Episode 149 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 05 - The Early Years of Epicurus
Date: 11/23/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2744-episode-one-hundred-forty-nine-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-05-the-early-yea/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 149 wraps up the discussion of Chapter 1 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy and transitions to Chapter 2, the early life of Epicurus. The episode opens with a discussion of the scarcity of contemporary evidence for Epicurus’s life: virtually nothing survives from his own lifetime, in sharp contrast to figures like Julius Caesar, for whom we have coins, temples, monuments, letters of Cicero, and books written in his own name. The one contemporary reference that can be identified is an epigram in the Greek Anthology (Book 7, epigram 72) attributed to Menander, who was Epicurus’s exact contemporary and served military training alongside him in Athens: “Hail, you twin-born sons of Neocles, one of whom saved our country from slavery, the other from folly” — referring to Themistocles and Epicurus respectively. Most material evidence for Epicurus (busts, rings, cemetery inscriptions) dates from the Roman period. Joshua observes that if the historical existence of Jesus were as well documented as Julius Caesar’s, Christians would not need to make apologists’ arguments about it. Martin notes that the early Christians expected the end of the world imminently and so did not preserve records in the way later generations would.
The panel discusses the scarcity of information about the daily lives of early Epicureans — how Metrodorus, Hermarchus, Polyaenus, and others all wrote works now lost, leaving us dependent on Roman-era commentary and Philodemus’s fragmentary material from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Cassius notes that we know Cassius Longinus claimed to be an Epicurean while participating in the deposition of Julius Caesar, but have very little about ordinary Epicurean lives in 300–250 BC Athens. The discussion includes a mention of Emily Austin’s new book Living for Pleasure, which Cassius commends as an accessible but rigorously documented introduction to Epicurus; Austin takes the position that Epicurus recommended marriage, supported by evidence in his will making provision for a dowry for Metrodorus’s daughter.
The panel then moves to Chapter 2, summarizing the known chronology: Epicurus born 341 BC on Samos (an Athenian colony off the coast of Asia Minor); military service in Athens 323–321 BC (where Menander was a fellow conscript); a decade in Colophon; roughly a year in Mytilene; four years in Lampsacus; then back to Athens in 306 BC until his death in 271 BC. Cassius describes the remarkable antiquity of Samos, noting that the tyrant Polycrates had a mountain on the island tunneled from both sides simultaneously to bring fresh water to the harbor city — an engineering feat that dispels any notion of Samos as a provincial backwater. The Greek system of dividing property equally among all heirs is explained as the mechanism that drove colonization: Athens regularly packed its landless poor onto ships and sent them to establish colonies, including Samos, which is how Epicurus’s parents came to be there, though Epicurus himself was an Athenian citizen from birth. Epicurus had three brothers — Neocles (the eldest), Chairidemus, and Aristobulus — and by all evidence maintained close family ties; a letter to his mother survives in which he tells her she should not be sending him food and money, as he ought to be the one supporting her.
The panel notes the early anecdote recorded by Sextus Empiricus: as a young boy studying with a teacher who was reciting “First of all, chaos was created,” Epicurus demanded to know out of what chaos was created if it was truly first — and when the teacher sent him to the philosophers for such questions, Epicurus replied, “Then to the philosophers I must go.” DeWitt also records via Ariston that Epicurus had begun studying philosophy at age 12, and that his first teacher was Pamphilus the Platonist — making his early thorough exposure to Platonism important background for understanding the directness of his later attacks on it. Cassius also addresses the “Paideia Fallacy” from page 44 of DeWitt’s book: Epicurus’s genuine objection was to the Platonic curriculum of geometry, rhetoric, and dialectic, but later detractors distorted this into a claim that he rejected all culture including music, literature, and history. DeWitt’s conclusion is that “his real offense was the attempt to establish a new culture that should compete with the prevailing cultures — in this he was successful, his school outstripped all others in the number of its adherents.” Cicero echoes the establishment panic by describing the Epicureans as “taking Italy by storm.” The episode closes with Cassius directing listeners to Nate’s list of famous Epicureans through history on the front page of EpicureanFriends.com.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”[Intro]
Welcome to Lucretius Today. This is a 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. Each week we’ll walk you through the Epicurean texts and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics. We’re now in the middle of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy. Now let’s join the discussion.
