20th of January 2023 -- Zoom Gathering

Note that we are choosing to use this month's 20th as the annual birthday celebration of Epicurus based on the work done largely by Don and Nate as below:

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Epicurus’s Birthday: The 7th, 10th, or 20th of Gamelion - Mystery Solved

This paper outlines the reasons to accept that Epicurus was born on the 20th day of the month of Gamelion.

Don

December 26, 2022 at 12:07 AM

Thread

Epicurus' Birthday 2023 - (The Most Comprehensive Picture Yet!)

In preparation for the annual "controversy" of when to celebrate Epicurus's Birthday:I

- 'm going with 7 Gamelion as the day.

- I'm using this as my authoritative source for the Athenian calendar: http://www.numachi.com/~ccount/hmepa/calendars/700.html

- Therefore, I'll be celebrating from sunset on Jan. 28 to sunset on Jan. 29, 2023.

- Check out the homepage of the site:

http://www.numachi.com/~ccount/hmepa/

Especially the "About the Calendar" page.

PS: As of Jan 2023, I'm adding in this link to the…

Don

November 23, 2022 at 7:25 PM

After an extremely busy two weeks, I'll be able to join tonight.

Very good looking forward to having you Charles! Lots to talk about.

Before I forget let me thank everyone who attended our 20th this month. We had a great group of people and I want to give special thanks to:

1 - Titus for getting up in the middle of his night to attend.

2 - Our (current) second-favorite professor who we fully expect to vie for the "first-favorite' title by writing his own book on Epicurus in the future (that's a joke - for now)

3 - Don for his excellent recitation (in Greek) of the Philodemus 20th passage.

4 - Kalosyni for narrating a great set of slides and giving a special reading of a poem she composed herself.

5 - Charles for being able to make it despite a grueling work schedule.

6 - Godfrey, Charles, and Joshua for being regular attenders and giving their usual sound commentary.

i think that's a majority of the attendees and I hope I didn't forget anyone. We don't generally have or need an "attendance report," and hopefully one day in the future we'll have so many that we can't thank everybody. But at least for now as we build a pattern for our regular meetings it is good to appreciate those who are helping us most in working toward a tighter community.

Quote from Cassius

3 - Don for his excellent recitation (in Greek) of the Philodemus 20th passage.

And Joshua for his impromptu recitation of Philodemus' poem in English!

And to Joshua's question about pronunciation, I probably should be using Allen's Vox Graeca recommendations. Philodemus is 1st c. BCE. I had in my mind he was later! So, yeah, aspirated stops not fricatives yet I may try to record and post an audio file at some point. In the meantime, check out the Seikolos epitaph below from Luke Rainieri.

αὔριον εἰς λιτήν σε καλιάδα, φίλτατε Πείσων,

ἐξ ἐνάτης ἕλκει μουσοφιλὴς ἕταρος,

εἰκάδα δειπνίζων ἐνιαύσιον: εἰ δ᾽ ἀπολείψεις

οὔθατα καὶ Βρομίου χιογενῆ πρόποσιν,

ἀλλ᾽ ἑτάρους ὄψει παναληθέας, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπακούσῃ

Φαιήκων γαίης πουλὺ μελιχρότερα:

ἢν δέ ποτε στρέψῃς καὶ ἐς ἡμέας ὄμματα, Πείσων,

ἄξομεν ἐκ λιτῆς εἰκάδα πιοτέρην.

Greek Anthology, Book IV, 11.44

To-morrow, dearest Piso, your friend, beloved by the Muses, who keeps our annual feast of the twentieth invites you to come after the ninth hour to his simple cottage. If you miss udders and draughts of Chian wine, you will see at least sincere friends and you will hear things far sweeter than the land of the Phaeacians. But if you ever cast your eyes on me, Piso, we shall celebrate the twentieth richly instead of simply.

Also mentioned last night and in Kalosyni's poem:

Seikilos epitaph - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Quote from Don

Also mentioned last night and in Kalosyni's poem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph?wprov=sfla1

Don't know if I've ever directly brought this up, but on my 21st birthday, a handful of years before I started my Epicurean journey, I decided to get my first tattoo, and, what a serendipitous coincidence...

To demonstrate how far down the rabbit hole of ancient Greek pronunciation one can travel, here is a 38-minute video from Luke Ranieri just on how the letter Ζζ zeta was pronounced:

I can't say enough good things about Ranieri. He is prolific in creating teaching materials for ancient Greek and Latin, from basic to fluent on

ScorpioMartianus

Spoken Latin, Ancient Greek, and Ancient Egyptian videos by Luke Amadeus Ranieri. 🤠🦂 Topics & tags: Latin Language Lessons for beginners, Latin Language,…

youtube.com

He's even made some great content recently on ancient Egyptian and Coptic. Check out his sea shanty in ancient Egyptian! Amazing!

There's also Ioannis Stratakis at Podium Arts: https://ancientgreek.eu/index.html He also has a great YouTube channel giving readings in the older Classical Attic pronunciation (i.e., Vox Graeca system).

Podium-Arts

Spoken Ancient Greek; texts in reconstructed pronunciation. For learning or enjoyment. Samples of audiobooks (most of which are for sale on www.ancientgreek.eu…

youtube.com