Episode 186 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 38 - Chapter 15 - Extension, Submergence, Revival - 01
Date: 08/12/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3238-episode-186-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-38-chapter-15-extension-submergence/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 186 opens Chapter 15 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, entitled “Extension, Submergence, and Revival.” Cassius provides an overview of the chapter’s structure — a mirror image of the book’s opening chapters on the school’s founding — tracing Epicureanism’s seven-century arc (three centuries BC, four centuries AD). Joshua illustrates the “synoptic view” with a Thoreau journal passage (October 20, 1852). The discussion covers: general evidences of popularity — Cicero’s ten references to Epicureans in his writings, the whole of Pontus said to be “overrun by Epicureans,” and Epicurus and Metrodorus mosaics at the House of Greek Authors in Autun (Augustodunum), France; the non fui, fui, non sum, non curo gravestone inscriptions found in Italy, Gaul, and Africa; the succession of 14 school leaders over 227 years from Epicurus’s death to Julius Caesar (44 BC); Hermarchus as first successor; Popilius Theotimus’s appeal to Plotina in AD 121; and Marcus Aurelius’s stipend to recognized schools. The episode discusses Stoic hostility under Chrysippus (“A good logician is an intellectual eunuch”) and DeWitt’s observation that Epicureanism, though mocked by name, was embraced anonymously by Rome. The Epicurean school in Antioch is examined — Philonides, patron Antiochus Epiphanes, and Demetrius Soter — followed by the story of Epicureanism in Judea: the forced Hellenization attempt, the Hasmonean revolt, the emergence of “Apikoros” as the Hebrew term for unbeliever, and R.B. Cunningham Graham’s Mogreb el-Aqsa account of the word surviving into 19th-century Morocco (and its echo in Frank Herbert’s Dune). The Sadducees’ similarities to Epicurean views and Josephus’s diatribe against Epicurus are briefly noted. The episode closes with DeWitt’s point that Epicureanism was a “missionary philosophy,” contrasting its universal vision with Plato’s hierarchical view. Martin offers no closing comments; Callistheni reflects on a translation variant of non fui, fui, non sum, non curo and the Democritus practice of meditating in graveyards.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: 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 186 of Lucretius Today. We are now starting the final chapter of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, Chapter 15, and it’s entitled “Extension, Submergence, and Revival.” As we started in the beginning of this book with the history of the Epicurean school, we are now in a mirror image. Originally we took up the beginnings of the school and the way it grew and strengthened and spread, and now we’re going to come to the period in which opposition arose — or lack of interest, or watering down of the principles — all sorts of different factors that would have led to its being less popular over time, eventually to the point where it was essentially crowded out of existence. It became unacceptable to be an Epicurean; it became something to be persecuted or marginalized from society. So as we go through this chapter, the period of extension is coming to an end, and then we’re going to have a period of submergence, and then the period of revival, where people began to take a new interest in at least portions of Epicurean philosophy — even though the whole school itself was never reinstituted officially, there certainly has been a lot of interest in it over the years that is increasing today.
As DeWitt says at the opening of the chapter: “If the synoptic view is presented, it may be said that Epicureanism flourished for the space of seven centuries, three before Christ and four afterward. At the outset, it started in a migration to the east and established itself in the world of Alexander, and after that, it began to flourish more to the west in Italy, Rome, and Roman Africa. It says during the Middle Ages, it survived as an evil name and was overlooked during the first series of the Renaissance. At long last, it experienced a revival in France in the 17th century and enjoyed a brief vogue in England during the period of the Restoration.”
I think that’s going to be one of the interesting things we can talk about as we go through this as well. It almost seems like the continental Europeans were more interested and more susceptible to Epicurean philosophy than England was in comparison to the period of interest in France, potentially even Germany. It seems like Epicureanism didn’t revive itself with the same level of interest in England as it did in some of the continental areas. In fact, in the very opening of the book, DeWitt makes the point that several of the more modern writers he criticizes as being less fair to Epicurus tended to be English as opposed to other areas of Europe.
