Episode 092 - The Plague of Athens, And The End of the Poem
Date: 10/12/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2221-episode-ninety-two-the-plague-of-athens-and-the-end-of-the-poem/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The final regular episode of the poem covers Book 6 from line 1125 to the end — Lucretius’s account of the plague in Athens, adapted from Thucydides. Joshua, Don, and Martin share the reading. Cassius notes a recap episode will follow next week, with further plans to be announced.
Discussion centers on three interpretations of the ending: (1) the poem is complete and the plague is a test of whether the reader has absorbed the philosophy (Greenblatt); (2) the poem is essentially complete but unrevised — Santayana argued Lucretius would have ended with a hymn to Mars mirroring the opening hymn to Venus, but the plague passage is almost that hymn; (3) Norman DeWitt’s hypothesis that a seventh book on the gods was planned. David Sedley’s commentary is cited to show Lucretius deliberately shifts the direction of plague’s spread from Thucydides’ account to make a point about universality.
Martin’s candidate for the plague’s identity is Lassa fever, which matches the symptom profile and the African origin. Cassius is careful to clarify the plague passage is not a moral condemnation of the Athenians but a picture of the world without Epicurean philosophy — these people predated Epicurus by a century. The episode closes with discussion of Epicurean funerary rites (non fui, fui, non sum, non curo; the “joyful Epicurean chorus” inscription from Naples; Vatican Saying 47), Menander’s epigram about the twin sons of Neocles, and the symmetry of the poem’s opening word (motherhood/birth) with its final word (departure/abandonment).
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 92 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 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.
This episode 92 will be the last of our regular episodes as we complete Book 6 and read Latin lines 1125 to the end of the poem. We’ll discuss our impressions of the plague of Athens today, and then next week we’ll have a recap of our impressions of the entire poem. In honor of our completion of the poem, we’ll split today’s reading with Joshua, Don, and Martin each taking a part. Now let’s join our panel reading today’s text.
Joshua:
One such plague as this, such deadly blasts, poisoned the coasts of Athens, founded by Cecrops. It raged through every street, unpeopled all the city. For coming from far, from Egypt where it first began, and having passed through a long tract of air and over the wide sea, it fixed at last upon the subjects of King Pandion. Men soon by heaps fell victim to the rage of death and the disease.
The head was first attacked with furious heats, and then the eyes turned bloodshot and inflamed. The jaws within sweated with black blood. The throat, the passage of the voice, was stopped by ulcers. The tongue, the interpreter of the mind, overflowed with gore and faltered with the disease, felt rough and scarce could move. And when the poison through the jaws had filled the breast and flowed onto the miserable stomach, then all the springs of life began to fail. The breath sent out a filthy smell abroad, like the rank stench of rotten carcasses. The powers of all the soul and all the body flag and grow faint, as in the gates of death. To these innumerable evils followed close a sad distress and sinking of the mind, loud sighs with bitter moans and frequent sobbings, all the day and night twitched and convulsed the nerves and every limb and loosened every joint and sorely wrecked the wretches, tired out with pains before.
That you could not perceive by the touch that the surface of the body was inflamed with any extraordinary heat — it felt only warm to the hand and looked red all over with burning pustules, as when the sacred fire spreads over the limbs. But all within was in a flame that pierced the very bones. The heat raged in the stomach as in a furnace. No garment ever so light or thin could be endured upon their limbs. They rushed into the wind and cold. Some plunged their bodies scorched with the disease in rivers and naked threw themselves in chilling streams. Some ran with open mouths and headlong leaped into deep wells. The parching thirst, insatiable, so burnt their bodies it made whole showers of water seem no more than a few drops.
The pain was without intermission, without end. The body lay quite spent, stretched out, the burning eyes wide open, and without sleep for many a restless night, rolled dreadfully about. The physician muttered to himself in silent fear and leaves the patient in despair. For many signs of coming death appeared: the mind distracted with death and horror, a stern brow and a countenance fierce and furious, the ears tormented with a buzzing noise, the breath thick or deep and seldom drawn, a frothy sweat flowing in abundance over the neck, the spittle thin and dry and yellow as saffron, and the salt matter could scarce be brought up through the jaws by coughing, a contraction of the nerves in the hands and a trembling over all the limbs, and a coldness creeping up gradually from their feet, the nostrils pinched in as at that point of death, the nose sharp, the eyes sunk, the temples hollow, the skin cold and hard, a frightful distortion of the mouth, and the skin of the forehead stretched and shining. Nor did the wretches lie long under the cold hands of death, for they expired commonly upon the eighth, or at the farthest, upon the ninth day.
Don:
But if any of the infected, as some did, escaped with life — either the filthy ulcers breaking, or by a most offensive looseness — they fell at last into a consumption and then died. Or streams of corrupted blood with grievous headache flowed from his stuffed nostrils, and thus his strength and life ran out, and the wretch bled to death. Such as escaped a sharp flux of filthy blood at the nose — the poison pierced into their nerves and limbs and seized upon their very genitals. And some were so terrified at the approach of death that they suffered the virile member to be cut off to preserve life. Some remained alive without hands and feet, and some lost their eyes — so terrible was the fear of death to these miserable wretches. Some were seized with an entire forgetfulness of everything; they did not so much as know themselves.
