Episode 112 - Epicurus' Letter to Herodotus - Introduction and Outlining
Date: 03/12/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2421-episode-one-hundred-twelve-epicurus-letter-to-herodotus-01-introduction/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The panel introduces Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus with Joshua reading the opening paragraph from Cyril Bailey’s translation, and the group explains why Bailey was chosen over Hicks and Yonge, noting that Bailey’s work built on Usener’s Epicurea. Discussion covers why the podcast spent two years working through Lucretius and Torquatus before reaching Epicurus’ own letters — the “forest and trees” problem — and what it means for Epicurus to compose an epitome or outline of the whole system. Two Philodemus quotes on the “unforgivable inactivity” of Epicureans who ignore the actual books provide a backdrop for discussing the importance of outlining, which leads to a comparison of list-making personality types and a discussion of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. Cassius contrasts Epicurus’ approach with Epictetus’ Enchiridion — which strips practical ethics from all metaphysics and physics — and Joshua introduces the keystone arch analogy: physics and epistemology are the two legs of the arch, and ethics is the keystone that would collapse without them. The episode closes on Epicurus’ own statement that he finds his own peace chiefly in the investigation of nature.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 112 of the Lucretius Today podcast, dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world, and to Epicurus, the founder of the Epicurean school. I’m your host Cassius, and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum we’ll walk you through the Epicurean texts and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
At this point in our podcast we’ve completed our review of Lucretius’ poem and we’ve covered the detailed presentation of Epicurean ethics given by Torquatus in Book 1 of Cicero’s On Ends. Today we turn to the higher-level presentation of these issues as found in Epicurus’ own Letter to Herodotus, which, like Lucretius’ poem, covers a combination of the full system. Now let’s join Joshua reading today’s text.
Joshua:
For those who are unable, Herodotus, to work in detail through all that I have written about nature, or to peruse the larger books which I have composed, I have already prepared at sufficient length an epitome of the whole system that they may keep adequately in mind at least the most general principles in each department, in order that, as occasion arises, they may be able to assist themselves on the most important points, insofar as they undertake the study of nature. But those also who have made considerable progress in the survey of the main principles ought to bear in mind the scheme of the whole system set forth in its essentials, for we have frequent need of the general view, but not so often of the detailed exposition. Indeed, it is necessary to go back on the main principles and constantly to fix in one’s memory enough to give one the most essential comprehension of the truth. And in fact, the accurate knowledge of details will be fully discovered if the general principles in the various departments are thoroughly grasped and borne in mind. For even in the case of one fully initiated, the most essential feature in all accurate knowledge is the capacity to make a rapid use of observation and mental apprehension, and this can be done if everything is summed up in elementary principles and formulae. It is not possible for anyone to abbreviate the complete course through the whole system if he cannot embrace in his own mind, by means of short formulae, all that might be set out with accuracy in detail. Wherefore, since the method I have described is valuable to all those who are accustomed to the investigation of nature, I — who urge upon others the constant occupation in the investigation of nature and find my own peace chiefly in a life so occupied — have composed for you another epitome on these lines, summing up the first principles of the whole doctrine.
Cassius:
Thank you, Joshua, for reading that for us. We have now completed not only the Lucretius poem but also the main section of the Torquatus narrative of Epicurean ethics in Cicero’s On Ends. What we’re going to do over the next several weeks is go back to Epicurus’ own letters as our next step in studying the philosophy.
One of the things we discussed briefly before starting today is that there are several public-domain translations available. There’s one by Cyril Bailey, which is what Joshua has just read, and there’s one by R. D. Hicks, and there’s an older one by Charles Yonge. So far we’re choosing to go with Bailey, who is certainly more recent than Yonge and has a great deal more footnoting and academic apparatus. The material we’re using has come primarily from Bailey’s Epicurus: The Extant Remains, which is a heavily annotated, dual-language edition. If anyone has any comment about that, let us know, because as we go through the text there will no doubt be questions about choices of words, and we’ll have several translations to compare.
Joshua:
Just to reinforce what you said about selecting Bailey: Don, in his new translation with commentary on the Letter to Menoeceus, pointed out that Bailey really did the hard work of building on Usener, whose Epicurea was the seminal text of its time. Bailey supplemented that by doing his own analysis of all surviving manuscripts and editing the text to figure out which manuscript had the fewest transcription errors — that kind of work is under the hood when you’re looking at an English translation. Bailey has also been more influential in subsequent years than either Hicks or Yonge, so there are very good reasons for choosing him. But it’s always good to have the other translations available too, since we can’t read Greek.
