Episode 086 - Typhoons and Whirlwinds
Date: 09/04/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2170-episode-eighty-six-typhoons-and-whirlwinds/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The panel reads Book 6, lines 423–527, covering Lucretius’s account of prestors (the Greek term for whirlwinds or waterspouts), cloud formation, the water cycle, rain, and a brief mention of the rainbow. Don traces prestor in Aristotle’s meteorological treatise, where it appears as a variant of the Greek typhon; Martin explains cyclone physics, Mediterranean storm patterns, and why Roman naval disasters in northern waters involved extreme waves rather than hurricanes.
The episode closes with close attention to the Latin of line 527 — what Lucretius means by the “virtue and power of the seeds” (Brown) — with Don consulting Lewis and Short on elementis and reddita to determine whether Lucretius means “properties,” “powers,” or “qualities.” The next section will cover earthquakes, with the long-anticipated magnetism discussion still ahead.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 86 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host, Cassius, and together with my panelists at the EpicureanFriends.com Forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’s 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 Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. For anyone who is not familiar with our podcast, please visit EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about those, please be sure to contact us at the Forum for more information.
In this episode 86, we’ll read approximately Latin lines 423 through 527 as we discuss rain and storms and continue further into Book 6. I apologize that I’m going to sound congested in today’s reading, but Don and Martin do fine, so let’s now join Don reading today’s text.
Don:
It is easy from what has been observed to apprehend the cause of those whirlwinds which the Greeks from the nature of things justly call Presters, and how they descend from above and fall into the sea. They are sometimes seen to descend from the air into the water like a pillar, and the sea raging about with violent blasts of wind seems to boil and is exceedingly tossed, and whatever ships are caught within the reach of the hurricane are in the utmost danger of being cast away. This happens when the force of the wind impetuously whirling within the cloud is not able to break it but drives it on so that it falls like a column let down into the sea. This descent is gradual as if it was thrust by some hand or arm and spread over the waters. When the cloud bursts the fury of the wind breaks out among the waves and violently whirling around takes fire and raises a wonderful heat and fermentation in the waters, for a rolling whirlwind descends with the cloud which being slow in its motion it bears along with it through the air. And when it has thrust the heavy body of the cloud into the sea it plunges furiously with it into the water and with a dreadful noise sets all the element in a blaze.
It sometimes happens that a whirlwind as it passes through the air will scrape off some seeds from the bodies of the clouds and rolling itself within will look like a Prester descending from above into the sea. When this vortex of wind falls upon the earth it bursts out without being kindled into flame. It whirls with mighty force and raises a tempest and bears down everything before it. This sort of whirlwind is not common on land, for the high hills hinder its descent and break its force, but it appears frequently in the wide sea and in the open air.
Now for the origin of clouds. These are formed when certain rough and hooked seeds as they fly about at length in the higher region of the air that is above us are held together loosely and not bound in a close and strict embrace. Of these, thin and small clouds are first produced, and many of them meeting together and pressing close make the large and heavy clouds which the winds drive every way abroad till they break out into a raging storm. And then the nearer the tops of mountains approach the sky, the higher they are, the more they smoke and appear covered with the thick darkness of a yellow cloud because the mists that arise are so thin and subtle that before they are discovered by the eye they are carried aloft by the winds to the tops of the highest hills, and since they unite there in larger bodies and show thick and condensed they seem to rise from the tops of these hills into the air. For when we ascend a high mountain the thing itself and the sense demonstrate that the winds tend to the highest places and rain there.
Besides, that nature raises many exhalations from the wide sea, as plain by observing that garments expanded upon the shore will soon be wet. And therefore to form such vast bodies of clouds many seeds are thrown off and arise from the motion of salt waters, and we see that mists and watery particles rise from all the rivers and from the earth itself, which like a vapor are from thence squeezed out and carried upwards and cover the whole heavens with darkness, and uniting together by degrees are sufficient to produce the clouds. For the seeds that are continually descending from above in a confused manner continually beat these mists upon the back and by condensing and pressing them close form them into clouds over all the sky.
It may be likewise that seeds from without from the immense space of the universe may flow hither and unite in the production of the flying clouds, for I have proved before that these seeds are without number and that the void is infinite. I have shown how suddenly and with what celerity they pass through this boundless space; it is no wonder therefore that tempest and dark clouds are in so short a time frequently spread over the whole heavens and cover the high mountains. The seeds move with such quick motion, since from every quarter through all the passages of the air, through all the breathing places I may say of the universe, the seeds can make their way hither and unite or withdraw and fly away again.