Cassius:
Welcome to episode 149. We have been going through Chapter 1 of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, and the remainder of Chapter 1 — which we have not covered and which we’ll probably finish today — is an elaboration of the points he’s already raised. Not only did Norman DeWitt make his book with Chapter 1 being an outline, he did the same thing within Chapter 1. So by covering the initial part of Chapter 1, we’ve already talked about much of the detail that’s in the remaining parts of Chapter 1. There’s a lot more in Chapter 1 that we’ll touch on maybe today, but won’t cover with the level of detail that DeWitt does. What we’ll do for future episodes of the podcast is we’ll go on to his individual chapters, such as Chapter 2, which is the history of Epicurus from Samos to Athens. And so for today, we’ll sort of summarize where we are in this opening section before we move on. One thing that’s interesting to observe is that other than the material in Diogenes Laertius, when you look at collections of fragments, there’s not an awful lot that remains from his own time period. Much of what we’re reading about Epicurus comes from the Roman and later writers. And of course, Diogenes Laertius is under the same issue, so we don’t have an awful lot of contemporary material.
Joshua:
Yeah, it occurred to me yesterday evening to actually ask the question: how much evidence do we have for the life of Epicurus that dates from his own time? And the reason it occurred to me is what you’ll see on Christian apologetic sites — claims like “there’s more evidence for the historical Jesus than there is for Julius Caesar,” which is a claim that is just patently absurd. Because for Julius Caesar we have not only books that he wrote himself, but also sources that were describing him and his movements in his lifetime — the letters of Cicero to Atticus, coins that he minted and distributed, temples that he dedicated, monuments inscribed with his name. So the evidence in the case of someone like Julius Caesar is actually very strong, in contrast to a relatively minor figure from the point of view of Rome — a relatively minor figure like this charismatic rabbi from Judea. So I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the evidence we have that is contemporary with Epicurus, and maybe the surprising thing is there really is not that much that dates from Epicurus’s own lifetime.
Joshua:
We have lists and lists of books and letters and summaries and epitomes that were written by Epicureans — not just Epicurus, but we have letters or treatises by Metrodorus, Hermarchus, Leontium, Polyaenus, all of the early figures in the school were writing around these times. But unfortunately not a single one of their works actually survives, and so what you’re left with essentially is basically later commentary. And by later commentary I mostly mean really not much earlier than about the first century BC — that’s when things actually start to survive from the ancient world for us regarding Epicurus, and then the critical time is the first and second century AD.
Joshua:
From Epicurus’s own lifetime, there’s actually basically — that I can find — one second-hand source that mentions his name, which is a relatively low bar. And it is an epigram in the Greek Anthology, which was written by Menander. This epigram comes from Book 7, and it is epigram 72 in that book, and it says: “Hail, you twin-born sons of Neocles, the one of which saved our country from slavery and the other from folly.” So in the first case he’s talking about Themistocles, and in the second case he’s talking about Epicurus. Now this is interesting because, as we’ll go on to read in DeWitt’s book, Menander was a direct contemporary with Epicurus — he was born in about the same year and was also an Athenian citizen, and with Epicurus served his mandatory two years of military training. Apart from that, almost everything else from this time period that has to do with the Epicurean school has been lost to us. So that kind of sets the stage for where we are when we’re actually exploring this material. And at that point you have to ask yourself: well, how confident are we about the later material?
Cassius:
We can be quite confident, in fact. The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum is probably the largest single library of original papyrus rolls to survive from antiquity. So there is really good material — it just comes a couple centuries later, apart from of course what Epicurus wrote in his own name.
Cassius:
Joshua, one of the aspects of what you’re talking about that’s always struck me as significant is how, for example, we’ve got busts of Epicurus, Hermarchus, Metrodorus — there are others that are also preserved — and of course many other ancient Greek philosophers as well. So you have all these busts where you know exactly what these people looked like from several hundred years before Jesus, and yet you don’t have anything from that period about Jesus.
