20th of January 2023 -- Zoom Gathering

    **Please Note: Our 20th Zoom is open to all Level 3 forum members. If you are not already a Level 3, but you are interested in attending, please private message Cassius or Kalosyni to find out how to become a Level 3 member.

    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:

    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

    **Please Note: Given that this is a special 20th, we will begin a half hour early -- at 8pm ET**

    The tentative agenda:

    8pm ET -- we'll start with open conversation

    8:30pm ET (approx.)

    1) I will present a short reading in commemoration of Epicurus.

    2) Anyone else who would like to share a short poem or short prose reading is welcome to do so.

    3) And we will discuss the topic "Implementing PD 27"

    9:00pm ET (approx.) -- We will finish off the evening with more open conversation, which likely will include discussion of our most recent and popular threads.

    You are welcome to "bring your own beverages" for a more festive experience.

    Any other ideas for the evening agenda? Please post here. Hope to see you then!

    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.

    Member Posting Statistics and Usage

    (Members who posted sometime between 04/29/2015 - 01/19/2023)

    Total
    since April 2015    		Posting members who logged on between
    01/01/2022 - 01/19/2023
    10 or more posts5532
    between 1 - 10 posts6721


    Since start of the forum in April 2015

    number of posts
    (minimum)    		number of users
    1124
    390
    578
    1055
    2537
    5023
    10020

    Some further statistics:

    Total number of members is 305, and minus the 124 (who have posted) = 181 members who have never posted. Of this 181 some of these may no longer visit. (We may want to decide how to deal with that at some point, such as freeze/delete the account after a certain amount of inactivity).

    I was going to mention some of these statistics this last night, but I don't think there is any way to know how many members continue (during the past year) to log on without posting (without counting by hand).

    Also, at some point I'll try to see what I can find out about our true number of visits per day (hits per day, non-registered visits).

    I presented some slides which you can see here, and that took up more time than usual. Part of this meeting turned out to be a little like an "annual membership meeting" and a year in review. But for the remainder of the year, the 20th meetings will have much more time for open Epicurean philosophy discussions.

    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

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