SOURCE: Diogenes Laertius, "Excerpts From the Life of Epicurus," in The Philosophy of Epicurus, North-western University Press, 1963, pp. 101-12.

[More than anyone, Diogenes Laertius was responsible for preserving details of Epicurus's life; most later scholarship has depended on his biography of the philosopher. The following excerpt begins with summaries of accounts meant to discredit Epicurus—accounts that portray the Epicurean life as debauched. After refuting these attacks, Diogenes Laertius walks his reader through the basics of Epicurean philosophy.]

¹The Stoic Diotimus, who bore Epicurus ill will, slandered him most cruelly by publishing fifty lascivious letters under his name, and so did the person who compiled the love letters that are supposedly Epicurus' but are traceable to Chrysippus, not to mention Posidonius the Stoic and his followers. … They claimed that he went around to houses with his mother, reading off chants of purification, and that he taught grammar school with his father for a miserable fee; also that one of his brothers was a pimp and had relations with the hetaera Leontion; and that Epicurus passed off Democritus' atomic theory and Aristippus' pleasure theory as his own. …

In his letters to Pythocles,² who was then in the bloom of his youth, he wrote, "I shall sit down and await your beauteous, godlike advent." … And they claim that he wrote to many other hetaerae, especially Leontion, of whom Metrodorus was also enamored. And in the essay The Purpose of Life he supposedly wrote, "As far as I am concerned, I do not know how I can think of the good if I subtract the pleasures of taste and the pleasures of sex, sound, and form." In a letter to Pythocles he said, "Hoist sail, happy youth, and speed far from all book learning."

Epictetus,³ too, called him a "foul-mouthed bastard" and abused him savagely. And even Timocrates, the brother of Metrodorus and a student of Epicurus' who later quit the school, says in a book entitled The Amenities that Epicurus vomited twice a day because of his high living, and he explains that he himself hardly had the strength to escape those nightly colloquia on philosophy and the mystic brotherhood. Also that Epicurus was ignorant in many ways about his subject and even more about life; that his body was in pitiable condition, so that for many years he was unable to get out of his sedan chair; also that he spent a mina⁴ every day on his table, as he himself mentioned in a letter to Leontion…, and that there were other hetaerae living with him and Metrodorus, named Mammarion, Hedeia, Erotion,⁵ and Nicidion. …

…. .

But these critics are all crazy. The man Epicurus has plenty of witnesses to his unparalleled benevolence toward all: his country, which honored him with bronze statues; his friends, so many in number that they could not even be counted by whole cities; his intimates, all of whom remained bound to him by the siren call of his teachings. …⁶ Then there is the continuity of the school, which lasted on and on after almost all the others had ceased to exist and which produced countless leaders, chosen one after another from among the "friends."⁷ And there is his gratefulness to his parents, his generosity to his brothers, and his kindness to his house slaves, as is evident from the provisions of his will and from the fact that they participated in the discussions on philosophy. The outstanding example is Mys, previously mentioned.⁸ We have, in short, his humanity toward all. It is impossible to describe his attitude of reverence for the gods⁹ and his love of country; it was because of his excessive reasonableness that he did not engage in politics. And though very difficult conditions prevailed in Greece at that time, he lived out his life there and crossed over to Ionia only two or three times to see his friends in various places. But they came to him from everywhere and lived with him in the Garden (as Apollodorus¹⁰ tells us) on a very frugal and plain diet. In fact, they were satisfied with a half pint of cheap wine and usually drank water. Epicurus did not think it right for them to deposit their property in a common fund, as did Pythagoras (who had said, "The property of friends is common property"), because this was the way of people who distrust each other, and if people are distrustful they are not friends. Epicurus himself remarked in his letters that he was satisfied with just water and plain bread. "Send me a small pot of cheese," he wrote, "so that I can have a costly meal whenever I like." This was the man who gave it as his opinion that pleasure is life's goal. …

