Episode 077 - The Formation of Language and Early Societies
Date: 07/02/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2074-episode-seventy-seven-formation-of-language-and-early-societies/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Panel reads Book 5 lines 1028–1105. Don reads passages on the natural origin of language, the impossibility of one man inventing and imposing names on others, and the parallel to animal communication (dogs, horses, birds). Cassius raises Epicurus’s On Nature Book 28 via Sedley’s paper, including the Megarian “hooded man” riddle and the etymology of kenon (void) traced to “the inside of an empty box.” Martin discusses fire from friction — bamboo forests, rocks, volcanic eruptions — and Don finds a 1910 Polynesian legend from Easter Island confirming crossed branches as a fire source.
The episode also covers fire as a civilizing force (contra the Prometheus myth), cooking learned by observing the sun ripen food, and the transition to organized society as kings build cities and gold eventually supplants beauty and strength as the primary social currency. Vatican Saying 43 on the love of money closes the discussion.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 77 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 with us at EpicureanFriends.com for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules, and to comment on anything you hear in these episodes. In this episode 77, we’ll read approximately Latin lines 1028 through 1105 from Book 5. We’ll talk about how nature prompted humans to form languages and the beginnings of organized society. Now let’s join Don reading today’s text.
Don:
Nature compelled them to use the various sounds of the tongue, and convenience taught them to express the names of things, like children, before they can well speak, are forced to make use of signs, and are obliged to point with their finger to the objects that lie before them, for every creature is sensible what faculties it has and how to use them. So calves, before the horns appear upon their heads, will butt fiercely and push with them when they are enraged, and the whelps of panthers and lions will defend themselves with their claws and feet and teeth when their claws and teeth are scarce to be seen, and all kinds of birds we observe trust to their wings and rely upon the fluttering support of their pinions. But to think that one man gave names to all things, and that men from thence learnt the first elements of speech is absurd and ridiculous. For why should one man distinguish everything by a name, and use the various accents of the tongue, and at the same time another not be as capable of doing this as he? Besides, if others had not the use of words among them as soon, how could they be acquainted with the use of them? Or by what art would this one man make them known and understand what he designed? One alone could not compel the rest, and by force make them learn the catalog of his names. He could not prevail by reason, or persuade men so unfit to hear to do so as he directed. Nor would they bear with patience, or by any means endure, to have the strange sounds of unintelligible words any longer prattling in their ears to no purpose. And then, what is there so very wonderful in this, that men, to whom nature has given a voice and a tongue, should, according to the various knowledge they had conceived of the great variety of things, distinguish each of them by a proper name, when mute cattle and the several kinds of wild beasts express their passions by different voices and sounds, when their fear, their grief, or their joys are strong upon them, and that they do so, you may observe, from evident examples. For when fierce mastiffs are at first provoked, with snarl, grin, and show their hard white teeth, and threaten in their rage with lower sounds than those they rend the air with when they bark and roar aloud. But when they gently lick their whelps, with their soft tongue, or toss them with their feet, or seem to bite and fondly gape as if to eat them up, but never touch them with their teeth, they show their pleasure with a whining voice. Not so as when they howl left by themselves at home, or when they whimper with their crouching bodies to shun the coming blow. And does not the horse with different neighings fill the air when, hot in blood in the prime of youth, he is sorely galled with the spurs of winged love, and rages in his lust among the mares, and, eager to engage, with open nostrils snuffs the scent? Does he not shake his trembling limbs and neigh for other reasons, with far other sounds? And then the feathered race, the various kinds of birds, the hawk, the osprey, and seagulls, that live and seek their food in the salt waves, they throw out other notes at other times than when they strive for food and fight for prey. And some will change their hoarse voice according to the different qualities of the air, as the long-lived ravens and the flocks of crows when they are said to call for rain and showers, and sometimes to cry for wind and storms. If therefore the different perception of things will compel these creatures, mute as they are, to send out different sounds, how much more reasonable is it that men should be able to mark out different things by different names? You may desire perhaps to be satisfied in other inquiries. Know then that thunder first brought down fire to the earth. All the fire in this lower world is in a great measure derived from thence. For many things we observe are set on fire by lightning when the vapors fly out from certain quarters of the heavens and the branches of trees pressing hard upon one another when they are driven backward and forward by the winds, grow hot, and by the violent agitation burst out into a rapid flame. And sometimes the bowels and bodies of trees, by rubbing together, will kindle and fly out into a blaze, and thus fire might be produced from either cause. But the sun first taught mankind to dress their food and soften it by heat, for they observed the fruits in the fields grew tender and ripe by the warmth and power of his rays. And so those who had more wit and sense taught their neighbors every day to leave their old diet and their former way of life to enter upon a new course and use the benefit of fire. And now their kings began to build cities and to raise castles as a defense to themselves and refuge in time of danger. They divided the cattle and the fields and gave to everyone as he excelled in beauty, in strength, and understanding, for beauty and strength were then in great repute and bore away the prize. At last riches and gold were found out which soon took away the honor from the strong and beautiful. Even the brave and beautiful themselves commonly follow the fashion of the rich.