And now I shall explain in what manner the rain is formed within the clouds above and falls down in showers upon the earth. I shall first show that many seeds of rain are raised from everything together with the clouds and that they increase together, both the clouds and the rain contained within, in the same manner as the blood increases in proportion with our bodies, or a sweat or any other moisture diffused through the limbs. The clouds likewise, like hanging fleeces of wool, suck up many particles of salt water when the winds drive them over the open sea. And so by the same rule a quantity of moisture is raised into the clouds from all the rivers, and there are many seeds of waters meeting from all parts and uniting variously together; the clouds being full are obliged to discharge their load of moisture for two reasons. Either the force of winds drives them close, or the number of them raised one above another presses them down from above with their own weight and makes the showers to pour down. Besides, when the clouds are made rare and thin by the winds or dissolved by the heat of the sun striking upon them, they discharge their rainy moisture and drop as wax dissolves and melts over a hot fire.
But expect a violent storm of rain when these clouds heaped up are pressed not only by their own weight but driven close by the stroke of winds from without. The rains used to confine us long at home and to last for some time when there are seeds of moisture in abundance, when the dropping clouds are raised on heaps above and are driven every way abroad, and when the earth thoroughly soaked sends back the vapors into the air.
And when the sun in a dark storm of rain strikes with its beams directly upon an opposite cloud full of moisture, then you see the colors of the rainbow drawn upon the black clouds. And all other appearances which are formed and increase in the upper regions of the air, and all the meteors that are raised in the clouds — the snow, the winds, the hail, the chilling frosts, and the strong ice that hardens the surface of the waters and stops and binds up the current of rivers as they flow — it is easy to account for all these and to apprehend their causes and how they are produced if you consider well the virtue and power of the seeds from whence they spring.
Cassius:
Thank you, Don. It’s easy to understand all these things, as you just said, once you think about the fundamental elements of the universe — I guess that’s our message for today. I love the way he goes on for line after line after line about the wind and the rain, and then at the end he’s like, “Oh hey, the snow, the wind, the hail, the chilly frost — yeah, you can explain all that easy.”
Don:
That’s okay.
Cassius:
Well, before we started today we were having a brief conversation about some of the background of this. Let’s go back and cover some of that, using passage 423 to talk about what the word Prester means. I see at least once in this passage the word hurricane appears, but I bet a lot — all I can do is speak for myself and say I have no clue, or had no clue, what a Prester was in reading all this, nor did I have a clue whether they had hurricanes in Athens or Rome in the area where this was written. So let’s try to clear that up for today. You said you looked into it, Don?
Don:
Yeah, the Prester, according to the LSJ — the main Greek dictionary — the definition is “a hurricane or waterspout attended with lightning.” And Prester is a Greek word; they have the Greek right there, P-R-E-S-T-E-R. It’s mentioned by Aristotle in his treatise on meteorology, evidently, and it said that the Prester is a variant of the — if we transliterate it — T-Y-P-H-O-N, so it looks like typhoon, which kind of surprised me. That is described as a whirlwind which forms within a cloud and, being unable to separate itself from the cloud, descends to the earth bringing the cloud with it. So this seems to be the tornado or the waterspout of modern meteorology. A tornado is a very intense progressive whirl of small diameter, and the funnel-shaped cloud is presumably the cloud which Aristotle’s whirlwind draws down with it. So they’re talking about that — Aristotle described whirlwinds, and Typhons, and Presters — but from what I could see, the Prester is a whirlwind or waterspout that descends into the water and is accompanied by lightning, so it looks like it’s on fire.
Cassius:
I don’t think I’m familiar with anything like that. Martin, can you explain to us what kind of phenomenon they have in the Mediterranean that they could be talking about here?
Martin:
Oh, we don’t have that kind of thing that much in Germany, so they definitely don’t have hurricanes. What they get in the Mediterranean is by far not as big as a hurricane. I read before that for the recent few hundred years where we have records, I think there were only two really hurricanes hitting Europe, and they were in Portugal and Spain — so there were Atlantic hurricanes. For the Mediterranean, I mean, they have also the same pattern — you have this whirlwind, but it doesn’t become as big. And nowadays it’s also not dangerous from the wind; it’s more that the torrential rains which come with it sometimes produce damage. But that might have been different, because otherwise how would the ancients have known? So apparently ships were in danger from these phenomena at that time.