Joshua:
Not only Jesus — if you were going to say that well, they decided they weren’t going to make any images of him because he was God and that was against the rules — no images of any of the other disciples either. It’s just striking to me how, if you want to talk about the possibility that the whole episode was invented, that the historical Jesus is the one who did not exist — not the historical Julius Caesar. And I would have thought it would have been significant and important to the early Christians to preserve images of these people who were so important to them, but they just didn’t get around to doing that.
Martin:
Actually the reason for that was they expected the end of the world to come soon. So they expected it to happen in their lifetime. So there was no need to preserve that. Only if one after the other of their own died, they figured it may take longer. And then that’s when they started more seriously to write things up.
Cassius:
Now that strikes me as one of those apologetic-type approaches that Joshua was talking about. Maybe it makes some sense, but maybe it’s just sort of a coping mechanism and maybe it’s just sort of an excuse.
Martin:
No, we had to repeat with the Muslims as well. So at first it was essentially the rule not to write it up. But of course they also expected — that’s why they were in a hurry to conquer as much as possible, to save as many souls as possible. And then gradually they figured it will not be that soon.
Cassius:
Yeah, I don’t guess anybody really doubts the historical existence of Muhammad, given all of his activities.
Joshua:
I should say though as well: no credible historian seriously doubts the existence of the historical Jesus either, and I personally don’t doubt that he existed. In fact, there are reasons just from the text itself and the Gospels to think that there probably was this person.
Joshua:
One more thing — you mentioned some of the busts that we have of Epicurus. This is also an interesting source of information, but in almost every case what we’re dealing with is information that dates primarily from the Roman era, which is a rediscovery or new transmission of what happened about three centuries prior in Greece. The rings that had Epicurus on them, I think, date from the Roman period. The cemeteries with headstones with inscriptions date from the Roman period. So I don’t think there’s any legitimate reason to doubt that Epicurus was a real person other than to make an apologetics argument — but it is the case that so much of what very little we have actually from his own time is dwarfed by everything that we’ve lost in the succeeding centuries. And it was a lot.
Cassius:
Joshua, here’s another angle of what you’re talking about too. We are constantly debating and discussing and trying to read tea leaves about: how did Epicurus actually live? Did he really live on bread and water? Did he really just love cheese? What was his opinion of figs? He has a will, so we know a little bit about the possessions that he owned when he died. But in terms of how did the people in the Garden of Epicurus actually live, there’s an awful lot of speculation and an awful lot of throwing around suggestions as if we know it for sure. But in terms of documenting the lives of actual Epicureans and pointing to what things they did or did not do during their lives, you really, again, have to get into the Roman period before you start reading about somebody like Atticus or Philodemus. To my knowledge, we don’t have many or any of the lives of Metrodorus, or the life of Hermarchus, or the life of any number of other subsequent leaders of the Epicurean schools, to give us that level of detail that would allow us to determine whether the things we read about — for example, the bread and water — whether that’s an analogy, a metaphor, something they did every day, or not.
Cassius:
And that’s one of the reasons that we are constantly debating to what extent these are metaphorical and to what extent these things are actually real. And of course the one example I use a lot too: we know that Cassius Longinus claimed to be an Epicurean at the time he was in the process of deposing Julius Caesar and leading a war against Octavian, talking to Cicero about saving the Republic and so forth, with Cicero debating back against him. You’ve got Cicero recording in the words of Torquatus or other people he uses as exemplars of Epicureans. You have all that going on in 50 BC, but very little about the day-to-day lives of anybody in 300 or 250 BC in Athens. And one other example: we often talk about whether the ancient Epicureans lived communally — was the Garden of Epicurus a school, or was it a communal hangout? Something you might find in California today? Or was it basically a house with some people living in it, with a separate location where they taught? All those things are constantly referred to in the secondary literature today, but without a lot of documentary evidence from the period when it was going on.