Cassius:
Thank you, Don, for reading that today. We have now progressed from running around in the forest to the openings of language and maybe closer society. So let’s see, where shall we start? Well, it seems we’re starting with language, at least in the first part of that section there. I want to ask Martin later on about the branches and the fire, but we’ll leave that for a little bit later. We’ve talked about that in the past. I remember it.
Don:
Exactly. So we came across that and that was a matter of dispute, I believe, when we talked about it before. So it’s coming back again here. But you know, Cassius, when you made the reference to the language, I was looking at that first paragraph and trying to fit how the first one fits into the sequence today. And looking at many of these things from sort of a DeWittian point of view — that anticipations, or preconceptions, or prolepsis ought to be some kind of an intuitive thing — I suppose this first paragraph before he gets into language might be not just a transitional introduction into language, but also he’s talking about even when you’re young — you don’t even have, if you’re a calf, you don’t even have horns yet, but you’re already being disposed by nature. You have a premonition, I guess, that they’re going to develop and that nature is leading you to defend yourself or to interact with others. So what do you think about the first paragraph?
Cassius:
Yeah, I think you’re absolutely onto it. It’s hilarious to watch young calves. I have seen some young musk ox that are known for butting their heads against each other in the Arctic and the babies will do the same thing whenever they’re running around the fields and butt into tires and trees and things like that. And it’s hilarious to watch because there’s no horns there — and that’s exactly what I thought of whenever Lucretius was describing the calves butting their heads and things. Yeah, I’ve seen goats do some things as well. For every creature is sensible what faculties it has and how to use them, even when they’re so young that those faculties haven’t developed yet to the point of being in their highest and best use. And of course that’s relevant too because he’s about to launch a discussion that language was not given to us by the gods or remembered from some prior life. He’s launching into a discussion of it coming from our nature as humans, I guess. Martin, you have any thought about — you’ve had a lot of comment on sort of the evolutionary aspect of things and how some of what Lucretius talks about is or is not related to that. Before we launch into the real issue of who selected the words and all of the detail of language, do you have anything about that first paragraph — for example, where the young birds are fluttering their wings even before they can fly?
Martin:
I mean, he is not using an example where he goes from observation with just a simple conclusion to what is then presumably correct. He sees that at least the higher species of animals all have some sort of communication and are practicing their skills in a way that the small little ones do the things — or try to do things — what their adults are doing. So in this way it makes sense to conclude from there that the development of language in humans is very similar to this.
Cassius:
Yeah, I think it’s great that he uses the exact example of human children too, pointing at things and trying to communicate in a rudimentary way before they can even use words. So the basis for communication is there even in a pre-verbal state. Right, it’s that aspect of things that continues to interest me — that I don’t know that I can articulate exactly why or where I think it leads — but as Martin’s been commenting the last couple of weeks, his paradigm is not starting from zero and evolving at a very slow pace over time, like I think our current viewpoint is. It’s like nature is really performing the functions that you sometimes think of — or I sometimes think of — as God, or as we would do ourselves if we’re creating a machine or something like that. He has nature in this role that these faculties are there at birth. I mean, I guess that’s the point Martin was raising — he’s got fully formed human beings coming out of the ground in the early stages of the earth, and I suppose in the same way that this earth is able to give birth to fully formed human beings, nature is investing in particular types of creatures particular types of faculties.