Apollodorus tells us in his Annals that Epicurus was born in the third year of the 109th Olympiad in the magistracy of Sosigenes¹¹…, seven years after Plato's death. At the age of thirty-two he first established a school at Mitylene and Lampsacus¹² and ran it for five years; after that he moved over to Athens. There he died at the age of seventy-two, in the second year of the 127th Olympiad in the magistracy of Pytharatus. Hermarchus of Mitylene, son of Agemortus, took over the school. Epicurus died of a stone that blocked his urine, as Hermarchus also tells us in his letters, after an illness of fourteen days. Hermippus relates that he got into a bronze tub filled with hot water, called for straight wine, and swallowed it. He then exhorted his friends to remember his teachings and passed away. …

As he was dying he wrote the following letter to Idomeneus: "On this happy day, which is also the last day of my life, I write the following words to you. The symptoms of my strangury and dysentery are continuing and have not lost their extreme seriousness. But offsetting all this is the joy in my heart at the recollection of the conversations we have had. Take charge of the children of Metrodorus,¹³ as behooves one who from boyhood on has been attached to me and to philosophy."

…. .

Epicurus was an extremely productive writer and sur-passed all other philosophers in the number of his works, of which there are upwards of 300 rolls. There is not one reference in these to outside authorities—nothing but Epicurus' own words. …¹⁴ The best of his works are the following: On Nature, 37 rolls; Atoms and Space; On Love; … Problems; Leading Doctrines; On Choice and Aversion; The Purpose of Life; The Criterion, or Canon; … On the Gods; Religion;… Lives, 4 books; … Symposium; … On Vision; … Atomic Films; Perception; … On Music; Justice and the Other Virtues; … Letters.

I shall now attempt to set forth the teachings contained in these works by laying before you three of his letters,¹⁵ in which he provided a summary of his entire philosophy; … but I shall first say a few words about the divisions of his philosophy.

It is divided into three parts—the normative, the physical, and the ethical. The normative contains the methodology of the system and is found in the single work entitled The Canon.¹⁶ The physics contains his whole theory of nature and is found in the 37 books of On Nature and, in elementary form, in his letters.¹⁷ The ethical part has to do with acts of choice and aversion and is found in the treatises entitled Lives and The Purpose of Life and also in his letters.¹⁸ The Epicureans, however, ordinarily group the normative part with the physical, claiming that it deals with fundamental criteria and the elements of the system. Physics, on the other hand, has to do with the generation and destruction of worlds and with nature as a whole; ethics, with things to be chosen or avoided, with different ways of life, and with the purpose of life.

They reject dialectic as deceptive, because (they say) it is enough for the natural philosopher to proceed according to the names of things.¹⁹ In The Canon Epicurus says that sensations, concepts, and feelings are the criteria of truth, and his followers add direct perceptions of the mind.²⁰ [Epicurus says as much in the Letter to Herodotus and in Leading Doctrines.]

1. Sensation is completely irrational and incapable of memory; it is not activated by itself, nor when activated by something else can it add anything or subtract anything.²²

2. Nor is there anything capable of refuting sensations, because a sensation of one class cannot refute another of the same class, since they are of equal authority; nor can sensations of different classes refute each other, since they do not pass judgment on the same objects.²³

3. Nor, again, can reason refute sensation, since it is wholly dependent on the sensations.²⁴

4. Nor can one sensation refute another, since we give our attention to them all.

5. Furthermore, the existence of our apperceptions is a guarantee of the truth of the sensations.²⁵

6. Our seeing and hearing are actualities, just as much as our experience of pain.

7. Thus it is necessary to draw inferences from phenomena regarding things that are not perceived.²⁶

8. All ideas take their rise from sensations through processes of coincidence, analogy, resemblance, and combination, with reflection contributing something also.²⁷

9. The mental images of madmen and dream images are realities, since they activate the mind, whereas the nonexistent does not thus activate it.