Cassius:
Well, that would have to be a terrifying thing if you were out on the Mediterranean and you saw a flaming whirlwind coming out of the sky even once. I’m sure it would make an impression.
Martin:
Yeah, let’s talk about the flame for a second. I’m definitely not familiar with that. I’ve seen all the pictures of tornadoes in the United States; I don’t recall really any flame. The only thing I can really think of there is that it would be lightning within the cloud of the whirlwind, and so it looks like it’s burning from the inside if you have these flashes of lightning from the inside of the whirlwind. So that would be how I would interpret that.
Cassius:
Yes, and that sounds correct to me.
Martin:
And this would also explain some of the imprecise descriptions in Lucretius. Also, if you look at what actually happens — it’s not that, if you go back to the regular whirlwinds, the water — at least on this… I don’t know how to say this. The storm actually, the main movement is up. It’s around in a circle, of course, and then up, not down. So it comes actually from the water and goes up. And you can see this also from the decay in air pressure. That’s why also they’re called cyclones, because there’s an upward movement of the air, which is associated with a loss in pressure. And then, of course, the balance is off; first outside, then the wind goes down and moves towards that center of the storm, closer to the surface of the water. So you could actually have the water literally being sucked up into the cloud because of the difference in air pressure, and then the strong wind will accelerate the evaporation of the water and the strong waves, and you get these phenomena where the water is dispersed into many droplets.
So normally when you have a storm with big waves, they will form a really dense mist around the waves, and on top of the waves there is foam — the water is made into foam. And of course from there you can immediately saturate the air basically to 100% of its capacity. And then when the air movement goes up and it cools down, that will explain why we have a lot of rain coming with the gust winds when it forms a flood.
Cassius:
That all sounds absolutely terrifying. Martin, also — I guess the period of time we’re talking about, the Romans would have been in contact with England. I don’t know whether this would be before or after the Roman invasion of Britain, but what about the west coast of France and England? Do they see hurricanes off the Atlantic?
Martin:
No, no. There are no more hurricanes — nothing that strong. Of course they will be affected by stronger winds and rain, but the hurricanes will have lost too much in strength. Normally they would not be called hurricanes. They are the remains of what ends up there.
Cassius:
Do hurricanes typically travel from east to west in the Atlantic?
Martin:
Yes, exactly.
Cassius:
Because I know we’ve been hearing in the United States about one barreling down in Louisiana just within the next 24 hours it sounds like. So all the tracks are like east to west.
Martin:
Even those which are formed in the eastern Atlantic tend to move west. So this is what I mentioned — in recent history we have only two real hurricanes hitting a part of Europe, and that’s Portugal and Spain. They don’t continue up.
Cassius:
I know they go up the east coast of the United States and hit New York and go to Newfoundland and whatever, but they don’t rotate all the way around and follow the — what do you call the current they have there?
Martin:
The Gulf Stream. And going all the way to England — I think by the time they hit the colder water they lose all their power, because they generate more power from the warmer water in the equatorial zones, and then they sort of play themselves out whenever they come over land and get into the colder water.
Cassius:
Yes.
Martin:
Okay. So we have different reasons for heavy storms. Two expeditions of the Romans ended badly when, after successful campaigns in Germany, they took their ships in autumn back home, and they got into these nasty storms — not like hurricanes, but with extremely high waves. And if the ship isn’t built for this, it will sink.
Cassius:
Well, before we move on from the first passage — I don’t suppose there’s anything in what we have as a parenthetical expression, where it says “which the Greeks from the nature of things justly call Presters.” Is there any reference to that phrase “nature of things” when he talks about the Presters?
Martin:
That’s so obvious.
Cassius:
Yeah, that was kind of interesting.
Don:
Yeah, I see Bailey and Munro both just say “which the Greeks from their nature call by name Fire-breather and Prester.” And Stallings doesn’t even refer to that “nature” element there, but she doesn’t use the word Prester either. She calls them “Blowers.”
Cassius:
Maybe there’s something about the Greek word Prester that indicates what Greeks call Blowers or waterspouts.
Alright, the second passage, 431 — anything there? Probably that’s just mainly a repeat of what we’ve been discussing. “With the dreadful noise sets all the elements in a blaze.”