Don:
Right, yeah, and it’s interesting too that he uses language like — you know, “nature compelled them,” or I’m looking at the Loeb translation, “nature drove them” — and it seems to be giving nature a — what I want to say — an active principle. I remember there’s a section in the DeWitt book where he says that what Epicurus would be talking about would be human nature, and I’ve wrestled with that in the past as well. I’ve not always been convinced by that. I did look at the Lewis and Short definition for the Latin word natura — actually used for nature — and there are some things here in the definition itself: the natural constitution, property or quality of a thing; the nature, course or order of things; the consistency with nature. So it is sort of like Einstein’s or Spinoza’s God — we’re talking about just the sum total of the physical laws and order of things that he might be talking about. And if you have nature written large in a certain way, this is the way things are going to play out. So whenever he says that nature compels them to do this, it might just mean that if things are the way they are, this is the way things are going to happen — so there doesn’t have to necessarily be a nature with a capital N, personified, but it’s just that if things are set up this way, this is the way things are going to happen, and they’re going to be compelled to do this.
Cassius:
Yeah, that helps explain the issue because it’s very interesting to me that you could go along with what you’ve just said and never go to the next step of sort of personifying nature as Venus, or at the end of the book where he talks about death he has “what if nature were to say these things to us,” and so forth. The relationship of his personification of nature to the physics — one of the points he makes is, “call upon Ceres if you like, or call upon gods if you like, as long as you don’t allow yourself to go into the supernatural side of things.” Maybe he thinks it’s harmless, maybe he thinks it’s useful, maybe he thinks it’s accurate in some way. I guess that would be one way I would describe the problem going through my mind: is he doing this because it’s useful? Or is he doing it because it is in some way accurately describing something?
Don:
Well, you also have to look at it too. I mean, he is writing a poem. He’s using poetic language and metaphor and illustrations and, like you said, the gods of the harvest and Dionysus and those sorts of things, personifying these things in a poetical sort of way. So I think that as a background, it’s the whole honey on the wormwood cup again, to use his own analogy.
Cassius:
Right. At least some of it, though, would exist in the more original text. I think the phrase — the one that always comes to mind — is “give thanks to nature that she’s made the necessary easy to get,” something like that. So it’s not just Lucretius, but I agree with you that the poetic form is going to bring that out. Well, anyway, that’s part of the ongoing issues in interpreting Lucretius and Epicurus that we’re not going to solve today. So what we have, at line 1041, is where we get right into the issue of where did language and words and so forth come from. And I will put in a plug here — I tried to read the Sedley paper on On Nature Book 28. It’s available on, I believe it’s Academia.edu — it’s freely available on the internet if you search for it. But man it’s dense. There is a lot of stuff going on. I think there’s like 79 pages on the paper that Sedley writes on On Nature Book 28. But I think it’s so important to have that original writing by Epicurus even if it is fragmentary in some places and there’s a little bit of reconstruction. There’s enough there that Sedley can really dig into the whole origin of language and the implications of it. And it’s a fascinating read, but wow, my eyes were starting to cross after a while with all the convoluted arguments and everything.
Cassius:
Well, what did you get in the most fundamental terms? Are we back again to contrasting this with Plato as the major thing we need to do, or what?
Don:
You know, oddly enough, it seems that the Megarians — the philosophical school of Megara — are the ones that seem to come in for the most play in this particular paper. And I find it interesting that there is a reference from Laertius that Epicurus did actually write a treatise against the Megarian school. So this seems to be the ones that he’s really going after in this particular one. But it seems to me, at least from what I could glean, that it is the whole idea that there doesn’t have to be a specific relation between the word itself and the thing that it describes. That Epicurus is going along the lines that language evolved from the feelings that you feel about particular things — and exactly what Lucretius is saying here about that you see animals use different tones of voice and different growls for different situations. It seems like Epicurus was saying the same thing with humans — that they have particular reactions to things, and the verbalizations and utterances that come from those are the things that finally get attached to things in the world.
Cassius:
Well, Don, the Megarians are one of those Greek schools whose name does not give a whole lot of hint as to what they stood for. Did you pick that detail up, or do you remember?