10. By "concept" the Epicureans mean "an apprehending," "correct opinion," "a thought" or "universal idea" deposited in the mind—in other words, a remembering of something frequently given in sensation from the external world. For example, take the expression, "X is a man." As soon as "man" is pronounced, we immediately think of a typical human being in line with the concept formed from antecedent sensory data. Hence the original meaning assigned to any word is clear and distinct evidence of truth. Furthermore, we could not look into what we want to investigate if we did not have prior knowledge of it. For example, the question "Is that thing in the distance a horse or an ox?" implies that we must have some conceptual knowledge of the appearance of a horse or an ox. We could not even have named anything without having first learned of its appearance through the concept. Hence concepts are clear and distinct evidences of truth.²⁹

11. In addition, matters of belief rest on clear antecedent evidence, to which we refer when expressing them (e.g., How do we know if this is a man?). Beliefs are also known as assumptions, and they may be true or false. They are true if verified or not contradicted, but false if they are not verified or if they are contradicted. It was for this reason that the principle of "the problem awaiting verification" was introduced—for example, waiting to get close to the tower and find out how it looks close up.³⁰

12. The feelings are two in number, according to the Epicureans, pleasure and pain. They are found in all animals, and the former is congenial, the latter naturally foreign. It is by means of these that acts of choice and aversion are decided upon.³¹

13. Some investigations have to do with actualities, others with mere verbiage³²

Let us review what Epicurus and those who came after him thought about the wise man.³³

1. Men inflict injuries from hatred, jealousy, or contempt, but the wise man masters all these passions by means of reason.

2. Once he has become wise, he no longer experiences the opposite state, nor does he voluntarily feign to. He will be more affected by feelings of pleasure and pain, but this will be no hindrance to wisdom.

3. A man cannot become wise in any and every bodily condition or in every nationality.

4. Even if the wise man is tortured he is happy. Nonetheless he will moan and groan under those conditions.

5. The wise man alone will show his gratitude and will continue to speak well of his friends, whether they are present or absent.

6. The wise man will not have intercourse with any woman with whom it is legally forbidden, as Diogenes tells us in his digest of Epicurus' ethical teachings.³⁴

7. Nor will he punish his house slaves; he will show them mercy and grant pardon to any that are conscientious.

8. The Epicureans do not think that the wise man will fall in love, or worry about his burial.

9. Love is not divinely sent, Diogenes tells us.

10. The wise man will not make high-flown speeches in public.

11. Intercourse never helped any man, and it's a wonder that it hasn't hurt him.

12. In addition, the wise man will marry and beget children, as Epicurus tells us in Problems and his work On Nature; but he will marry according to his station in life, whatever it may be.

13. He will avoid certain persons and certainly not make a fool of himself when drinking, as Epicurus remarks in the Symposium.

14. Nor will he meddle in politics (Lives, Bk. I), nor play the dictator, nor live like a Cynic³⁵ and beg alms (Lives, Bk. II).

15. Even if he goes blind he will still take part in life (ibid.)

16. He will likewise grieve,³⁶ as Diogenes tells us in Bk. V of his Excerpts.

17. He will plead his own case at law.

18. He will leave written works behind him, but not make set speeches in public.

19. He will be prudent about his property and provide for the future.

20. He will love country life.

21. He will confront adversity, because no one can count on the friendship of Lady Luck.

22. He will be careful about his good name to the extent of not losing public respect.

23. He will take greater pleasure than others in the festivals.³⁷

24. He will set up likenesses of others but will be indifferent as to whether he has any of himself.

25. Only the wise man could talk properly about music and poetry, but he would not actually compose poetry.

26. One sage is no wiser than another.³⁸

27. He will make money if he stands in need of it, but only by his profession.

28. He will, on occasion, wait upon a sovereign.

29. He will gloat over another's troubles—but only as a means of setting him straight.

30. He will assemble a school but not for demagogic purposes; he will lecture publicly but not of his own free will; and he will speak dogmatically without skeptical reservations.³⁹

31. He will be the same asleep or awake.⁴⁰

32. Sometimes he will die for a friend.

The Epicureans teach:

That faults are not equal in importance;⁴¹

That health is a value for some persons but a matter of indifference to others;

That courage does not arise naturally but from utilitarian considerations;

That friendship arises because of its advantages; that there must be a starting point, of course, just as we sow seed in the ground, but that friendship is consolidated by the communal living of those who have attained the full complement of pleasure;⁴²

That happiness has two senses: supreme happiness, like that of the deity, which cannot be intensified, and the happiness that has to do with the increase and decrease of pleasure. …

In other works Epicurus rejected divination, e.g., in The Minor Epitome. "Divination is nonexistent," he says, "and even if it did exist, events are to be regarded as things not within our control."⁴³ So much for the practical considerations that he has treated in greater detail elsewhere.