Don:
Yeah, there are several references here to fire, which, like you say, must be a reference to lightning.
Cassius:
Yeah, so it looks like the clouds are on fire if you have the lightning within the cloud itself. Right. Okay, well 443. Don’t let me go too fast there, Don, if you see something you’d like to talk about.
Don:
No, the only thing I’ll mention is that I’ve done this a number of times, but Lucretius’s — or if he’s using Epicurus’s words — their powers of observation I think are top rate. It just surprises me how the tiniest details he seems to mull over.
Cassius:
Yeah. I think we’re ready to move to 451 and talk about the origin of clouds. Does anybody have anything else to say about tempests? Okay, so let’s move on to 451. And of course, they are formed when rough and hooked seeds fly about at length in the higher region. And he’s saying the thin and small clouds are first produced and meet together and make the large and heavy clouds.
I find it interesting — and this is going to bring in some of the paragraphs that come later — but I find it interesting that he doesn’t equate the water itself with the mist in the clouds in such a way. It almost sounds like whenever he talks about the rain farther on, it’s like he sees clouds as some sort of fleece or some sort of material that soaks up the water and then releases it, instead of seeing the clouds themselves as composed of water.
Don:
That’s an interesting point. Because it almost sounds like — whenever he’s talking about the pressing down, that’s what will squeeze the clouds and actually squeeze the water out — like if you put a sponge in water and then squeeze it out. The cloud is the sponge and the water is the rain, but he’s not making the connection between the water and the rain.
Martin:
If you want to be — how to say this — make a charitable interpretation, then we can interpret the air as a sponge. And then the movement down or up of the air will be associated with it, but of course it’s normally the opposite of what he says. It’s when the air goes up that the water comes out, not when it’s pushed up.
Cassius:
Exactly. I did get some satisfaction from his observing about the clouds coming off the tops of the mountains, and he says it’s because the mists go up the mountains and then they’re pushed together at the top of the mountains — so the mountains aren’t making the clouds; it’s just that it’s up higher and there’s more wind and that sort of thing.
Well, I believe we’ve almost come to line 470, and that one has interested me, because when I first started reading it I thought this was a repeat of the example from earlier — I think it’s Book 1 or Book 2 — where he talks about garments drying off. But actually this is the reverse of drying off. And I’m not even sure — is he right about that? If you spread a garment on a seashore, does it become wet just from the salt water in the air? Is that something that happens on the ocean?
Martin:
That’s what happens — if you have the waves, especially the bigger waves, you will produce mist, and this will make it wet. And it also carries salt in these droplets, so you also get salt from that.
Cassius:
Well, I like the ocean, and I thought I’d been there enough to observe that, but that’s something I’m not familiar with. Don, have you witnessed that?
Don:
Well, it depends on what shore you’re on too. I mean, if you’re somewhere there were a lot of waves kicking up and things like that, it’s going to be more mist in the air. But if you’re on a beach in Miami or the Riviera, the sun’s probably going to take care of any of the mist that would come from some of the smaller waves. I think it just depends on the situation. If you go to the beach because the weather is nice, chances are the waves are very low, so then it doesn’t happen that much.
Martin:
And it’s especially not visible. The stronger the wind gets and the higher the waves come, then you observe this foam, and then eventually the mist runs, and this can become very dense in strong storms. But at that time, when this happens to where you can see it, you will not be at the beach.
Cassius:
In fact, Martin, you have me wondering now — my geography of Germany has never been very good, but these European countries on the north side where they have — I guess that’s the North Sea — I guess people go to the beach at the North Sea just like they go to the Riviera or to some place in Florida. But I would suspect that the climate and the temperatures would be a lot different there, in the regions around Norway and Sweden and Denmark and so forth.
Of course, Lucretius would have been talking about the Mediterranean versus those things, but maybe it’s easier to observe this phenomenon, and Don is making the point that the sun would burn it off. I’m used to the sun burning everything off when I go to the beach, I guess, but if the sun’s not so bright and hot like on the north side of Europe, maybe you see that happen more frequently.
Don:
And you also see — I don’t want to read too much into his word “shores” — there are different kinds of coastlines too. If you look at some of the coasts along California where the cliffs are really steep and the waves just smash on the cliffs and put up all the mist from the crashing waves, you can definitely get some mist there. But I do find your observation interesting, that he talked about clothes drying in one part and now clothes getting wet in this part. In different contexts and different scenarios, the same phenomenon can be used for different illustrations.