When heaps of bodies lay upon one another, unburied upon the ground, yet the birds of prey and the wild beasts either kept at a distance to avoid the noisome stench, or if they tasted, they soon died. At that time no birds appeared abroad in the day, nor did the wild beasts leave the woods by night. Many of them were infected with the disease and fell down dead. The faithful dogs especially lay gaping out their infected breath in every street, for the poison drove out life from every limb.
The many funerals of the dead were hurried away, without order, and unattended. Nor was there any certain remedy to be applied, for what was of service to some and relieved the patient and preserved life was fatal and brought death to others.
But the most wretched and deplorable thing of all at this time was that when once a person found himself infected with the disease — as if a sentence of death had passed upon him — his spirits failed him. He fell into melancholy and despair, thought of nothing but death, and so gave up the ghost. Human funerals were heaped one upon another because the fierce contagion of the disease incessantly raged and carried on the infection.
And if anyone, too fond of life and fearing to die, avoided to visit the miserable sick, the same want of help was soon his own punishment. He died in a filthy and deplorable manner, abandoned and without assistance, and perished by neglect, like the wretched beasts of the field.
Martin:
And those who were compelled by shame and by the moving cries and piteous moans of their friends to attend them in their distress were seized by the infection and died by the disease and the fatigue. Indeed, the most pious among them lost their lives in this manner. And when they had endeavored to bury the bodies of whole families of their friends, among those of the friends of others, they returned wearied with grief and weeping. And most of them took to their beds for sorrow. There was not one to be found who, in this calamitous time, had not grievously suffered either by the disease or by death or by the most bitter pain and anguish of mind.
Besides, the shepherds and the herdsmen and the lusty plowmen pined away with the infection. Their bodies lay miserably stretched out in their close narrow huts and died of poverty and the disease. You might frequently see the dead parents lying over the dead children, and again the children expiring upon the bodies of their wretched mothers and father.
Nor was it a small addition to this plague that was brought from the country to the city. For the infected peasants flocked hither in multitudes from all parts and carried the sickness along with them. They filled houses and all places, and as they were pent up close together, they set the greater power to slay them in heaps. Many bodies lay along in the streets, gasping for thirst, and rolling to the public fountains. They drank insatiably and were suffocated with water. Others you might see in the highways and common places, languishing with their bodies half dead, horrible with filth, covered with rags and rotting with the corruption of the limbs. There was nothing but skin upon the bones, and that quite dried with eating ulcers and buried in nastiness.
And lastly, death had filled all the temples of the gods with dead bodies. All the shrines of the celestial deities were loaded everywhere with carcasses. The priests furnished these places with such wretched guests. Nor was there any reverence paid to the gods. Their divinities were no more regarded, for the present calamity overcame everything. Nor did the people any longer observe that custom of burial they had ever followed, which was to bury their dead in the city. They were all distracted and amazed, and everyone buried as the exigency of things would permit.
And sudden rage and dreadful poverty drove men into many outrageous actions. They would place their relations with violent outcries upon the funeral piles that were prepared for others, and light the fire, and often quarrel with much loss of blood rather than forsake the bodies of their friends.
Cassius:
Okay, thank you Joshua, Don, and Martin for reading the final section of the final book of our poem today. I want to especially express my appreciation to Martin for being all the way through from the very beginning of Book One to the very end of Book Six. And I also want to thank Don and Joshua — Joshua coming on most recently, but adding a lot — and Don being a trooper as well. Even though we’re finishing the book today, we have some big things planned that we can discuss at the end of today’s presentation. But we’ll finish Book Six here with this section and take probably next week to do sort of a recap of the book, and then we’ll have more plans to announce later.
But again, thanks for reading today and for dividing it up. I think if we had heard much more of Joshua at the very beginning, I’d be ready to slit my throat — the death and misery of what is being discussed here. So where shall we begin?
Don:
That is some dark stuff.
Cassius:
It is very dark, and obviously one of the things we ought to discuss today is just the issue of whether this was the intended end of the poem or not, and to what extent it serves as an appropriate ending to go through the darkness of the plague of Athens. Anybody want to tackle that general topic before we go into the details?
Joshua:
Yeah, I’ve actually written a bit about that in my notes here. From my reading on the subject, it seems as if there were maybe three ways to look at this as the end of the poem. I’ve got them written down as three options. One, the poem is more or less complete. Two, the poem is more or less complete but largely unrevised. And three, the poem is basically unfinished. And to typify each, I have a little quote.
If you think the poem is complete, you might find Stephen Greenblatt expressing your view. He acknowledges there’s a case to be made from the Latin text that the poem is not fully revised — things like lines that don’t fit the meter that Lucretius would have fixed if he’d gone through it again. But he basically says: if this is the finished poem, what Lucretius is doing here in the last section, with this horrible disease, is setting up a test to see how well you’ve learned everything that came before.
If you think the poem is unrevised and is missing some larger sections, George Santayana might express your position. He says — and I’m paraphrasing — if Lucretius had revised and finished the poem, he would have ended it with a hymn to Mars. He started the poem with a hymn to Venus, and the entire poem is about this dyad of forces: creation and destruction. He would have started with things coming together and ended the poem with an explicit hymn to Mars and things falling apart — Mars on the war path.
