SOURCE: A. E. Taylor, "The Life of Epicurus" and "The Salvation of Man," in Epicurus, Constabel & Company Ltd., 1911, pp. 35-79, 80-96.

[In the following excerpt from his Epicurus, Taylor first places Epicurus's biography in the context of Greek culture and history and then presents his view of Epicurus's ethics. Refuting the myth of Epicurus's debauchery, Taylor instead charges the philosopher with "timidity" and "a lack of moral robustness. " His biography ends with a summary of the connection between Epicureanism and early Christianity. In his discussion of Epicurean ethics, Taylor contends that they were uniquely democratic, made accessible to the layperson as well as the ruling elite.]

The Life of Epicurus

When we turn from Plato and Aristotle, the great constructive thinkers of the fourth century before Christ, to the study of the new sects or schools,—that of Epicurus was, in date of foundation, slightly older than the others,—which came into being early in the third century, under the successors of Alexander, we feel at first as if we had passed into a new moral atmosphere.

Philosophy seems to have dwindled from the magnificent attempt to arrive at scientific knowledge of God, man, and nature into a mere theory of conduct, and, in the theory of conduct itself, the old conception of the individual man as essentially a member of a community freely banded together to live the 'good life,' in virtue of which Plato and Aristotle could treat what we call 'ethics' as a mere part of the wider study of society, its aims and institutions (Politics), to have given place to a purely individualistic doctrine of morals which has lost the sense of the inseparable union of the civilised man with the civilised society. So keenly has this difference of tone been felt that writers on philosophy have almost always adopted the death of Aristotle as one of those historical land-marks which indicate the ending of an old era, and the beginning of a new, like the English Revolution of 1688 or the French Revolution of 1789. The cause of so great a change has been variously sought in the special conditions of life in the third century. Under the hard pressure of the Macedonian dynasts, it has been said, Philosophy naturally became identical with the theory of conduct, because, in such untoward times, the effort to understand the world had to be abandoned for the task of making life bearable. The theory of statesmanship shrank into a mere doctrine of morals because with the battle of Chaeronea the free life of the independent city-states came once for all to an end. Others, again, have seen the key to the developments of Philosophy in the third century in a return of Greek thought from the 'idealism' of Plato and Aristotle into the materialism, which, as is alleged, was natural to it. There is an element of truth in these views, but they are none the less, as they stand, thoroughly unhistorical.

It is true, to be sure, that under the Macedonian rulers the ordinary man was cut loose from the immediate participation in public affairs of moment which had been characteristic of the life of the sovereign city-state, and that individualism in ethics is the natural counterpart of cosmopolitanism in public life. It is also true that both the Epicurean and the Stoic systems regarded the theory of the chief good for man and the right rule of life as the culminating achievement of Philosophy, and that both tended, in their doctrine of nature, to revert to views which are curiously reactionary as compared with those of Plato and Aristotle. But it is false to suppose that the death of Aristotle or the appearance of Epicurus as a teacher really marks any solution of historical continuity. From the time of Pythagoras at least Philosophy had always been to the Greek mind what personal religion is to ourselves, a 'way of life,' that is a means to the salvation of the soul, and this conception is no less prominent in Plato and Aristotle, when they are rightly read, than in Epicurus and Zeno. And, with regard to the alleged effects on Philosophy of the disappearance of the old life of the free city-state, it is important to recollect that Aristotle composed his Politics under the Macedonian régime, and that the Athens of Pericles had ceased to exist, except as a mere shadow of its former past, before Plato wrote the Republic. If any single date can be taken as signalising the end of the old order, it should rather be that of the surrender of Athens to Lysander, or even that of the defeat of Nicias before Syracuse, than that of the collapse of the anti-Macedonian agitation of Demosthenes and Hypereides on the field of Chaeronea.

Similarly the cosmopolitanism and individualism of the Epicurean and Stoic ethics is no new departure, nor even a reaction to the attitude of the 'Sophists' of the fifth century, but a direct continuance of traditions which had never died out. Epicurus is directly connected by a series of discernible though little known predecessors with Democritus, just as Zeno is with Antisthenes and Diogenes. Nor is it true that the third century was a period of intellectual stagnation. It is the age of the foundation of the great Museum and Library at Alexandria, of the development of literary criticism into a craft, of the creation of the organised and systematic study of history and chronology, and the compilation of full and exact observations of natural history in the widest sense of the term. Above all, it is the time to which belong the greatest of the Greek mathematicians, and astronomers, Eudoxus, Euclid, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus of Samos, Apollonius of Perga, Archimedes.

The notion that a century so full of original scientific work was one of intellectual sterility is probably due to a simple historical accident. For the most part the writings of the successors of Plato and Aristotle, as well as those of the early Stoics, happen not to have been preserved to us. Hence we readily tend to forget that the scientific and philosophical work of the Academy and Lyceum was vigorously propagated all through the period in which the new schools were seeking to establish themselves, and that the Stoics, the most important of the new sects, were not merely keenly interested in 'Physics,' but were also devoted to minute researches into Formal Logic, much of which, in the shape in which the Middle Ages have handed it down to us, has been inherited directly from them. Hence we come to look on the indifference to logic and scientific Physics which was characteristic of the temperament of Epicurus as if it was a universal feature of 'Post-Aristotelian' thought, and falsely ascribe to the age what is really true of the man. Of the age it would be much more true to say that it was one of devotion to the advancement of special sciences rather than to the elaboration of fresh general points of view in Philosophy. In this respect it is closely parallel with the middle of our own nineteenth century, when the interest in philosophical speculation which had culminated in the 'absolute Philosophy' of Hegel gave place to absorption in the empirical study of Nature and History.

Having said so much to guard ourselves against a common misunderstanding we may proceed to consider what is known of the personal life and habits of Epicurus. Our chief source of information is the so-called Life of Epicurus which forms the last section of the ill-digested serap-book known as the Lives of the Philosophers by Laertius Diogenes. (Of additional matter from other sources we have little beyond one or two unimportant letters of Epicurus himself which have been preserved, along with much later Epicurean materials, under the lava which overwhelmed the city of Herculaneum). In its present form the work of Diogenes only dates from the middle of the third century A.D., and, indeed, hardly deserves to be called a 'work' at all, since it can be shown to contain notes which must have been made by generations of successive readers, and seems never to have been subjected to the final revision of a single editor. Its value, for us, depends on the fact that it is largely made up of notices drawn from much more ancient authorities who are often quoted by name. This is particularly the case with the Life of Epicurus which is, in the main, drawn from the statements of Epicurus himself, his intimate friends, and his contemporary opponents, … and may thus be taken as, on the whole, a fair representation of what was known or inferred about him by the Alexandrian writers of'Successions,' or Handbooks to the history of Philosophy, the earliest of whom date from the latter part of the third century B.C. For this reason, and for the sake of giving the reader a specimen of the biographical material available in the study of ancient Philosophy in a specially favourable case, I proceed to give a complete rendering of the strictly biographical part of Diogenes' account of Epicurus from the text of Usener.