Joshua: Cassius, I started the book with this quote from Henry David Thoreau on how we define the synoptic view, because I think you’re right — this last chapter of the book is clearly meant to mirror in a way the first chapter of the book. But again, he’s going to start with the synoptic view here, and the synoptic view of things simply means, as the word suggests, seeing many things together in their proper relation. And I think Henry David Thoreau in his journal describes that quite well. He says: “Many a man, when I tell him that I have been onto a mountain, asks if I took a glass with me. No doubt I could have seen further with a glass, and particular objects more distinctly — could have encountered more meeting houses. But this has nothing to do with the particular beauty and grandeur that an elevated position affords. It was not to see a few particular objects as if they were near at hand, as I had been accustomed to seeing them, that I ascended the mountain. But to see an infinite variety, far and near, in their relations to each other, thus reduced to a single picture.” That’s Henry David Thoreau in his journal of October 20th, 1852, and one of the best descriptions of — at least metaphorically — taking the synoptic view that I’ve ever seen.
So I think you’ve done a very good job, Cassius, of laying the groundwork here. We started the book with the tide coming in for Epicureanism. As we end the book here, the tide is going back out again. And seven centuries of Epicureanism will, unfortunately, die in the dark almost, because the record toward the end becomes very scarce — very sparse, I should say — to the point where one of these Christian church fathers can say that the ashes of Epicureanism are so cold that not a single spark can be struck from them.
Cassius: Yeah. That’s a really good way to extend these opening comments here — to focus on the synoptic aspect of it — because there have always been people talking about Epicurus, whether to criticize him or to support him, or to pick out certain aspects of his school and his philosophy to talk about. Certainly there are the people who are interested in the atomism, who found Lucretius and his science to be an interesting and useful way to look at things. There are people who are just interested in general in being happy and the idea of where pleasure and pain fit into the proper way to live. There are all sorts of isolated pieces of Epicurean philosophy that have never failed to be a source of interest and discussion over the years. But when you put it all together and take the broader overview — the Epicurean school and the Epicurean movement, the Epicurean philosophy that Epicurus was teaching as a whole — that’s one of the threads that we’re going to want to follow here. Because just because somebody says they wish to be happy, just because somebody says they like pleasure, just because somebody says they dislike pain, just because somebody says that the world is made up of atoms and void, or that everything is natural — you don’t have the full picture of Epicureanism unless you bring these divergent pieces together. And you have this emerging property, this emerging quality of the overall picture, that becomes very difficult to resolve after the first couple of hundred years after Christ.
People are being either driven underground or they’re losing interest in it, or they’re being persuaded by other positions. And just because somebody says they are interested in talking about pleasure does not make them an Epicurean and does not mean that what they’re saying is consistent with Epicurus’s point of view. Just before we started this morning, I dealt with a post over Facebook where somebody said he was constantly confused about what is Epicurus’s position towards emotion — because the Stoics have a position about emotion being harmful to virtue and harmful to the best life, and people think Epicurus is just like the Stoics. And so they think that, well, Epicurus must have had the same position. But of course Diogenes Laertius says that Epicurus says the wise man is going to feel emotion more so than other people are. It becomes very difficult, especially for people who are exposed to markets, to people who just have a general understanding of Stoicism — in which people often say that “well, this is very similar to Epicurus” — you have all these difficulties of looking through the lenses of distortions from other perspectives. You even have Christians embracing aspects of the atomism of Lucretius and Epicurus. You have Gassendi in his work attempting to sort of meld these ideas together so that it becomes possible again to talk about Epicurus. So there’s a constant fog of confusion about what Epicurus really taught and what he didn’t teach. And as we go through this last chapter on submergence and revival, that’s going to be one of the themes to keep in mind here. What happened to the school as a whole? What happened to this overall synoptic viewpoint that you’re talking about, and do we really see this synoptic viewpoint emerging in certain isolated places as time goes by — or is what does emerge in Gassendi or in England really Epicurean philosophy at all? Is it some part of it? How does it relate to the whole? All those issues are going to be interesting to discuss.
As he moves on at the beginning of the chapter, DeWitt says that during the lifetime of Epicurus and his colleagues, the chief competitors and adversaries were the Platonists and the Peripatetics — the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Then he says during the last two centuries before Christ, the chief competitors and adversaries became the Stoics. And for reasons we just touched on a moment ago, the Stoics identified Epicurus as their enemy — they saw that if you’re putting pleasure as the goal of life, there’s nothing more contrary to the idea of placing virtue at the center of life, as they were doing, than to place pleasure. So the Stoics spent a lot of time condemning and attempting to argue that Epicurus was wrong. And then DeWitt says that after the death of Cicero in 43 BC, the controversy era came to an end. And at that point, the process of combining different elements — especially between Stoicism and Epicureanism — was accelerated by Stoics such as Seneca, Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius himself. And that the last rivalry that was involved were the Christians, who before 200 AD had come forward as condemning the Epicurean viewpoint — certainly the aspects of Epicurus that there’s no life after death, there’s no supernatural God, and that pleasure should be the focus of life rather than salvation or something that’s going to happen to you in another world.