And then if you think the poem is completely unfinished, I think Norman DeWitt more or less holds this position — it’s been so long since I’ve read that book — but there’s this idea that Lucretius was going to write a seventh book on the subject of the gods.
So, Cassius, you mentioned the first one — Lucretius sets up a test. This is Greenblatt: Lucretius sets up a test to see how well you got this.
Cassius:
A test, or a challenge, or a review — or just a summary of the fact that this is a natural part of life, that death is the end for each one of us individually but not as a group, hopefully. I could see all three being possible.
Joshua:
Yeah, in terms of all three being possible — it seems to me there are a lot of similarities between positions one and two, because Santayana’s view that if Lucretius had finished the poem he would have ended with a hymn to Mars — it seems to me he almost kind of did end with a hymn to Mars. This passage here is about things falling apart in the most catastrophic way for humans. Whole cities dying off. That’s the hymn to Mars right there.
I was just looking up a section in Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom by David Sedley, published by Cambridge University Press, and he talks a little bit in there about the difference between Lucretius’s account of the plague and Thucydides’s account, and he says: “These and similar clues as to how Lucretius was beginning to shape his source material then give strong support to the hypothesis that the eventual moral message was to be a quintessentially Epicurean one about facing terminal suffering with the right frame of mind — a frame of mind that will enable us to eliminate fear and to tolerate pain cheerfully if it should come our way. Whoever we are and wherever we live, if we have not learnt this lesson we cannot face the future with truly Epicurean equanimity. Like Lucretius’s, so too Epicurus’s last written words had been a description of terrible suffering — his own — yet his happiness he wrote was unmarred.” And the very last line of that chapter is: “The panic, fear, and misery of the pre-Epicurean Athenians in the face of bodily suffering, hardly worse than Epicurus’s own terminal illness, a brilliantly graphic backdrop to this final lesson in Epicurean ethical canon.”
Cassius:
That is great. And actually you just saved me looking like an idiot, because I almost said Tacitus instead of Thucydides.
Don:
Don’t admit to that!
Cassius:
But no, that’s a great passage. I had the same thing written down in my notes — I typed “Lucretius sees this in some ways as a moral failure.” I think I read that in one of the footnotes in the Loeb edition.
Joshua:
Sees what as a moral failure?
Cassius:
The reaction of the people that we were reading about.
Don:
Yeah, yeah. And he kind of goes point by point. Even the temples of the gods are swamped with the plague and with dead bodies. I’ve been taking some notes as we were reading, and he talks about the importance of friendship, the importance of not abandoning your friends, the fact that the deities can’t help you, that the deities don’t care about the plague and obviously are not concerned with it at all. Even if that’s the whole thing about friendship — he’s talking about people who would die for their friends. But with an interesting twist, because if you look at the section starting at 1230, he says that if anyone too fond of life and fearing to die avoided to visit the miserable sick, they fell sick with the disease — and those who visited the dying sick also fell sick with the disease and died. So I think you’re right, and that reinforces the point you were making but in a different way. He’s saying this disease is going to wipe through this city indiscriminately. It’s going to kill people of all walks of life in all circumstances. And it’s going to kill you if you try to avoid it, and it’s going to kill you if you try to help people who are sick with it. To me that’s an argument for helping people who are sick with it.
Joshua:
Exactly, yeah. I think that reinforces that whole idea — if you’re going to have a good chance of getting it anyway, how do you want to end your life? Trying to help people, or cowering in the cellar somewhere?
Cassius:
And one of the texts that comes to mind as you’re talking about that is Vatican Saying 47, because of all the different reactions of the people that Lucretius is cataloging here at the end, there’s nobody here who appears to be doing what was in Vatican Saying 47 — “I have anticipated fortune and entrenched myself against all thy secret attacks. And I will not give myself up as captive to thee or any other circumstance. But when it’s time for me to go, spitting contempt on life and those who vainly cling to it, I will leave life crying aloud a glorious triumph song that I have lived well.” I don’t see anybody here at the end of Book Six doing that. So I think that’s part of the cataloging of the moral failures of these people — they are not approaching things that way.
Do I understand this is an account of an older plague that hit Athens? Do we know what the date of this particular plague was?
Don:
I was hoping you were on top of that!
Joshua:
I don’t know.
Martin:
It started in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, so 430 BC and lasted about four years.
Cassius:
So this would have been before Epicurus, sounds like a hundred or more years.
Martin:
Yes.
Cassius:
Okay, so we’re looking back at a pre-Epicurean time where these people didn’t have access to the truth, so to speak.
Don:
Yes, yes — that’s right.
Cassius:
I’m trying to remember something. There’s a line from earlier in the poem — I think it’s in Book One — where Lucretius is talking about embarking on this project of teaching Epicurean philosophy, and he says something to the effect of everyone else is confused about this, and they confuse each other. They have this philosophical disease and they catch it from each other like sheep.
Joshua:
Well, now that’s the Diogenes of Oenoanda inscription at the very beginning.
Cassius:
There you go, there you go. That’s the very opening where Diogenes talks about why he’s writing the inscription. I don’t know that I can find it quickly enough, but I’m sure Don knows it by heart. Don, do you remember that?
Don:
You love to do that, don’t you? I’m going to edit that out, I’m going to edit that out.