Joshua:
Yeah, those are good examples. I think that in the Philodemus material we get from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, there’s some stuff on Metrodorus I believe — but as is the case with everything else, it’s all very fragmentary and very difficult to get a hold of. So the letters of Epicurus and the will of Epicurus in particular are absolutely crucial for understanding what’s going on, and they don’t have a lot of biographical information in them. So you have to rely on ancient commentary, ancient secondary sources, in order to fill in some of the gaps. And here’s an example from what we’ve been discussing over the past week on the forum. You’ve got a fragment attributed to Metrodorus in which he apparently says something to the effect that sex never profited anyone and you’re lucky if it doesn’t harm you. That’s a great example, and of course it goes along with the issue of whether Epicurus advised marriage or not. You’ve got people who say the text is corrupted and says one thing; some say the text advises for marriage. It would be very helpful to have real-life accounts of the lives of some of these people to try to validate which one is most likely correct.
Cassius:
And I’ll go ahead and mention here in this episode: we’ve had a recent development this past week that’s come to my attention — there’s a new book out by Emily Austin called Living for Pleasure. She’s a professor, and I think has done a very, very good job of preparing sort of an introductory text on Epicurus that also contains a lot of detailed citations and good background information, so it’s not just a breezy book. It’s really got a lot of good information. And I believe she talks about the marriage issue in there as well, and she observes, for example, that in the will of Epicurus he is preparing to take care of the children of Metrodorus — apparently one of them, either Metrodorus or Hermarchus or somebody, had had a child that they named Epicurus. There were several children around named Epicurus, and so we’re left to assemble from circumstantial evidence like that. The fact that at the very least these people had children around, and Emily Austin I think takes the position that he actually did recommend in favor of marriage and children — with the caveat, like everything else, that circumstances can override that in an individual life.
Joshua:
There is a case in the will — and I think it does relate to Metrodorus’s daughter — in which Epicurus makes provisions for her eventual dowry when she does get married. So he’s either sentencing her to misery, or he actually believes that getting married is a good idea — one of the two; probably the second.
Cassius:
Anyway, this is all important partially because the first sentence in Chapter 2 says: “It is quite possible from the surviving data to piece together a consequential account of the life of Epicurus and of his development as a man and a philosopher.” So with everything we just said as background, that’s how Norman DeWitt is willing to summarize the information.
Cassius:
Since we started looking at that opening of Chapter 2: Epicurus is born on the island of Samos, and that was 341 BC. His period in Athens was from 323 BC to 321 BC, when he was likely involved in military service. There was a relatively short period in Athens, and then he goes to Colophon for ten years, and from Colophon to Mytilene for only about a year, and then to Lampsacus for four years, and then back to Athens in 306 BC, where he continued until his death in 271 BC. Again, this is some ten years or less since Plato has died. DeWitt says that in 341 BC, Plato had been in the grave for six years, and Aristotle was in his second year of teaching at the court of Philip of Macedon as tutor to Alexander. So a lot of things were going on right at the time that Epicurus was born and growing up.
Cassius:
Just a couple of interesting points. I think it would be very helpful actually to look at a map of Greece and see where Samos is in relation to mainland Greece. It’s on completely the other side of the Aegean — and I mentioned this in our first podcast episode on Diogenes of Oinoanda and the inscription in Asia Minor — because Samos is actually right off the shore of Asia Minor. So it’s well within the scope of the Greek world, but really nowhere near mainland Greece and not of course where Athens is. So with that as context, we have Greece being a largely maritime and island civilization. And just to give you an idea of what’s going on on Samos: a couple hundred years before Epicurus, there was a leader on Samos named Polycrates, and he had a problem. There’s a natural harbor on Samos which would be quite easy to defend, and that’s where the city was — but there was no fresh water. There was a mountain in the middle of the island, and then on the other side you had fresh water. So at this very, very early date in antiquity, what you find is this rather amazing feat of engineering where Polycrates actually hired a geometrician to survey the mountain, and then his workers tunneled the mountain from both sides, meeting in the middle. This is quite an extraordinary thing to have achieved, and it gives an idea that Samos is not necessarily the backwater that it looks like when you first see it on a map.