Joshua: So there’s one school of philosophy, Cassius, that is somewhat curious by its absence in these passages, and that is skepticism or Pyrrhonism — the idea that knowledge is impossible. And that, less than Plato probably, but to a great extent, that was involved in a lot of the problems that Epicurus had with the way that his contemporaries and predecessors were doing philosophy. I suppose the rise of both Stoicism and Christianity are anti-skeptical to some extent themselves — with Christianity being so dogmatic about divine revelation, and I guess Stoicism is to some extent dogmatic as well about the possibility of knowledge, but they just have a different version of it. I would say that probably from the point of view of whether knowledge is possible, the Stoics would probably answer that with a yes. What Stoicism took from the skeptics and even from the Cynics — which is another school of philosophy that is absent here in this text — what Stoicism took from those groups is the idea that material condition, the stuff that we surround our life with, the luxury and stuff like that, is not only unnecessary, but it’s actually a hindrance to our full understanding and our full enlightenment when it comes to pursuing philosophy.
Cassius: Before we go further into the decline and submergence of Epicurean philosophy, we have a section that’s a little more upbeat, entitled “The General Evidences of Popularity.” And so before the tide begins to recede, it first crests, and that’s what we’re going to talk about here for a few minutes.
So it says that Lucretius mentions the philosophy is disseminated among great races, and Cicero is a frequent witness. He has no fewer than ten references to the number of Epicureans in his own writings. Laertius writes that the friends of Epicurus were so numerous as not to be counted even by whole cities. DeWitt notes that according to Lucian, the whole of Pontus was overrun by Epicureans. Toward the bottom here of page 329, we have this quote from Cicero: he says that Epicureanism had a sensational influence not only upon Greece and Italy but also upon the whole barbarian world. Of course, to the Greeks, the barbarians were non-Greeks.
What’s particularly interesting about Epicureanism is its far-flung reach. In fact, I have a webpage open here if I can navigate to it. In the town of Autun in France — which was a Roman settlement called Augustodunum — there’s a house called the House of Greek Authors, and there is a series of mosaics of Greek authors. The authors are Anacreon, Epicurus, and Metrodorus. What it suggests — particularly with the presence of Epicurus and Metrodorus — this is in France. When Julius Caesar famously conquered Gaul, this is in the territory that he would have conquered. And what we find are mosaics of Greek authors that have been transmitted from Greece to Rome, carried with the legions and the first settlers into this city in France, and they’ve got mosaics that have been rediscovered. So it’s certainly evidence of the widespread reach of Epicureanism, and not just in the so-called cultivated and civilized regions of Greece and Italy.
And DeWitt also talks about the references to Epicureanism under Antiochus Epiphanes and his successors over in Judea.
Joshua: Yep. So after Alexander the Great conquered Asia Minor and then he died, his empire split basically into several parts. So Ptolemy took Egypt, and then he had other generals — like Perdiccas, for example — who took Macedonian Greece, and then Asia Minor was its own unit governed under the Seleucid dynasty. So Antiochus Epiphanes — one of his chief ministers actually was an Epicurean — and there is a surviving inscription which details this particular Epicurean. What’s interesting about it is it’s actually one of the earliest examples of physical evidence left to us from the Epicurean school. We can find a lot from the Roman period, but not so much from the Greek period or around the Aegean in the time that Epicurus lived, or within even a few centuries afterwards. There’s so little that survived. So looking for physical evidence from that key period, there’s almost nothing that survives. Perhaps some of the images of Epicurus, although most of them are either Roman copies or difficult to know when they were made. But most of the physical evidence that survives from the school survives from the Roman period.
Cassius: And then DeWitt goes on to make this interesting claim. He says: “In Judea, it was so endemic as to inspire the book of Ecclesiastes.” Ecclesiastes is one of the later books of the Old Testament and is said to show some Hellenic and particularly Epicurean influence.
