Ancient World Review

Pliny The Elder - "Life Is Being Awake"

Pliny the Elder was what we would now call a workaholic, totally absorbed in his writing. According to his nephew, Pliny the Younger, "the only time he took from his work was for his bath, and by bath I mean his actual immersion, for while he was being rubbed down and dried he had a book read to him or dictated notes. When traveling he felt free from other responsibilities to give every minute to work; he kept a secretary at his side with book and notebook; and in winter saw that his hands were protected by long sleeves, so that even bitter weather should not rob him of a working hour. For the same reason, too, he used to be carried about Rome in a chair. I can remember how he scolded me for walking; according to him I need not have wasted those hours, for he thought any time wasted which was not devoted to work. It was this application which enabled him to finish all those volumes of the Natural History." Source: Livius.

According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "Pliny was no philosopher. It may indeed be thought refreshing to have a view of the ancient world from an author who did not have some claim to the philosophical viewpoint ... there is an engaging personality at work..." Pliny's writing in the Natural History is "highly individual: as is the style and the imagery, which was often misunderstood in later antiquity, and can still baffle today." An ancient encyclopedia may sound dry, but the Natural History is an absorbing mixture of facts and fantastic stories. I first read the Penguin Classics selection from the encyclopedia on a cross-country flight years ago and couldn't put it down.

Here's a typical entry:

"Beyond the Scythian Cannibals, in a certain large valley in the Himalayas, there is a region called Abarimon where some forest-dwellers live who have their feet turned back behind their legs; they run with extraordinary speed and wander far and wide with the wild animals. Baeton, Alexander the Great's road-surveyor, states that these people could not breathe in another climate, and for that reason none had been brought to the neighboring kings, or to Alexander himself." -- Natural History. Source: Strange Science.

The Natural History is a monumental achievement that opens a window into the ancient world as seen by an educated Roman. Pliny himself was the model writer and researcher and no matter what your personal interests might be his life represents a practical philosophy well-worth emulating today. In fact, I'd say that Pliny the Elder's approach to life is still the best philosophy available anywhere:

"Life is being awake. The Natural History is a monument to keeping alert, and to the useful employment of time. Pliny's energy and diligence astonished his nephew, were intended to impress his contemporaries, and still amaze today; they were, moreover, not a contingent habit of mind, but intended as an ethical statement. For all his defects of accuracy, selection, and arrangement, Pliny achieved a real summation of universal knowledge, deeply imbued with the mood of his time, and the greatness of his work was speedily recognized. It was a model for later writers ... and attained a position of enormous cultural and intellectual influence in the medieval west." -- OCD.

The Philosophy Of Epicureanism

When the Greek philosopher Epicurus died in 270 BC, he left his house and garden in Athens to one of his disciples, Hermarchus of Mytilene. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "[Hermarchus] and his followers lived together, secluding themselves from the affairs of the city and maintaining a modest and even austere standard of living, in accordance with the Master's teaching. They included slaves and women."

Their community was called the Epicurean School or "The Garden" after the house's garden. According to the OCD, "the school was much libeled in antiquity and later, perhaps because of its determined privacy and because of Epicurus' professed hedonism. The qualifications that brought this hedonism close to asceticism were ignored, and members of rival schools accused the Epicureans of many kinds of profligacy."

"In Christian times, Epicureanism was anathema because it taught that man is mortal, that the cosmos is the result of accident, that there is no providential god, and that the criterion for the good life is pleasure." (OCD)

According to Epicurus.net, "Epicurus's philosophy combines a physics based on an atomistic materialism with a rational hedonistic ethics that emphasizes moderation of desires and cultivation of friendships. His world-view is an optimistic one that stresses that philosophy can liberate one from fears of death and the supernatural, and can teach us how to find happiness in almost any situation."

"The philosophy of Epicurus (341–270 B.C.E.) was a complete and interdependent system, involving a view of the goal of human life (happiness, resulting from absence of physical pain and mental disturbance), an empiricist theory of knowledge (sensations, together with the perception of pleasure and pain, are infallible criteria), a description of nature based on atomistic materialism, and a naturalistic account of evolution, from the formation of the world to the emergence of human societies." Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Comment: Epicureanism sounds completely reasonable to me. It's not surprising that Christians would have attacked it so vehemently.

Did The Buddha Exist?