Joshua:
Here’s what you were talking about. It’s Fragment number three from the Inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda, and it says: “Having already reached the sunset of my life, being almost on the verge of departure from the world on account of old age, I wanted before being overtaken by death to compose a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure and so to help now those who are well-constituted. Now if only one person or two or three or four or five or six or any larger number you choose — provided it’s not very large — were in a bad predicament, I would address them individually and do all in my power to give them the best advice. But as I have said before, the majority of people suffer from a common disease — as in a plague — with their false notions about things, and their numbers increasing for mutual emulation, they catch the disease from one another like sheep.” I’ll stop there in the quote. It goes on further, but yes — I didn’t remember that it specifically talked about a plague there.
Cassius:
Yeah, I’m glad you were able to find that. I could remember where it came from but not the specific wording. And it does seem to have some applicability here.
Don:
Oh yeah. I thought it was interesting that Lucretius brings up the “sacred fire” again — that we talked about several episodes ago. That’s some kind of particular disease. It’s called St. Anthony’s Fire — it’s a particular infection that comes from a particular kind of mold. There are a couple different options that historians have tried to figure out what it typically refers to, but it included a high fever and rashes and that sort of thing. And I find it interesting that he references that same disease here again. I don’t have the line in front of me, but that was just a few episodes ago where we talked about it.
Cassius:
One more point of history before we go further. Even at the very beginning today, I realized in reading this that I am completely without knowledge on the founding of Athens. When it says “Athens, founded by Cecrops,” I’ve not even heard that name before. And then it refers to them as the subjects of King Pandion. Does anybody know anything about Cecrops or King Pandion?
Joshua:
No. It sounds like we have a bunch of Romanophiles here rather than Hellenophiles. According to Apollodorus, Cecrops was the first king of Attica.
Cassius:
Yeah. And Pandion was a son of Erechtheus, the king of Athens. It sounds like he was king while this happened — the subjects of King Pandion. It might even be because Erechtheus was almost the mythological king and Pandion was a later son, so that might not be necessarily historical, but it might be one of those things like a Romulus-and-Remus reference — our ancestral founding was under Cecrops and our lineage comes through Pandion.
Martin:
It has to be a reference to ancestry, because at that time Athens had been a democracy for a long, long time. There should have been no king anymore at that time.
Cassius:
That’s right — so they’re looking back at a historical progenitor of the people of Athens. Interesting.
Well, if we move to the second passage at 1145, we’re getting into the very gory details of the symptoms of this disease. We probably ought to talk for a second about what exactly this plague was. I see a note from H.A.J. Munro here, and there was a lot of disagreement in his time about exactly what this was — whether it was typhus, fever of some kind, the black death, smallpox, or some other form of plague. Does anybody have any information on what we think was the modern diagnosis based on these symptoms?
Martin:
It’s still under debate. There is some hope because a mass grave was found, so there is probably some research going on. A preliminary finding was typhoid, but then this was criticized as done wrongly. So hopefully in a couple of years we’ll have some updated results. My personal favorite from looking through it is Lassa fever. I’m not a medical expert, but looking at all the information given in context, Lassa fever seems the best match.
Cassius:
What type of fever is that, Martin? I’m not familiar with that term.
Martin:
Lassa fever. L-A-S-S-A. It occurs in Africa, which is consistent with the poem saying it came from Egypt — actually from Ethiopia and then moved along the Nile, so that fits already. The symptoms are fever, chills, headache, vomiting, raised bumps in the skin, oral ulceration, rashes, and dizziness. And untreated, it kills the sufferer within seven to twenty-six days — so even the eight to nine days mentioned in the text fits. Let’s wait a couple of years because there’s no urgency until hopefully we get a definite answer from the research.
Joshua:
Yeah, it says one of the most common complications of Lassa fever is deafness, and Lucretius talks about the ringing in the ears too in the description of symptoms.
Cassius:
Well, does anybody want to pick out any particular symptom they’d like to discuss? Don, you’ve been waiting to get to this episode here — any particular part of the symptoms?
Don:
You know, it had been a long time since I read this, and I specifically did not read it ahead of time for the episode because I wanted an immediacy to the detail. And again, I think I’ve mentioned this a number of times, but I think Lucretius is so good about his powers of observation and his way of detailing things, and this is just another example of that — he goes down to the minute details of what the people were going through. But it’s not just a listing of symptoms. It’s a real visceral explanation of what the people were going through who had this disease. He doesn’t hold back on his description of the horrible nature of this thing.
One sentence does stand out to me: “To these innumerable evils followed close a sad distress and sinking of the mind.” And Epicurean philosophy tells us that even when your body is undergoing something horrible, the mind has a measure of control — like Epicurus, you can even experience pleasure in your dying days even with the pain.
Joshua:
Now, Cassius, I’m not going to say this to disagree with what you just said, because you’re certainly correct — but I’d give one caveat, and that is that the mind itself is not affected by the disease. To some extent this might be a refutation of the more Stoic-like perspective that the mind can always prevail over the body, because this would probably be an example of the mind itself getting sick, and at that point being unable to do its normal function of allowing us to recall past pleasures and maintain our composure in the face of all this. Because where it caught my eye at the beginning — 1178 — is where it says “the pain was without intermission, without end.” And you relate that back to Principal Doctrine 3 about how generally pain, if it’s intense, is going to be short, or if it’s long, it’s going to be not so intense. So I wonder if indeed this is a kind of tension between that and the plague here — maybe we need to be reminded that to some extent, just like death itself, it’s impossible for our minds to overcome diseases which prevent our minds from functioning as the Stoics would say we should always be able to do.