Cassius:
Right. And as far as Usener goes, he wrote in German, which would be helpful to Martin but not so helpful to many of the rest of us.
Joshua:
Precisely. There’s so much great German scholarship that’s simply not available to us, unfortunately.
Cassius:
The other thing that’s important to keep in mind as we go into this letter: I keep mispronouncing it Menoicius, which is the more Greek pronunciation — the correct English form is Menoeceus. The Letter to Menoeceus was thought by Norman DeWitt to be the earliest of the three letters, possibly composed as early as the Lampsacus period before Epicurus even arrived in Athens and started the Garden. The main distinguishing feature between the Letter to Menoeceus and the letters to Herodotus and Pythocles is that the Letter to Menoeceus is written in a more elegant style. By the time Epicurus settled in Athens, he had adopted a plainer style — which DeWitt said was adapted from Euclid’s geometry. So the letter we’re dealing with today is, comparatively, less stylized and more readable, which hopefully means there’s less room for interpretive ambiguity.
Joshua:
I think I mentioned this to you, Cassius, in the last episode — people might wonder why it took us so long to actually get to Epicurus’ own words. Do you have anything to say to that?
Cassius:
I definitely have something to say to that. When I first started reading Epicurus, it seemed logical to say, let’s just start with the man himself. There are things out there like The Epicurus Reader — a little book that collects his important material, including these letters — and I know that was one of the first things I saw on the internet. And one of the first things I did was go to this Letter to Herodotus as a starting point.
The analogy I think is most useful is that of getting the forest and the trees confused. When I was reading this letter, I found it extremely hard to figure out what he was talking about and why, even though it is a relatively high-level summary. I came to Epicurus thinking he was mostly of interest because of his view of pleasure as the goal of life — a fairly conventional viewpoint. I had been reading Stoicism and I knew there was a controversy about the role of pleasure versus virtue. So I was expecting the most basic letter of Epicurus to be focused on those issues. Then I got to the Letter to Herodotus and found it was covering things I was not expecting — his epistemology tied together with physics in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
I would say the same thing about Lucretius — maybe even more so. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for new people to pick up Lucretius and expect to understand Epicurean philosophy on their first read. You get the trees with Lucretius, all the details. Then you get to Herodotus and maybe you have the forest at a higher level. But to me the whole orientation was so foreign to what I had been taught. It’s taken me years of reading to get more familiar even with an outline of the topics we discuss and to see how they fit together. So what we did in the podcast was start with Lucretius because there’s a general interest in the science and the swerve and those things, and we used those episodes as a launching ground to get the details into some kind of context. Now we’re in a position to better understand the way Epicurus puts things in more summary form.
Martin, did you read the Letter to Herodotus fairly early in your reading of Epicurus?
Martin:
It was actually the first letter. The first thing I read from Epicurus was the Letter to Herodotus — it was the first one in the collected surviving works of Epicurus that I had in German. I found it useful, but it was by no means the end of the road.
Cassius:
I think everybody knows that Epicurus was involved with atoms and void, and that atomism was a significant part of what he was going to be talking about. But it’s not something we can immediately relate to ethics today. Now — you used the word “summary” just now to describe this letter. The word we’re going to encounter here is epitome. Maybe we should talk about what an epitome is in the context of Epicurean philosophy, because this letter is an epitome of natural science, and Epicurus wrote quite a lot about natural science. His magnum opus was his work On Nature — I believe 37 books — and when you’re reading Lucretius, you’re getting a sense of what may have been in those 37 books. This letter is a quick summary of the whole system of natural science. What’s the difference between a summary and an epitome, if there is one?
Joshua:
That’s what I’m trying to get at the heart of, because I’m not sure there’s a whole lot of difference. The Oxford Languages definition of epitome in its secondary sense is “a summary of a written work; an abstract.” An archaic definition is “a thing representing something else in miniature.” So they’re all fairly similar — though I think summary has a different connotation in my mind than outline does. This letter is going to be more point-by-point than a very brief summary. The other thing to keep in mind is the long-standing practice on the EpicureanFriends.com forum of inviting people to make their own outlines of the philosophy. We know Thomas Jefferson did that, and we have an example of his outline. Epicurus himself regularly used summaries of the important parts to help people remember what he was talking about — as he says: “We have frequent need of the general view, but not so often of the detailed exposition.”
