SOURCE: Benjamin Farrington, "Friendship versus Justice," in The Faith of Epicurus, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967, pp. 20-32.

[In his Faith of Epicurus Farrington stresses the centrality of friendship in Epicurean doctrine. The excerpt that follows fills out his thesis, explaining the significance of context, and, especially, of Plato "just city."]

In what remains of the writings of Epicurus we have nothing intellectually comparable to the splendid edifices raised by Plato in the Republic and the Laws. What we have of Epicurus is three letters and a handful of sayings. It is true that the more closely these are studied the clearer it becomes that they are expressions of a firmly articulated system. [G.] Arrighetti [Epicurus Opere, 1960] is right to maintain that the scientific language of the school is so technical and strict that translation is difficult because every term recalls a doctrine and requires a note. Still we must not assume that in the lost 'three hundred scrolls' were literary masterpieces comparable to those of Plato. However that may be, what is certain is that the sayings of Epicurus, as they are, represent a protest from a man of different temperament, sensibility, and aims; and that they cut so deep and proved so effective that Epicureanism, rightly judged, is found to be an historical phenomenon as important as Platonism.

It is the clash of these two temperaments, these two sensibilities, that is symbolized by the terms Friendship and Justice. The divergence produced more than a battle of the books. Both Plato and Epicurus aimed at a reconstruction of Greek life, and each in his own way was a man of action. When Epicurus founded his society of friends and forbade his adherents to partake in politics he was challenging both the theory and the practice of Plato. The Epicurean movement was designed to spread by personal contact, by example and persuasion, as a kind of leaven. There is no other way in which friendship can be spread. But the just city of Plato was to be established, if opportunity offered, by force.

If Plato did not enter the political arena in his native city, it was for the reason he put into the mouth of Socrates in the Apology. His chance of survival would have been slight. But in 367 BC (two years after the founding of Megalopolis in Arcadia, just to remind ourselves what politics in this age was like) Plato, being sixty years of age, accepted an invitation from Dionysius II of Syracuse, a city in which democracy had been overthrown, to advise and assist in the plan to synoecize Western Sicily as a means of strengthening the Greek presence in the island against the pressure from Carthage. The project did not go well, and, after a few months, Plato was back in Athens. But he returned to Syracuse on the same errand six years later, working on the draft constitution for the synoecism, and stayed for almost a year. Soon the involvement of the Academy in the affairs of Syracuse was to become more dramatic and direct. Dionysius was not in the eyes of Plato and his followers a suitable ruler; and in 357, Plato being then too old to participate personally, Dion, a friend of Plato and a member of the Academy, having whipped up support in the Peloponnese, made a dash across the Ionian Sea and captured Syracuse by a surprise assault. Many young members of the Academy were in the expeditionary force, among them Aristotle's friend Eudemus, who fell at the moment of success. The victorious Dion established a narrow oligarchy, but soon ran into trouble. Having fallen foul of his admiral, he liquidated him, and was then himself treacherously killed by another Academician, Callippus, who made himself tyrant.

Such activities were not isolated but rather typical of the role the Academy aspired to play in public affairs. Shortly before Plato's death, at the other end of the Greek world, a gifted adventurer, Hermias of Atarneus in the Troad, who had been in Athens and liked Plato's views, carved a small kingdom for himself out of territories nominally at least under Persian way. He built himself a new capital, Assos, and, if the Letters of Plato can be accepted as genuine, it was with Plato's support that he assembled a small cabinet of Academicians to guide him in his task. These in the end amounted to five—Erastus, Coriscus, Xenocrates, Aristotle, and Theophrastus. As the purpose of the Syracusan project had been to contain Carthage, so the kingdom of Assos was to provide a bridgehead for the invasion of Persia now being planned by Philip of Macedon. But the Persians tumbled to what was going on, seized the person of Hermias, interrogated him under torture, and crucified him.

These and other incidents of the same kind gave the Academy its reputation as a centre of political activity not stopping short of military violence. The activity and the reputation persisted down to the life-time of Epicurus…. [A] Platonist, Evaeons, had just been ejected from his position as tyrant of Lampsacus when Epicurus came upon the scene. The role of the philosopher in politics was a burning topical issue, and when Epicurus laid it down as a rule that such activity was to be eschewed in the Garden as incompatible with the life of friendship, he was consciously breaking away from the example of the older school.

