Sailing to Lampsacus: Diogenes of Oenoanda, New Fragment 7 Clay, Diskin Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Spring 1973; 14, 1; ProQuest pg. 49 Sailing to Lampsacus: Diogenes ofOenoanda, New Fragment 7 Diskin Clay O F THE EIGHTEEN new fragments of Diogenes which Martin Ferguson Smith has discovered in Oenoanda, the most difficult and perhaps the most interesting is New Fragment 7.1 Two of its three columns are very nearly complete (see PLATE 1) but its argument is hard to make out. Smith first thought that the subject of the stone was cosmogony and the role of chance in the formation of a world. He was brought to this interpretation by the word TVfLTrClVOV in col. ii line 12 and two letters of col. iii line 7, which he restored as i.\[lKWV] 'whirls'. Both the 8lV'T} and the descriptive term TVfLTrClVO~,8~c (or StCKO~tS~C) played a role in the cosmogony and cosmology of early atomism, and TO ClVTOfLClTOV and TVX'T}, the subjects of the end of the new fragment, figure as the critical terms of Aristotle's discussion of the cosmogony of Democritus.2 But what makes this story unclear is, as Smith saw,3 the lack of a discoverable masculine singular subject for the verbs from col. ii line 1 to col. iii line 8. (The text of the new fragment is reproduced below with some important revisions.) The identification of the ClVTOV of col. ii line 2 must have been clear from col. i, but only the edge of this column has been preserved to a depth of six letters at most. The discovery of the precise subject that underwent the violent and seemingly painful events narrated in columns ii and iii is essential to an understanding of the new fragment, and Smith is quite fair in admitting that without it the whole fragment remains obscure. What is it that is being gulped down and belched up again, lacerated, skinned and nearly completely flayed? 1 AJA 75 (1971) 365-69. The new text presented in this essay differs in important respects from the text published in 1971. This study owes a great deal to Mr Smith; indeed, my text and commentary are the result of our collaboration, and I have recorded a number of his suggestions in the commentary to our new text. I also owe thanks to Mr Smith for his generous help and encouragement and for the photograph reproduced as PLATS 1. Z The essential passage from Aristotle's discussion of -rVX7J and 'TO alh6p.IX'TOV as physical causes in his Physics is presented, with additional details from Simplicius' commentary, in Diels-Kranz Vorsokr. 6 68 A 67-69. 3 Smith, op.cit. (supra n.l) 367. 49 50 SAILING TO LAMPSACUS The translation I offer here reveals sufficiently the character of the events described in New fr.7 (cols. ii and iii) and, with the help of Plutarch, makes possible the identification of the subject of the inscription. Indeed, the masculine singular subject of the bulk of the new narrative is identical with the victim who suffered the violent events so forcefully described, and the identification of this victim explains one of the oddest features of the language of the inscription­ the exuberant and poetical style, which led Smith to suspect that Diogenes was closely following not Epicurus but Democritus. TRANSLATION H ••• of the rocks, from which it did not yet wash him in (to dry land), but the sea gulped him down and belched him back up again. It was then that he was lacerated, as you would expect, and he swallowed down a great mouthful (of salt water); he was badly skinned when he crashed upon the sea-eaten rocks. But gradually he suc­ ceeded in swimming through to open water, and just then he was borne along on the waves' to the festival drum (?) and, flayed almost to an inch, he barely escaped with his life. Now he spent the next day in this state upon a high promontory and the following night and the next day until nightfall, exhausted by hunger and his injuries. "We now understand that events which lay beyond our control are benefits despite appearances-the very doc­ trine he commends to you as reasonable. For your herald who brought you to safety has died; for afterwards chance ... " There are a fair number of accounts in Greek of the experience of being shipwrecked.5 None I know is so dramatically told and so circumstantial as that of the new fragment from Oenoanda except one: Odysseus' account of being washed up on the island of Scherie (Od. 5.367-463). Indeed, the victim of this shipwreck seems to have 'Another interpretation of this obscure passage is given in the commentary to these lines. 