Cassius:
Right. And I was looking at this earlier — I became unclear in my mind about how many epitomes or summaries Epicurus had actually written. Going back to DeWitt, it appears he’s saying this letter constitutes a “little epitome,” while the 37 books constitute the full work — but DeWitt seems to imply there was another, larger epitome that Lucretius was working from. I’m no longer clear whether Lucretius was working from the 37 books or from a larger intermediate summary.
Joshua:
Well, I assume DeWitt is correct. He does say right here in the second line: “I have already prepared at sufficient length an epitome of the whole system.” So there’s apparently another epitome out there somewhere. Lucretius’ poem is way too detailed to be based only on this small epitome — I would expect he at least consulted some of the larger works. Maybe one aspect to draw from this is that Epicurus himself probably generated several outlines at different levels of detail, just as I find I do my outlines differently every time I put pen to paper.
Cassius:
That makes sense. But before we go further into the text, Joshua — you had some material you wanted to slip in about the Philodemus quotes.
Joshua:
Yes — because we’ve been talking about summaries and epitomes, I want to mention that among the things discovered at Herculaneum in the carbonized papyrus scrolls was this quote by Philodemus — actually two quotes. He says: “He who claims to know us, meaning Epicureans, and to be instructed by us, who claims to be a genuine reader of various writings and of complete books — even if he says something correctly, he has only memorized various quotations and does not know the multitude of our thoughts. What he has to do he looks up in summaries, like people who believe they can learn to be steersmen from books and can cross every ocean.”
And the second quotation — I’m pulling these directly out of Don’s wonderful commentary on the Letter to Menoeceus: “The most shocking thing about most Epicureans is the unforgivable inactivity in regards to the books.”
So in finally getting to the letters of Epicurus himself, even though they may be summaries or epitomes and we don’t have the rest of the original work, we are at least being attentive to the books themselves and reading the words of Epicurus in their own right.
Cassius:
Those are great quotes — really good to add those in. The second point — the unforgivable inactivity regarding the books — I’ve certainly experienced the phenomenon over the years. So many people will come to the forums knowing just a little bit and acting as if they know everything, without having read Lucretius or the details. They think that by looking at the Principal Doctrines or some other summary they can understand the whole philosophy. And even if you had a complete set of the 37 books in front of you, if all you’re doing is cutting and pasting words without understanding them, you’re not making any progress. There’s a Vatican Saying applicable here — something to the effect that we need true health, not just a semblance of health — that’s what philosophy needs to bring you. So we need to actually understand Epicurus’ philosophy, not a semblance of it.
Cassius:
Let me talk about something I consider extremely controversial, and this is how I’m going to draw Martin back into the conversation. Totally separate from philosophy: in my observations of working with people, it seems you can categorize them by this question: do they like to use outlines, or do they think outlines are a ridiculous waste of time? Do they like to make lists, or do they think lists are a waste of time? Do they make lists of their lists of their lists and never get around to doing anything?
There seems to be almost a personality type that likes to make lists and outlines, and another type that doesn’t like that at all — that wants to percolate things in their mind and then sit down and write everything out at once. I’ve been recently involved in writing material with other people, and I urged them to put together an outline so we’d at least know where we’re going. Several of them said, “No, that’s not the way I think — I can’t do that, I just need to think about it for a long time and then sit down and write it all out at once.”
So Martin — are you an outliner and a list-maker?
Martin:
I think I’m not extreme in this case. Sometimes I do outlines and make lists, but it’s not something I always do. I certainly didn’t do an outline of my views on philosophy.
Cassius:
I have a feeling we can put you in the non-outliner camp. And Joshua — I notice you were about to say something. David Allen’s voice comes out of you on this subject.
Joshua:
Ha! Well, one thing I remember about David Allen when I was first reading some of his material: his central idea is having a “trusted system.” The theory is that in order to reduce anxiety and actually get things done, you need a way to capture everything. When something new presents itself that needs doing, you write it down in your notebook or on your phone and walk away from it, trusting that the memory of what needs to be done is preserved there — so your mind doesn’t have to keep circling back on that one thought. Then once a week you dump your captured items into your inbox and process them. It’s probably analogous to what we’re talking about here with Epicurus — having those key principles fixed in your memory so you can act quickly when the occasion demands.
