Talk:Diogenes of Oinoanda

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By diffusion of writing and educated classes ancient world met with intricacies of religion-based state, we may schematize:
Designer is responsible of malfunctioning... but one justified: superman and man are betrayer (Lucifer, Adam): but Messiah ...
There is no designer (Buddhist materialism, man is the sole mover: confine desire, not hate): a religion of sages, saints, heroes, demigods - especially if died - (no transcendent beings) more easily imitable than an omnipotent god, was sufficient for a cryptic priest class with bowl. (see Confucianism, Taoism). In Greece thaumaturges such as Abaris, Aristea of Proconnesus, Epimenides; statesmen and leaders such as Brasidas, Sophocles, Lisander, Dion, Philip of Macedonia, Alexander the Great; among philosophers Pythagoras, Empedocles, Epicurus, were object of cult.
God is only an inoffensive paragon (Arist.'s Motionless Mover); and perhaps: "be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect". Love of god/god loves.
Pantheist man/demigod , instead of living after ones own head, is even better than customary gods as he has the virtue of endurance in addition (Stoicism, Sen. Prov. 6.6). Rules have to foretell and follow predictable thing and more than anything else to deny common sense in order to inflate pride.
Ignorance is responsible (Socrates, mystery and gnostic religions, 'death is the death of the death' became fairly inconsistently a second life out of the time). All religious refinement egged on staking a guiltless half god sensitized to get over the troubles, being he himself subject to suffering, in the second century AD of so-called 'Age of Anguish'.

Diogénous tou Oinoandéôs perì ais]thêseôs kaì physeos epitomê. Diogenes of Oinoanda's epitome on sensation and nature.

Among materialists, whereas Buddhism believed in a paralyzing wisdom in a conventual state, Epicurus theorized a conjectural individual wisdom too, in an individualistic and lobbyist state: live secluded, without Buddhist/Cynic/Stoic importunities and diatribes, therefore no religion. "He will found a school, but not in such a manner as to draw the crowd after him." [Diog.L. 118-120]; “I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know, they do not approve, and what they approve, I do not know.”[Epicurus at Sen. Lucil, 29.10] . But when Trajan's Roman Empire reached his largest expansion and pacification, Epicureanism came into power and grants through his wife Plotina (and was continuing with Hadrian and M.Aurelius), somebody began to dream of cosmopolitanism and of the City of Demigods, a demigods based ethic like Tibetan Buddhism and Confucianism (Anatolia was the silk route's terminus) with side dish of cult of the ancestors. "we ought to make statues of the gods genial and smiling, so that we may smile back at them rather than be afraid of them" [Oin. Inscr. Fr 19 M.F. Smith]. God is Love. Previously in the same region as well an event of Epicurean theocracy had done gods statues to smile in Antioch, the whole of Antiochus Epiphanes (d. in 164 B.C.) and of his successor's reign. Lysias of Tarsus (Cilicia), Phaidros' son and partisan of Antonius, established a despotism based on egalitarian Epicureanism [Ath., V, Deipn. 215b]. At Apamea in 2nd C. the chief of the Epicurean school, Aurelius Belius Philippus was also priest of Baal. And at Epicurus' times an Epicurean supporter since 306 B.C., the Syrian Mithres, was the Macedonian King's minister. The Platonic-Pythagorean Numênios (Syria, Apamea, 2nd cent. A.D.) reports live: «arrangement of Epicureans each other can be compared with a well organized state» [Numênios , fr. 24 of The Places at Euseb Praep.evang, XIV,5, 727].
According to M. Ferguson Smith, Diogenes of Oinoanda (about ten thousand inhabitants, who were in league with Cibyra, Bubon, Balbura: the tetrapolis) was just a rich scion of Emperor cult priests family, at the temple of Caesar (supporting universal monarchy), and an influential envoy of his town, possibly as a Roman citizen, ("it is highly probable that his inscription was carved in the A.D. 120", out of the same stonemason's handwriting of another dated inscription). Whence his due charitableness and paternalism (mankind "suffer from a common disease"; "salvation") and satisfaction for epigraphs and catechism. A state religion with citizens, Gods, demigods-Emperors plus Epicurus called 'our savior (sôter), our herald' (Fr. 72), “he who sees through soul's eyes” [De Nat. Deor., I, xix, 49], with his Epicurean secretaries, all persons full of good feelings and strictly cosmopolitan. He forgot the Epicurus' request for “not be engaged in gathering the masses, something which is a form of meaningless "demagogy" and unworthy of the natural philosopher” [Phld. On Epicurus Pherc 1232].
D. poses as a scholarch and imitates Epicurus' letters and last will. He and perhaps his Epicurean friends - Menneas, Dionysius, Carus and Theodoridas strayed from Epicurean teaching in secondary aspects but they appear, however, to have distanced itself from official doctrine in Oriental-stile (at the same time in the region was becoming popular a group of Christianity's monotheistic religions of Theos Hypsistos (Supreme God) proclaimed for Oinoanda in the 'Clarian' oracle), presenting Epicurean doctrines in form of epitomes, letters, and maxims, following Philonides' example in Antioch - who was priest too - that is in dogmatic form (paideia for scions), what Epicurus had perhaps made only for novices. The very Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Diogenes L. - our sources - had of course read no one of the 300 volumes of Epicurus, and plundered those garlands. Relative values chosen by a group of undemanding philosophers, in order to have leisure for thinking, became fit for not paying passer by: "this pattern of study is useful to everyone concerned, I, who devote myself continuously to the subject and who am most at peace by living this sort of life" [Herod. L. 36]; "Epicurus supposes that only the Greeks are qualified to practice philosophy"[U226]; and let's alone “all tribes of men which have been unable or unwilling to make such agreements not to harm one another” (P.D. 32) or “Not every bodily constitution makes it possible for one to become wise (DL 10.117).
Epicurus would have not rejoiced at, but Diogenes' ambition and his stomach complaints affect us indeed after many centuries. "But if we assume it to be possible [...] we shall have [no slaves at that time] (for indeed [we ourselves shall plow] and dig ..." [Inscrip.. Fr. 56]. I wonder he ever touched an hoe handle. Philodemus confines himself to society as it is and rejects farming with one's own hands in On Household Management col. xxiii, 1-9: at that time manual labor was not remunerative: exactly the income of one slave ...
"[...] our disposition godlike and show that not even our mortality makes us inferior to the imperishable and blessed nature [...]. In that disputed Letter to the mother, about nightmares - rich parents are told [the father had just sent, without description, 9 mines: a tenths of the Garden's cost] - is attributed to Epicurus in spite it is put among a series of Diogenes' own letters; Epicurus' mother was actually a superstitious sorceress (even though sometime today fortune teller get millionaire ...) but not so rich , Diogenes' parents just were.
Was Diogenes seriously engaging to an enlightened theocratic Universal Empire? As an old garrulous man and former businessman, he was no more a/or no proactive politician, as he makes known , but certainly he was well-connected in order to make use of human relations for business reasons; every young man begins as a fire-raiser and drops the curtain as a fire-fighter, and we may give him the benefit of the doubt. Anyway we have only a quarter of the inscription. As a priest and cautious Epicurean he preached his sectarian good feelings, as a rich man he practiced an ostentatious euergetism (prudent gifts to envious lover classes, often cross [see euergetic Vatican Saying 67]. A porch was of service to market stalls, scribes and schoolboys; an anthropometric card of the benefactor was lifelike and by now everlasting. But inscriptions were perhaps read even less than in today churches, because they were obstructed by stacks of basket of fruits and blackboard of schoolteachers.