Don:
Well, they seem to be one of the things that Sedley talks about in the article and that Epicurus wrote about in Book 28 — was the whole idea of knowing and not knowing something at the same time. And this was later on in the arguments, but the analogy that they used was the “hooded man” riddle, that I guess was used by the Sophists and the Megarians to illustrate this point about language. The idea is that a person is presented with another person with a hood over their face, and the person is asked, “Do you know this person?” And of course the hooded person is disguised so you don’t know who they are — and you say, “No, I don’t know that person.” So they take the hood off and here it’s the person’s father. So they knew them all along, but they didn’t know them when they had the hood on. So now you obviously don’t know something and know something at the same time — because you actually know the person but you didn’t know them because there was a hood. It just seemed like a ridiculous argument to me, but it was like a riddle that the Sophists used to say, “You can know something and not know something at the same time.” And there’s a whole section in Book 28 on analyzing that riddle.
Cassius:
Yeah, we talk about Plato a lot, and not to say anything good about him, but it certainly looks like there were others who were far worse than Plato ever thought about being in terms of playing word games.
Don:
Exactly. And that’s — I think you said that really well. I think that’s what Epicurus was trying to get away from. He was always looking for — even words that were eventually used for abstract concepts — he always wanted to go back to the original meaning. I thought it was interesting that one of the things Sedley talks about here from Book 28 is the idea of the word kenon for void — for emptiness — in “atoms and void.” And the original meaning — the analogy he used — was the inside of an empty box. If you put your hand inside an empty box you can move it around, so the whole idea of kenon, void or emptiness, is the ability to move around. And atoms are constantly moving in the void. And if you use kenon as an abstract concept you still go back to that original meaning of the idea of an empty box and the ability to move, and that transfers directly over even whenever you’re using it as an abstract concept. So he was always trying to go back to the original meanings of words even if they were used in that abstract sense.
Cassius:
Martin, you jump in anytime.
Martin:
If I have an idea that I can really contribute, I’ll do that.
Cassius:
Okay, absolutely. Yeah, this was kind of deep. I’m not sure whether I think that the primary point here is the aspect of whether one man came up with a word and it somehow spread to others, or whether we’re talking maybe more abstractly about whether a word is somehow naturally connected to the thing that it describes. Because I know there is a lot of that thought at least in some people who read the Letter to Herodotus — I think there are some discussions there about phantasms and different Greek words that I’m not competent to struggle with. But certainly there is the conceptual issue of what is a word, what is a concept, are they in any way naturally linked to the subject they’re discussing, or are they purely made up by man for our use in describing things? And that goes into this whole issue of universals that we were talking about recently as well, because it could certainly get very deep here. But Don, do you have a sense about whether he’s primarily concerned about whether a single man came up with words as a practical question, or is he immediately here more concerned about the abstract issue about whether a word has any kind of natural connection to the thing being described or not?
Don:
Yeah, at least here in Lucretius, it definitely seems like he’s talking about the fact that it doesn’t make sense for one man to impose his words for things on everybody else. Because if one man could do it, then every other man could do it. And so there would be competing candidates for whatever you wanted to call something, and then language would never arise because everybody would be speaking their own language.
Cassius:
Yeah, that’s a particularly interesting part. I guess that’s part of this paragraph at line 1041 that we’re talking about, because you’ve got that same circular issue about how could the gods have created the planet or the universe when they didn’t have a pattern to go by — and this is related to that, I think.
Don:
Yes, that’s a really good point. I think that that’s the idea — or at least an argument — for the natural arising of language from the idea of the sounds that dogs make, or the sounds that birds make, or the sounds that horses make. Humans in their infancy, whenever they rose up out of the earth, so to speak, are making noises in reaction to things. And as time went along, those utterances then became attached to those things within different groups, and so then everybody would react the same way because they were part of the same community. And then that’s how that particular language would rise up. One of the things that I believe I remember from reading the Book 28 material too is that that’s one of the arguments for different languages as well — that different people living in different areas would have different reactions to things. And that’s why different languages arise, because not everybody has the same reaction to different phenomena. And that’s how different words would come to be associated with technically the same thing. You look at the same thing in one area and look at the same thing in a different area, you might have different reactions to it. And that was one of the arguments for different languages arising in different places. And I guess he’s reinforcing that in the next several passages or paragraphs here by referring to the different types of animals — the cattle and the mastiff and the horses — who communicate in their own ways, so that it should not be something that seems overly wonderful to us or magical that the humans would be able to do this as well.
Cassius:
In a reverse kind of way, we don’t think that what the cattle or the cat or the dog are doing with their communications is anything magical. We don’t think that they’re in touch with some kind of divine being or divine ideal realm, that their communication is in any way connected like that. So why should we think that ours is either?