Joshua:
When you say he’s on the other side of the sea — you’re talking about near Turkey as opposed to the Greek mainland — and the thought that comes to mind when we start talking about his travels and how he ends up in Athens, is that Epicurus is not some local philosopher in the provinces who spends all of his time writing books for himself and stays close to home his whole life. It looks to me like Epicurus is traveling around and then targeting and ending up in Athens because he has every intention of getting in the middle of the philosophical learning and the philosophical debates and the philosophical school building of that time. He was interested in pursuing philosophy not just for his own sake, but for spreading it to other people, and he knew that Athens would be the place to do that.
Cassius:
Of course, Epicurus is an Athenian citizen from birth, despite being born on Samos — Samos at this time is a colony of the city-state of Athens. This is part of the reason you have these Greek city-states all over every available seacoast on every sea in the whole area essentially. And it has to do with the way that property was handed down. In a place like England, where you have this long-standing aristocracy, the tradition was that the eldest son was given the bulk of the property, and the younger sons and daughters — in the case of daughters, they were given dowries; in the case of sons, they might have been given lesser properties or more commonly were simply required to go into some sort of profession or trade to make their own living.
Cassius:
In ancient Greece they had a very different system: regardless of any other circumstances, the property was supposed to be divided equally among all of the heirs. It sounds good on paper, but the problem that comes up is: if you own a hundred acres of farmland and you have four sons and you die, each son gets twenty-five acres. Well, then they grow up on their twenty-five acres, raise a family, they have four sons, your twenty-five acres is now divided by four when he dies — and that gets inherited. The problem is you very quickly run out of land, and Greece is already rocky and mountainous and problematic when it comes to land in the first place. So what these city-states would do is take the poorest citizens, bundle them up on some boats, and then send them off to a far distant shore to establish a colony. And so this is precisely what happened to Epicurus’s parents. His parents were born in Athens — or in a deme, as they called it, outside the walls of Athens — but they were running out of land, so Athens scooped a whole bunch of people up and sent them off to the colonies. To be sent off to the colonies was essentially to be relegated to a permanent lower class, so that’s one point to be made in Epicurus’s favor: despite these beginnings, he actually goes on to become one of the most famous and notorious philosophers in the ancient world.
Cassius:
But the really interesting thing for me is the decision ultimately to settle in Athens. He was a citizen of Athens, so that kind of pushed him in one direction. But it says something about him and his desire and what he was planning on doing. It also says something about the character of the city-state of Athens relative to all his other options. He could have spent his whole life in Lampsacus and done okay there, but Lampsacus is not the philosophical center of the Greek world. Athens at this time is the philosophical center of the Greek world, and Epicurus had from a very early age a project to get as many people as he could to start thinking along the lines he was thinking. If he’s going to do that, he needs to go where the action is. And the action for a philosopher in the third century BC is to go where all the big names are — big names like Plato and Aristotle, who were active in the time — well, Plato of course is dead at this point, but these major systems of philosophy have their center in Athens. So it’s not at all surprising that Epicurus’s next move is to go to Athens.
Cassius:
And Epicurus had three brothers — it looks like he was maybe the second-born. The oldest was Neocles, and then he had two other brothers whose names I’ll try not to butcher: Chairidemus and Aristobulus.
Joshua:
Yes, and I think it’s recorded in some of the secondary literature that his brothers, or some of his brothers, were with him in his school of philosophy. One thing that would be worth knowing more about is the situation with his parents. Because we know from one of the letters — is this one of the letters that survives in the inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda? The letter that he writes to his mother?
Cassius:
I think so. His mother had been sending him money or food or something, and he says it’s not right that you should be sending me this stuff — I should be sending you this stuff, because as you go into your old age, you need more security when it comes to food and money than I do at this time in my life. It’s kind of surprising to me that his parents — his mother and his father — who had such lowly social status on Samos, it’s kind of surprising that they wouldn’t come with him to Athens.