There is, in fact, a certain brutality about Plato that must have been offensive to Epicurus. For instance in the Republic (IX, 578) he discusses the dangerous isolation of the tyrant and does it in this way: Rich individuals in cities have many slaves and yet live securely. But this is because the whole citizen body is leagued together for the protection of each individual. But imagine one of these slave-owners, say with fifty slaves, carried off by some god into the wilderness with his family and property where there are no freemen to help him. Will he not be in an agony of fear lest he and his wife and children should be put to death by the slaves? Well, such is the situation of the tyrant who isolates himself.

This placid acceptance of the city as a league of masters to protect themselves against their slaves is exhibited again in the Laws (VI, 777-8). Here the correct management of slaves is the topic. Plato gives two main rules. First, the slaves should be recruited from different countries so that they will share no common speech. Second, while they must not be unjustly punished they must not be allowed to forget that they are slaves. This result will be achieved, if every word addressed to them is a command, if the slightest pleasantry is absolutely excluded, and if correction is always physical chastisement, not a verbal rebuke, as if they were free.

How in God's name should Epicurus, whose rule was not to punish slaves, but to pity and forgive (Diogenes Laertius, Life of Epicurus, 118), really take kindly to this man? Even Aristotle, who knew and loved him, was put out of patience. For Aristotle, as for Epicurus, happiness was the highest good. He examines the regulations made by Plato for the realization of the ideal city. Control of the city is to be in the hands of a small class of Guardians, and to ensure that they shall not be selfish he deprives them of all the means by which selfhood is normally achieved. His Guardians are to have their wives, children and property in common so as to be uninfluenced by any but public motives. Aristotle protests, 'The Guardians must be unhappy, being bereft of wives, children, and property. And if they are not happy, who will be? Surely not the exponents of the arts and crafts, nor the mass of manual workers.' (Politics, 1264b.)

'The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship', says William Blake. This conception of friendship as the very essence of man, and also indeed of God, is the heart of what Epicurus has to say to his age. With this message he swept the ancient world as Rousseau did eighteenth-century Europe. 'It is surely a wonderful thing,' says Rousseau, 'to have got men into a situation in which they cannot live together without outwitting, supplanting, deceiving, betraying, and destroying one another.' This too Plato deplored; but his solution was the imposition of a 'just' constitution by a small élite of trained metaphysicians on a rigidly stratified State. For Epicurus this remedy was worse than the disease. He sought, not an external order, but a voluntary acceptance of a contract of friendship, in this also anticipating Rousseau.

The question, then, arises, whether Epicurus was an anarchist. The answer must be No. Anarchism, understandably, was not without its representatives in Athens at this time. The Cynics, some of them men of noble character, were in revolt against the very conception of civil society. They advocated a return to nature without drawing any clear distinction between animal and human nature. Hence a certain flouting of public decency, which was, indeed, the origin of their name. But for the Epicureans the cure for the ills of the time was not a return to nature but to human nature, human nature being defined by its possession in the highest degree of the capacity for friendship.

Here a comparison with Rousseau can help. Rousseau, like Epicurus, thought that man at a certain point in his development had lost the true path. What that point was Emile Faguet [La Littérature Fraçdise, 1715-18, 1896] well defines:

It was the day on which humanity abandoned patriarchal life, the life in which goods are held in common, well-being is universal, riches are unknown, and luxurious pleasures, arts, and vices are still undreamed of. This, not savagery, is what Rousseau meant by the state of nature. This halfpastoral, half-rustic stage, the stage which excludes great nations, great towns, and property, he calls the state of nature, not because he thought it primitive but because he thought it most natural to man. It was to this he would recall mankind.

The State which Faguet describes is identical with Plato's First or Simple City, before the Luxurious State arose. This had had the benediction of Socrates; and this, as A. E. Taylor remarks [in Plato, the Man and his Work, 1926], 'is already on the right side of the line which separates civilization from barbarism'.

