First Meeting at Kassa

Welcome to Legendum - The Greek and Roman Classics Reading Group

We held the first historic meeting of the Classics Reading Group aka 'Legendum' at Kassa cafe/opticians! on the seafront last Sunday. A warm welcome to all of us.

Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to find several members, get together and set this group up so quickly! I should have done this sooner, it was sort of running around my brain for a while and whilst thinking/chatting aloud over a roaring bonfire in the wilds of St.Leonard's with Simone, decided to take the plunge and go for it. I am glad we did.

We had a round table session and managed to hammer out some basics of what, where, how and why and our next meet. the next meetings is at Simone's house and will take place on June 9th, at 4.00 p.m. We are planning to talk about our impressions etc gleaned from a reading of the first 2 books of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius.



Latin and Greek texts can be found at : www.perseus.tufts.edu

Translations (of varying quality) can be found at project Gutenburg: www.gutenberg.org

The Penguin Translations available from Libraries or Bookshops are by R.E Latham (This is the version I used as a crib when doing it for A Level at School) or a more recent version in Penguin by Alicia Stallings.

There are some good general intoductory articles on Lucretius and the De Rerum on Wikipedia and some of the links at the bottom of those articles also look interesting, particularly the argument for Lucretius as a source for the pro-evolutionist/anti-creationist argument.

The book mentioned by Liz was The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt

I mentioned a interesting blog which is Kenodoxia a blog on Ancient Greek Philosophy and other things by Dr. James Warren of Cambridge University, who seems to be quite an authority on Epicurean thought.

See you all soon,

PS: Please leave a comment to say hello and add any suggestions to the blog - its the group's i.e. Your!! blog so please add suggestions and I will add them in, such as links, book suggestions, requests etc.