Cassius:
Yeah, I had never noticed that comparison before. Okay, and 476 and 483. I think we’ve mentioned it before, and I think Lucretius has mentioned it before — I can’t remember whether it was in Book 5 or Book 6 — about the whole idea of the water cycle. And I think he has a good basic grasp of it. Martin, can you feel free to say something about that? It seems to have a good idea of the water cycle.
Martin:
Yes. Yes. So that finds that the overall picture he got right.
Cassius:
I do find it kind of, let’s say, odd whenever he talks about the seeds coming in from outside our own world, outside our own little part of the universe, at line 483.
Martin:
Yeah, there’s definitely the idea that some clouds can be formed of seeds that come from outside and can be dispersed so quickly because they go outside. So it doesn’t seem like he’s got a very accurate concept of just the distances involved.
Cassius:
Once you get to the sky, it all seems to be in one place. Yeah, the vault, the vault of heaven. It definitely strikes me just from this — you have the sky, and then you have the clouds, and then just beyond the clouds is the vault of the heavens where the stars and planets and everything reside, and there’s some sort of permeable barrier there that seeds from outside our world can come in and form our clouds.
I don’t know that it’s very prominent here, but he clearly is thinking about that aspect of elements coming from other worlds to our world. And it might bring up — whenever they talk about other worlds and other peoples on other worlds — if you think of the Epicurean concept of our world as the globe of the earth, and then our clouds, and then the globe that surrounds us with the stars and planets, that’s a fairly self-contained little packet of the universe. So if you talk about other worlds, they may technically not be that far away. It seems like a much more compact, quote-unquote, “world” than I think we normally think of it, because even when we had talked about it before, I thought of the stars and planets in the shell surrounding the Earth as being pretty far away — but this makes me think that shell is a lot more compact than I had originally envisioned.
As we’re talking about it, I’m not even clear anymore in my mind whether he thinks that the stars and lights we see in the sky are actually planets themselves. It’s almost like those are features of the vault itself.
Martin:
Exactly.
Cassius:
And then on the other side of those things there are other worlds like ours with other vaults and planets within them maybe.
Martin:
Exactly.
Cassius:
Yeah, so it’s really not even necessarily the case that he would look up at any particular star and say, “Well, maybe there’s life on that star.” Maybe he’s talking about something on the other side of that.
Don:
Exactly. The life would be on another world encased in its own little vault of heaven somewhere else in the infinite universe. Those stars we see are just points of light or points of flame — however he’s described it before — and nothing could live on the stars or the planets, because if I remember correctly, planet is just the Greek word for “wandering star,” because they move around differently than the other stars in the background. So if you’re going to have something that lives on another world, it has to have its own little shell of stars and its own little rocky world in the middle of that shell.
Martin:
Yeah, interesting. I mean, he cannot have known this, but I read in one series that the reason we have surface water on Earth is meteorites — they provided it — so the water we have actually came in from outside. Not from far away; it came probably from the asteroid belt or somewhere. And that’s why we have this water. But of course when these come in, they come in a few at a time, and that is not enough to really form a cloud, so it would not produce this mechanism. But the mere fact that we have surface water here may be due to this coming in from outside.
Cassius:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I don’t see it as I’m scanning right this second, but I think the word meteorite does appear in this passage somewhere. He’s considering meteorites to be a feature of the meteorological phenomena — of the clouds, right — as opposed to something we’d think of separately. And since he talks about seeds coming together, the hooked and the rough and that sort of thing, possibly you could extrapolate that into: the meteorites that fall from the sky must have been formed in the sky somewhere and came from there. There’s no real conception of a rocky world in the vault of the heavens — if a rock falls out of the sky, it’s going to have to be formed in our quote-unquote sky somewhere.
Well, what we have at line 495 is largely the same water cycle material we’ve been talking about already, and that’s where we get into the hanging fleeces of wool, where they suck up the water and that sort of thing. That’s what made me think of the clouds as a substance to soak up water as opposed to water itself.
Don:
Right.
Cassius:
Yeah, and the clouds being full are obliged to discharge their load of moisture for two reasons, and then once again we get into: it could be this, or it could be this.
Don:
Right.