Cassius:
But you know, in terms of that general family relationship, that’s probably worth noting. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that he’s estranged from his family in any way. It actually looks like he’s pretty close to his family, for whatever that’s worth. And we have this evidence of him writing letters to his mother, as you’ve discussed.
Joshua:
I don’t know whether his father even survived to write letters to, but again, in general, if you’re comparing Epicurus to somebody who might say that he’s going to turn brother against sister and children against parents — as somewhere in the New Testament — I don’t think there’s any evidence that Epicurus was sowing discord among family structures anywhere. And in fact there are several recorded items about how he dealt with children.
Cassius:
Oh, Joshua, also: one thing that we do see sometimes mentioned — and in Cicero we’ll see references to Epicurus being described as the “Gargetian.” While Epicurus certainly came from a humble background with his parents, apparently Metrodorus published a book entitled On the Nobility of Birth in which he made plain that Epicurus belonged to the House of Gargettus and the ancient family of the Thalites. But at any rate, that’s one of the names sometimes associated with Epicurus — the garden philosopher, but also the Gargetian, apparently a reference to a region.
Cassius:
It’s more properly considered like a group of people — a subdivision of the city itself. So the word is deme, which of course is from the Greek word demos, meaning the people, as in the word democracy. So this is a group of people of a certain social stratum in parts of the city. In fact, I’m on the Wikipedia page here, and it says that demes as simple subdivisions of land in the countryside seem to have existed in the sixth century BC and earlier, but did not acquire particular significance until the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC. Under those reforms, enrollment in the citizen lists of a deme became the requirement for citizenship — prior to that, citizenship had been based on membership in a phratry or family group. Cleisthenes’s reforms divided Athens into 139 demes, and the establishment of demes as the fundamental units of the state weakened the genos, or aristocratic family groups, that had dominated the phratries. So this division into the demes is apparently one of the aspects that led to the flourishing of what we would call Greek democracy.
Joshua:
One thing that always sticks out at me about the earliest information we have about Epicurus is on page 42 of the book, where it says the following anecdote has been preserved, first by Sextus Empiricus: for while still quite a young lad, he had demanded to know of his teacher — who was dictating to him the line “First of all, chaos was created” — Epicurus demanded to know out of what chaos was created if it really was first. And then when the teacher, with some irritation, denied that it was any of his business to teach those things but rather of the men called philosophers, Epicurus supposedly replied: “Then to the philosophers I must go, if they alone really know the truth about realities.”
Cassius:
That seems to be part of this explanation about how Epicurus didn’t like to be called a school teacher — he was a philosopher going after truth. He was not just somebody who was repeating other people’s information that you were expected to memorize. But that’s one of the first things we have about Epicurus: that he was interested in philosophy, that he was questioning where chaos had come from if chaos was supposedly the beginning of everything — which of course leads into the issue of “nothing from nothing,” which is a foundation of his physics.
Joshua:
Yeah, and what goes on to explain part of the interest involved here is this mention of chaos, because in Democritean physics there was no place for chaos. And so this is a very early moment apparently in his education, but it does rather set the stage for where he would end up when it came to basic questions about the most fundamental aspects of nature. That he would essentially discard any system that involved chaos as its beginning is not surprising.
Cassius:
Yeah, and DeWitt mentions in the same discussion that there’s a person named Ariston who recorded in a life of Epicurus that Epicurus had begun to study philosophy at the age of 12. And so DeWitt is raising the possibility that maybe Epicurus had already been introduced to Democritus at this early age. Which reminds me of course of the statement made by Torquatus in Cicero’s De Finibus, where he talks about how we should not have to go on learning until old age things that we should have been taught as children — which I would package together into a conclusion that we ought to find ways to teach Epicurean principles to children at very young ages.
Cassius:
Yeah, and there’s a further point here that’s of interest. It says it is certain that Epicurus did take himself to a philosopher, and that this man was the Platonist Pamphilus. So this very early introduction to Platonism seems to have been important. One of the things we discussed in the previous episodes was that the primary orientation of Epicurean philosophy in relation to the other philosophies of the time was his definitive rejection of so much of what Plato was professing to be true. And so this early introduction and education into Platonism actually turns out to be hugely important later on.