Epicurus differs from the Cyrenaics⁴⁴ regarding pleasure, in that they sanction only dynamic pleasure and not static, whereas Epicurus sanctions both types in the soul and in the body, as he tells us in On Choice and Aversion, The Purpose of Life, Book I of Lives, and in his letter to his friends in Mytilene. Similarly Diogenes in Bk. 17 of his Excepts and Metrodorus in the Timocrates write that pleasure is conceived as both dynamic and static. And Epicurus says in On Choice and Aversion that "freedom from mental and bodily pain is a static pleasure, whereas joy and merriment are looked upon as dynamic, active pleasures."

Epicurus also differed from the Cyrenaics in that they taught that bodily pains are worse than mental and pointed out that offenders undergo bodily punishment, whereas Epicurus held that pains of the mind are worse, since the body is afflicted only momentarily in the present, but the mind in the past, present, and future. Similarly the pleasures of the mind are greater. As proof that pleasure is the purpose of life he adduces the fact that all animals from birth on are well content with pleasure but recoil from pain naturally and nonrationally. Our own experience, then, is the reason we avoid pain. …

And the virtues are chosen not for themselves but for their pleasurable consequences. … Virtue is the only thing inseparable from pleasure; other things, such as food, are separable. …

Notes

¹ These selections are drawn from the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers, a compilation of the second century A.D. The work is of uneven merit and reliability, although the biography of Epicurus happens to be the best single life of a philosopher that we have from antiquity.

Epicurus was a very affectionate man and a great letter writer. The effusive language of some of his personal letters could easily be interpreted erotically by those who wished to do so, and apparently there were many malicious and cynical persons who did. Furthermore, the walled Garden in Athens was the habitat of a number of Epicurean "friends" of both sexes—male disciples such as Metrodorus and Hermarchus and female followers such as the free woman Themista and the three slave hetaerae, Leontion, Nicidion, and Mammarion ("Baby Lion," "Little Conquest," and "Sweet Mamma," respectively). The hetaerae were not only high-grade "call girls" but also semieducated professional entertainers, roughly comparable to the Japanese geishas. The price of this (apparently) innocent and high-minded experiment in communal living was the inevitable charge of promiscuous sexual relations leveled by foes and rivals in the outside world. The opening selections give us a sordid picture of the backbiting and vilification that were undoubtedly current in all the philosophical schools of the time, including the Epicurean. In true journalistic fashion Diogenes first gives us "the dirt" about his subject, then quickly takes pains to correct this impression by showing us the real Epicurus. The biography ends with a disjointed and choppy account of what Epicurus taught, some parts of which are nonetheless quite valuable and throw additional light on the meager remains of this prolific writer.

² The recipient of the (second) letter bearing his name.

³ None other than the famous Stoic philosopher, who happened to live more than three centuries after Epicurus! The brickbats exchanged by the Greek schools remind us of the snide comments made by the various Christian sects about each other over the years.

⁴ Almost twenty dollars.

⁵ Hedeia and Erotion were both common names in the trade, meaning "Sweetie" and "Lovey," respectively.

⁶ The language is fanciful, but the claim is not. The loyalty of successive generations of Epicureans to the person and teachings of the master was remarkable and a well-known fact in ancient times. Lucretius, who lived two centuries after Epicurus and was a non-Greek, is a prime example. "Deviationists" were almost unknown. This probably testifies to the strong religious feeling of the Epicurean communities, which made for solidarity among the "friends" as well as for philo sophical purity.

⁷ The school had a continuous life of some five centuries, but by the time Diogenes wrote his biography it had already begun to assimilate itself, both in doctrine and membership, to the surrounding communities of Stoics and Christians, who were far better organized for survival. See DeWitt, op. cit., Chap. XV, "Extension, Submergence, and Revival."

⁸ This name means "The Mouse."