What’s interesting about this is that the main group of early Epicureans were all together before they moved in a body to Athens. So the real home of early Epicureanism is these Greek islands on the east side of the Aegean along the coast of Asia Minor. And it turns out to be important because DeWitt is making the point here that two of the really influential early Epicurean thinkers — actually well after the time of Epicurus — were born in the east, educated into Epicureanism in the east, and then went to Greece and Rome. The best records we have are probably from Greece and Rome, but there’s this whole other world over there, east of the Aegean, and that’s the real hotbed of Epicureanism in the first century of its spread.
And DeWitt kind of ends this section on what scholars have found throughout the relevant period on gravestones, which in Latin says non fui, fui, non sum, non curo — “I was not, I was, I am not, I do not care” — or “I am unconscious of it.” It’s interesting for two reasons. In part, because it echoes something in Lucretius. Lucretius’s argument against fearing death — it’s called the argument from symmetry: you didn’t exist for an eternity before you were born and apparently suffered no problems from it; you just have another eternity of non-existing ahead of you. You’ve already been through one, so there’s no difference. The gravestone seems to echo that approach, this argument from symmetry. The other thing that’s interesting about it is that for a gravestone not to have names and dates and who they married and what they did is unusual. But it’s well in line with one of the things that Epicurus thought was important — which has been summarized as “live unknown” — this idea that you don’t have to pursue fame or high office or distinction in the Roman military or anything like that in order to be happy. Those things not only do they not make you happy, they’re possibly a positive hindrance for you in becoming happy. So the anonymity of the gravestones, all carrying a variation of this same phrase, also ties it back to Epicureanism. And they have been found apparently in not only Italy but Gaul — modern day France — and in Africa, the Africa of the Ptolemies. This idea that you are not only dead but you’re unconscious of it and you don’t care anymore after you’re dead certainly is one of the principal positions of Epicurean philosophy, and not something that non-Epicureans are really going to want to trumpet. The existence of such sentiments from Italy, Gaul, and Africa shows the extension that the philosophy had made.
Just to keep a big-picture overview of where we are: when we talk about Epicurean philosophy, we blend all these periods together up through the time of Cicero and Seneca sometime after Cicero, who were in this Roman period summarizing these Epicurean positions and arguments. During this general time frame — we’re talking about the early Roman Empire, Julius Caesar himself, the areas that he had been involved with — Julius Caesar went all the way to England, of course. And so you’ve got knowledge of Epicurean philosophy at least being carried all across the Roman world. You’ve got Cicero complaining about how widely accepted it was. So you’ve got at least a general idea that by the first hundred years after Christ, the Epicurean philosophy was well known and to some extent accepted throughout the Roman world, and at that point had reached probably the geographic high watermark of its influence.
And so now DeWitt turns on page 331 to the fortunes of the parent school, which brings the focus back to the sort of officially organized Epicurean school as based in Athens. And he points out that Epicurus himself had been bent upon ensuring the perpetuity of its existence and that in his will he bequeathed income to his executors for the use of his disciples forever.
By the way, we should mention that Don did an excellent piece on the location of the Garden outside of the walls of ancient Athens on the main road between the Dipylon Gate and the Academy, and also showing where he thought maybe the house was located. So that’s out there. There’s a video also of that on the YouTube channel and well worth watching. So I recommend people go look at that.
Joshua: Yes. So the bottom line there is that Cicero is documenting that the Garden as a location was still in use when Cicero visited Athens in 78 BC, and that in 51 BC the house it looks like was being threatened by rebuilding by Memmius.
Cassius: Right. That’s my understanding of it as well. And then to what it says: “More important is the succession to the headship of the school. The will designated Hermarchus as the first incumbent with the title ‘leader among his fellow students in philosophy.’ The implication is clear that each leader should select his successor.” Now that says “implication,” but of course that’s something we don’t always make clear. Metrodorus had previously died. So among the three original leaders — Epicurus, Metrodorus, and Hermarchus — Metrodorus was gone by the time Epicurus died; Hermarchus was still alive, and Epicurus designated Hermarchus to be his successor.
Joshua: Yep, Hermarchus taking advice from Polyaenus — it was kind of the pair of them together, but with Hermarchus making decisions.
Cassius: DeWitt says of these leaders of the school, there were 14 leaders over 227 years — from the death of Epicurus to the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. Laertius mentions only, after Hermarchus: Polystratus, Dionysius, Basilides, and Apollodorus.