'Epicurus, an Athenian, son of Neocles and Chaerestrata, of the township of Gargettus, and of the house of the Philaidae, according to Metrodorus in his work On Good Birth. Heracleides, in the Epitome ofSotion, and others say that he was brought up in Samos, where the Athenians had made a plantation, and only came to Athens at the age of eighteen when Xenocrates was conducting his school in the Academy and Aristotle at Chalcis (i.e. 323/2 B.C.). After the death of Alexander of Macedon and the expulsion of the Athenians by Perdiccas, he followed his father (they say) to Colophon. He spent some while there and gathered disciples round him, and then returned to Athens in the year of Anaxicrates. For a time he pursued Philosophy in association with others; afterwards he established the special sect called by his name and appeared on his own account. He says himself that he first touched Philosophy at the age of fourteen. But Apollodorus the Epicurean says in Bk. I. of his Life of Epicurus, that he was led to Philosophy by dissatisfaction with his schoolmasters who had failed to explain to him Hesiod's lines about Chaos. Hermippus says that he had been an elementary schoolmaster himself but afterwards fell in with the books of Democritus and threw himself at once into Philosophy, and that this is why Timon says of him:—

His brothers, too, were converted by him and followed his Philosophy. There were three of them, and their names were Neocles, Charidemus, and Aristobulus, as we are told by Philodemus the Epicurean in his Compendium of Philosophers, Bk. x. Another associate was a slave of his called Mys, as Myronianus says in his Summary of Historical Parallels. Diotimus the Stoic, who hated him, has calumniated him savagely by producing fifty lewd letters as the work of Epicurus. So has he who collected under the name of Epicurus the correspondence ascribed to Chrysippus. Other calumniators are Poseidonius the Stoic, Nicolaus and Sotion in the twelve books entitled An Answer to Diodes, which deal with the observance of the twentieth day of the month, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. They actually say that he used to accompany his mother on her rounds into cottages, and recite her spells for her, and that he helped his father to teach children their letters for a miserable pittance. Nay, that he played the pimp to one of his brothers, and kept Leontion the courtesan. That he gave out as his own the atomic theory of Democritus and the Hedonism of Aristippus. That he was not a true born Athenian citizen, as we learn from Timocrates and the work on The Early Years of Epicurus by Herodotus. That he heaped shameful adulation on Mithres the intendant of Lysimachus, addressing him in correspondence as Gracious Preserver, and My very good Lord. Nay, he even bestowed the same sycophantic flatteries on Idomeneus, on Herodotus, and on Timocrates, who exposed his secret abominations. In his correspondence he writes to Leontion, 'Gracious God, darling Leontion, how your sweet letter set me clapping and cheering when I read it'; and to Themista, the wife of Leonteus, 'If you do not both pay me a visit, I shall prove a very stone of Sisyphus to roll at a push wherever you and Themista invite me'; and to Pythocles, then in the bloom of his youth, 'Here I shall sit awaiting your delightful and divine advent.' In another letter to Themista, according to Theodorus in Bk. IV. of his work Against Epicurus, he calls her 'Queen and huntress chaste and fair.'

He corresponded, they allege, with a host of courtesans, particularly with Leontion, with whom Metrodorus also fell in love. Further, in the work On the Moral End, he writes: 'For my part I can form no notion of the good if I am to leave out the pleasures of taste and sex, of hearing and of form.' And (they say) in the letter to Pythocles he writes, 'For God's sake, crowd on sail and away from all "culture"!' Epictetus calls him a lewd writer and reviles him in round terms. Nay, worse, Timocrates, the brother of Metrodorus, a disciple who had deserted the School, says in his Paradise of Delights that Epicurus used to vomit twice a day in consequence of his riotous living, and that he himself escaped by the skin of his teeth from the 'midnight lore' and 'mystical fellowship.' Further, that Epicurus was grossly ignorant of science and even more ignorant of the art of life; that he fell into so pitiable a habit of body as not to be able to rise from his litter for years on end; that he spent a mina a day on his table, as he writes himself to Leontion and to the philosophers at Mytilene. That he and Metrodorus enjoyed the favours of Mammarion, Hedeia, Erotion, Nicidion and other courtesans. That in the thirty-seven books of his treatise on Nature he is nearly always repeating himself and transcribing the ideas of others, especially of Nausiphanes, and says in so many words, 'But enough of this; the fellow's mouth was always in labour with some piece of sophistic bragadoccio, like those of so many others of the slaves.' And Epicurus is charged with having said himself of Nausiphanes in his letters, 'this threw him into such a passion that he started a personal polemic against me, and had the face to call me his scholar.' Indeed he used to call Nausiphanes a 'molluse,' a 'boor,' a 'quack,' and a 'strumpet.' The Platonists he called 'Dionysius' lickspittles,' and Plato himself 'that thing of gold.' Aristotle, he said, was a rake who ran through his patrimony and then turned mountebank and druggist. Protagoras was styled 'the Porter' and 'Democritus' scrivener,' and reproached with being a village dominie. Heracleitus he called 'the Muddler,' Democritus 'Dumb-ocritus,' Antidorus 'Zany-dorus,' the Cynics 'the national enemy,' the dialecticians 'a general pest,' Pyrrho 'Block' and 'Boor.'

Now all this is stark madness. There are abundant witnesses to his unsurpassed goodwill to all mankind: his native city, which honoured him with statues of bronze; his friends, who were too numerous to be reckoned by whole cities; his followers, who were all held spellbound by the charms of his doctrine—except Metrodorus of Stratonice, who deserted to Carneades, perhaps because he was depressed by his master's unrivalled merits; his school, which has maintained an unbroken existence, though almost all others have had their seasons of eclipse, and has been under a succession of innumerable heads, all of them faithful to the persuasion; his gratitude to his parents, beneficence to his brothers, and the humanity to his servants which may be seen from his will, and from the fact that they shared in his Philosophy, the most notable of them being the aforesaid Mys; in a word, his universal benevolence. As for his piety towards the gods and his native land, words cannot describe them. 'Twas from excess of conscientiousness that he would not so much as touch political life. Consider, too, that though Hellas had then been overtaken by most troublous times, he spent his whole life at home, except that he made one or two flying visits to Ionia to see his friends in that quarter, who, in their turn, flocked from all parts to share the life in his Garden, as we are told particularly by Apollodorus, who adds that he payed eighty minae for the site. The life they led there, so says Diodes in Bk. III. of his Brief Relation, was of the simplest and plainest. They were amply content, so he says, with half a pint of vin ordinaire; their regular drink was water. Epicurus, he says, disapproved of the community of goods sanctioned by the saying of Pythagoras, 'what belongs to friends is common.' Such a system, he thought, implies distrust, and where there is distrust there can be no true friendship. He says himself in his letters that he can be satisfied with water and coarse bread. And again, 'Pray send me part of a pot of cheese, that I may be able to enjoy a varied table when I am in the mind.' Such was the character of the man who made 'Pleasure the end' an article of his creed. So Athenaeus celebrates him in the following epigram:—

Alas, we toil for nought; the woful seed
Of strife and wars is man's insatiate greed:
True riches harbour in a little space,
Blind Fancy labours in an endless chase;
This truth Neocles' deep-considering son
From heavenly Muse or Pytho's tripod won.

We shall see the truth of this still better, as we proceed, from his own writings and sayings.