⁹ The gods in question were the deities of the state religion, purified and redefined. …

¹⁰ A famous disciple who had the nickname of "Despot of the Garden." He is mentioned later in the biography (sect. 25) as having more than four hundred rolls, or books, to his credit, one of which was Annals, a history of the school.

¹¹ I.e., at the end of 342 B.C. or the beginning of 341 B.C. His death occurred in 270 B.C. An Olympiad was the four-year period between the celebration of the Olympic games.

¹² Two cities of northwestern Asia Minor. Geography is of some importance here because it was in the coastal cities of Ionia further to the south that Greek materialism had its beginnings, rather than in Greece proper. Democritus, the founder of atomism, had lived and taught for many years at Abdera in Thrace, the district northwest of the Hellespont and not far distant from Mitylene and Lampsacus.

¹³ A favorite disciple who died seven years before Epicurus.

¹⁴ Epicurus always insisted that he was self-taught and owed no philosophical debts, even to Democritus. He denied that Leucippus, Democritus' predecessor, had ever lived (sect. 13). This dishonest or, at the least, disingenuous attitude was no doubt intended to magnify his own originality and authority, but it only succeeded in calling forth numerous changes of plagiarism. Professor DeWitt excuses Epicurus on the ground that he was a moral reformer and hence felt himself "absolved from debts of gratitude."

¹⁵ Diogenes interspersed his biography with the Letter to Herodotus, Letter to Pythocles, and Letter to Menoeceus as well as the important collection of ethical aphorisms entitled Leading Doctrines. We would have little or no knowledge of these works otherwise.

¹⁶ This is what we today would call his epistemology, which emphasizes the empirical basis of knowledge and the various tests for truth (sensation, direct mental perception, universal concepts, and the feelings of pleasure and pain) as against the dialectical or purely logical methods favored by Plato and other rationalists. …

¹⁷ E.g., the Letter to Herodotus.

¹⁸ I.e., his personal letters, of which we have fragments, and also the Letter to Menoeceus.

¹⁹ Two important points:

1. Epicurus rejected the dialectic of Plato, i.e., the method of logical argument that aimed at universal definitions (What is piety? What is justice? etc.) and at the discovery of eternal archetypes or Ideas (Piety, Justice, etc.). The Epicureans of course used deductive logic in building their system as much as anybody else, but they anchored it firmly to empirical data and never allowed it to become a free-floating, speculative method. Epicurus believed that if logic were divorced from fact it became mere verbalizing and led to "inconceivable" entities such as the Platonic Ideas, which to him were "empty words." The root cause of his break with Plato lay in the fact that in a "salvation" philosophy the purpose of knowledge is necessarily practical and therapeutic and not theoretical or speculative. …

2. "The names of things" (e.g. "horse," "ox," "man") immediately evoke their corresponding concepts, which have been generated in the mind by repeated sensory experience (of horses, oxen, and men). The point of this obscure remark is that it is unnecessary and misleading to engage in a long search for definitions, in Platonic fashion, since our experience of natural objects already provides us with clear and distinct mental images. Cf. Herod. 37-38: "We must grasp the meanings associated with the word sounds in order … to avoid leaving matters in a state of confusion by expounding terms ad infinitum or by using meaningless verbiage. We must therefore look to the primary concept in the case of each word and not require exposition. …" See also sect. 33 of this biography. …

²⁰ The numbered items following in the translation are snippets from The Canon, or theory of knowledge, a treatise now lost. Note the order that they follow: sensations, concepts, feelings. This is one of the more important sections of the biography.

²² I.e., sensation is self-evident in its truth value and does not need proof. Every sensation is autonomous and self-contained, and neither gains nor loses by comparison with another, except when the mind misinterprets what is given in sensation—as in the case of a mirage, where something is added.

