might even be somewhere in Lucretius — that the slave owner should not just treat slaves as doing the boring slave job, but rather that they learn something and grow. So there was some motivation to improve efficiency as well.
And we see this partly with mechanical devices. Also, if you have slaves who can just take a big spoon to scoop up water and put it in a bucket, then you don’t need to invent an Archimedean screw to pump water — but it was invented anyway by the ancient Greeks, and similar devices elsewhere. So slavery would not have completely stopped people from inventing things.
The other observation, more in favor of that point, is what I observed when I had an American visitor here in Thailand. He observed that at a construction site, a worker was using a hand saw to cut a fairly big piece of wood. This is something that wouldn’t happen in the U.S. or Germany because the time this takes would make the cut extremely expensive — the construction site would use a disc saw and finish in less than a minute. So labor cost does drive the adoption of technology.
Don:
The other thing that came to mind was that we don’t really know what we don’t know. We have the Antikythera device for the astronomical observations, we have Archimedes’ screw that we know of. There could be any number of things that were lost that we just do not have remains of. So we just assume they didn’t have them. But who’s to say there weren’t other labor-saving devices or inventions that are just buried in rubble somewhere, or were made out of wood or some perishable material, or there are papyri with plans for things that we don’t have anymore? There’s so much that we don’t know. We tend to think we know so much about the ancient world, but we know an infinitesimal amount of what life was actually like back then.
Cassius:
Yeah, that’s a good observation too. The topic almost smacks to me of a kind of Marxist analysis. It strikes me as just far too easy to look at slavery as a social organization method and say that explains why the technology did not advance — as if having somebody at your elbow to carry out your wishes eliminates every reason to improve. Whether it’s avoiding disease, better food, or whatever, having a slave doesn’t mean life is everything you’d want it to be. So it’s always struck me that there must be at least a combination of factors, if not just something totally different, that would explain some of the different attitudes between the ancient world and the more modern world.
To try to keep this related — Lucretius is largely a science book. It’s the study of nature. And you are constantly sort of wrestling with the question: are you simply studying nature solely so you can get out from under the fear of gods, and once you’re out from the fear of gods, you just put it back on the shelf and don’t worry about it any further? I don’t think that could really have been the Epicurean attitude. That would be unfair to the people who held it. That’s the same attitude as running from pain — as soon as you get away from the immediate heat of the fire, that’s all you want in life. I don’t think that’s the way Epicurus would have looked at it either.
Don:
Yeah, I keep coming back to that with the whole idea of pain and pleasure — that you’re willing to put up with immediate pain that’s going to lead to more pleasure. So it’s not always about running away from pain. And I agree that some people try to characterize the philosophy that way. But in the few documents we have left, it’s about the long-term planning of your life to live as most pleasurably as possible. You will put up with some pains now to get more pleasure in the future. So yeah, it’s not just removal of pain.
Cassius:
Yeah, you’re about to get me wound up again, because that would be the argument I would see some people make — that Lucretius and Epicurus put all this effort into studying nature, did all these observations about atoms and void, came up with all these theories, but in the end all they wanted to do was blow up the idea of a supernatural God and get out from under the thumb of religion. And as soon as they achieved that goal, they just went back to their cave and started eating their wine and cheese and figs and put everything else aside, because that’s just the way people who pursue pleasure are — not very driven, not very interested in life, just interested in avoiding pain.
Don:
Seven volumes, just on On Nature…
Cassius:
Yeah. It’s not — if you want to avoid pain, there are a lot easier ways than putting all that work into composing all those volumes.
Don:
Exactly.
Cassius:
Is there anything else in the material from today that we should cover? These last two paragraphs we haven’t really discussed very much. But I’m not sure that I see the oblique nature of the zodiac or things like that being particularly helpful to us, because he’s in the end continuously showing that these are just alternate explanations. The very last sentence might be of interest. I don’t really know the significance when he talks about “the doctrine of the Chaldeans who followed the hypothesis of Berossus, and attempted to overthrow the vulgar astrology of the Greeks.” Do you guys know what’s referenced there in terms of Chaldean astrology being supposedly superior to the vulgar astrology of the Greeks?