5 Most of the literary descriptions are listed in RE 2 (1923) 412 s.v. "Schifbruch." DISKIN CLAY 51 suffered what Odysseus would have suffered were it not for Athena (426-27): " () ",. , ~ , ,I..() ,~""" () EV a K a7TO p£VOVC OpV'f' 7] J cvv U oeTE apaX 7] J , , E£ f.L7] ••• And it is Odysseus' description of Charybdis which is recalled in the language of New fr.7, which has the sea sucking its victim in and belching him up again (Od. 12.235-38): avapocpf7eat ~ ()&Aaeea Ka, pfjg(U 7TaAtv. IfEpicurus' moral doctrines had not struck Plutarch as so stridently in conflict with the events of his life, the masculine singular subject of the narrative in Diogenes would remain unknown-one of the many anonymous victims of a shipwreck. But thanks to a device familiar from Epicurus, Colotes, and Plutarch's anti-Epicurean dia­ logues, we learn the events of Epicurus' life which Plutarch saw as contradicting his moral doctrines.6 For the purposes of solving the riddle posed by New fr.7 Epicurns' 7Ta(J7] are more important than the doctrines they are made to refute, but these doctrines too are critical for a full understanding of the new inscription. In his dialogue against Epicurus' conception of the pleasant life (Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum) , Plutarch seizes on Epi­ curns' assertion of the possibility of a confident and steadfast ex­ pectation in life (;AmCfw mCTOV Kat fNf1aLOV, 1090A). This Plutarch saw as refuted by the unforeseen events of Epicurus' own life. One of these was the experience at sea which nearly cost Epicurus his life. Unfortunately Plutarch's MSS have garbled the term which described more precisely the nature of this mishap, and for the moment a part of the text is left between daggers (1090E): ." ~, (J , , , ~ , , '\"~'" ~'\ 0XI\WV DE vf.Love Kat I\rJCTWV Wf.LOT7]TCXC Kat KI\7]pOVOf.LWV autKtae J En DE 1\0t- , , , , t(J '\ '{J I ',1..' f' t 'E ' " , ,~ , f.LOVC aEpwv Kat al\accav EV payK7]V V'f' atc 7TtKOVpOC Ol\tyov EUE7]eE (J ~ \ , 'A' .1. • ',1.. '" \' KaTa1TO 7]vat 7TI\EWV EtC af.L'f'aKOV J we ypa'f'H J n av I\EyO£ TtC; Until May of 1970 and Smith's visit to the site of ancient Oenoanda, • Epicurus' formulation of this principle is: OVK €coV"Tal COt TOtC '\6yotc a[ 1Tpcff£tc aK6'\ovBo£, KL1 xxv. He puts it to effective use against those who refer the cause of all events to 'neces­ sity' in the n£p~ !Pvc£wc: Epicurus, ed. G. Arrighetti (Torino 1960) 31.28.6-17; Sententia Vaticana (SV) 40. Phillip De Lacy's discussion of the importance of 1TaB7J in Epicurean po­ lemic, "Colotes' First Criticism of Demoeritus," in Isonomia: Studien zur Gleichheitsvorstellung im gnechischen Denken (Berlin 1964) 67-69, points up the inadequacy of Bignone's charac­ terization of Plutarch's argument as ad hominem (cj. RivFC 44 [1916] 281). 52 SAILING TO LAMPSACUS this was the only report of the shipwreck Epicurus barely survived on one of his trips to Lampsacus. Oddly it receives little notice in modern accounts of Epicurus' life and Wanderjahre.7 Epicurus' travels did not come to an end with his establishment in Athens in the summer of 306. Despite the turmoil created throughout the Aegean by the strug­ gles of the 8ta8oxot, Epicurus managed to make some trips to Asia to visit his friends (Diog.Laert. 10.10). It is his solicitude for the com­ munities of friends established in Asia, Egypt and on the Hellespont that invites comparison with the voyages of St Paul. Indeed, Epicurus had such deep roots in Lampsacus that Strabo could call him Tp6TTOV 7'£V~ AaJLl/1aK"f/V6v (13.1.19). But Plutarch gives only one sure detail of the disaster which befell Epicurus as he was sailing to Lampsacus: he was sucked down by the sea. Plutarch's word is KaTaTTo{}fjvat, which clearly corresponds to avapofjcat in Diogenes (col. ii line 3). Beyond this, the text of Plutarch's MSS is corrupt, and the real story of what happened is disguised by the unintelligible {}ai\accav €v{1payld]v of X and the equally impossible €v{1paYK"f/v