Cassius:
Yeah, and of course in one aspect it is wrong — so that means it’s the other way around, right? Explain that, Martin, what do you say?
Martin:
Yes. It’s the last sentence in that paragraph: “Besides, when the clouds are made rare and thin by the winds, or dissolved by the heat of the sun striking upon them, they discharge their rainy moisture and drop as wax dissolves and melts over a large fire.” This is wrong. When they become more dense and rise up to colder air, that’s when they discharge the rain, not when they are about to evaporate.
Cassius:
Yeah, okay. I thought that was an interesting metaphor though — the wax dissolving and melting over a fire. It’s like, oh, well, that’s how the rain comes: whenever the clouds dissolve, they let it pour down. It’s an interesting metaphor that he uses there. That’s certainly another example of him looking to the things around him that we can see on earth and analogizing that to a possible method for what he sees above. And again and again it’s that — I hesitate to say “hedging your bets,” but: it’s like, “Well, it could be this mechanism or it could be this mechanism, and we’re not sure, so I’ll just put them both here.”
Don:
Right, right.
Cassius:
Okay, 517 — “when we can expect a violent storm of rain when the clouds are driven close by the stroke of winds from without” — I guess another water cycle type of a paragraph there. And “when the earth thoroughly soaked sends back the vapors into the air.” Do we know if the water cycle was an accepted piece of knowledge back then? Is this a novel approach?
Don:
Oh, I don’t know.
Martin:
Yeah, I would expect Aristotle should have figured this out already.
Don:
Oh, that’s a good point. The fact that the Presters are mentioned in Aristotle’s meteorology treatise — I think it would be an interesting thing to look at in light of what Lucretius is talking about, to see what he actually figured out first. Not that I’m a big fan of Aristotle, but you know, we’ll use him for our own purposes if we have to.
Cassius:
Right, right. They certainly built on each other to some degree, in terms of the observations that they made. It’s more — maybe it’s more the conclusions they drew from the observations that’s the real problem.
Don:
I would agree. I would agree with that.
Cassius:
And of course 524 is a mention here of the nature of a rainbow; it doesn’t really go into a lot of detail explaining it.
Don:
Yeah, I was disappointed he didn’t get into more of that — like why the colors of the rainbow show up, from an Epicurean perspective. Because I could probably think of a dozen different explanations: it could be this, or it could be this, or it could be this. You’ve left us hanging there, leaving us wanting more. Though by omission it’s interesting to observe that he didn’t see any need to refute the idea that it was a sign from God — that He would promise never to send the rains to destroy the earth again. So I guess maybe the Judaic tradition had not penetrated that far at that point where he thought it was necessary to refute it.
I do find it interesting that he realized it’s something about the positions of the sun and the rain and the clouds that make the rainbow — that it wasn’t just a phenomenon that was on its own, that you had to have these components in place to see the rainbow. That’s an interesting thing. I personally just find rainbows fascinating.
Cassius:
Right, right. Well, exactly. The thing I just read not that long ago was the fact that even two people standing next to each other don’t see the same rainbow. It just blows my mind to think about the way that your eyes in relation to the rain and the clouds and the sun — you’re only seeing your rainbow, and everybody else is seeing their own, because of the way that the angles are. It just blows my mind.
Martin:
Yeah, this is probably the case when you stand close to Niagara Falls, because then you’re close to it. But if you’re far away, the cloud front is kilometers away, and I think just a meter shouldn’t matter.
Cassius:
Yeah, well, I agree with what you’re saying, Don — I’ve always found rainbows fascinating too. Sorry he didn’t go further into it.
All right, and then passage 527, we can talk about that. One thing that jumps out at me is the very last of what we have here. Brown translates that “these things are easy to account for and apprehend their causes if you consider well the virtue and power of the seeds from whence they spring.” And I’m going to jump to the conclusion that that’s an example of how the word virtue originally meant strength or something like that — would you say, Don? I wouldn’t think that he’s talking about their courage or their prudence or anything like that. And maybe there’s not even virtute in there, but I don’t have it.
Don:
I’ll grab my Loeb here real quick and see if I can figure out what’s at 527. I see Munro says “when you have fully understood the properties assigned to elements,” and Bailey says “when you have duly learned the powers that are vouchsafed to the elements.”
Cassius:
So power might be another synonym for virtute, if that’s the word that’s there. And did you say the Loeb has “when you have fully understood what qualities belong to their elements”?