Cassius:
Now help me bring that back to reality, Don. I think everybody probably agrees that the mind can get sick just like the body can, and that’s probably been mentioned earlier in the poem. So we really do need to reconcile what’s going on here with Principal Doctrines 3 and 4 about the way we manage pain, because there are going to be times in life that the mind is not capable of overcoming something like this.
Don:
I think actually both you and Joshua are right in a manner of speaking. I think Joshua was right in the sense that — as long as your mind is intact — Epicurus is a perfect example that even as he was experiencing his pains and dying, he could recollect things. But you’re right in the sense that if your mind is affected, or if there are neurological problems, your mind isn’t going to work that way. And then think of it: apparently because they couldn’t sleep, after a couple of nights without sleep the brain will definitely no longer function properly.
Cassius:
Yes, exactly. And guys, one of the benefits of us working together over time is you’re going to know exactly where I’m about to go with what I’m about to say, and you’ll be able to help me echo it more articulately than I can myself.
Because what do we regularly see — not only on the EpicureanFriends.com forum but also on Facebook and other places where Epicurean philosophy is discussed — you do see a lot of people who come looking to Epicurean philosophy for relief from pain in life that sometimes is really not just a matter of having incorrect thoughts or making incorrect choices. You do have situations in life where the mind — the brain — is sick, just like the rest of the body or any other organ can be. And so we find it’s very important to always keep that distinction going. Sometimes there are really clinical problems involved in the pains that some people have, and they can’t find all the relief they need through philosophy. It may be that they can find some relief, and hopefully philosophy will educate them to be realistic about where their pains come from and what’s causing their issues. But we do need to always be careful that when people come to talk about philosophy, if they are affected by clinical issues they need to be treated in a clinical situation. There clearly are diseases of the brain that can lead to clinical depression and other issues of malfunctioning of the brain that need chemical responses to them.
Don:
I think what you’re getting at too is that it’s not necessarily separate from philosophy — especially Epicurean philosophy, which always teaches that there are physical and material causes for particular diseases. The brain can become diseased just like the body can, and there are physical remedies like medications and counseling that I think dovetail nicely with philosophy. But it has to be treated for the disease or condition that it is.
Cassius:
Right. People can have guilt complexes through religion — they feel like they’re bad people, they’ve done something wrong, and they go spiraling down in a self-reinforcing disease of condemning themselves and never seeing any hope or light at the end of the tunnel. If you continue to spiral down almost like an airplane in a dive that can’t pull out, you’ve got to be realistic about what put you into that in the first place and find a way to break free from it. If it’s behavioral things, philosophy can help with that. If it’s more a chemical imbalance, that has to be treated for the medical condition that it is — and then maybe philosophy can provide a grounding for your life and a direction.
There are numerous sections in Lucretius and throughout Epicurean philosophy on exactly that point. Everything that we think of as mental does go back originally to the body and to the physical constitution. So if you’re oriented in Epicurean philosophy you can be realistic about tracing down the source of your problems in whatever direction those problems lead you. And I frankly want to go on record again — this is one of the areas I would most condemn Stoicism and Stoic philosophy: the implication that the mind is always in control and that your willpower is sufficient to overcome no matter what the problem is. If you’re caught in the grasp of some kind of clinical disease that’s affecting you biologically, one of the worst things you could do is just double down and think that you’re going to fix a chemical problem by willing it away.
Joshua:
Right. And I actually had a post on the forum where I had been reading Ask Reddit and there was a similar question that came up and someone had said that reading Stoicism had really helped them. And I said, first of all, if it really does help, that’s great. But I said, Stoicism kind of sees everything through the lens of an indifferent — you’re a sheltered soul surrounded by granite, and nothing can really affect you from the outside. But nothing can really touch you in a good way from the outside either. Whatever happens, happens. And I thought that was terrible advice to give a person experiencing those kinds of thoughts.
Yeah, that’s the thing I’ve recently been thinking too — I forget what I was reading, but they were talking about the fact that ancient Stoicism was predicated on the idea that you were directly related to Zeus, a cog in Zeus’s machine with a particular purpose to fulfill. Whatever happened to you was a direct result of fulfilling your position in that mechanical universe. So you buck up and whatever comes your way was supposed to come your way. Now the modern Stoics have divorced it from the divine providence aspect, and I say: well, where does that leave you then? At least in the original framework you had a divine purpose you could rationalize. If you divorce it from that, what do you have left?
Cassius:
They’ve divorced it in significant part, in my view, because they see exactly the problem we’re talking about right now. Because in my mind Epicurean philosophy is almost revolutionary against much of the mainstream of Greek philosophy, whereas Stoicism is a doubling down on the traditional Greek philosophy that the people at the time of the plague would have held as their common viewpoint — the Zeus and divine guidance and fate and so forth. Those things which the modern Stoics have attempted to distance themselves from were essential to the formation of Stoicism; they were trying to carry the traditional viewpoints of Plato and Aristotle even further by focusing on virtue the way they did.
But here we see the gods piling up with dead bodies in their own temples. This is one of those things where it’s a repudiation of “everything happens for a reason.”