"Reliable factual data on the life of Siddhartha Gautama is very scarce. His historical biography can be, to some extent, pieced together by comparing early Buddhist texts from different traditions. These accounts are filled with myth and legendary stories that slowly but surely changed the initial attributes of the biography of the Buddha. The final form of these texts were written down many centuries after the death of the Buddha. The true words and accounts of the Buddha were merged with legendary additions from oral traditions. Moreover, it seems obvious that the editors of the final versions of the many biographies of the Buddha made their own additions and shaped the contents of the texts according to their own interests in order to support their own philosophical and religious ideas." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.

Comment: It's hard to separate fact from fiction when it comes to a legendary figure like the Buddha. The sources for his life are muddled and contradictory, but at least they provide us with a description of what he looked like and a detailed biography, which is a lot more than we have for Jesus, who I've always believed to be a purely legendary character. Whether these accounts of the Buddha are historically accurate is another question altogether.

Alchemy - Sacred Secrets Revealed

Note: Video presented without endorsement. "However one regards it as a science and philosophy, Alchemy provided the beginnings of chemistry, and certainly helped to develop the apparati of chemistry. It is part of the history of science, which is the history of human interaction with nature, and humanity's attempts to harness the power of nature for very human needs and wants." Source: Lloyd Library and Museum.

The Tradition Of Alchemy In Greece

Alchemy apparently originated in a fusion of Greek and Egyptian magical, religious and philosophical traditions. "Of ancient texts on Greek alchemy there survive two papyri, three vast corpora [large collection of writings] of differing date and content, and a few isolated treatises," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), 3rd ed. revised.

The oldest alchemical text, according to the ancient alchemists, was the "Physika  kai mystika or 'Natural and Initiatory Matters,' ascribed to Democritus, the famous Greek philosopher who helped to formulate the atomic theory of the universe. He wasn't the author, however. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "credit cannot be given to the tale that Democritus spent his leisure hours in chemical researches after the philosopher's stone -- the dream of a later age ..." The real author -- the so-called "Pseudo-Democritus" -- lived hundreds of years later and wrote several books on the subject.

According to the OCD, "there were five main strands of Greek alchemy:

(1) The technical achievements of artisans in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt in producing convincing imitations of gold, silver, precious stone, and purple.

(2) The doctrine of mimesis, according to which the point of techne (craftmanship) was to reproduce nature, with the ultimate aim of matching, if not excelling it.

(3) The decline of Greek rationalism and the complementary rise in the power of revelation.

(4) The theory of "universal sympathy" renewed by Stoicism; everything in the cosmos is linked by occult ties of "sympathy" and "antipathy" -- a worldview integrating astrology and magic.

(5) The intuition of the unity of matter.

According to the OCD, the alchemical tradition based on the Physika kai mystika of the Pseudo-Democritus combined all these different elements. "In a temple in Memphis, Democritus and his friends put the recipes to work without achieving transmutation," so they apparently never made the breakthrough they were searching for.

Epicurus, Atomism And Ethics

Note: "A number of important theorists in ancient Greek natural philosophy held that the universe is composed of physical ‘atoms’, literally ‘uncuttables’ ... These philosophers developed a systematic and comprehensive natural philosophy accounting for the origins of everything from the interaction of indivisible bodies, as these atoms—which have only a few intrinsic properties like size and shape—strike against one another, rebound and interlock in an infinite void. This atomist natural philosophy eschewed teleological explanation and denied divine intervention or design, regarding every composite of atoms as produced purely by material interactions of bodies, and accounting for the perceived properties of macroscopic bodies as produced by these same atomic interactions. Atomists formulated views on ethics, theology, political philosophy and epistemology consistent with this physical system. This powerful and consistent materialism, somewhat modified from its original form by Epicurus, was regarded by Aristotle as a chief competitor to teleological natural philosophy." Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Galen, Doctor To The Gladiators

Note: Galen was one of the giants of Western civilization. "His dominant influence on later generations, comparable only to that of Aristotle, is based on his achievements as a scientist, logician, and universal scholar, and on his own self-proclaimed insistence on establishing a medicine that was beyond all sectarianism. [According to Galen,] the dissension of earlier science could be conquered by an eclectic rationality based ultimately on notions in which all shared, and be turned into a stable system of Galenic medical and practical philosophy." -- Galen, Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. revised.