Joshua:
Yeah, you really almost get a picture here similar to what Frances Wright employs in her A Few Days in Athens with the example of Theon — you really get a picture of a young person in ancient Athens who is interested in philosophy and reading what he can, going around to different teachers as he can, and from a very early age exploring these issues. Again in contrast to the idea that he’s perhaps some wandering poet on a mountainside who all of a sudden decides to write some verses on happiness or something. He systematically appears to be studying and attacking all sorts of issues involved in philosophy.
Cassius:
Yeah, and this leads into Norman DeWitt’s next subheading, which is the Paideia Fallacy — this is on page 44 — in which he tackles the issue of whether or not Epicurus was an enemy of education and culture. What he says is: to Epicurus this meant the Platonic curriculum of education then in vogue — that is, geometry, rhetoric, and dialectic. Ancient detractors, however, exploiting the ambiguity, insisted that it applied to all culture, including the traditional education in music and literature. Plutarch added history, and Quintilian echoed the general accusation. So as you get further and further from the original dispute that Epicurus had with Plato, people just start tacking on other things — “oh yeah, Epicurus hated music too, write that down.” So what started out probably as a very important and probably very sensible rejection of what the Platonists were doing actually balloons and becomes “Epicurus was an enemy of all culture.”
Cassius:
Yeah, this is where that quote appears that it is recorded that Epicurus said to someone something to the effect of: “Flee with all speed, blessed boy, and flee from all education.” When of course Epicurus was extremely well educated and was doing his very best to educate the people who would listen to him.
Cassius:
And the upshot of all of this, finally, is at the bottom of page 44. DeWitt says: “His real offense — Epicurus’s real offense — was the attempt to establish a new culture that should compete with the prevailing cultures. In this he was successful: his school outstripped all others in the number of its adherents.” So Epicurus’s real crime is not that he rejected Plato — it’s that he sought to establish himself in competition with Plato and be successful at it. That was the real problem. And Cicero echoes this portrayal of Epicurus by saying that the Epicureans are taking Italy by storm — as if this is a foreign invasion that threatens the very foundations of culture and civilization.
Cassius:
Well, if we go ahead to his cadetship in Athens — probably just worthwhile reporting this — Greece is in more or less constant, uneasy struggle with Persia at the time, not just with Persia but among the Greek city-states themselves. So in the city of Athens you have this mandatory two-year military training — so that in case something does come up, they can summon you back to fight for the country. And Epicurus did this himself. And as I mentioned earlier, Menander was also in his cohort. Menander went on to become a comic playwright, and in fact one of the most celebrated playwrights in antiquity. Unfortunately, of the over one hundred plays that he wrote, only one of them survives — and it survives in a very fragmentary form. So once again what we’re dealing with is such a lack of crucial information: not that the information didn’t exist, but that it simply did not survive the Middle Ages.
Joshua:
Yeah. And I’m always concerned about not overstating something or representing something that we can’t really confirm, especially in this issue of him being basically in the army. It’s very tempting to try to read information into that and think about what it might say about the question of whether Epicurus was against the use of force in general — pacifist in any way. And so when you look back and think about the fact that he might have himself served in the armed forces of Athens, it’s very tempting to try to read something into that. And I think you can read something into that: that there’s no record that he did not serve, there’s no record that he denounced military service at any point in his life, there’s no record of him saying negative things about the defense of Athens. But there’s just frustratingly little detail from which you can do anything other than make a general presumption.
Cassius:
I suppose it’s possible that Epicurus had some health or other reason that he did not serve, but there’s no record of him not serving. And of course, with so many negative people trying to do all they could to undermine Epicurus in later years, there probably would be some accusation that he had avoided military service if he had in fact avoided it. So it’s probably fair to read into it exactly what DeWitt is reading into it here — that he did serve and participate. Yeah, he says on page 52 that the two were of the same age and discharged their military service together, as is well known. But then he goes on to address this question of whether this epigram is actually attributable to Menander, which is by no means certain — which goes back to what we were discussing at the beginning, which is the lack of source material dating from Epicurus’s own lifetime, apart from just what he wrote himself.