Among the ancients, says Diodes, his preference was for Anaxagoras, though he controverted him on some points, and for Archelaus the teacher of Socrates. He says further that he trained his followers to learn his compositions by heart. Apollodorus says in his Chronology that he had heard Nausiphanes and Praxiphanes, but he himself denies it in his letter to Eurylochus, where he says he had no master but himself. He even declares (and Hermarchus agrees with him), that there never was any such philosopher as Leucippus whom Apollodorus the Epicurean and others speak of as the teacher of Democritus. Demetrius of Magnesia adds that Epicurus had heard Xenocrates.

His style is plain and matter of fact, and is censured by the grammarian Aristophanes as very tame. But he was so lucid that in his Rhetoric he insists on no stylistic quality but lucidity. In correspondence he used 'Farewell' and 'Live worthily' in place of the customary formula of salutation.

Antigonus says in his Life of Epicurus that he copied his Canon from the Tripod of Nausiphanes, and that he had heard not only Nausiphanes but Pamphilus the Platonist in Samos. That he began Philosophy at the age of twelve, and became head of his school at thirty-two.

According to the Chronology of Apollodorus he was born in Olympiad 109/3, in the archonship of Sosigenes, on the 7th of Gamelion, seven years after Plato's death. That he first collected a school in Mytilene and Lampsacus at the age of thirty-two. This lasted for five years, at the end of which he migrated, as said, to Athens. His death fell in Olympiad 127/2, in the year of Pytharatus, at the age of seventy-two. He was followed as head of the School by Hermarchus of Mytilene, son of Agemortus. The cause of death was strangury due to calculus, as Hermarchus, too, says in his correspondence. The fatal illness lasted a fortnight. Hermarchus further relates that he entered a brazen bath filled with hot water, called for some neat wine which he took off at a draught, enjoined his friends not to forget his doctrines, and so came to his end. I have composed the following lines upon him:—

Farewell, my friends; be mindful of my lore;
Thus Epicurus spoke,—and was no more:
Hot was the bath, and hot the bowl he quaffed;
Chill Hades followed on the after-draught.

Such then was the tenour of his life, and the manner of his end. His will runs as follows. [The main provisions are that the 'Garden and its appurtenances' are to be held in trust for the successors of Epicurus, and their associates. A house in the suburb Melite is to be inhabited by Hermarchus and his disciples for the former's lifetime. Provision is made for the due performance of the ritual for the dead in memory of the parents and brethren of Epicurus, for the regular keeping of his birthday, for the regular festival of the twentieth of each month, and for annual commemoration of his brothers and his friend Polyaenus. The son of Metrodorus and the son of Polyaenus are to be under the guardianship of the trustees on condition that they live with Hermarchus and share his Philosophy. The daughter of Metrodorus is to receive a dowry out of the estate on condition that she behaves well and marries with the approval of Hermarchus. Provision is to be made for an aged and needy member of the community. The 'books' of Epicurus, i.e. presumably the manuscripts of his works, are bequeathed to Hermarchus. If Hermarchus should die before the children of Metrodorus come of age, they are to be under the guardianship of the trustees. Mys and three other slaves are to receive their freedom.]

The following lines were written to Idomeneus on the very point of death: Ί write these lines to you and your friends as I bring to a close the last happy day of my life. I am troubled with strangury and dysentery in unsurpassable degree, but I can confront it all with a joy of mind due to remembrance of our past discussions. To you I leave the injunction to take care of the children of Metrodorus as befits your lifelong association with me and Philosophy.'

'He had numerous disciples. Specially distinguished were Metrodorus of Lampsacus, son of Athenaeus, (or Timocrates) and Sande, who never left him after making his acquaintance except for one six months' visit to his birthplace, whence he returned to him. He was an excellent man in all respects, as is attested by Epicurus himself in sundry Dedications and in the Timocrates, Bk. III. With all these excellences he bestowed his sister Batis on Idomeneus, and took Leontion the Athenian courtesan under his protection as a morganatic wife. He was imperturbable in the face of troubles and death, as Epicurus says in his Metrodorus, Bk. I. They say he died in his fifty-third year, seven years before Epicurus. Epicurus himself implies that he had predeceased him by the injunction in the aforesaid will to care for his children. Another was the aforesaid Timocrates, a worthless brother of Metrodorus. [Here follows a list of the works of M.]

'Another was Polyaenus of Lampsacus, son of Athenodorus, according to Philodemus an upright and amiable man. Also Hermarchus of Mytilene, son of Agemortus, who succeeded to the headship of the school. He was born of poor parents, and originally a teacher of rhetoric by profession. The following admirable works are ascribed to him. [The list follows.] He was an able man and died of a palsy.

'Item, Leonteus of Lampsacus and his wife Themista, the same with whom Epicurus corresponded. Item, Colotes and Idomeneus, both of Lampsacus. These are the most eminent names. We must include Polystratus who followed Hermarchus, and was succeeded by Dionysius, and he by Basileides. Apollodorus, the 'despot of the Garden,' who composed over four hundred books, is also a man of note. Then there are the two Ptolemies of Alexandria, the dark and the fair; Zeno of Sidon, a pupil of Apollodorus and a prolific author; Demetrius, surnamed the Laconic; Diogenes of Tarsus, the author of the Selected Essays; Orion; and some others whom the genuine Epicureans decry as Sophists.

'There were also three other persons of the name Epicurus: (1) the son of Leonteus and Themista, (2) an Epicurus of Magnesia, (3) a maître d'armes. Epicurus was a most prolific author.' [Follows a list of his works, and the writer then proceeds to give a summary of his doctrine.]'

The proceding pages have given us a fairly full account of the life and personality of Epicurus as known to the students of antiquity. I may supplement it with a few remarks intended to make the chronology clear, and to call attention to one or two of the salient points in the character which it discloses to us.

First as to chronology. Of the authorities used in the Life far the best is Apollodorus, whose versified Chronology embodied the results of the great Eratosthenes. His data make it clear that Epicurus was born on the 7th of Gamelion (i.e. in our January) 341 B.C., and died in 270 B.C. They also enable us to fix his first appearance as an independent teacher in Mytilene and the neighbourhood, approximately in 310, and his removal to Athens in 306/5 B.C. We may take it also as certain, from other sources as well as from the evidence of Timon, that the place of Epicurus' birth was the island of Samos, where a colony or plantation was established by the Athenians in the year 352/1, Neocles, the father of Epicurus, being, as we learn from Strabo, one of the settlers. When the Athenians were expelled from Samos by the regent Perdiccas in 322, Neocles for unknown reasons preferred emigrating to the Ionian town of Colophon to returning to Athens, and Epicurus followed him. The assertion of his enemies that he was no true Athenian citizen (this would be their way of explaining his lifelong abstention from public affairs), may have no better foundation than the fact of his birth at a distance from Athens, or, again, may be explained by supposing that Neocles had some special connection with the Ionic cities of the Asiatic coast. In any case the salient points to take note of are that Epicurus must have received his early education in Samos (itself an Ionian island), and that his philosophical position had been definitely settled before he left Asia Minor to establish himself at Athens. This will account for the attitude of aloofness steadily maintained by the society of the 'Garden' towards the great indigenous Athenian philosophical institutions, and also for the marked lonicisms of Epicurus' technical terminology. It is clear from the narratives preserved by Diogenes that the family of Neocles was in straitened circumstances, but there is no more ground to take the polemical representation of Neocles and his wife as a hedge dominie and village sorceress seriously than there is to believe the calumnies of Demosthenes on the parents of Aeschines. That Neocles was an elementary schoolmaster may, however, be true, since it is asserted by the satirist Timon, who belongs to the generation immediately after Epicurus, and the schoolmaster, as we see from the Mimes of Herodas, was not a person of much consideration in the third century. With regard to the date of the establishment of Epicurus at Athens one should note, by way of correcting erroneous impressions about 'Post-Aristotelian Philosophy,' that when Epicurus made his appearance in the city which was still the centre of Greek intellectual activity, Theophrastus, the immediate successor of Aristotle, had not completed half of his thirty-four years' presidency over the Peripatetic school, and Xenocrates, the third head of the Academy, and an immediate pupil of Plato, had only been dead some eight years. The illusion by which we often think of the older schools as having run their course before Epicurus came to the front may be easily dispelled by the recollection that Epicurus's chief disciples, Metrodorus, Hermarchus, Colotes, all wrote special attacks on various Platonic dialogues, and that Hermarchus moreover wrote a polemic against Aristotle and Epicurus himself one against Theophrastus, while, as we shall see later, we still possess a 'discourse of Socrates' in which an anonymous member of the Academy sharply criticises Epicurus as the author of superficial doctrines which are just coming into vogue with the half-educated.