Joshua:
Right, right.
Cassius:
And when we get down to about 1230, the idea that when people realize they’re going to die it causes them to fall into despair and ultimately to give up the ghost — there’s a section on that earlier in Lucretius as well. But Epicurean philosophy takes the reverse position. It doesn’t kill our spirit to realize that at some point we’re going to die. We’re all born with the death sentence, as one of the Vatican Sayings I think attributed to Metrodorus puts it. But just because we realize that doesn’t kill our spirit — it should invigorate us to use the time that we have more vigorously and more intensely than we otherwise would, because we’re going to face an eternity in which there is no possibility of any pleasure. We can take comfort that there’s not going to be any pain either, but that’s a small comfort if we’ve turned around at the end of our lives and found that we’ve largely wasted it and not pursued the types of pleasure that are available to us.
Joshua:
Yeah, exactly. It’s one of those things where you struggle with the idea that mortality is what gives sweetness to life. But really in the end that’s what it is — you have a finite time to do whatever you want to do and you have to make the most of it.
Cassius:
To me it’s more of a spur. It doesn’t necessarily give life its actual value — it’s the pleasure itself that has the value — but it’s so easy in life to just procrastinate and put off doing things you should do, and then turn around and ten years have passed.
Joshua:
Yes. All sorts of songs and artwork can be summoned to that particular point — how time goes by so fast and the good things you wish to appreciate are not here but for a brief moment. And carpe diem — I find it so interesting when I go back and look at that word carpe. “Seize the day” — “seize” has such a violent sort of connotation to me. But it’s more of a “harvest” or “pluck the right fruit.” It’s more like, you know, harvest and pluck — rather than “seize,” which always strikes me as you’ve got to go go go. Whereas it’s more like: slow down, savor the moment, that sort of thing.
Cassius:
Joshua, the more I think about this the more I really do like the observation you brought earlier from Santayana — this is essentially a mirror of Book One. Venus in charge of organizing the pleasures of life is being mirrored by Mars organizing the destruction of life.
Joshua:
Oh yeah. When I first read that essay — I have a lot of problems with that essay — but I read that one line and thought: that is genius. What’s that — a broken clock strikes twice a day?
So earlier I said that this passage represented a moral failing. I’ve been re-reading it and glancing it over again, and what it certainly represents is this disease that runs through society and breaks down all boundaries — all institutions, all social bonds, all religious rites.
There’s an interesting example of this in 1252. He says, “Besides, the shepherds and the herdsmen and the lusty plowmen pined away with the infection.” How much do you read of what they called pastoral literature — Virgil’s Eclogues, some of Horace’s work — this idea that life in the countryside is this happy, cheerful, carefree idyll? And even here, even that idea — that the country is a refuge, that the rural setting is a holiday from problems — even this just gets torn right through by this horrifying disease. You can see it in the temples, in family relationships, in relationships between friends, even in the pastoral ideal. Everything is just afflicted. The city, the country, the high, the low, the parents, the children — everything.
Martin:
Yeah, just as we talk about this, I see a discrepancy between what’s written in our history books and what’s in the poem. Here the poem says the people from the countryside brought it to Athens — but the historical record says it was brought through the harbor into the city and spread from there.
Joshua:
Sedley actually brings that up too — that’s a difference between Thucydides’s account and Lucretius’s account: they have it going in opposite directions. He says: “One further discrepancy is that where Thucydides describes the crowding of country dwellers into the city, Lucretius instead gives the impression that the plague spread death into the countryside. I imagine that this deliberate shift prepares the ground for a warning about universality. Such sufferings are not a hazard exclusive to civic life but one which every human being must be prepared to confront and deal with.”
Cassius:
Boy, Sedley is really doing well there at the conclusion. I’m going to have to read that book. And that is Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom by David Sedley, published by Cambridge University Press — the book that I would most like to read and have not even begun.
Well, I don’t think we’re ready to begin closing comments yet. Does anybody have another section of the actual text to pull out that we haven’t done yet?
Martin:
Certainly we’ve commented on many of them, such as the bodies piling up in the temples. Here’s one — it’s actually the very final passage — why does Lucretius choose to make the final words of the poem a discussion of fighting over funeral pyres? In many articles nowadays, after writers have finished everything, they make a kind of final ironic point. And I think it’s the same here, because compared to all these cruel things happening, it’s just ridiculous that people fight over pyres.
Joshua:
That’s a good point. And I’ve been curious about this for a long time — I’ve even flipped to the back of the book before to see what he ends on. And it’s interesting to me that, at least in this translation, the last word is “friends.”
Cassius:
Oh, wow.
Joshua:
Because earlier on — I mentioned it I think two episodes ago — we saw the last use of the word “pleasure.” I was interested to see if “pleasure” made an appearance in the last lines of the poem, but it doesn’t. Instead, it’s “friends.”
Don:
Well, I’d have to check Munro. Munro and Bailey indicate the last word is “bodies,” which would potentially be applicable too. I was checking the Latin, and the Perseus text and the Loeb edition actually have two different words at the end, which I’m not quite sure what to make of.
So the Perseus ends: nec mos erat ullus tempore tali — and the Loeb ends differently: rixantes potius quam corpora desererentur. They’re completely different last lines and I don’t even see the one listed in the Loeb edition, which is just kind of freaking me out here, because they basically end with the same English translation about the pyres and the fighting over them — but the Latin is nowhere even close.
