[Woman with wax tablets and stylus (so-called "Sappho"), Naples Archeological Museum]
Pompeii: Breathtaking new paintings found at ancient city. Stunning artworks have been uncovered in a new excavation at Pompeii, the ancient Roman city buried in an eruption from Mount Vesuvius in AD79. Archaeologists say the frescos are among the finest to be found in the ruins of the ancient site. Mythical Greek figures such as Helen of Troy are depicted on the high black walls of a large banqueting hall. The room's near-complete mosaic floor incorporates more than a million individual white tiles. … (BBC)
Live like a corpse. How acceptance of death set the samurai free. In the year 1700 Nabeshima Mitsushige, daimyo (lord) of the Saga domain, passed away. Yamamoto Jōchō, one of his samurai retainers, claims to have intuitively sensed his impending doom. From Kyoto, he rushed home: just in time to witness Mitsushige's final moments. The death of the daimyo marked the end of Jōchō's service. He stated a desire to die with his lord by committing junshi: ritual suicide by self-immolation. This might, to say the least, strike us as a peculiar retirement plan. But at the time, it was held to be a supreme expression of loyalty. Still, his fellow clansmen intervened. Junshi was too radical even for the samurai of the Edo period and outlawed by both the Saga domain and the Tokugawa government. Thus, Jōchō became a Buddhist monk instead. In the hills of Kurotsuchibaru, he would spend the rest of his life as a hermit. There, perhaps inadvertently, he became one of history's most influential martial philosophers. … (Daily Philosophy)
A few of the ideas about how to fix human behavior rest on some pretty shaky science. It’s hard to walk a block or finish a morning coffee without encountering some system that attempts to tell you what to read, what to buy, how to lose weight or prevent dementia or tweak your decisions in other specific ways. My watch constantly buzzes with “relax reminders.” The number of calories appears next to every menu item at fast-food restaurants. These experiences are the result of a concerted scientific effort to understand and adjust human behavior — “nudges,” as the legal scholar Cass Sunstein and the economist Richard Thaler call them, that push us gently to make preferred choices. The “nudge doctrine” the pair developed has led to the creation of hundreds of “nudge units” in governments all over the world (including our own), that seek to put nudges in policies and procedures. Examples of actions that are called nudges include making organ donation opt-out instead of opt-in, and sending information about how much drivers would save by switching to car-pooling and public transit. … (New York Times)
How to eat like a Stoic: the ancient diets of Cynicism and Stoicism. They talk both about what we should eat and how we should eat it, if we want to live wisely and gain strength of character. For instance, we’re told of the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus: “He often talked in a very forceful manner about food, on the grounds that food was not an insignificant topic and that what one eats has significant consequences. In particular, he thought that mastering one’s appetites for food and drink was the beginning of and basis for self-control.” Musonius taught that Stoics should prefer inexpensive foods that are easy to obtain and most nourishing and healthy for a human being to eat. It might seem like common sense to “eat healthy” but the Stoics also thought we potentially waste far too much time shopping for and preparing fancy meals when simple nutritious meals can often be easily prepared from a few readily-available ingredients. … (Donald Robertson’s Substack)
Michael Sugrue, 66, dies; his talks on philosophy were a YouTube hit. The college lecturer, in a uniform of rumpled khakis and corduroy blazer, paces on a small stage, head down. “The lectures you’re about to see,” he says in introducing a series of talks, videotaped in somewhat hokey lo-fi style in 1992, “cover the last 3,000 years of Western intellectual history.” The lecturer, Michael Sugrue, would go on to teach Plato, the Bible, Kant and Kierkegaard to two generations of undergraduates, including for 12 years at Princeton, without ever publishing a book — an academic who hadn’t “really had a career,” as he told The American Conservative after retiring in 2021. But that same year, in the depths of the pandemic, Dr. Sugrue uploaded his three-decade-old philosophy lectures to YouTube, where many thousands of people whose aperture on the world had narrowed to a laptop screen discovered them. His talk on the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, in particular, seemed to fit the jittery mood of lockdown, when many people sought a sense of self-sufficiency amid the chaos of the outside world. It has now been viewed 1.5 million times. … (New York Times)
Well, I always have thought of myself as a fierce Samurai warrior, so ... .