Don:
Exactly. I think that’s well put. And it’s another one of those things too that Epicurus always seems to be going back to — children and animals — to look at how nature manifests itself. Even in the area of pain and pleasure. So even in the origin of language he’s looking at nature and children and animals to say, “Well, here are the rudiments of what we’re talking about, and this is the natural progression of where things came from.” “If the different perception of things will compel these creatures, mute as they are, to send out different sounds, how much more reasonable is it that men should be able to mark out different things by different names?” So what that line seems to say to me is that the language that humans speak is just an advanced form of the sounds that dogs make and horses make, on a different level — but it’s a difference in degree and not kind. Is that the right way of putting that sort of thing?
Cassius:
Right, exactly. The reverse would be the Platonic view. There you go. Yeah. We don’t think that our communication is different in kind from the communication of the dog running around barking at the burglar — just more complex. It’s a fascinating subject. And whenever he was talking about the one person coming up with names for things and making other people use them —
Don:
I could not help but think about constructed languages like Klingon and Elvish and all those sorts of things that are created by one person and that are used in various forms of entertainment, books, and things like that. But they couldn’t do that if the idea of language and communication didn’t already exist. So even though you do have people coming up with fully blown languages themselves, you still need the underlying concepts that are involved in language for them to even do that as well. So it’s not like they came up with those names even though those words may never have existed before — you still need the underpinnings of language and linguistics to be able to do something like that.
Cassius:
Don, I think that line 1087 serves as sort of a dividing line, and the last two paragraphs we’re going to talk about today move on to a little bit different subject. So why don’t we go on to the final two paragraphs that we have for today — lines 1091 and 1105 — because the subject seems to change. What do you make of the subject that we’re turning to, Don?
Don:
I think it’s interesting that he brings up the whole idea of fire, and then the fact that it was so instrumental in changing the way people lived. Because he’s really talking here about changing their diets and cooking their food, and it’s a whole paradigm shift from running naked in the woods and eating acorns.
Cassius:
Well, is he intentionally just contrasting this with the Prometheus myth of a god bringing down fire to us?
Don:
Oh, I think that’s definitely part of it. It’s not said explicitly, but I think that’s definitely — we got fire, and we did not get it from the gods. We either got it from lightning coming down, or from the branches of trees rubbing together. Let’s talk about the branches of trees. What do you guys remember about the prior discussion? Martin, I do remember your being involved in that, because I think you were maintaining that it is possible that this happened. Do you remember that?
Martin:
Yes, I remember it, but I cannot find the source now. When I just looked through again I find a lot of contradictory statements. So “branch on branch” — I found one answer, “no, that’s not happening,” but elsewhere I found in bamboo forests that may happen. So that in that case it’s not so much branch on branch — it’s them against them — because I know this from having seen bamboo forests actually. So depending on what species it is, these bamboos really bend easily in the wind, and that may lead to sufficient friction against each other. So in some accounts, friction of tree against tree causing fire may make sense. Then in another answer it was said it’s not a rubbing of branch against branch, it’s a rubbing of leaf against dry leaf. But this does not really convince me, because you need force to create sufficient friction to create heat, and leaves are too soft — they will just decay before they get hot enough, is my expectation. And then something which we didn’t find last time — another way that may happen is that rocks falling down a slope and hitting another type of rock may create sparks, and if the forest is very dry, especially with dry leaves, once you have the spark hitting them the fire would start. So in a dry forest, once the fire starts, the spread is easily explained. Then of course a trivial example that is apparently observed is lightning, and then the heat from volcanic eruptions causes fires, and probably the impact of meteorites into a dry forest may start fires too.
Don:
Oddly enough, I was doing a quick internet search here and there’s a book from 1910 called The Legends of Maui: A Demigod of Polynesia, and there’s a line in it that says the natives of Easter Island say that their ancestors learned how to make fire by seeing smoke rise from crossed branches rubbing together while trees were shaken by fierce winds.
Martin:
So that’s from Polynesia. That is unexpected.