Quam corpora — then “the bodies” — and desererentur must be the abandoning that some are referring to.
Cassius:
So “abandonment” — at least under the Loeb translation — is connected to the Latin last word, meaning to leave, depart, forsake, abandon, give up, let down. So I find it kind of interesting that at least in the Loeb the very last word has to do with departing and leaving.
Joshua:
So it’s like — yeah, the very last word of the Latin is basically “thanks for coming, see you later.”
And what was the first word of the poem?
Cassius:
Aeneadum — the mother of Aeneas — so the very first lines are about being born, and the very last lines are about going away.
Joshua:
How about that? Did that work?
Cassius:
That’s good. That works. Yeah.
Don:
Just in case anyone’s curious, Rolfe Humphries ends the poem this way — he says: “Sudden need and poverty persuaded men to use horrible makeshift — howling, they would place their dead on pyres prepared for other men, ply the torches, maim and bleed and brawl to keep the corpses” — meaning their corpses — “from abandonment.” So he uses “abandonment” as his final word.
Cassius:
The one that appeals to me the most is that the beginning is about motherhood and being born, and the end is dying. Yeah.
Joshua:
That’s why I’m really skeptical of the idea of there being a seventh book, because six books has such a nice symmetrical feel to it.
Don:
I totally agree with you — this idea that there was a lost seventh book… I detect raging Pythagorean numerology coming into you guys in terms of analyzing this!
Cassius:
It’s poetic symmetry! I’m not sure I agree with the seventh book hypothesis. I would have liked to read a hymn to Mars if Santayana was right and that had ever been written — I think that would have been great.
Okay, we’ve probably come to the end of this episode and the end of the book. But before we go to closing comments — does anybody have anything else to add in general, or maybe specifically, before we conclude?
Joshua:
I just wanted to talk for a minute about Epicurean funerary rites, because this is a topic I find fascinating. We know that the Roman Epicureans had a phrase they liked to put on their tombstones: non fui, fui, non sum, non curo — “I was not, I was, I am not, I do not care.” That strikes me as very strongly Epicurean.
I kind of contrast that with a story I like about Diogenes the Cynic. He was asked by his townspeople what they should do with his body after he died, and his response was, “Just throw it over the city walls.” They replied, “Well, what about the wild animals and the dogs — aren’t you afraid they’re going to eat it?” And he said, “Yeah, you’re right, you better give me a stick to fight them off.” And they said, “How are you going to use the stick? You’re going to be dead.” And he said, “Well, if I’m dead, why do I care if they eat my body?” I quite like that story. I’m no Cynic, but I enjoy some of those stories of Diogenes.
Cassius:
Are you finished on Epicurean funerary rites, Joshua? I don’t think you are.
Joshua:
I don’t think I am either.
Cassius:
Because you’re probably one of these many people who uses their phone to read EpicureanFriends.com every day. But for those who are rigorous and use a desktop or a laptop — when you go to our home page over on the right-hand side, every time you visit the forum you’ll see a graphic there in honor of a gentleman named Amrinder Singh. That’s one of the graphics I put up several years ago. Amrinder Singh was someone who lived in Australia and got involved on the Epicurean Facebook group. He had a picture of himself on the front page — he was a flyer of ultralight airplanes, and he had taken a picture of himself with a leaping pig on the back of the helmet he had made for his ultralight flights. Unfortunately he had an accident on March 10th of 2017 and passed away. We eventually found out a little bit more because his daughter has come to the EpicureanFriends forum and participates there occasionally, and hopefully we’ll hear from her more in the future.
On that graphic I put the text of the inscription Joshua already read — non fui, fui, non sum, non curo — but there’s another one in the Latin inscriptions that are out there. Don, you’re going to have to help me, but there is another preserved inscription from another funeral stone which has the person’s name and then something about the Epicurean choir singing — that this grave is being watched over by the Epicurean choir singing. I think that’s the general interpretation.
Don:
I had to look that up, and I found an article from JSTOR that says the person commemorated was an Epicurean in Naples, shown by his cognomen to be a freedman from Syria, as the name Haranus is Semitic and recurs in Second Maccabees. So it’s from Syria. But it says the full inscription from the first century BC was: “Gaius Stahlius Haranus watches over this abode, one of the joyful Epicurean chorus.” So ex Epicurea gaudenti coro is translated as “one of the joyful Epicurean chorus.”
Cassius:
I am glad you said that, because I certainly butchered it and did not realize that “joyful” was in there. And that is certainly one of the themes I like to follow from Epicurean philosophy — that the joy in it is an important part of it. Gaudenti coro — the joyful chorus.
Don:
Yeah.
Cassius:
Anything else before we wrap up?
Don:
Nope, that is it. I think it just — Lucretius is such an amazing piece of work, and to have been able to be part of this whole project of going through the entire poem was both an honor and a pleasure. So thank you for including me.
Cassius:
You’re very welcome, glad you were with us, and we very much appreciate it. And in fact one of the last things I would say today picks up on something you said earlier, Don, and it plays right into what Joshua just read. Because I think I’ve probably myself used the words today that some of what we’re reading in this last section is “a moral failing of the people who are involved.” And as I think about that I would probably use a different expression, because when I think of a moral failing I think of people who know better or should know better and who don’t apply their knowledge correctly to deal with the current situation.