Cassius:
Joshua, are you yourself a list-maker and an outliner, or not?
Joshua:
It’s not a major habit of my life, but when I’m working on a project — absolutely yes. I’ll write down a list of everything I’m planning to do. I’ve got that going on right now in an Epicurean-related project, where I have a master list of everything I’m trying to include, broken down into sub-lists. David Allen — everything I know about him I learned from the podcast Hello Internet — his big thing is to capture every thought. If there’s any promise in an idea, you write it down. That way your mind doesn’t have to keep twirling around on it. So I will make lists, though not constantly. When I have a project going on, it’s certainly a technique I’ll use.
Cassius:
Maybe creative people in particular think that list-making is too restrictive and doesn’t fit the way they do things, and that’s probably true for certain types of people. But I just know in my own experience that when I attack something like Epicurean philosophy — something new I don’t really understand — I do try to make a list of the main issues being discussed. It’s almost like taking notes in a college lecture. I try to make bullet points under categories, keeping things organized in a way that allows me to remember what the categories were at least.
I observe that an awful lot of people who get into Epicurus get deep into the ethics — the issue of absence of pain, pleasure, virtue — and pay no attention whatsoever to the rest of the philosophy. That’s a significant mistake, especially on the epistemology issue. I even hate that word because it’s not one that normal people use — but the issue of how to think, what knowledge is, when you can consider something to be relatively confirmed: those issues are extremely important and most non-trained philosophers devote little attention to them at all.
Cassius:
Let me give you a contrasting example of what an epitome or summary might look like. This is the Enchiridion of Epictetus — a short manual of Stoic ethical advice compiled by Arrian. According to Wikipedia, it is not a summary of the discourses but rather a compilation of practical precepts: “eschewing metaphysics, Arrian focuses attention on applying the philosophy to daily life.” That’s the kind of thing people want when they’re exclusively looking at ethics. But you can’t separate the ethics from the epistemology and from the physics in Epicurean philosophy — it doesn’t work out. You end up just making up your own ethics, which is fine, but the conclusion you arrive at will not look a whole lot like Epicurean philosophy. You don’t even realize why Epicurus thought the physics and epistemology were important.
Joshua:
I think you’re absolutely right that they’re not just important but are principally important. I keep going back to that scene in Epicurus’ early education — his first break with established philosophy — where he found it appalling that his instructor couldn’t explain what chaos was and where it came from. It was a question in metaphysics that first broke him away from the prevailing philosophy of his age. So when he went to build his own philosophy, he built it from the ground up on the physics and the epistemology, with the ethics arrived at after those two were in place.
I’ve used the image of the keystone arch to represent these three concepts: you’ve got the ethics as the keystone of the arch, and one leg is the epistemology, and the other leg is the physics. All three support each other — that’s the nature of an arch. Pull one part out and everything collapses. But the two that are really the foundation are the physics and the epistemology.
Cassius:
To try to hammer that point home: the last sentence of what we have today is paragraph 37 — “Wherefore, since the method I have described is valuable to all those who are accustomed to the investigation of nature, I, who urge upon others the constant occupation in the investigation of nature and find my own peace chiefly in a life so occupied, have composed for you another epitome on these lines, summing up the first principles of the whole doctrine.”
So when you want to explain something to somebody, you give them the basics. You don’t hide the ball. You don’t give them just part of everything. You give a summary of the first principles of the whole doctrine as a starting point. If you want to introduce somebody to Epicurean philosophy, what would you do, Joshua?
Joshua:
That is a difficult question. Frances Wright gives an interesting view of things. She says you wait to pose a question until the mind of the student is eager to ask it, and you wait to give your answer until the question is asked. I’m not going to go door to door with the Letter to Herodotus. But to the interested student, you have to have this kind of outline on hand. And handing someone 7,000 lines of Latin dactylic hexameter is probably not the best approach.
Cassius:
Many years ago, when I first started my work career, I worked for one of these big American companies — AT&T — and they had a saying about presentations: you tell them what you’re going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you told them. You start out by giving the person the summary of what it is you’re going to talk about, then you deliver the meat, then you summarize at the end. That’s kind of the logical approach to almost any discussion when you’re starting with something new. And that’s what Epicurus is doing here — summing up the first principles of the whole doctrine as a starting point.