To enable us to transport the argument back into the conditions of ancient life in Attica we are not lacking in information. The rapid changes in the fortunes of Athens and, it must be added, the astonishing clarity with which from the time of Solon and Cleisthenes the underlying economic, political, and social realities had been grasped, combined to produce a pageant of historical development unique at so early a period. The political philosopher had much material at hand. Philochorus, the greatest of the historians of Attica, who in the year that Epicurus founded the Garden, held the posts of seer and diviner at Athens, took as his subject the constitutions, festivals, and ceremonies of Athens and was able to bring his history down from the stage when the inhabitants of Attica were shepherds living in scattered villages till Athens had become an oligarchy, or plutocracy, in which the effective control of public life was in the hands of the 12,000 men who were rich enough to share the burden of the liturgies.

The details of this long political evolution escape us, but the main fact is clear. In its original state the population of Attica was organized in four tribes with their constituent groups, the phratries or brotherhoods. They prided themselves on their equality, calling themselves by such names as 'feeders from the same crib', 'sharers of the bran-tub', 'suckled on the same milk'. They had no tradition of submerged groups of inferiors, serfs, plebeians within their ranks. The equality, of course, did not last. In the pseudo-Xenophontine Constitution of Athens, which dates a little before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC, the population is already divided into the wealthy, the noble, the good, the few, the fortunate, the landowners, on the one hand; and the poor, the commoners, the inferior, the bad, and anyone connected with the sea, on the other. But the memory of the old tradition remained strong.

As we have already seen in our quotation from Thucydides, right down to 431 BC, 'the bulk of the Athenian citizens were living on the very estates with land, house, and shrine which their families had held continuously since before even the time of Theseus'. (N. G. L. Hammond, Land Tenure in Athens etc, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1961, 76-98.) Even the ancient festival of the phratries, the Apatouria, had survived, with its worship of Apollo Patröus and Zeus Herkeios, its communal meal, and its country jollifications. If, then, we want to inform ourselves what Plato was thinking about when he drew his contrast between the Simple and the Luxurious City, and of that better state of society Epicurus had in mind when he recommended abstention from politics and affairs, it is foolish to look elsewhere than to the idyllic past of Attica itself.

It was to the gods of this idyllic past that the Antigone of Sophocles appealed when she found that the law of the city asked her to love one of her brothers and hate the other. Zeus for her was Zeus Herkeios, the patron god of the phratries. Aristotle discusses the passage when he makes his distinction between particular law and universal law. 'Universal law is the law of nature. For there really is, as everyone by some intuition of the divine dimly discerns, a natural justice that is binding on all even without formal covenant with each other. This is clearly what Antigone means when she claims that the burial of Polyneices was a just act in spite of the prohibition. She means that it was just by nature, being, as she says, one of 'the unwritten and unfailing statutes of the gods, the life of which is not of today nor yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth'. (Rhetoric, 13, 1-2.)

For Epicurus, brooding on the same problems, the commandments are reduced to one, 'Believe in the immortality and blessedness of god, for this is the image of god engraved on the mind of every man.' (TM [Epistle to Menoeceus], 123.) Blessedness, the attribute of the immortal nature, is synonymous with love or friendship (philia). 'Of all the good things wisdom provides for life-long blessedness the chief is the acquisition of friendship.' (PD [Principal Doctrines], xxlvii.) 'The noble nature dedicates itself to wisdom and friendship, of which the first is a mortal good, the second immortal.' (VF [Vatican Fragments], lxxviii.) Here friendship is called immortal because it is the way of life of the gods, while wisdom is only the path by which mortals may discover the blessedness of friendship. Then the conclusion of the whole matter, 'Meditate on these things day and night, both by yourself and with one like yourself, and you shall live like a god among men. For a man who lives amidst immortal blessings is not like a mortal man.' (TM, 135.)

This religion of friendship had its roots in the current idealization of primitive life, seen not as a form of savagery but as a state of civilization congenial to the true nature of man. In arriving at this conception Epicurus was indebted to many of his predecessors but to none more deeply than to Aristotle, with whom the topic of friendship received an astonishing development. To understand what Epicurus owed to Aristotle in this matter, and where he broke with him, will be our concern in the rest of this chapter.

In his Politics Aristotle accepts justice as the basis of the State, and the State itself as natural:

Man is intended by nature to be part of a political whole and is driven by an inward impulse to such an association. Accordingly the man who first constructed such an association was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when perfected, is the best of animals; but without law and justice he is the worst of all … Justice is the basis of the polis, and the constitution of a political association is the same thing as the decision of what is just. (Politics, 1253a.)