Rhodes and Kos (nearby Oinoanda) were already considered by Phld. a nest of dissidents and "helmsmen on the basis of one book", the epitomes [See Rhet. 2 col. LII 11-LIII 14, and Ad Contubernales (PHerc. 1418 and 310)]. Nicasichrates and Timasagoras (a 'ungrateful blowhard') preached that a sage had not to be subject to the passions of anger (turning the other cheek?); Bromius seemed to prefer political to sophist rhetoric. Antiphanes reproached fee-paying lessons. All neglected technicality of rhetoric, that is boring style and grammatical flatness. Amafinius, Rabirius, Catius Insuber studied there, being criticized by Cicero and Cassius, and ignored by Lucretius and Philodemus.
Diogenes was no stylist too (nor his stonemason). For sure, since barbarous shortage of Epicurean legacy, his clarification of temporal situation of desires/virtues with their causes (fr 31-33), and of intellect notion as a swage block (which reminds cones and rods' structure (see also Cassius Longinus) are important indeed. "Now you, being unable to mark off these distinctions, and being unaware that the virtues have a place among the causes that coincide with their effects (for they are borne along with [pleasure), go completely astray]". Of course he meant unselfish virtues (kalos). "So it is through impingements] that the soul receives in turn the things seen by the eyes; and after the impingements of the first images, our nature is rendered porous in such a manner that, even if the objects which it first saw are no longer present, images similar to the first ones are received by the mind [...] (fr 9). An Epicurean maxim about importance of personal independence (really individualist for once), adds kinetic desires distinction about what is at hand and in other hands. "The sum of happiness consists in our disposition, of which we are master" [...] not the one "which is under the control of others" (Fr. 112 ), in line with the position of Epicurus (cf. SV 67), that of Lucretius (5,1133-1134) and Philodemus [Rhet. I, 226, and I, 238, col. viii).

We may not find specialist knowledge such as in Philodemus' On Signs, Rhetoric, On Poems, but a resumption of Oinoanda excavation - at international project's money, though - would be a non-confessional country's sign.