A 2000-year-old postcard | Hacker News Reader

A 2000-year-old postcard

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67 pointsbenbreen11 comments

I'm reminded of a quote from Seneca's letters to Lucilius, also circa 1st century CE:

> Thank you for writing so often. By doing so you give me a glimpse of yourself in the only way you can. I never get a letter from you without instantly feeling we’re together. If pictures of absent friends are a source of pleasure to us, refreshing the memory and relieving the sense of void with a solace however insubstantial and unreal, how much more so are letters, which carry marks and signs of an absent friend that are real. For the handwriting of a friend affords us what is so delightful about seeing him again, the sense of recognition.

That's lovely.

Who would write like that nowadays? I always feel like this old way of writing is a sign of higher beings.

It certainly is poetic. I don't know how much of that comes from the translation which will have been done by someone who already "knows" that these letters are important classical texts. If I knew Ancient Greek then maybe I could read it and it would seem like reading people's Facebook messages today.

But if you like that kind of writing, then try writing like that! If you keep at it, your friends will at least to recognise that style of writing as part of you. :-)

Thank u for the encouragement :)

if you keep writing like that, your friends will etch your words into stone and make sure it survives :)

only the most poetic stuff survived I think, the receipts and useless spam mail was thrown out / recycled

Even 2000 year old prose is a window into the lives of people exactly like us. The same vanity and flaws; the raw ambition. Read Cicero’s letters.

There are almost 7.9 billion living people. There are more literate people on the planet than any other time in history. The corpus of private correspondence produced daily is huge, and you will never see more than a tiny sliver of it. There could be a thousand Senecae (in terms of the quality of their private letters) living alongside you, and you would never know it.

Keep in mind, too, that that text is a translation. Seneca didn't write that. A translator named Robin Campbell did. I trust Campbell captured the essence of what Seneca meant, and I'm willing to believe its beauty in English is analogous to the beauty of Seneca's Latin, but who writes like that nowadays? Robin Campbell did in 1969, pretty close to nowadays!

Right about private correspondence however i follow many intellectual blogs on the rationalist diaspora (lesswrong, substack) + reddit and HN and I have never quite seen a blog showing this level. One would have thought internet would make discovering such talents order of magnitudes easier.. I recently read heard some Molière and the verbal virtuoseness is unmatched to anything else I know of.

I didn't knew about Robin Campbell, will give it a try :)

This brings to mind the Vindolanda tablets: https://www.thoughtco.com/vindolanda-tablets-roman-forces-in... used by Romans at Hadrian's wall.

Many personal messages, for example:

'Caelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum' - the sky is obscured by constant rain and cloud...

or 'Commilitones mei non dolor. Quibusdam placet mitti iubet' - My fellow soldiers have no beer. Please order some to be sent.

Fascinating insight into the past! It makes me appreciate the convenience of emails and messaging today.

Did he sail downstream or upstream, though?

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