Epicurus was by no means blind to the force of this argument. But he thought it needed correction. Only the simple form of the State was 'natural', for this was held together by the natural impulse of friendship. The fully-developed State, with its code of laws enforced by external sanctions, was not natural to man.

This point of view was clearly expressed in a remarkable document drafted even before the School had left Lampsacus for Athens. Epicurus had been admitted to Lampsacus by the representative of the Macedonian overlord, Lysimachus. This must have encouraged the school to expect favour also with the Macedonian overlord of Egypt. Accordingly Colotes, as we have said, addressed to the first Ptolemy a defence of the Epicurean school against all others. In it he attempts an explanation of the reform aimed at by his Master, a portion of which has been preserved by Plutarch. It might have been written as a supplement and correction to the argument of Aristotle quoted above:

Those who have established laws and ordinances and instituted monarchies and other forms of government in towns and cities, have placed human life in great repose and tranquillity and delivered it from many troubles; and if anyone should go about to abolish this, we should live the life of wild beasts and be ready to devour one another when we met. But we are to treat now of how a man may best keep and preserve the end of nature, and how he may from the very beginning avoid entering of his own freewill upon offices of magistracy and government over the people. (Plutarch, Against Colotes, 30 and 31.)

The italicized words define the limit of the form of association Epicurus thought natural for man.

So much for the Politics of Aristotle. When, however, he wrote his Ethics, he saw things from a somewhat different angle. The last two books of the Nicomachean Ethics are wholly devoted to friendship. The treatment is thorough. And in this extensive discussion almost everything which survives in the scanty remains of Epicurus is anticipated. The debt of Epicurus is open and undisguised. If it is not also acknowledged this is because, in the last analysis the spirit which animates the philosophy of the two men, is so very different.

In his treatise on the Generation of Animals (753a) Aristotle notes how the capacity of animals for love of their young is proportionate to their practical intelligence:

Nature seems to wish to implant in animals the sense of care for their young. In the lower animals it lasts only to the moment of giving birth to an incompletely developed animal. In others it lasts till the development is complete. In all the more intelligent it covers the bringing up of the young also. And in those which have the greatest share of practical intelligence we find familiarity and love shown also towards the young when fully grown, as with men and some quadrupeds.

Then in the Ethics, when he begins the discussion of friendship, he harks back to this natural association between love and intelligence:

Parent seems by nature to feel it for child and child for parent, not only among men but among birds and most animals. Creatures of the same kind are drawn together; and this is especially true of men, so that we bestow praise on men who love their fellows. That this is true of mankind as a whole we see when we travel. Every man is a friend to every man. Moreover friendship seems to hold States together, and law givers set more store by friendship than they do by justice. For concord seems to be akin to friendship, and when men are friends there is no need of justice. On the other hand, even just men need the impulse of friendship to bring them together in the first place. Indeed justice in its fullest sense is friendship. Nor is friendship only a means. It is also an end. For we praise those who love their friends, and regard the possession of many friends as a noble thing. In short we identify goodness and friendship. (1155a.)

If there were not so much else that differentiated Epicurus from Aristotle, this magnificent paragraph might be accepted as the foundation-charter of the Garden. To a man of the temper of Epicurus it was an invitation and a challenge to base an ecumenical movement on the philosophy of friendship. For friendship is shown to be rooted in nature, to be proportionate to the degree of intelligence, to be the common possession of all men everywhere, to be prior to justice both in the order of time and of logic, to be a self-sufficient principle of concord in society, and an end in itself. In a word, friendship is virtue in practice.

How deeply rooted this ideal was in the school of Aristotle is exemplified by what remains of the writings of his pupil Dicaearchus, a slightly older contemporary of Epicurus, to whom Aristotle had assigned the task of writing a history of civilization in Greece. 'Men at the first stage of civilization,' writes Dicaearchus, 'were near the gods, best by nature, and lived the best life. They did not know war, and their chief blessings were freedom from the compulsion of necessity, health, peace, and friendship.' (Porphyry, De Abstinentia, IV, 2; Cicero, De Officiis II, 5.16.)