Forum user Nate has two important resources that he has compiled. One of them is a kind of ongoing list of Epicureans whose names are known to modernity from antiquity. And the other one — which we probably should have covered in the last section — is this map that he has put together showing his current understanding of where Epicurean communities, or influence at the very least, would have centered in the ancient world. And it’s very, very wide-ranging. So those two resources, we’re going to have to compile everything into the thread for this episode because it’s all relevant.
Joshua: Yes, this is going to be a general overview thread of where things ended up 2,000 years ago.
Cassius: It says that after Zeno, the school declined, and except for Patro — of whom Cicero had a low opinion — only one head is known by name. And then in AD 121, the leader of the school, Popilius Theotimus, appealed to Plotina, the widow of the Emperor Trajan, to intercede for relief from a requirement that the head should be a Roman citizen.
Joshua: Yes. I believe what survives from that episode is Plotina’s letter to Hadrian and Plotina’s letter to the Epicureans, informing them of Hadrian’s decision.
Cassius: And then DeWitt goes on to say that Marcus Aurelius, when he was emperor, bestowed a stipend of 10,000 drachmas per year upon the heads of all the recognized schools. So the emperor of Rome was taking steps to foster philosophy. For the time being, that would not last. So we would presume that the school was officially still active at least until 180 AD.
So now DeWitt interjects here that there was a period of Stoic hostility around the time of Chrysippus, who died in 206 BC. There’s no record of rivalry or animosity between Epicurus and Zeno, who had founded Stoicism — we know that they were alive and working around the same period of time. But by the time of Chrysippus, the Stoics were definitely targeting Epicurus. He says: “It was Chrysippus’s great achievement to develop the study of logic, for which he won a permanent place in the curriculum of studies, thus contributing handsomely to the growing sterility of ancient culture. Whatever be the merits of logic, it is valueless for the increase of knowledge. A good logician is an intellectual eunuch.”
Joshua: That’s actually very interesting.
Cassius: So what continues on: “An outstanding effect of the career of Chrysippus was to replace the Platonists and Peripatetics as first-line troops in the campaign against Epicureanism and relegate them to the auxiliaries. While the disciples of Epicurus were uniformly men of goodwill and desirous of peace, there were different breeds of Stoics: some dignified, others vulgar. Some were unprincipled, and among them no weapons were barred when logic seemed futile — they resorted to the poison gas of scandal and imputed to the pen of Epicurus collections of obscene letters.”
This is another of DeWitt’s statements: “It may be added, however, that Stoicism enjoyed only a Pyrrhic victory. It is true that the Stoic catchwords of reason, virtue, and duty were welcomed by the Romans as labels, but the Epicurean love of decorum appealed to them more profoundly. When Cicero lavished praise upon Marcus Brutus for his combination of comitas with severitas — courtesy with unflinching veracity — he was borrowing the language of Epicurus. Stoicism was descended from Cynicism, and the latter signified the philosophy of the dog — the creed and practice of Diogenes, who used an overturned wine cask as a kennel. To this type, the vulgar sort of Stoic with his coarse cloak and unkempt hair and beard tended to revert, and so became a comic character. Such vulgarity was abhorrent to the dignified sons of Romulus, and when Juvenal derided it, he was speaking for his countrymen. And independence of spirit combined with courtesy and decorum were really congenial to Rome. It is the label of hedonism that offended.”
So DeWitt had a quote at the beginning of this book — he said, and I’m paraphrasing, it was the fate of Epicurus to be named when he was mocked and to be anonymous when he was praised. And as we go into the future of the school and the future of his ideas, that becomes a very important thing to keep in mind. Really in other aspects it was Epicureanism that drew them in — much like, and I’m sure DeWitt will mention this further down, much like it was Epicureanism that appealed to St. Augustine. He said that if it weren’t for Epicurus’s denial that there was a creator, he would have given him the palm.
I think it’s pretty obvious why this would be the case. The Romans are renowned for being practical — they’re not as abstractly intellectual perhaps as the earlier Greeks had been — and it’s this practical nature of a Roman which I think would naturally be attracted to a practical analysis of reality like Epicurus was pursuing. He was looking for evidence and clear conclusions about things, and not looking to just suspend himself in disbelief like the skeptics were, or really look to another world that might not exist as various religions do. I would think that that would definitely have appeal to the Romans, and apparently did appeal to the Romans. Again, people say Julius Caesar himself had Epicurean leanings, and certainly Cassius Longinus and many other leading Romans of the time had Epicurean views and seemed to be attracted to them even when there were aspects of it that they had to struggle with.