With regard to the personal character of Epicurus one or two interesting things stand out very clearly from the conflicting accounts of admirer like the original writer of the main narrative which figures in Diogenes, and again Lucretius, and enemies, like the detractors mentioned by Diogenes, or unfriendly critics like Plutarch and his Academic authorities. We may disregard altogether the representation of Epicurus and his associates as sensualists who ruined their constitutions by debauchery. There is abundant testimony, not solely from Epicurean sources, for the simplicity of the life led in the Garden, not to say that most of the calumnious stories are discredited by the fact that the worst of them were told by personal or professional enemies like Timocrates, the Judas of the society, and the Stoic philosopher who palmed off a fictitious 'lewd correspondence' on the world under the name of Epicurus. Abuse of this kind was a regular feature of controversy, and deserves just as much credit as the accusations of secret abominations which Demosthenes and Aeschines flung at each other, that is to say, none at all. What we do see clearly is that Epicurus was personally a man of clinging and winning temperament, quick to gain friendship and steadfast in keeping it. There is something of a feminine winsomeness about his solicitude for the well-being of his friends and their children, and the extravagant gratitude which the highflown phrases quoted from his letters show for the minor officers of friendship. At the same time Epicurus and his 'set' exhibit the weaknesses natural to a temperament of this kind. Their horror of the anxieties and burdens of family life, their exaggerated estimate of the misery which is caused in human life by fear of death and the possibilities of a life to come … testify to a constitutional timidity and a lack of moral robustness. The air of the Garden is, to say the least of it, morally relaxing; one feels in reading the remains of Epicurus and Metrodorus that one is dealing with moral invalids, and that Nietzsche was not far from the truth when he spoke of Epicurus as the first good example in history of a 'decadent.' Partly we may explain the fact by the well-attested physical invalidism of the founders of the school. Epicurus, as we see from Diogenes, though he lived to a decent age, was for years in feeble health, and it is significant that Metrodorus and Colotes, two of his chief disciples, died before him at a comparatively early age. We shall probably find the key at once to the Epicurean insistence on the life of simple and homely fare, and to the violence with which, as we shall see, he and his friends insisted on the value of the 'pleasures of the belly,' to the great scandal of their later critics, in the assumption that they were life-long dyspeptics. (The ancients simply inverted the order of causation when they observed that the bad health of Epicurus and Metrodorus might be regarded as God's judgment on the impiety of their tenets.)

The ugliest feature in the character of Epicurus, as revealed in his life and remains, is his inexcusable ingratitude to his teachers, and his wholesale abuse of all the thinkers who had gone before him. This tone of systematic detraction was taken up by his friends; the quotations given in Plutarch's Essay against Colotes are a perfect mine of scurrilities directed against every eminent thinker of the past or the present who had in any way strayed from the path of rigid orthodoxy as understood by Epicurus. There can be no doubt that the object of all this abuse was to make Epicurus appear, as he claimed to be, no man's pupil but his own, the one and only revealer of the way of salvation. And yet it is quite clear, as we shall see, that Epicurus is in every way the least independent of the philosophers of antiquity. There is no reason to doubt that he had originally been instructed in Samos by a member of the Platonic school, and the bitterness with which the Academy afterwards attacked his character and doctrines may, as has been suggested, have been partly due to the sense that he was, in some sort, an apostate from the fold. His treatment of the teachers from whom he had learned the Atomism which has come to be thought of as his characteristic doctrine is absolutely without excuse.

We shall see [later] that the whole doctrine is a blundering perversion of the really scientific Atomism of a much greater man, Democritus, and that Epicurus had undoubtedly derived his knowledge of the doctrine from Nausiphanes, a philosopher whose importance we are only now beginning to learn from the Herculaneum papyri. Yet both Democritus and Nausiphanes are, on the showing of Epicurus' own admirers, covered by him with the coarsest abuse, and one may even suspect that we have to thank Epicurean anxiety to conceal the dependence of the adored master on his teacher for the fact that until Herculaneum began to yield up its secrets, Nausiphanes was no more than an empty name to us. This vulgar self-exaltation by abuse of the very persons to whom one is indebted for all one's ideas distinguishes Epicurus from all the other Greek thinkers who have made a name for themselves, Plato is almost overanxious to mark his debt to his Pythagorean teachers, and the way in which he does so, by putting discoveries of his own into the mouth of the Pythagorean astronomer Timaeus, has played sad havoc with the histories of Greek science. Aristotle has undoubtedly rather more self-importance then is good for most men, but even he stops short at regarding his own system as the final philosophy towards which his predecessors were unconsciously progressing. It was reserved for Epicurus to put forward a clumsy amalgam of inconsistent beliefs, and to trust to bluster to conceal the sources of his borrowings.

A few words may be said here as to the amount of the extant remains of Epicurean literature, and the later fortune of the School. Of the actual works of Epicurus the whole has perished, apart from scattered fragments preserved in quotations of later authors, mostly unfriendly. We possess, however, two undoubtedly genuine letters, one to Herodotus on the general principles of Epicurean Atomism, and another to Menoeceus containing a summary of ethical teaching, both inserted in Diogenes' Life. The Life also contains two other documents, purporting to be by Epicurus, (1) a letter to Pythocles on astronomy and meteorology, and (2) a set of … Select Apophthegms forming a brief catechism of the main points of the doctrine.