Cassius:
Yeah, the branches at the top of trees going back and forth in the wind strikes me as a pretty reasonable way that that could happen. But I don’t think we found that the last time we talked — the Polynesian example. That’s good. They believe their ancestors learned to make fire by seeing smoke rise from crossed branches rubbing together while trees were shaken by fierce winds. So it doesn’t say what kind of trees they were, or that kind of thing. But just the fact that that is from Polynesia — and the ancient Greeks and Polynesia did not have any contact from what I can remember — it does still… I have to agree with Martin that it does seem a bit improbable as a general rule.
Cassius:
Well, in this paragraph that we’re in now, we extend the rubbing together of the branches to the issue of men learning to cook their food by observing the sun — basically, that the sun ripens things. Now that strikes me as a little bit odd as well, that we would learn to cook based on the sun.
Don:
Oh yeah, I could see that because I mean if you leave something out it’s going to dry. I mean if you were making jerky or something like that you would sort of get the idea from seeing either fruits or even animal carcasses getting dried up by the sun. And it’s like, “Well, that might be interesting,” and I could see that as at least a possibility. I’m not much of a cook at all, but is that something that people traditionally do — is dry things out in the sun?
Cassius:
Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, you see like Alaskan communities and things like hanging up salmon and that sort of thing, and Native Americans — that was a big thing to dry their food in the sun to preserve it.
Martin:
Although in Africa they’re drying fish, and this dried fish if you put it in a soup it just falls apart. So it’s no more the body of the fish — it’s then very small pieces dissolving into what makes apparently a thick soup.
Don:
Yeah, yeah, so I could definitely see that. And I think the point about the whole idea of contrasting it against Prometheus bestowing fire upon humans is a good point too — that again, this is a natural occurrence, and here’s how it could have happened, and these are some various theories on how people started cooking with fire and how we got to use fire to make things.
Cassius:
Okay, well the final passage we have today, at line 1105, begins to move us to another transition — we decided to stop here for today, but next week in the middle of all the science we go into one of the most ethical sections that’s in the whole poem. But the transition phase is this passage at line 1105, where he talks about kings beginning to build castles, and then he ends on a sort of sarcastic or poetic or some kind of interesting comment about how even the brave and beautiful themselves commonly follow the fashion of the rich. Because he’s talking about the brave and the beautiful being the commodities that kings value the most at the start, but even the brave and beautiful follow the fashion of the rich. Isn’t that true?
Don:
I mean, yes, I think it is. It’s kind of like gold takes over everything — gold takes precedence over beauty and bravery. And there are other things which I can’t believe he’s really happy to observe, but nevertheless he’s probably right — it does in many cases. I remember a line from Thoreau’s Walden — he was talking about how he just wore plain clothes that he made himself and things like that when he was living in the woods, and he was deriding the whole idea of fashion. He says, “You know, somebody in Paris puts on a hat and everybody in the United States puts on the same hat,” that sort of thing.
Cassius:
This very last sentence may be something that goes equally — or if not better — with what we’re going to talk about next week, because this last sentence is clearly something that’s negative, and the remedy for it is what we’re going to discuss next week.
Don:
Exactly. This is like a teaser. Yeah. But I think he sets up perfectly the whole idea that that’s how kings came into power and then gold was discovered and that took the place — because it seems to me that this is saying that beauty and strength are tangible concepts that we can see. If somebody’s strong and helps out the community we can appreciate that. If somebody’s beautiful, you can appreciate that. But then once gold was found and people pursued riches that way, that abstract concept of gold as a commodity was the thing that superseded even the natural things of beauty and strength. But it starts the paragraph with the idea that again, the way of organization is not handed down by a god or whatever, but that “those who had more wit and sense taught their neighbors to leave their old diet and enter upon a new course of life and use the benefit of fire.”
Cassius:
I find it interesting the last few lines there in the Perseus version: “Thereafter wealth was discovered and gold was brought to light, which soon of honor stripped both strong and fair, for men however beautiful in form or valorous will follow in the main the rich man’s party.” That is very interesting to me. Like you said, it’s true in many cases anyway, at least. And you have — I’m thinking things like pop culture and fashion — somebody who’s rich gets imitated by a large segment of the population. So — one of the Vatican Sayings was about the love of money. It’s not exactly the biblical version, but remember what I’m talking about — Vatican Saying 43, it looks like: “The love of money, if unjustly gained, is impious, and if justly gained, is shameful, for it is unseemly to be parsimonious even with justice on one side.” I was thinking to myself before today I wanted to go back especially given what we’re going to talk about next week and look at whatever there is left of Philodemus’s On Property Management.