Don:
That was Munro.
Cassius:
Oh, this is — this is Rouse and Smith in the Loeb, so evidently they’re using the same thing. Do you see the Latin?
Don:
Yeah, and that last line looks like: cum bene cognoris elementis reddita quae sint — so there’s no virtute or anything in there that I can see. I’m going back a few more lines — no. So maybe Brown is using “virtue and power” to stand in for the qualities that the others are translating as “qualities.” But virtue does seem to be an odd word choice there.
Cassius:
Yeah, but the other translators say “power” — well, “powers” is Bailey, and “properties” is Munro. I don’t even see what word gives “qualities.” Is it reddita, or?
Don:
It could be reddita. Let’s see what reddita — unfortunately I don’t have my Perseus Project up right now, so.
Cassius:
Well, I’m looking at my Loeb; it says “when you have fully understood what qualities belong to their elements,” right — so I don’t know where the word quality would come from there either. That normally wouldn’t lead us to belabor something like that, but it certainly reminds me of some of the earlier discussions about the properties of the elements versus the qualities of the bodies — that elements only have certain properties, but when you bring them together into bodies you have all of these qualities, which is where you get into the issues of accidents or events that arise from just the limited number of properties that the elements have. So maybe he didn’t intend to go that deep here.
Don:
I’m still digging around in that Latin and I cannot find reddita — that did not seem to pan out.
Cassius:
Yeah, I don’t see what word gives that. You said you found reddita — to me it just looked like “return” or “restored” or so.
Don:
That seems — hold on a second, we’ve got a couple minutes here, let me bring up my Perseus, because — so elementum is of course the first principles or simple substances. I wonder if — oh, that’s interesting. So cum bene cognoris elementis reddita quae sint — the elementis there, actually in the Lewis and Short dictionary, is “a first principle or an element — the first principles, rudiments in the arts and sciences, and the Categories of Aristotle, the beginnings of other things.” So maybe that whole idea of “qualities” is wrapped up in that word itself — those are like, you have to understand the first principles, or the primary elements, or the qualities of those elements. That’s interesting. And again, this is where I bemoan my lack of Latin. And I’m assuming cum bene cognoris is — “it’s good to know” — and reddita does have some connotations of “to make or cause a thing to appear” somehow. So maybe that phrase there is “to give back or render a thing according to its nature or qualities,” and those two words together might be getting at the whole idea of what those elements do — understand what their power is.
Cassius:
Well, after this discussion I’m beginning to think that maybe he’s really just referring to: you’ll understand how all this works when you understand the basic processes he’s been discussing.
Don:
No, I think you’re exactly right — as opposed to going all the way back to the elements themselves, he’s talking more about the overall processes. So you don’t have to know about the seeds themselves, but the way the seeds have interacted in a larger context, you can figure out why these things do what they do.
Cassius:
Okay, well, we’ve probably come to the end of a session for today. Let’s talk about any general comments that anybody has about what we’ve covered.
Martin:
All right, I think I’m good. That sort of took all my steam out there at the end.
Cassius:
Yes indeed. Well, I’ll make some notes as I edit about what we’ve just said — about the way he’s concluding that section as a general statement that we can figure out the rest of the things we see in the sky in terms of rain and clouds and so forth if we just start with the basics he’s been talking about over the last several paragraphs.
As we look forward, we’ll be discussing earthquakes next week, and there’s going to be some relationship to the winds. I think we’ll find next week that he’s talking about caverns and so forth beneath the earth that contribute to that — while I don’t think he’s really focusing on winds beneath the earth, he does make a reference to that. So we’ll be talking some more about what winds do next week.
And I think it’s important to say too that when we were talking about the “elements” in that last line in Latin, we’re not talking about the atoms — we’re talking about the processes and things like that. So I wouldn’t interpret “elements” as atoms there.
Don:
Right.
Cassius:
Okay, well, we’ll come to a close for today. We’ve got at least a couple more weeks before we get to the section that Don has been waiting for, about the death and plague that subsumes and consumes all of Athens. So we’ll have a little bit more time. And we’re still looking forward to the anticipated discussion about magnetism. So earthquakes first — okay, well, thanks for your time today. We’ll come back in a week and continue on. Talk to you soon.
Don:
Sounds good.
Cassius:
Bye bye.
Martin:
Okay.
Don:
Bye.