The accuracy of the first of these is evinced by its close agreement with what we are told by later authors of the physical doctrine of Epicurus, particularly with the corresponding sections of the poem of Lucretius. This letter cannot possibly be a genuine work of Epicurus, and we know from Philodemus that even in his own time (first century B.C.) its authenticity was doubted. It is pretty certainly an excerpt made by some early Epicurean from the voluminous lost work on Physics and thrown into epistolary form in imitation of the two genuine letters. As to the second document, it was known to Philodemus and Cicero under its present title, and appears, as Usener holds, to be an early compendium made up of verbal extracts of what were considered the most important statements in the works of Epicurus and his leading friends. There are also a large number of moral apophthegms either quoted as Epicurean or demonstrably of Epicurean authorship embedded in Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Porphyry, the Anthology of Stobaeus and elsewhere. Usener has shown that the chief source of these sayings must have been an epitome of the correspondence between Epicurus and his three chief friends, Metrodorus, Polyaenus, and Hermarchus, the four recognised καθηγϵμα̨νϵς or 'doctors' of the sect. From later Epicureans we have the great poem of Lucretius who can be shown in general to have followed his master very closely, though in what strikes a modern reader as his highest scientific achievement, his anticipations of the doctrine of the evolution of species, he is probably reproducing not Epicurus but his own poetical model Empedocles. The excavation of Herculaneum, and the subsequent decipherment of the papyri found there, has also put us in possession of a great deal of very second-rate stuff from the hand of Philodemus.

A word as to the subsequent fate of the School. The two chief characteristics of the sect, as remarked by the ancients, were the warmth of the friendship sub sisting between its members, and their absolute unity of opinion, which last, however, had its bad side, since, as the ancients complain, the chief reason of the absence of controversies is that the Epicureans read nothing but the works of Epicurus and the καθηγϵμα̨νϵς, and treat them as infallible scriptures, even being expected to learn the Catechism by heart. A third peculiarity was the almost idolatrous adoration paid to the founder who, as we see from Lucretius, was regarded as all but divine, as the one and only man who had redeemed the race from universal misery by pointing out the path to true happiness.

It has been remarked that the Epicurean society in many ways is more like the early Christian Church than it is like a scientific school. Thus (1) it is not so much a band of thinkers as a group of persons united by a common rule of life. (We must remember, however, that this 'religious' side to the association between the members of a 'school' belong equally to Pythagoreanism and Platonism.) (2) Like the Christians, the Epicureans are primarily united by the 'love of the brethren,' and by a common devotion to a personal founder who is regarded rather as a Redeemer from misery than as an intellectual teacher (though here, too, we must not forget that Pythagoras was equally to his early disciples a divine or semidivine Redeemer, with the difference that with them it was largely by revealing scientific truth that he was believed to have effected the redemption). (3) Like the Church, the Epicurean society is indifferent to differences of nationality, sex, social status. (4) As Wallace says, the correspondence of Epicurus and his friends mixes up high speculative theories with homely matters of every-day life, such as the regulation of diet, in a way which is equally characteristic of the New Testament. (5) Epicureanism has also its analogue to the Christian 'love-feasts' in the monthly common meals which are provided for by Epicurus in his will. Similarly his concern for the children of Metrodorus and for the support of needy and aged brethren reminds us of the care of the early Christians for the 'poor saints,' the widows, and the orphans. The two societies also correspond on their unfavourable side, in what has always been the great intellectual sin of the Church, undue readiness to treat its formulae as infallible and exempt from all examination. The Epicurean who read nothing but the καθηγϵμᾳνϵς the prototype of those modern Christians who read nothing but the Bible and the approved commentaries, and regard criticism and free inquiry as the work of the devil. If the Philosophy of the Garden had ever become a widely diffused and influential theory of conduct, it must necessarily have plunged the ancient world into the same conflict between 'science' and 'religion' of which we hear too much today.

These analogies—though most of them can be to some extent found in other philosophical schools—make it all the more interesting to note that the Epicureans and the Christians, though representing diametrically opposite types of thought, met on common ground as being the only sects who openly repudiated the established religion and scoffed at its apparatus of public ceremonial. The Sceptic avoided the collision easily enough. Precisely because he held that unreasoning faith is involved in all judgements he felt no call to deny the theological belief of his fellows. The Platonist and the Stoic stood to a large extent on common ground with popular religion in their devotion to their belief in Providence and the moral government of the world, to which the Platonist added a fervid faith in Theism and immortality: like Broad Churchmen today, they could always acquiesce in the details of popular religion by putting a non-natural interpretation on everything which, in its plain sense, seemed objectionable or absurd. But the Epicurean was cut off from these expedients by the fact that it was one of his cardinal doctrines that 'the gods' exercise no influence on human affairs, as the Christian was by his belief that they were 'idols' or even devils who could not be worshipped without blasphemy against the true God. Not that the Epicureans, like the Christians, refused to take part in the public ceremonial of worship. Philodemus expressly appeals to the exemplary conduct of Epicurus himself on this point. But they made no secret of their scorn for the popular belief in Providence, prayer, and retribution, and hence no amount of external compliance could clear them from the charge of atheism with persons for whom religion was a vital affair. Lucian (second century A.D.) illustrates the point amusingly in his account of the ritual instituted by the charlatan Alexander of Aboni Teichos who set up an oracle which gained great repute and was even once formally consulted by the Emperor Marcus. Among other things, Alexander started a mystical ceremonial from which he used formally to exclude all 'infidels, Christians, and Epicureans.' In the course of the worship he used to cry, 'Away with the Christians!' the congregation giving the response, 'Away with the Epicureans!' the Christians and Epicureans being the two bodies who were persistently infidel from Alexander's point of view. Lucian adds that Alexander solemnly burned the works of the objectionable teacher, and that it was an Epicurean who first exposed the fraudulent trickery of his oracle, and narrowly escaped being lynched by the devout mob for doing so.

Much earlier, probably about 200 B.C., there appear to have been actual persecutions, and perhaps even martyrdoms, of Epicureans in various Greek cities, and we know that works were published in the style of the religious tracts of our own day, relating the judgments of Heaven on Epicureans and their miraculous conversions.

As to the internal history of the sect there is not much to be said, since, as we have seen, they were too indifferent to speculation to make any important innovations on the original teaching of the 'doctors,' though, as we have yet to see, there was at least some attempt to lay the foundations of an Inductive Method in logic. The School continued to flourish as a distinct sect well down into the third century after Christ. The names of a number of prominent Epicureans of the first century B.C. are well known to us from Cicero, who had himself attended the lectures of two of them, Phaedrus and Zeno of Sidon. (It should be mentioned that before Cicero's time the house of Epicurus in Melite had fallen into ruins and the gardens of the philosophical sects had been ruined in the cruel siege of Athens by Sulla.)

When Greek philosophy began to make its appearance in Rome itself the first system to be so transferred was the Epicurean. Cicero mentions as the first Latin writers on Epicureanism Gaius Amafinius (Tusculan Disputations, iv. 6) and Rabirius (Academics, i. 5), and speaks vaguely of their being followed by many others. He finds much fault both with the literary style of these writers and with the want of arrangement in their works, but says that the doctrine made rapid headway owing to its unscientific character and apparent simplicity. It is not clear whether these Latin prose works were earlier or later than the great poem of Lucretius. Lucretius, according to St. Jerome, lived from 94 to 53 B.C., wrote his poem in the intervals of an insanity brought on by a love-potion, and ended by his own hand. The poem was polished up by Cicero. A comparison with Donatus's Life of Virgil shows that Jerome's dates are a few years out, and that the real dates for the poet's birth and death should probably be 99/98-55 B.C. The meaning of the remark about Cicero is probably that Cicero edited the poem for circulation after the author's death. Munro has shown that the Cicero meant is pretty certainly the famous Marcus, and the fact of his connection with the work is made all the more likely since the only contemporary allusion to it occurs in a letter from Marcus to his brother Quintus, then serving on Caesar's staff in Britain and Gaul, written early in the year 54 (Epp. ad Quintum Fratrem, ii. 11). The 'editing' cannot have been at all carefully done, as the poem is notoriously in a most disjointed state. According to the manuscripts Cicero tells his brother that it is a work exhibiting both genius and art (which is, in fact, the case), but most modern editors make him underrate the poem by inserting a negative with one or other of the two clauses. The influence of Lucretius on the poets of the Augustan age, such as Virgil, Ovid, Manilius, belongs to the history of literature, not to that of philosophy.