Cassius:
I do think it’s fair to follow circumstantial evidence in these things. Epicurus was so widely disliked — if there were major episodes in his life that were embarrassing to him, I think you could guarantee that those major episodes would have been amplified and would have come down to us. And the absence of anything of that sort in regard to his service in the military is an indication to me at least that he probably did serve, and there probably was not a scandal to be recorded there, or else it would have been.
Joshua:
One more point on Menander, because there is a genuine scholarly dispute as to what the relationship, if any, was between Menander and Epicurus. And a lot hinges on this epigram, which is of uncertain origin. There is a quote that comes from one of Menander’s plays, and the topic is divine provenance. One of the characters says: “I’ll enlighten you clearly. The total number of cities, let us say, is 10,000. The number of inhabitants in each city is 30,000. Do the gods handle them one by one and deal out tribulation or prosperity?” And the father-in-law is amazed. He says: “How could that be? For what you say means a laborious kind of life for them.”
Cassius:
So that could point to Epicurean influence on Menander, right?
Joshua:
Yep. That’s certainly one of the repetitive themes — that the universe is not controlled by gods because it would be burdensome for them to do so, and no perfect being would agree to enlist in such an occupation.
Cassius:
So let’s go ahead and conclude for today. Martin, any closing thoughts on the early life of Epicurus?
Martin:
I’ve nothing to add.
Cassius:
All right. Joshua?
Joshua:
Well, I’m still very interested in coming up with some contemporary citations or sources or mentions for Epicurus. So if anybody comes up with anything interesting or good on that point, I would absolutely love to see that on the forum, because I am coming up with basically nothing apart from, as I say, what Epicurus wrote himself. That’s definitely something for us to pursue over time — more anecdotes about all this. And I guess Usener was going through and looking for citations of probably more philosophical significance rather than just ordinary references to him. But it would really help fill out the period a lot if we had more background about what these early Greek Epicureans were actually doing with this philosophy in those first one hundred, two hundred years after Epicurus began teaching.
Cassius:
I think we do have a pretty good list of the names of the leaders of the school. I think there is a fairly good continuity chain of who those names were. But as far as what they were famous for — it seems to me, as I say that, maybe in the discussions of Philodemus, I think Philodemus has a tendency to record more of the changes over time or the discussions within the Epicurean school. And probably there are, in Philodemus’s material, some references to subsequent teachers of the school after Epicurus. And that might give us some hints. But it’s really frustrating that we don’t have more material and we have to reconstruct the way we do.
Joshua:
Cassius, just help me remember this because I want to plug one more thing — and that is a document which Nate has put together on the forum. Are you more familiar with this than I am?
Cassius:
Oh, absolutely. And that’s a great way to close the episode, because that shows how poorly organized I’ve been today — I should probably have started out with that discussion. Anyone who wants to find that can go to the front page of EpicureanFriends.com, scroll down to the special resources for students of Epicurus. There is a link to Nate’s list of famous Epicureans through history. It seems like we also have a timeline somewhere, but maybe that’s what this is. What Nate has done there is a very, very good job of going through and looking for references to the people who are recorded to have been associated with the Epicurean school. It’s chronologically organized. Unfortunately, just as we’re discussing, there’s very little to be assembled about each one of these people other than their names and the general time period. But what Nate has done is provide a list of the names associated with the school, and to the extent that there’s something available, to document where the information comes from as well. So there’s a very long list of names. And in fact, there’s a good many Greek names associated with it, but you don’t begin to get a lot of detail until you get back down into the Roman period.
Cassius:
Okay, well, that’s a good example of the resources that we try to put together at the EpicureanFriends.com forum. So we’ll add some more links into the show notes for this week and bring our discussion of the early years of Epicurus to completion, and we’ll move on into the further development of the school next week. So thanks for being with us today, and we’ll be back in a week.