Joshua: Right. Part of what’s interesting about that is that Lucretius and Horace — those two in particular, to the extent that Horace had Epicurean leanings — partly found their way to the heart of Roman society with Epicureanism because they apparently flouted one of Epicurus’s conventions, which was that poetry is used in the service of lies — lies about adventures that never happened, lies about the intercession of the gods that weren’t real, lies about myths and so forth. So for Lucretius and for Horace to take that art that had been allegedly maligned and turn it in fact into good use was part of the key, I think, to get into at least educated Roman society.
Cassius: Okay, the next section is entitled “The School in Antioch.” We’ve been continuing to talk about the area known today as Turkey, known as Asia Minor, perhaps back in that period. And it says that the Epicurean school in Antioch is remarkable for its importance, but also for the fact that its existence is known only from a papyrus. DeWitt mentions that Epicurus himself had been a privileged person who enjoyed the endowments of generous friends, and that linkage between an Epicurean philosopher and someone else who was generous — perhaps like Lucretius, who was looking for a relationship with Memmius in his time — applies to the Antioch school. It’s in the light of these relationships that we should read of the distinguished philosopher Philonides, who set up headquarters in Antioch and surrounded himself with a throng of scholars. So it’s Philonides mentioned earlier who made a convert of Antiochus Epiphanes and enjoyed not only his patronage but that of the successor of Antiochus by the name of Demetrius Soter.
Joshua: Right. It should be noted, by the way, that Demetrius Soter was, I guess, the nephew of Antiochus Epiphanes and that Philonides was Demetrius’s tutor — much like Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander the Great.
Cassius: This says that Philonides published 125 books and rearranged the letters of Epicurus and his three colleagues according to names and subject matter, which sounds like the kind of thing we do today — constantly going back and rearranging and categorizing them.
Joshua: Yes, much like Don’s recent and ongoing project with the Principal Doctrines — yeah, that’s exactly the kind of stuff we like to do.
Cassius: He says here that “the unique interest that attaches to the Epicurean school in Antioch is enhanced by other reasons” — particularly, he says, it is probable that it served as a base of operations for the forcible introduction of Epicureanism into Judea.
Yeah, people who are interested in this aspect of Antiochus Epiphanes could look over at EpicureanFriends.com. Within our resources there is a heading entitled “Epicureanism and the Judeans.” And he says that Antiochus — anxious to secure Judea in connection with his Egyptian expedition and to create a more culturally unified empire — had the Zadokite high priest removed and founded a Greek-style gymnasium in Jerusalem. Antiochus was sympathetic to Epicureanism, so his attempt at a forced Hellenization of Judea was closely linked to Epicureanism in the minds of the Judean patriots. Which is where this term “Apikoros” comes from — the word for unbeliever — as the rabbis were supposed to study the law so as to be able to answer the objections of the Epicureans.
Another factor was that the Epicureans were prominent in the Hellenized cities of Galilee, creating a rivalry between Epicureanism and the traditional religion among the northern Judeans. Antiochus’s provocations brought about a strong nationalistic reaction, which exploded into violence when a rumor of Antiochus’s death reached Judea. While the rumor was false, nonetheless the Hasmonean leader Judas Maccabeus was ultimately successful in his revolt against the Seleucids.
So there’s a whole line of interesting material there about the influence of Antiochus in the area now known as Israel, and a lot to be investigated there for someone who’s interested in it. DeWitt says: “As for Antiochus himself, his very name was loathsome to the Jews because his adopted surname, Epiphanes, means ‘the God manifest.’” DeWitt goes into a discussion of what he sees as Epicurean aspects of the book of Ecclesiastes. “A living dog is better than a dead lion, for the living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything.”
Joshua: So back on this story of Epicurus as a byword for unbelievers. There was a Scottish traveler in the 19th century named R.B. Cunningham Graham, and he wrote a book called Mogreb el-Aqsa, in which he tells a story about his travels in Morocco. What’s interesting is the long lifespan of this word “Epicurus.” He’s living in a community where you have this Moorish influence, you have this Jewish influence, and you have Christian missionaries also going into the region. And the missionaries — from the perspective of some of these other groups — don’t seem to be really doing much at all. They’re not working, they’re not there supporting families, they’re just going around talking to people. And so the Jewish community calls them “Apikoros,” “Apikoros of Shaitan” — a lazy missionary of the devil. And then some of these other groups in the area at the time hear this as “Bikuros” and latch onto that. And so they start — without knowing the context of the word — referring to Christian missionaries in the area as “Bikuros” with a completely different context.