²³ E.g., taste cannot refute taste. A says, "This martini is very dry"; Β says, "It isn't dry at all." This apparent contradiction doesn't destroy the reliability of the senses, as the Skeptics claimed, but shows their relativity to the perceiver and makes each sensation authoritative. In the second case, one sense cannot contradict another; e.g., A says, "This martini tastes of juniper berries," and B, "It looks like water." Obviously. What is not mentioned here is the important fact that sensations are often misinterpreted by the mind, in which case we need to "refute" them by closer inspection. …

²⁴ Reason was an ancillary tool and was never listed as a primary test for truth. Cf. Lucr. 4.482-85, "What should we consider as having greater validity than sensation? Will reasoning that takes its rise from 'false' sensation have power to contradict the senses when it originates wholly from them? If they are not true, all reasoning likewise becomes false." Professor DeWitt (op. cit., p. 136) strongly denies that this means that "the whole content of consciousness is derived from the sensations," and for this and other reasons refuses to regard Epicurus as an empiricist.

²⁵ I.e., the fact that our sensations are not merely passively registered but actively cognized and fitted into the existing content of consciousness, witnesses to their truth.

²⁶ There are two classes of material events that are not open to direct perception: (1) atoms and their behavior and (2) remote celestial phenomena such as comets and solar eclipses. In both cases our knowledge is inferential and derived from the "signs" that observed phenomena provide. Reason enables us to draw such inferences, but it is not the primary source of truth. Much the same attitude is seen today in statements such as "Science is a mental construct resting on the evidence of the senses."

²⁷ This passage is discussed and illustrations provided in Introduction V.2.d. Professor DeWitt (op. cit., p. 136) unconvincingly writes off this testimony of Diogenes as unreliable, although it is obviously part of a context extracted from Epicurus' lost treatise on the theory of knowledge. He would translate the Greek noun for "ideas" as "secondary or inferential ideas," i.e., ideas that are logically derived rather than built up from sense experience. In other words, DeWitt has strong prejudices against calling Epicurus an empiricist. On the other hand, it is certainly obvious that Diogenes was in error, or at least inexcusably vague, in saying that all our ideas "take their rise from sensation." For example, the proposition that "worlds are infinite in number" (Herod. 45) is clearly not given in sensation, but logically derived from the first principle that "the totality is infinite both in the quantity of atomic bodies and in spatial magnitude" (Herod. 42). Perhaps we should give Diogenes the benefit of the doubt by saying that by the term "ideas" he meant "universals" such as "man," "horse," "ox"; but DeWitt is not willing to concede even this (op. cit., 112-13).

²⁹ Cf. Lucr. 4.478-79: "You will find that the concept of truth arose first from the senses and that the senses cannot be refuted." … Professor DeWitt again writes off Diogenes' account of the empirical origin of concepts as the testimony of a two-bit hack. He attempts to reverse the generally accepted opinion on this point and by using a battery of arguments both good and bad (op. cit., pp. 142-8), tries to prove that, far from being empirical in origin, Epicurus' "concepts" were a priori or innate ideas provided by nature as effective guides for thinking—just as it has provided the feelings of pleasure and pain as effective guides for the moral life. One of the pieces of evidence seemingly in favor of this view is the fact that the Greek noun for "concept" (prolepsis) means "anticipation"; hence "if an idea precedes or anticipates something, this can hardly be anything but experience" (p. 145). Thus, for example, nature has provided us with an innate idea of justice, so that when we mature we may be able to distinguish just acts from unjust. But if so, nature is a purposeful agent, and … ideas of purpose are utterly foreign to a materialism such as Epicureanism. It would seem, rather, that Diogenes has provided us with the correct interpretation of "anticipation": "We could not look into what we want to investigate if we did not have prior knowledge of it." A concept is anticipatory in the sense of being a precondition to our identifying new occurrences of individuals of given classes (e.g., Is that a horse or an ox?) or as a preexisting means of delimiting some field of investigation (e.g., how could one write a book on baroque art without first having some conception of the meaning of "baroque," gained through hearing baroque music and seeing baroque painting and architecture?). Both these meanings of "anticipatory" are compatible with the empirical origin of concepts.