Apart from the agreement between the Lyceum and the Garden on the great fundamentals touched upon above, there is agreement also on points of detail. We have noted, for instance, that Epicurus admitted his slaves to his society of friends. It might be thought that this was a point on which Aristotle gave no lead to the practice of the Garden. In fact Aristotle discusses the question, and, in spite of his well-known insistence that slaves are so by nature, by a characteristic distinction he opens the door for Epicurus. There can be no friendship, he says, with a slave qua slave. But a slave is also a man, and there can be friendship with him in so far as he is a man. (Nicomachean Ethics, 1161a.)

Other points on which Epicurus was to insist are that under certain circumstances a man will die for his friend, and that the value of a life is to be judged not by its duration but by its quality. Aristotle anticipates both opinions. 'The good man does many things for his friend, and if need be dies for him…, since he would prefer a short period of intense pleasure to many years of humdrum existence.' (Nicomachean Ethics, 1169a.)

Finally Aristotle stresses the importance for friendship of the life together. The argument is elaborate and characteristic of the emergence at this period of a greatly increased consciousness of the inner life. Animals, says Aristotle, have sense-perceptions, men alone are conscious of the fact that they have them. In the technical language of the time, their aisthesis is accompanied by synaisthesis. Self-consciousness accompanies not only their sensations but their thoughts. We think, and we are conscious that we think. This is the source of the good man's pleasure in himself. When he thinks about himself, he can approve himself. He has a good conscience. But his friend is to him another self, and to share with a friend the awareness each has of the other's goodness is the specific pleasure of friendship. The beasts of the field can share only the pleasure of feeding on the same pasture. Sharing for men means sharing their thoughts and words (1170 a-b).

What is there left for Epicurus to tell us about friendship? Not very much, it might seem, except that for Aristotle friendship was the stepping-stone to political life, while for the Epicureans politics were the destruction of friendship. 'They fled from the polis,' says Plutarch, 'because they held it to be the ruin and confusion of blessedness.' (Life of Pyrrhus, xx.) Philodemus, the head of the Garden at Naples, explains why:

If a man were to undertake a systematic enquiry to find out what is most destructive of friendship and most productive of enmity, he would find it in the regime of the polis. Witness the envy felt for those who compete for its prizes. Witness the rivalry that necessarily springs up between the competitors. Witness the division of opinion that accompanies the introduction of fresh legislation and the deliberate organization of faction fights which set not only individuals but whole peoples by the ears. (Sudhaus, Volumina Rhetorica ii, 158-9.)

Nor do we lack direct evidence in his own words of what Epicurus thought about Aristotle's political writings. The nub of Epicurus's complaint is that at the end of his life Aristotle deserted philosophy for political theory, and thus he became (writes Epicurus, in words that plainly survive in a very damaged manuscript) 'a more damaging adversary of the blessed and wholesome life than those who actively engage in politics.' (Sudhaus, Volumina Rhetorica, ii, 56-64.) The astonishing thing is that so uncompromising a creed should have met with wide success. 'Friendship,' cried Epicurus, 'goes dancing round the world bidding us all awake and pass on the salutation of blessedness.' (VF, iii.)

It is not easy to understand the appeal of the Epicurean gospel of friendship unless we remember that it was addressed to a very sick society. For a gospel it was, as well as a severe intellectual discipline for those who were capable of such mental exertion. In one of the writings of William Tyndale we read, 'Evangelion (that we call the gospel) is a Greek word; and signifieth good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man's heart glad, and maketh him sing, dance, and leap for joy.' Epicurus, too, was an evangelist and thought of himself as such, as did also his disciples. The mood of disillusionment with politics was not to last for ever, but it lasted a long time. More than two hundred years later Lucretius was celebrating the man who set friendship above politics in these terms:

Who can avail by might of mind to build a song to match the majesty of truth and these discoveries? Who has such skill in speech that he can fashion praises to match the deserts of him who has left us such treasures, conceived and won by his genius? It is beyond the skill of mortal man. For if we are to speak as befits the majesty of the truth now known to us, then we must say that he was a god, a god I say, who first disclosed that principle of life we now call wisdom, and who by his skill rescued us from the seas that engulfed us and the thick darkness and brought us into still waters and a clear light. (On the Nature of Things, v, 1-11.)