This is what we need more of … Classicists taking the time to write letters to the editor when the paper doesn’t quite get it. In this case, David Blank (UCLA) comments on a recent review of Greenblatt’s The Swerve in the New York Times:
Sarah Bakewell, reviewing “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” by Stephen Greenblatt, writes that the original texts of Epicurus “didn’t make it; . . . we know them only secondhand” (Oct. 2). As with Mark Twain, reports of the death of the works have been much exaggerated. Scholars have papyrus fragments of Epicurus’s 37-book magnum opus “On Nature” from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum to keep them busy, not to mention three letters summarizing his philosophy for his followers and a collection of pithy sayings encapsulating it. The latter two survived via the medieval manuscript tradition, in Diogenes Laertius’s “Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers,” which also contains an account (and defense) of Epicurus’s life, and was a major source for the Renaissance and early modern revival of atomism, as well as a best-selling Italian edition, a few years ago, of the “Letter to Menoeceus” — proof that Epicurus himself still speaks directly to us.
- via Epicurean Fragments (New York Times)
If you missed the review via my #classicalbook Twitter tag or via Explorator last week:
- The Almost-Lost Poem That Changed the World (New York Times, of course)
… perhaps what we really need is a bunch of Classics types to ‘Occupy Fleet Street’ …
rogueclassicism 