In all fairness it must be admitted that other arguments adduced by DeWitt are very persuasive, among them the testimony of Cicero that the true conceptions of the gods were inborn. The question of the status of concepts in Epicurus is closely connected with the larger question of whether he was an empiricist, and DeWitt wages a concerted campaign on several fronts against the widely accepted opinion that he was. If he is right, then Epicurus was an intuitionalist and not an empiricist at all as far as the nature of concepts is concerned. But even so, the other two important criteria of truth—sensations and feelings—are unaffected and constitute major evidence for the empiricist side of the argument. In any case De Witt's arguments must remain inconclusive, since the word for "concept" appears only four times in the extant writings of Epicurus, which is too slender a basis for decision, and because we lack an all-important document, Epicurus' Canon, or theory of knowledge.

³⁰ … Some beliefs are open to direct verification (e.g., Is that tower round or square?). Others are not, especially when they involve the causes of remote celestial phenomena (e.g., What is the cause of the rising and setting of the sun?). In the latter case, plural hypotheses are set up, and the principle of noncontradiction comes into play: Any hypothesis that is not contradicted by our terrestrial experience may be regarded as probable. …

³¹ I.e., decisions for or against various courses of action. …

³² Epicurus is contrasting his own empirical methods with the dialectical methods of the Platonists. See note 19, above.

³³ What follows is a scrapbook of Epicurus' views on "the wise man," or ideal Epicurean. The recurring "will" is usually equivalent to "ought to." Everything is disjointed and run together, and the reader gets the impression that Epicurus was no better than a cracker-barrel moralist. Numbering has been introduced into this melange to give a semblance of order. This section is capped by the Letter to Menoeceus.

³⁴ Not the biographer, but Diogenes of Tarsus.

³⁵ The "beat" philosophers of antiquity, who flouted all civilized conventions and lived like street dogs (whence their name).

³⁶ Unlike the rival Stoic sage, who disciplined himself not to feel emotion, including grief at the loss of a child or friend.

³⁷ Oddly enough, Epicurus was very punctilious in his own observance of the rites of the state religion and urged his followers "to sacrifice piously and properly." Whether his motives were defensive, hypocritical, or pious cannot be properly ascertained, but Professor DeWitt (op. cit., 280-81) holds that they were completely sincere and gives good reasons for so believing.

³⁸ It is suggested by Ettore Bignone, an Italian editor, that since Epicureanism was a closed, dogmatic system any idea of progress or of one Epicurean thinker advancing beyond another was automatically ruled out.

³⁹ The Epicureans considered it a virtue and not a vice to have arrived at a complete system of positive dogmas about nature and human nature. This closed body of teachings they regarded as the only "true philosophy," in contradistinction to the speculative uncertainties of Platonism and the crippling excesses of Skepticism. Their dogmatism can be justified only in the light of their over-all aim—the cure of souls in an age of anxiety. …

⁴⁰ I.e., equally unperturbed.

⁴¹ The Stoics, contrariwise, held that they are equal, since conduct is either moral or immoral, with no possible middle ground of partly moral, partly immoral.

⁴² I.e., by professional Epicureans who live the simple life of ataraxia in a group; cf. L.D. 40. "Those who have attained the full complement of pleasure" is a technical phrase for "perfect Epicureans." It may anticipate a similar technical phrase in St. Paul's Epistles (cf. Ephesians 3.19: "To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fullness of God," i.e., become perfect Christians).

⁴³ I.e., it is impossible to read the future by supernatural means. Even if it were possible, things happen deterministically, and we can do nothing about them.

⁴⁴ A fifth-century school founded by Aristippus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates'. Since it antedated the Epicurean school by more than a century and also taught that pleasure is the moral good, Epicurus was accused of plagiarizing from Aristippus (sect. 4 of Diogenes' biography). But the two conceptions of pleasure differed radically. Epicurus taught that pleasure was neutral and largely static, consisting in freedom from pain in body and mind, whereas Aristippus held that pleasure is positive and dynamic, consisting in the immediate, intense enjoyments of the moment, whatever they may be; also that there is no difference between "lower" and "higher" pleasures (e.g., sex and Brahms), because all pleasures are bodily states. The moral life consisted in rational regulation of our actions, with a view to maximizing the positive balance of pleasure over pain. In other words, Cyrenaicism was what Epicureanism has always tended to become in the hands of its lay practitioners … Nevertheless it was fundamentally different from the sectarian practice of the Garden.