To the same general period as Lucretius belongs Philodemus from whom so many fragments have been discovered in the rolls brought from Herculaneum, and who lived under the protection of Cicero's enemy L. Calpurnius Piso, the father-in-law of Caesar. Another well-known Roman Epicurean is Titus Pomponius Atticus, the life-long friend and correspondent of Cicero. Gaius Cassius Longinus, the real author of the conspiracy against Caesar, is also said to have belonged to the sect, to which, it must be owned, he did no credit. Horace's profession of Epicureanism is well known, though we may be sure that his interest in the system was confined to its ethical side. A later and greater writer who, without being a member of any sect, was largely in sympathy with the spirit of the Epicureans and shared their veneration for Epicurus as the deliverer of mankind from degrading superstition, is Lucian of Samosata (second century A.D.). There is some evidence that the popularity of the doctrine was augmented in the second century of our era. Plutarch. and Galen, in this century, found it worth while to revive the polemic against Epicurus which had been originated in his own lifetime by Plato's Academy, and steadily kept up until it took a Latin dress in the ridicule which Cicero's Academic and Stoic characters are made to pour on the School in his philosophical dialogues. When the Emperor Marcus endowed the chairs of Philosophy at Athens at the expense of the state, Epicureanism, as well as Platonism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism figured among the state-supported doctrines.

Naturally enough, as the Christian Church became more powerful and more dogmatic, it found itself in violent conflict with the anti-theological ideas of Epicurus, and such writers as Lactantius (end of third century A.D. made him a special object of invective, thereby unconsciously contributing to increase our stock of Epicurean fragments. By the middle of the fourth century the School had fallen into oblivion, and the Emperor Julian (reigned 360-363 A.D.) congratulates himself on the fact that most even of their books are no longer in circulation. Towards the end of the century St. Augustine declares that even in the pagan schools of rhetoric their opinions had become wholly forgotten. (Epist., 118, 21).

…. .

The Salvation of Man

We come now to the central citadel of Epicurean doctrine, the part which, as Epicurus holds, gives all the rest its value—the theory of human conduct, variously styled by him the doctrine of Lives, of Ends, of Choice and Avoidance. Here again we shall find the attempt to replace high and difficult ideals by some more homely and apparently more easily compassed end of action. Epicurus wants a principle of conduct which is not for the elect few only, but can be immediately understood and felt by the common man. Like many moralists before and after him, he thinks he finds what he wants in the notion of pleasure as the only good and pain as the only evil. The Platonic conception of life as 'becoming like unto God,' the Aristotelian identification of the best life with one in which, by means of science, art, religious contemplation, we put off the burden of our mortality, may be inspiring to the chosen few, but to the plain average man these are noble but shadowy ideas. And for what is shadowy the prosaic Epicurus has no taste. 'The consecration and the poet's dream' are to him empty nothings. 'I call men,' he writes in one letter, 'to continual pleasures, not to empty and idle virtues which have but a confused expectation of fruit' (Fr. 116); and in another place, 'I spit on the noble and its idle admirers, when it contains no element of pleasure' (Fr. 512). But pleasure and pain are things we all know by immediate experience, and what could seem a simpler basis for conduct than the rule that pleasure is good and pain bad? So Epicurus seeks once more to bring down moral philosophy from heaven to earth by reverting to Hedonism. The naturalness of the view that pleasure is the only ultimate good, says Epicurus, borrowing an argument from Plato's pupil Eudoxus, is shown by the spontaneity with which all animals seek it. 'His proof that pleasure is the end is that animals delight in it from their birth and object to pain spontaneously, independently of any process of education.' Like other Hedonists, he has been roundly abused for degrading morality by his doctrine, but some of the abuse at least may be pronounced undeserved. When we consider how many philosophies and religions have done their best to make life miserable by representing the tormenting of ourselves and others as admirable in itself, we may feel that some credit is owing to any man who is not afraid to maintain that happiness is itself a good thing, and that to be happy is itself a virtue. And, as we shall see, Epicurus does not in the least mean that the best life is that of the voluptuary. He taught and enforced by his example the doctrine that the simple life of plain fare and serious contemplation is the true life of pleasure, and in the main, with one great exception, the practical code of action he recommends does not differ much from that of the ordinary decent man. The main objection to his Hedonism is a theoretical one; as he regards the feeling of pleasure as the only good, he is bound to deny that virtue or beauty has any moral value except as a necessary means to pleasure, and thus his ethics, while demanding an innocent and harmless life, can afford no inspiration to vigorous pursuit of Truth or Beauty, or strenuous devotion to the social improvement of man's estate. The air of the Garden is relaxing; it is a forest of Arden where nothing more is required than to 'fleet the time carelessly.' There is a touch of moral invalidism about the personality of a teacher who could declare that 'the noble, the virtuous, and the like should be prized if they cause pleasure; if they do not, they should be left alone' (Fr. 70). To be more precise, in saying that pleasure is the good, Epicurus is not telling us anything new. Hedonism as a moral theory is dealt with in Plato's Protagoras, had been advocated by Democritus, and expressly put forward within the Academy itself by Eudoxus.