Cassius:
But okay, beauty and strength strike me as something that clearly come from nature, and you can see nature being directly involved in them. But I wonder if money is in the same category — I tend to think that it’s not.
Don:
Yeah, money is definitely a concept — something that a community agrees on. Just like a piece of paper: you can go out and exchange it for a piece of bread because everybody agrees that this piece of paper is worth x number of loaves of bread. Money is definitely an abstract concept. And I notice that the Epicurus Wiki translates Vatican Saying 43 as: “To love money unjustly is impious, while to do so justly is shameful, because it is improper to be stingy even justly.”
Cassius:
That’s a good example of one of those things that’s really kind of hard to decipher. You want to decipher that, Don?
Don:
No. It’s clearly saying something negative about the love of money, but the way that justice is thrown in there would probably take far too long for today to try to dissect it. But there’s something about — and of course the whole Epicurean concept of justice is so difficult as well — I suppose if you were to just insert “by agreement” there, or “contractually,” you could potentially make some sense out of it, in saying that it doesn’t matter whether you gained it by agreement or by stealing it, it’s still unseemly.
Don:
Yeah, I think it always goes back to — if I remember correctly in Philodemus — it’s that you shouldn’t be stingy, because that will show people that you’re stingy and nobody will want to be your friend. And in the other direction, if you’re profligate and doling out money, people will just want you for your money. So there has to be — I hesitate to say “middle path” or something — but there’s something in there like that.
Cassius:
Don, this is an example of where I certainly wish I had dedicated my life fifty years ago to understanding Greek, because you’d have to be able to understand the Greek. But part of what jumps out at me is a problem with what it’s saying here — “parsimonious” means, like you said, “stingy” a moment ago. “Stingy” is not necessarily, to me, something that’s consistent with the rest of the meaning of this paragraph, because it seems to me that the focus is on money and how you gain it. What does stinginess have to do with that exactly?
Don:
Exactly.
Cassius:
It seems to me maybe that’s a poorly translated word, and that the whole focus all the way through is on your love of money. Because “parsimonious” is not a word that jumps off my tongue every day, and it does mean “stingy” — as opposed to just “loving money.” I think that something more consistent with the meaning would be: loving the money that you gain justly is impious, and loving the money that you gain unjustly is shameful — and just leave it at that, and not try to work stinginess into the concept there.
Don:
Exactly. I think you’re absolutely right. I think especially in some of these things — and I think we’re going to talk about next week again as a teaser — it really has to do with the English translation, and you really have to go back and look at the Greek originals and see what it actually says. Because a lot of that I think does come across and a lot of it is moralistic, and just the way that it was translated at the time things were translated. So I fully agree with you there.
Cassius:
But for now, and for today, this last sentence in what we’re talking about — it’s an interesting juxtaposition to me to consider how it fits in with beauty and strength. Because like I say, those seem to be natural endowments that you can fairly easily trace back to nature immediately. But to me, I don’t know that gold or riches are necessarily something that are as closely connected with a natural preconception or natural anticipation — because you recognize what’s strong and you recognize what’s beautiful at a pretty early age. That would be something that nature — among young of all kinds, or at least humans — you could certainly say that. But as far as money goes — so that would be one of the ways that I’m going to work on distinguishing the subject next week: that joy and delight can occur, and braveness and beauty and all sorts of things in the world, but the further you get away from the natural dispositions to things, like money, the more difficulty you’re going to have.
Don:
I fully agree. I think you’re definitely onto something.
Cassius:
Martin, we’re beginning to run long for today. Do you have something new to add right now, or any closing thoughts?
Martin:
I’ve said everything already.
Cassius:
All right, well, Don, any closing thoughts for the day?
Don:
I think I would just encourage people to look up that Sedley paper on On Nature Book 28. It’s a fascinating read if you’re interested in the whole idea of the origin of language. And of course what we were referring to as well today was Sedley’s Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, which is probably one of the best Lucretius books that many haven’t been exposed to — but it certainly has a lot of good raw material in it.
Cassius:
I agree. Okay, well hopefully we’ll have Charles back with us next week, and we’ll move on in Book Five as we begin to close in on the ending of Book Five. So if nobody has anything else, we will close for today.
Don:
Sounds good. Thanks.
Cassius:
Bye bye.