But as Don or Joshua brought up — this plague occurred 100 years or more before Epicurus. Playing into the recurring theme of Epicurus almost being a savior of humanity, and the beginning of Book Six itself explicitly talking about Epicurus in those terms — I think one of the things to take away from here is that this disastrous series of traumatic events, this despair and giving yourself away to death and piling up bodies in the temples — this was going on among people who were not Epicureans, who didn’t have the benefit of having studied Epicurean philosophy in their life, who were afraid of death and afraid of the unknown and did not have the resources of intellectual study and character that come from what we gain from Epicurean philosophy. Not just a totally intellectual position, but a visceral feeling about life and the way the world should operate, the way the world does operate, and our part in it.
And through Epicurean philosophy we don’t fall victim to the same kind of despair and nihilism that affects so many people when they come into contact with adverse circumstances — and of course these were extremely adverse circumstances. But it’s probably a very appropriate way to end the book — to talk about the antidote to adverse circumstances, which is to have a reasoned understanding of the universe. And at the end of life to do what is listed in Vatican Saying 47 — to have the attitude that you won’t give yourself up as a captive to fortune or to any circumstance, but when it’s time for us to go we’ll leave life crying aloud a glorious triumph song that we have lived well. That’s really the summation of what I see in Epicurean philosophy. This is the prescription for living life well. And in the end it comes down to that basic attitude towards life that is encapsulated in your worldview, your philosophy, your general approach to living.
So we’ve spent a lot of time talking about atoms and void and all the different aspects of science including magnetism, which I found so fascinating — but in the end the product of all of that is to have this worldview and sense of life that gives you confidence in facing adversity. That’s my little sermon to end today’s episode. It’s not the end of our podcasts by any means, but for today that’s my final thought.
Anybody have anything else before we close today?
Martin:
I just wanted to ask — while I was talking about Lassa fever my connection dropped. What was the last thing you could hear from me?
Cassius:
I think we heard everything. There might have been a slight gap, but what I heard made sense. Do you think something important didn’t get included?
Martin:
I don’t know. So anyway, we have the recording, and if I see that an important thought was lost I can put it in the comments for the episode.
Cassius:
That’s correct — because unlike death, we have another opportunity once the podcast is over. We can expand and supplement our comments in the continuing discussion.
Okay. For me that’s all. Don or Joshua, who prefers to go first?
Joshua:
I do have one thing. This kind of expands on what we were just talking about with the funerary rites and inscriptions. There is an epigram that mentions Epicurus by name. Epigrams were, in earlier history, actually inscribed onto walls or tombs; it later became an art form not necessarily inscribed on anything. So we don’t know if this was actually inscribed on something or not. But let me read it to you. It’s from Menander — and Menander was the same age as Epicurus. He was an Athenian citizen like Epicurus, and they both served the requisite two-year military training that every male Athenian citizen had to do at about age 17. So Menander and Epicurus were doing this at the same time.
Menander wrote the inscription, and it says: “Hail, you twin-born sons of Neocles, of whom the one saved his country from slavery, the other from folly.” So the son of Neocles who saved his country from slavery was Themistocles, and the son of Neocles who saved his country from folly was Epicurus. These are two different Neocleses, by the way — their fathers just happen to have had the same name.
Cassius:
That’s a great observation. That’s very cool.
Don:
Yes. Anything further, Joshua?
Joshua:
I’m ready for Don.
Don:
Okay. Well, the only thing I’ll say again is what I said at the beginning — I find Lucretius’s powers of observation and his ability to convey those things in this metrical structure just always impressive. The humanizing aspects he can bring forward, and just the idea of how closely he observed different phenomena, always strikes me.
Cassius:
All right, guys. Again, Joshua, Martin, and Don — thank you very much for all of your effort and participation in these podcasts. We have a long way to go, and hopefully we’ll do this many many more times into the future. But it’s something of a milestone to have completed over 90 episodes going through Lucretius from start to finish, and I hope a lot of people have gained a lot from this besides me.
And thank you to all of the other participants who have been part of this as well. We’ve been going at this for over two years. It was not something that we should ever have expected anybody would be able to follow through from beginning to end, but Martin was able to do it. The very nature of life is that people get called in different directions and things change over time, so we have to be flexible. I’m just appreciative that we were able to get the assistance we had from our panelists over the last two years.
Joshua:
I kind of skated in at the end here. But having been on the inside just for two or three weeks, this is a lot of work you guys have put into this, and have for a very long time. So thanks to both you and Martin and everybody who came before.
Cassius:
You may have skated in at the end of this series, but we have many many more ahead. Welcome to the Hotel California, Josh.
Joshua:
Exactly. Check in but you never check out.
Cassius:
All right, we’re at the end of the poem for now, but we’ll talk again next week, and we’ll soldier on as we work further to strike a blow for Epicurus — to quote from Lucian’s Alexander the Oracle-Monger: “Strike a blow for Epicurus, that great man whose holiness and divinity of nature were not shams, who alone had and imparted true insight into the good, and who brought deliverance to all that consorted with him.” That’s a good line to end the episode. All right, talk to you soon.
Joshua:
Thank you very much.
Martin:
All right. Bye, thanks.