What does look at first sight more original is the way in which Epicurus conceives of the highest pleasure attainable by man. He holds the curious view that, though pleasure is a positive thing not to be confounded with mere absence of pain, yet the moment pain is entirely expelled from the mind and body we have already attained the maximum degree of pleasure. Any further increase in the pleasure-giving stimulus, according to Epicurus, can only make pleasure more variegated, not increase its intensity. 'The (upper) limit of pleasures in magnitude is the expulsion of all pain. Where pleasure is present, and so long as it is present, pain and grief are, singly and conjointly, non-existent' (Catechism, 3). 'Pleasure receives no further augmentation in the flesh after the pain of want has once been expelled; it admits merely of variegation' (ib. 18). The source of this pessimistic estimate of the possibilities of pleasure is patent; the doctrine comes from Plato's Philebus. Plato had taught that the satisfactions of appetite are never purely pleasurable; they are 'mixed' states, half-pleasurable, half-painful. They depend for their pleasantness upon a pre-existing painful state of want, and the process of satisfaction only continues so long as the pain of the want is not completely assuaged, but still remains in the total experience as a stimulus to go on seeking more and more satisfaction. The 'true' pleasures—i.e. those which do not depend for their attractiveness on the concealed sting of unsatisfied want—belong to the mind, not to the body. It is to meet this depreciation of the everyday pleasures of satisfying bodily appetite that Epicurus declares the complete expulsion of pain and want to be already the maximum attainable degree of pleasure, and denies the existence of the 'mixed' experiences. The alma voluptas of his school thus comes to mean a life of permanent bodily and mental tranquillity, free from disquieting sensations and from the anticipation of them—a view which he has merely taken over from Democritus, who spoke of єύθνμίᾳ̑, 'cheerfulness of temper,' as the true end of life. What he has done is simply to express the Democritean theory in a terminology specially intended to mark dissent from the Platonic and Aristotelian doctrine. His own words are: 'The end of all our actions is to be free from pain and apprehension. When once this happens to us, the tempest in the soul becomes a calm, and the organism no longer needs to make progress to anything which it lacks, or to seek anything further to complete the good for soul and body. For we only need pleasure so long as the absence of it causes pain. As soon as we cease to be in pain we have no need of further pleasure. This is why we call pleasure the beginning and end of the happy life. It is recognised by us as our primal and connatural good, and is the original source of all choice and avoidance, and we revert to it when we make feeling the universal standard of good. [Eudoxus.] Now it is because this is our primal and connatural good that we do not choose to have every pleasure, but sometimes pass by many pleasures when a greater inconvenience follows from them, and prefer many pains to pleasures when a greater pleasure follows from endurance of the pain. Every pleasure then is a good, as it has the specific character of the good [i.e. to attract us for its own sake], but not every pleasure is to be chosen; so also every pain is an evil, but not every pain should be always avoided' (Ep. iii., p. 62, Usener). Hence he differs from his Cyrenaic contemporaries, who preached a robuster type of Hedonism, in three points. (1) The end of the individual action is not the pleasure of the moment, but a permanent lifelong condition of serene happiness. So, unlike Aristippus, he does not accept the doctrine of taking no thought for the morrow, but says 'we must remember that the future is neither wholly our own, nor wholly not our own, that we may neither await it as certain to be, nor despair of it as certain not to be' (Ep. iii., Usener, p. 62). (2) Epicurus insists strongly that pleasures are not all 'transitions' from one condition to another; besides the pleasures of transition there are κατᾳ̑στημᾳ̑τικαì ήδονᾲί, pleasures of repose, a point which had already been made by Plato and Aristotle. He says: 'Freedom from mental disquietude and from pain are pleasures of repose; joy and delight we regard as activities of change' (JFr. 2). Hence he is often wrongly classed among those who regard mere freedom from pain as the highest good. (3) He definitely gives the preference to pleasures of mind over pleasures of body, arguing that 'in bodily pain the flesh is tormented merely by the present, but in mental pain the soul is distressed on account of the present, the past, and the future. Similarly mental pleasures are greater than bodily' (Fr. 452). They are greater, that is, because they include the memory of past and the anticipation of future happiness. Indeed, Epicurus carried this doctrine to the point of paradox, saying that a 'sage' would be happy on the rack, since his pleasant recollections of the past would outweigh his bodily sufferings (Fr. 601). Later writers like Seneca are never tired of making merry over the Epicurean 'sage' who must be able to say, even while he is being roasted alive, 'How delightful this is! How I am enjoying myself!' Epicurus, as we have seen, illustrated the doctrine practically by the serenity of his last painful days. But, as the Academic critics are careful to remind us, we must recollect that all the mental pleasures of memory and anticipation, to which Epicurus attributes such value, are resoluble into the recollection or anticipation of pleasurable experiences which are themselves analysable into sensations, and therefore corporeal.

As we should expect, Epicurus is never tired of denouncing all ascetic views about the pleasures of bodily appetite. He insists ad nauseam that man has a body as well as a soul, and that the happy life is impossible if we neglect the claims of the body. He and his friends often put the point in coarse and vigorous language, which scandalised persons of refined turn of mind. Metrodorus said in a letter to his brother Timocrates, 'The doctrine of nature is wholly concerned with the belly' (Fr. 39), and Epicurus that 'the beginning and root of all good is the pleasure of the belly, and even wisdom and culture depend on that' (Fr. 67). Metrodorus, probably using a formula devised by his master, asks 'what else is the good of the soul but a permanent healthy condition of the flesh, and a confident expectation of its continuance?' (Fr. 5), a definition which is a perpetual subject for denunciation by the Academic critics. The real meaning of sayings like these is more innocent than it looks to be. Epicurus is, after all, only saying in exaggerated language, that even a philosopher cannot afford to neglect his digestion. The fact that both he and Metrodorus were confirmed dyspeptics goes far to explain the vehemence of their language about the 'pleasures of the belly.' Carlyle might easily have said the same sort of thing, and Dr. Johnson, who was far from being a voluptuary, actually did.

More open to attack was Epicurus' trick of abstracting from the whole concrete experience of the satisfactions of virtuous action, and asserting that the pleasure which accompanies the right act is the end to which the act itself is merely a means. This leads him to the utilitarian view that if you could only escape the painful consequences which attend on indulgence in a pleasant vice, the vice would no longer be bad. 'If the things which give rise to the pleasures of the profligate could deliver our understanding from its fears about celestial portents, and death, and future suffering, and could also teach us to limit our desires, we should have no reason left to blame them' (10 of the Catechism). This is, of course, a conscious contradiction of the famous Platonic doctrine, that to have a bad soul is itself the worst penalty of sin. Epicurus, however, holds that this separation of vice from its attendant consequences is not actually possible. The pleasures of sin are always attended by the fear of detection and punishment, and often by other disagreeable consequences. Also they cannot teach us to limit our desires, and thus escape the torment of unsatisfied passion. Nor can they, like science, dispel the fear of death or divine judgment. This, and not any inherent badness in them, is why they must not be admitted into our lives. The true conditions of a happy life are two: (1) the assurance that all consciousness ends with death, and that God takes no interest in our doings; (2) the reduction of our desires to those which cannot be suppressed and are most easily satisfied; the simple life. Epicurus accordingly recognises that there are three classes of pleasures: (1) those which are natural and necessary, i.e. those which come from the satisfaction of wants inseparable from life, such as the pleasure of drinking when thirsty; (2) those which are natural but not necessary, e.g. the pleasures of a variegated diet, which merely diversify the satisfaction of our natural appe tites; (3) those which are neither necessary nor natural, but created by human vanity, such as the pleasure of receiving marks of popular esteem, 'crowns' and 'garlands,'—as we might say, knighthoods and illuminated addresses. The wise man despises the last class, he needs the first, the second he will enjoy on occasion, but will train himself to be content without them. (The basis of this classification is Plato's distinction, in the Philebus, between 'necessary' and 'unnecessary' bodily pleasures. The sensualism of Epicurus compels him to take no account of Plato's 'pure' or 'unmixed' pleasures, such as those which arise from the performance of noble deeds, or the pursuit of beauty and truth for their own sakes.)

Epicurus, then, looks on the simple diet not as necessary in itself to happiness, but as useful by keeping us from feeling the lack of delicacies which cannot be procured. 'We regard self-sufficiency as a great good, not that we may live sparingly in all circumstances, but that when we cannot have many good things we may be content with the few we have, in the fixed conviction that those who feel the least need of abundance get the greatest enjoyment out of it' (Ep. iii., Usener, p. 63). Thus in practice the Epicurean ideal comes to be satisfaction with the simplest necessaries of life, and Epicurus could say (Catechism, 15), 'natural riches are limited in extent and easy to procure, while those of empty fancy are indefinite in their compass'; and again (Fr. 602), 'give me plain water and a loaf of barley-bread, and I will dispute the prize of happiness with Zeus himself.' So enemies of the theories of the school often praise its practical counsels. As Seneca says, 'my own judgment, however distasteful it may be to the adherents of our school [i.e. the Stoics], is that the rules of Epicurus are virtuous and right, and, on a clear view, almost austere; he reduces pleasure to a small and slender compass, and the very rule we prescribe to virtue he prescribes to pleasure; he bids it follow Nature.' Even of the tortures of disease he holds that they cannot disturb true happiness. If severe, they are brief; if prolonged, they are interrupted by intervals of relief.