So it’s interesting how this name, “Epicurus,” 2,300 years later, is swirling around in Morocco in a very religiously and ethnically charged place, as kind of a slur that was being passed around among different groups. I find that kind of thing really interesting. But it kind of starts here — it starts here in Judea and in Antioch and the places we’re talking about right now.
Cassius: Yeah, to me it provides another example of how the really controversial things that we’re talking about are not just the question of pleasure and happiness, but really controversial issues of whether there’s an eternal immortal soul, whether there’s life after death, whether there’s a supernatural God. And people really latch on to these issues as really going to the heart of everything else. To some extent, they’re right. They take the wrong position from an Epicurean point of view, but they’re correct in seeing how important these issues are to address.
Joshua: I completely agree. Dune, which is a science fiction series written by Frank Herbert in the 1960s or so — it’s kind of having its day because of the Timothée Chalamet movies — it’s interesting because that name “Bikuros” appears as a minor character in that science fiction series. Herbert had read that book by Cunningham Graham. The name “Bikuros” is morphing in weird ways and traveling in very strange ways into books that have really nothing to do with it, and I find that very interesting.
Cassius: Yes, yes. DeWitt mentions at the bottom of page 335 another connection that many of us may remember from our early years — maybe in Sunday school or learning the Bible. To the extent a lot of people know some of the background from the Bible, they’ve heard of Pharisees and Sadducees. And apparently — this is not covered extensively here by DeWitt — but apparently the Sadducees had some views that appear to have been very similar to some of the important views of Epicurus. DeWitt says: “The beliefs of the Sadducees, as recorded by Josephus, included the denial of divine providence and the assertion of free will, which exhibit an unmistakable coincidence to the teachings of Epicurus. This coincidence is more noticeable because of the reluctance of the Sadducees to hold public office” — at least those two commonalities exist.
And what DeWitt closes that section with is to again refer to the writings of Josephus, who included a defense of the prophet Daniel and an extended diatribe against Epicurus and his views on the government of the universe, specifically naming Epicurus as his target.
The next section that DeWitt deals with is entitled “Epicureanism in the New Testament,” which is a constant theme of DeWitt throughout the book in drawing parallels to the development of Christianity and certain things that it may or may not have picked up from Epicurean philosophy. And for someone who’s really interested in this, this section is expanded in much greater detail in DeWitt’s subsequent book, St. Paul and Epicurus. We’ve discussed this many times. Some people are interested in this topic, some people are not. We’ll defer to St. Paul and Epicurus and people who would like to read this subsection — it starts on page 336.
Joshua: So on that subject, one of the interesting aspects of the origin of the holiday Hanukkah: one reading of the historical events has to do with understanding this as a revolt of sort of orthodox conservative Judaism against the Hellenized Judaism that DeWitt is talking about here. And Christopher Hitchens has a very interesting take on that — which I don’t have well enough in mind to explain — but I’ll see if I can find it and post it, and the counter-argument that I’m reading to it right now. This interplay between Hellenism and these other religious groups and schools of thought at the time is interesting in its own right, and that there may have been an element of Epicureanism involved in this explicitly makes it even more interesting for us.
Cassius: Oh yes, I’m by no means any expert on Hebrew holidays and so forth, but I would think that you’re right — Hanukkah in particular has a connection with Epicurean philosophy, and the events that are preserved from that holiday stem from the actions of the Greeks who were to some extent Epicurean in their viewpoint. You can imagine, with the reaction that people like Lucian had in describing Alexander the Oracle Monger, that the Epicureans would have challenged any religious group that seemed to them superstitious in any way.
So we’re not going to go into a lot of detail about much of what’s included on pages 336 through 339. Again, those who are interested in it can pursue that if they are. The point that probably could be emphasized to bring us to a conclusion of our episode today is that DeWitt has made the comment that Epicurus was a missionary philosophy. One of his first articles that DeWitt wrote was entitled “Philosophy for the Millions.” A significant part of that is: Epicureanism is not an abstract, dry subject that’s intended to be just absorbed so that you’ll have knowledge for the sake of knowledge or wisdom even for the sake of wisdom. It does have much more of a lifestyle perspective to it. When you think about Plato or Aristotle, there are certainly very many practical implications of what they taught, but Epicureanism does have this emphasis that the implications of the philosophy are very direct and clear. We’ve been talking today about how successful it was in becoming known to a large number of people throughout the Roman world because of this practical aspect that it had.