Joshua:
Not really a summary technique, but certainly a tool widely used in modern pedagogy, is what some call the “praise-criticism-praise” sandwich. When you’re talking to students and have some behavior you want to correct, just coming out entirely negative isn’t the right approach. So you praise them for one thing, then you criticize them for the thing you really want them to hear, then you praise them for another. And that reminds me of rimming the cup of wormwood with honey — the technique Lucretius describes, where you coat the bitter medicine with something attractive to entice the patient to drink. That’s why people end up talking about pleasure when they introduce Epicurean philosophy — it’s the thing that grabs you. The epistemology and physics don’t often grab people with the same intensity that the ethics of pleasure do.
Cassius:
That’s exactly right. And that’s one reason the modern Stoics don’t talk about their physics or epistemology that much — the version of Stoicism you see on Reddit or social media isn’t delving into the real metaphysics. But in Epicurean philosophy, all three are intertwined and you have to keep them all in mind.
Does anybody have any new topics before we have closing thoughts? Martin, what are your closing thoughts?
Martin:
I have nothing to add.
Cassius:
All right. Joshua?
Joshua:
In closing, I would just call the reader’s attention to that final line in paragraph 37: “I, who urge upon others the constant occupation in the investigation of nature, and find my own peace chiefly in a life so occupied, have composed for you another epitome on these lines.” So it’s not contemplating the ethics that Epicurus finds his own peace chiefly to reside in. It’s the study of nature, the investigation of nature, in which he finds his own peace chiefly in a life so occupied. That’s why we’re going into this. That’s why we want to study and investigate nature. And hopefully, by the end of our discussion of the Letter to Herodotus, we will find our own peace chiefly in a life occupied with the investigation of nature.
Cassius:
Joshua, I think that’s a really good place to close today. I was thinking this morning that I’ve sensed my own perspective beginning to shift a little bit. I continue to have, and will always have, a strong appreciation for identifying pleasure as the guide and pleasure as the greatest good — all these formulations about the nature of life. But as Joshua has said many times before, after you come to those conclusions, what then? What do you do next? And this is Epicurus saying that he’s spending most of his time occupied in the investigation of nature — which includes not just studying insects but these very theoretical questions of whether the universe is infinite, whether matter is infinitely divisible, all the issues of physics and epistemology.
He was writing books, writing letters, teaching people, expanding his reach and knowledge. That’s where he finds his happiness. He’s not focused on immediate bodily sensations alone. He’s got projects that give him the sense of satisfaction of understanding things better and getting rid of anxiety. I tend to think that many people who study Epicurus read the discussion of pleasure as the goal and think that somehow, magically, things will get better for them just by identifying this as the goal. But that’s not what Epicurus did. He was campaigning. He was constantly engaged in philosophical controversy. As Cicero said, he was a pamphleteer. And of course that’s what Lucretius did — the whole poem is basically a long pamphlet to Memmius trying to explain why he should be an Epicurean and why these things are correct. You don’t just sit in a cave with a piece of cheese and think you’re going to compete with Zeus for happiness. Once you learn these things, you put them to use — and it’s the putting of them to use that brings the happiness, not just identifying them.
Joshua:
I would just enhance what you’ve said by pointing out that the investigation of nature, as you’ve mentioned in terms of bugs and butterflies, includes epistemology as well. There’s a quote from Dr. Samuel Johnson about Shakespeare being the “poet of nature” who held up to his readers “the faithful mirror of manners and of life.” What he was really talking about in that case was human nature — and we’re part of nature. As we investigate the nature of the universe, we’re investigating in a sense our own nature and our own future, including the fact that we’re going to die. Even contemplating something like that can be a path to the happiness that Epicurus finds in occupying his life with the study of nature.
There’s also an interesting anecdote in Christopher Hitchens’ autobiography. He was in university in the 1960s, a tumultuous time, and he was very much the local ringleader of various campus protests. One of his professors pulled him aside — very impressed with him because he was obviously well-read and well-spoken — and said, “If you keep this up, you’re going to become a pamphleteer,” as if that were a fate to be avoided. Apparently being a pamphleteer was not looked upon as a great occupation. But that’s exactly what Epicurus was — and Lucretius after him.
Cassius:
All right, well, that’s the beginning of the Letter to Herodotus that we’ve been discussing. Thanks for your time today. We’ll come back next week and dig into the remainder. Until then, we’ll talk with you on the forum.
Joshua:
That was good. Okay, bye-bye.