of a. In the Loeb text of the dialogue De Lacy and Einarson have emended the text to read {}ai\acc"f/c ap.TTWTtV v' ~c, which is attractive in its sense; but it is difficult to imagine how ap.TTWTtV could have been corrupted into €v{1paYK7}v.8 More compelling is the second of two emendations suggested by Bignone;9 his {}ai\accav €PL{1pVXTJV is attractive since it comes closer to the MSS readings than ap.TTW7'£V and can find support where he did not 7 E. Bignone is the only scholar to give Epicurus' shipwreck on his way to Lampsacus a place in the account of Epicurus' life. In his long and operatic recreation of the formation of Epicurus' moral thought (L' Aristotele perdute e la fermaZione filesefica di Epicure II [Florence 1936] 143-48), he rightly saw, as had Usener, that the notice in Plutarch must derive from one of Epicurus' letters, but he insists that all the details of Plutarch 1090B figure in Epi­ curus' bitter letter to the philosophers in Mytilene (frs.111-14 Us.). In his attempt to as­ semble the fragmentary details into a coherent portrait of Epicurus' early life, Bignone identifies the ypa4>-rf mentioned by Philodemus in his n£p~ 'E1rtKOIJpov, fr.6 col. ii, with this long letter (p.117). According to Bignone, Epicurus wrote to the philosophers in Mytilene to inveigh against his rivals for having forced him to undertake this "disastrosa navi­ gazione." The occasion of Epicurus' wreck at sea would then be his move from Mytilene to LampsaGus. But there is not the slightest hint of the context imagined by Bignone to be discovered in New fr.7. 8 Another consideration that speaks against the emendation is that it would seem from the context of New fr.7 that Epicurus was caught in the backwash of a wave that had broken against the rocks and not an C1p.1rW'TtC, which usually describes a more gradual re­ cession of the sea (cf. Hdt. Z.ll, 7.198, 8.1Z9). • In op.cit. (supra n.7) 145 n.1, which is superior to his earlier emendation 8~accav a3 flp~J1 txp' ~c in op.cit. (supra n.6) ZSI. DISKIN CLAY 53 think to look for it, in the poetic description (Od. 5.411-12) of another wreck at sea which Epicurus seems to have taken as his model: " 0 \ \ I 't' ',/..\ <;'\ ~ EKToe EV P.EV yap 7Tayot 0<:, EEe, ap.'f" OE Kvp.a f3'{3PVXEV p60£OV • • • Plutarch might have recognized this model, since he quotes Odyssey 5.410 precisely when he returns to the theme of shipwrecks in 1103E. Clearly Epicurus survived to describe his shipwreck, but it is not clear from Plutarch what form this description took. He says no more than WC ypacpEL. But later on in this tract Plutarch's spokesman Aris­ todemus lets drop that he had recently in hand a collection of Epi- , I (" \ \, \, , \ <;' ~'O ,~ curus etters Evayxoc yap KaTa TVX'Y}V Tac E7TLCTo/\ac OL7]/\ ov aVTOV, 1101B). The possibility that Plutarch knew of Epicurus' near scrape with death from one of his letters seems good.10 He seems to return to this letter at the close of an essay dominated by language taken from the sea. Near the end of the essay Aristodemus turns Epicurus' conception of death as a dissolution (TO 8LaAV()EV avaLC()7]TE'i, KLl II) against him and evokes in vivid terms the dissolution or 'shipwreck' that awaits every good Epicurean at death. His Greek is worth re­ producing (1103E) for the light it throws on the new fragment of D· ,\ \, \, f3' <;', () , "" 'I:' lOgenes: KaLTOL VEWC P.EV EK71'ECWV E71'L aT'Y}c ota/\v EtC'Y}C E71' E/\71'LOOC , ~, • ~ 't \ - \ <;' t ' ~ <;' \ , oXELTa, nvoc we YTi 7TpoeE<:,WV TO ewp.a Kat maV'Y}<:.op.EVOC, T'Y}C OE TOVTWV cpLAococptac-and here he quotes a line from Odysseus' account of his own shipwreck (Od. 5.41O)-EKf3anc ot) 71''Y} cpatvE()' cUoc 71'OA£O'iO Ovpa'E. What would seem to secure this as a reference to Epicurus' account of his own shipwreck is Plutarch's method of refutation. In Aristo­ demus' imagined dialogue with his Epicurean puppet, the Epicurean conception of death and pain is reduced to the merest recitation of the main articles of Epicurus' catechism. Following the recitation of Epicurus' KVpLaL Ll6saL I and II comes the doctrine the Epicurean ex­ presses in the following language (1103E):11 "I tell you to eat and be rI \ A' r I \ I ,. " f' , ( merry-on V'Y} .::J La XELfLa<:,ofLEV