Joshua: Right. We constantly hear about this, don’t we — about how Epicureanism is so similar to Buddhism in this way, or it’s so similar to Christianity. But the differences are so pronounced. Because it’s true that Epicurus is trying to help people in a way that Plato is maybe not as interested in, because Plato already has this idea that some people are born to be philosophers, some people are born to be lower class uneducated people, and that’s never going to change. Epicurus has the idea that everybody has fundamentally the same problems and that everybody is in need of what are fundamentally the same solutions. But the identity of the problem for Epicurus is very different from the identity of the problem in Christianity, and it’s very different from the identity of the problem in Buddhism. And the solution likewise for Epicurus is very different from either of those other schools. So we could talk a lot about the similarities — people love to do that — but the differences are very, very stark.
Cassius: The differences are stark. And one more analogy I think we can make as we close the episode for today. There’s been some recent posting and discussion — something we talk about regularly — the Tetrapharmacon, the commentaries that are out there on that, where it comes from, Philodemus and so forth. There’s an article that I’ll link in this episode which talks about the controversies that surround that and the issue of: you do wish to simplify things so that you can understand them, especially when people don’t have the time to invest in detailed study. But there’s always a danger of oversimplification. The point being that in order to get the most out of a philosophy, you do have to constantly consider it, constantly apply it. It’s not a set of magic words where you pronounce them as an incantation and be saved and all of a sudden instantly be transformed into a new person — which is something that Christianity might suggest. So the importance of ongoing study ends up being a lifestyle of its own, something that has to be continuously pursued in order to get the benefits out of it.
So with that, let’s bring our first discussion of Chapter 15 to a conclusion. Martin, do you have any closing thoughts for today?
Martin: No comment today. Thanks.
Cassius: Callistheni, any thoughts for today?
Callistheni: Yes. Earlier in this episode, you talked about the phrase non fui, fui, non sum, non curo, and I looked it up on the internet and an interesting translation I found says: “I didn’t exist, I did exist, I don’t exist, I have no cares.” It’s a slightly different take, especially on the last part — “I have no cares” — because I’ve heard it translated as “I do not care,” which strikes me as strange, because if you’re putting it on a tombstone, the person is not there. But overall, this is something to really meditate upon — the meaning of this for Epicureans — because you’re negating the stance of a supernatural afterlife, which all through the ages there have been different takes on what the afterlife was. And so this is really a central core belief of Epicureans.
Cassius: That’s a very good point, Callistheni. Earlier in the week, Don posted a thread to the forum in which he cited or put a link to a new blog post by Bart Ehrman about confronting your own mortality. Recently I’ve been interested in the story about Democritus, who used to spend time sitting in tombs and in graveyards in order to acclimatize himself to the understanding that he will die. Keeping your own mortality well in view is a really, really important part of all of this — not because you want to become morbid and death-obsessed, but because you want to overcome the fear and to come to a new level of understanding that demonstrates that fear to be unreasonable. That’s a huge, huge part of the philosophy in all areas of its practice and all areas of its theory. So very important to bring it up, yeah.
Josh, any other thoughts beyond that for today?
Joshua: I don’t think so, no. I see that next week we’re going to talk about Epicureanism in Alexandria, Epicureanism in Italy, Epicureanism in Rome. So we’re certainly not done with this project of tracing the ancient school.
Cassius: I should probably close with something that I quoted earlier, and I still haven’t looked it up — it’s from Lactantius or Tertullian, one of these early church fathers: “The ashes of Epicureanism are so cold that not a single spark can be struck from them.” I would offer as a counterpoint to that, that I think our efforts here on the forum — and in other areas of what we’re doing — have some meaning. Maybe the spark is still alive.
Well, we’re talking about the tide going out in part because we’re interested in the tide coming back in again. And in nature, the tide ebbs and flows. Perhaps after 2,000 years, it’s time for the tide to dramatically reverse. So that’s a good place to close for today. We’ll come back next week. If you have any questions or comments in the meantime, please let us know. Thanks for your time today. We’ll see you next week.