In practice, then, though not in theory, Epicurus refuses to separate pleasure and virtue. 'You cannot live pleasantly without living wisely and nobly and justly, nor can you live wisely and nobly and justly without living pleasantly. Where any one of these conditions is absent pleasurable life is impossible' (Catechism, 5).

In respect of the details of his scheme of virtues, Epicurus is enough of a true Greek to give the first place to Φρανησις, wisdom, reasonable life. 'He who says that it is not yet time for Philosophy, or that the time for it has gone by, is like one who should say that the season for happiness has not yet come, or is over. So Philosophy should be followed by young and old alike: by the old that in their age they may still be young in good things, through grateful memory of the past; by the young that they may be old in their youth in their freedom from fear of the future' (Ep. iii., Usener, p. 59). 'When we say that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of the profligate, nor those which depend on sensual indulgence, as some ignorant or malicious misrepresenters suppose, but freedom from bodily pain and mental unrest. For it is not drinking and continual junketing, nor the enjoyments of sex, nor of the delicacies of the table which make life happy, but sober reasoning which searches into the grounds of all choice and avoidance, and banishes the beliefs which, more than anything else, bring disquiet into the soul. And of all this the foundation and chiefest good is wisdom. Wisdom is even more precious than Philosophy herself; and is the mother of all other intellectual excellences' (Ep. iii., Usener, p. 64).

Of all the fruits of Philosophy the chief is the acquisition of true friendship. 'Of all that Philosophy furnishes towards the blessedness of our whole life far the greatest thing is the acquisition of friendship' (Catechism, 27). The solitary life is for Epicurus, as for Aristotle, no life for a man who means to be happy. He would have agreed with some recent writers that the highest good we know is to be found in personal affection. We have already seen how closely analogous the Epicurean organisation, bound together by no tie but the personal affection of its members, was to the early Christian Church, in which also love for the brethren replaces the old Hellenic devotion to the 'city' as the principle of social unity. Hence it is not surprising that Epicurus, like Our Lord, is credited with the saying that it is more blessed to give than to receive. In his attitude towards the State Epicurus naturally represents a view antithetic to that of Plato and Aristotle, who insisted upon common service to the 'city' as the basis of all social virtue. Unlike Aristotle, who teaches that man is by his very constitution a 'political animal,' a being born to find his highest good in the common life provided by the community into which he comes at birth, Epicurus revives the old sophistic distinction between the 'natural' and the 'conventional,' taking the purely conventional view as to the origin of political society and the validity of its laws. Societies are merely institutions created by compacts devised by men to secure themselves against the inconveniences of mutual aggression. 'Natural justice,' he says, 'is an agreement based on common interest neither to injure nor to be injured.' 'Injustice is not an evil in itself, but because of the fear caused by uncertainty whether we shall escape detection by the authorities appointed to punish such things.' 'It is impossible for one who has secretly done something which men have agreed to avoid, with a view to escaping the infliction or reception of hurt, to be sure that he will not be found out even if he should have gone undetected ten thousand times' (Catechism, 31, 34, 35).

Law, then, has no deeper foundation in human nature than agreement based on considerations of utility. It is only when such an agreement has been made that an act becomes unjust. Hence Epicurus holds that brutes have no rights because, from their lack of language, they can make no agreements with one another. The personal friendship of the 'brethren' is a thing which goes infinitely deeper and is more firmly rooted in the bed-rock of human nature, though even friendship is held to be founded in the end on mere utility. Of Plato's conception of law as the expression of the most intimately human, and, at the same time, the most divine element in our personality, Epicurus has no comprehension. So though his doctrine, as preserved in the Catechism, is that the 'wise man' will in general conform to the laws, since some of them are obviously based on sound utilitarian considerations, and even the breaking of those that are not is likely to have unpleasant consequences, Epicurus definitely refuses to say that the wise man will never commit a crime. His words, as reported by Plutarch, are: 'Will the wise man ever do what the laws forbid, if he is sure not to be found out? It is not easy to give an unequivocal answer to the question.' Plutarch interprets this to mean, 'He will commit a crime if it brings him pleasure, but I do not like to say so openly.' It must be allowed that on Epicurus' own showing his 'wise man' would have no motive for refraining from a pleasant crime if he really could be secure of impunity. The 'sage' is not a person whom one would care to trust with the 'ring of Gyges.'

It was a consequence as much of the age as of the Epicurean ideal that Epicurus dissuaded his followers from taking part in public life. They were to leave the world to get on by itself, and devote themselves to the cultivation of their own peace of soul by plain living and anti-religious reasoning. This separation of personal conduct from service to society is the point on which the Epicureans lay themselves most open to attack as representing an ethics of selfishness and indolence. We may plead in palliation that their 'quietism' may be regarded as partly a necessary consequence of the substitution of large monarchies for the old city-states. In such monarchies, even when their code of public morality does not keep men of sensitive conscience out of public life, it is inevitable that the direction of affairs of moment shall be confined to a few practised hands. Yet it must also be remembered that not a few philosophers, Academics, Stoics and others did play a prominent part in the public affairs of the age without soiling their garments. It is impossible to acquit Epicurus and his friends altogether of a pitiable lack of wholesome public spirit. It was only reasonable that a noble temper like that of Plutarch should be outraged by the insults they heaped on the memory of such a statesman and patriot as Epameinondas because he preferred wearing himself out in the service of his country to taking his ease at home. In practice, however, as the ancient critics observed, the apparently contradictory maxims of Epicurus and Zeno were not so far apart as they seem. Epicurus said that the 'sage' should not engage in politics except for very pressing reasons; Zeno that he should, unless there were special reasons against doing so. But in actual life an Epicurean with a bent for politics, or a Stoic with a taste for retirement, could always find that the reason for making the exception existed in his own case.

By following the rules of life thus laid down the Epicureans hold that any man, without need of special good fortune or high station or intellectual gifts, may learn to lead a life which is free from serious pain of body or trouble of mind, and therefore happy. The 'sober reasoning' which teaches him to limit his wants to the necessities of life, to banish fear of God from his mind, to recognise that death is no evil, and to choose always the course of action which promises to be most fruitful of pleasure and least productive of pain, will, in general, leave him with very few pains to endure. And if there are inevitable hours of suffering to be gone through, and if death is the common doom of all, the 'wise man' will fortify himself in his times of suffering and on his deathbed by dwelling in memory on the many pleasant moments which have fallen to his share. Thus prepared, says Lucretius, he will leave the feast of life, when his time comes to go, like a guest who has eaten his full at a public banquet, and makes way without a grumble for later comers; Metrodorus adds, that he will not forget to say 'grace after meat,' and thank 'whatever gods there be' that he has lived so well (Fr. 49).