Don:
Are the Chaldeans the same as the Babylonians? I thought so, but maybe wrong.
Cassius:
I guess it’s the Babylonian science of the Chaldeans, so the word’s right there. They were known for their astronomical observations and that sort of thing.
Don:
Actually, in Munro and in Bailey it’s “the Babylonians.” But Brown’s 1743 doesn’t have the word Babylonian that I see. Sorry, I was looking at one of the other translations.
I was surprised — I didn’t realize that the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn were as old as they are, evidently. It is interesting to see the sun move along the horizon throughout the year. My personal experience of this is that I have an infrared sensor on my garage door, and at certain points of the year the sun will hit it just right so it will not close in the morning. I literally have to block the sensor with something to get the door to close. That’s my connection to this astronomical phenomenon of the sun moving from one tropic to the other.
And I’m looking now at the Bailey version of that last sentence. It’s probably more clear than the 1743 version — when he says “as the Babylonian teaching of the Chaldeans, denying the science of the astronomers.” So what is he saying there? Is that an allusion to astrology versus astronomy, or just a different system?
Cassius:
That was my take too. I presume it’s a competing system, but they’re both still largely superstition-based.
Don:
Right — “as if the schemes of both could not be true, or you had less reason to embrace the one than the other.” So at least for today we end on another reference to being careful not to take a partisan view of one over the other unless you’ve got the evidence to do so.
Cassius:
That definitely seems to be the theme of this particular section of Book Five. Well, let’s begin to think about closing thoughts for the day. Martin?
Martin:
Yes. One more thing to add. He clearly states that the sun travels underneath the earth. This is again indirect support that he wouldn’t think of a flat earth, because if you really think this through as a three-dimensional picture — the sun going underneath the earth — then it plainly makes sense that the earth should be more like a sphere as well.
Cassius:
Yeah, basically everything — earth, moon, sun — everything’s a sphere. So it seems like I would agree.
Martin:
Yeah, that was all I still had to add for today.
Cassius:
Okay, so we didn’t have Charles with us today. We’ll hopefully have him back next week. Don, do you have any final thoughts for the day?
Don:
No, no — the only matter of trivia I’ll bring up is I had never heard of the goddess Matuta. That was a new one on me. That doesn’t even sound like a Roman or Greek name to me. Did you look it up?
Cassius:
Did you look it up to see?
Don:
I did look it up, and it’s the same goddess that we know sometimes as Aurora. It’s the goddess of the dawn. And that’s also the one in Homer where he describes her as “rosy-fingered” — “rosy-fingered Dawn.” That’s the whole idea of the rosy tinge across the horizon. And then where Lucretius talks about all that light coming together and forming the sun as it comes up in the morning — you can see that evidently from Mount Ida.
Cassius:
Yeah, yeah. I was about to make the ridiculous observation that Matuta sounds to me like a brand of an automobile. Just like Ahura Mazda was a god over in Iran, right? So I think of Mazda and Matuta.
Don:
I just did a Google of Matuta. It says “Matuta” or “Mater Matuta.” Tuta being a Latin word about taking care of something, like tutelage, or something along those lines. The only thing that jumped out at me first of all was Hakuna Matata. So it sounded like something from Disney’s The Lion King.
Cassius:
Hakuna Matata is the one that’s in The Lion King, but Matuta sounded like that. It is not connected, so I’ll just say that out loud. Only in my loosely connected brain.
Martin:
It’s in the sound systems of some African languages and Japanese that are very similar — consonant-vowel, consonant-vowel syllable structure. This could as well be an African language word or a Japanese word. So that is completely off topic. A good way to end the day, probably. And of course it matches Latin as well, because Latin has a similar sound system.
Cassius:
I don’t even know what we’re going to be into next week, but we’ll see. Okay, well with that then we’ll just agree to come back next week. Anybody have anything else?
Don:
That’s it for me.
Cassius:
Okay, well we’ll come back in a week and do it again. Thanks everybody for your time today.
Don:
Yeah, thanks. Bye.
Martin:
Bye-bye.