Episode 187 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 39 - Chapter 15 - Extension, Submergence, Revival - 02
Date: 08/18/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3250-episode-187-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-39-chapter-15-extension-submergence/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 187 continues Chapter 15 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, covering Epicureanism in Alexandria (Ptolemaeus the White and Ptolemaeus the Black; Philo of Alexandria; Dionysius the Great; the Library of Alexandria and its collection of Epicurean texts), Epicureanism in Italy (Amafinius and Rabirius as the first Latin Epicurean writers; the Bay of Naples as a center of Epicurean activity; Siro’s school at Parthenope; the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum and the discovery of Philodemus’s works and fragments of Lucretius; the etymology of Posillipo from Greek meaning “respite from pain”), and Epicureanism in Rome (Gaius Fabricius; Aurelius Opillius’s school closed in 92 BC; the strategy of teaching philosophy in Latin vs. Greek; Calpurnius Piso and Julius Caesar’s Epicurean circle including Hirtius, Pansa, Gaius Matius, Trebatius, Cassius Longinus, and Maecenas). The episode discusses Maecenas’s defiant statement about wanting to keep his life even in agony, prompting analysis of DeWitt’s thesis that life itself is the summum bonum and the Epicurean position on suicide. The second half covers the tide of reaction against Epicureanism: the publication of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things in 54 BC as a turning point; Cicero’s anti-Epicurean campaign following his daughter’s death in 45 BC; the “conspiracy of silence” against Lucretius; Brutus’s last words on virtue; and the subsequent geographic shift of Epicureanism back to Asia Minor (Lucian of Samosata; Diogenes of Oenoanda). A book recommendation is given for Epicurus in Rome: Philosophical Perspectives in the Ciceronian Age, edited by Sergio Yona and Gregson Davis.
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 187 of Lucretius Today. This is our second episode devoted to Chapter 15, the final chapter of Epicurus and His Philosophy. We started last week with the section devoted to extension of Epicurean philosophy and talked about the influence of Epicurean philosophy in Asia Minor, also in Palestine. And today we’re going to start with the school in Alexandria, which says that Epicurus had established connections with Egypt while still living in Lampsacus. And he was accused of, quote, trying to make recruits among the visitors from Egypt. There are apparently a number of anecdotal pieces of evidence that are referring to here. He says that the first Ptolemy was not averse to Epicurean philosophy and that Colotes had referenced Ptolemy in one of his satires. But we do know that apparently there were two Epicurean scholars in the city: Ptolemaeus the White and Ptolemaeus the Black — which may mean, according to DeWitt, that the former was Greek and the second was a native. He says their date is unknown, but the writings of the famous Jewish writer Philo of the early Christian era attest to the continued prevalence of Epicurean influence in Alexandria. Abundant evidence of the same in the following century is afforded by the writings of Dionysius the Great, Bishop of Alexandria, who is a chief authority for Eusebius on Epicurean doctrines.
Joshua: Right. So those are a couple of big names. Philo of Alexandria in particular is a very, very famous Jewish writer from the city, and we don’t know much at all really until we have one sentence on Ptolemaeus the White and Ptolemaeus the Black here, because that’s really all we know — that there were two men named Ptolemaeus in Alexandria who were Epicureans.
Cassius: We’re recording this on August 13th, but yesterday — August 12th — is one of the two traditional dates for the anniversary of the death of Cleopatra, who of course is a major figure in Alexandrian history. So that happened, I think, either on the 10th or on the 12th of August, but this weekend sometime is considered to be the anniversary of that. What Cleopatra’s death really marks is the end of the Hellenistic period — this period of the spread of Greek culture to Italy, to Egypt, to all along the Mediterranean with Alexander the Great’s army. He went to all of these places, and so the death of Cleopatra as sort of the last pharaoh and the provincing of Egypt under Octavian really marks the end of the Hellenistic period, but also in a way the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire, because another major population center and a huge exporter of grain had now fallen into the Roman fold.
We also can be relatively certain that Epicurus’s books, including his 37 books on nature, would have been in the Library of Alexandria, because they were ruthless — absolutely ruthless — about getting books. Their stated goal was to get every book ever written. And they had a number of interesting ways of doing this, the Ptolemies. The law in Alexandria was that any ship that came into the harbor — this wonderful massive harbor separated by the heptastadion and shielded by the island of Pharos to the north of the coast — any boat that came into the harbor was searched by officials, and if a book was found, they took it, they had one of their scribes copy it, and then they gave the owner the copy. So it’s this kind of reverse copyright system in Alexandria, where the original of every book was owned by the state. So it allowed them to accumulate a massive number of books, and it’s unthinkable really that Epicurus’s own books would not have found their way onto those shelves. So it’s certain that Epicureanism was known to the scholars of the library. We just don’t have much more information than that — in part, of course, because some portion of the library system in Alexandria was burned by Julius Caesar when he set fire to the ships, and then later with Hypatia and others when the Serapeum, or the Daughter Library, was sacked by a Christian mob. So unfortunately very little actually survives, which is terrible because this was a treasure house of antique literature.
Beyond that, it’s really difficult to know what was going on with Epicureanism in Alexandria, but it’s the cultural linchpin of the Mediterranean at that point in time, and at its height had a larger population than either Athens or Rome. So a very important city, and Epicureans were sure to be there in this sort of cultural mix in which you’ve got the Greek ruling class, the native Egyptians, you’ve got the very large Jewish population for the time, Christianity when it came up — there are centers of Christianity in Alexandria — so it’s sort of this very intense cultural crucible, and Epicureanism certainly would have been there, but we just don’t know that much about it, unfortunately.
Yeah, Joshua, it looks like one of the points that DeWitt is making here about Alexandria — and specifically in regard to the Jewish connection — is that he says it’s probable that the impact of Epicureanism among the Jews of Alexandria was of earlier date than the introduction of Epicureanism into Judea through Antioch. DeWitt points out that one of the original three wards of the city, founded in 332 BC, one of them was Jewish. And so what he’s saying is that apparently one of the reasons — to the extent we’ve already discussed it — is that there appears to be preserved commentaries, as you said earlier — Philo and other Jewish writers who were then cited by Christian fathers later on — that by coming into contact, and presumably conflict, between the positions of the Jews and Epicurus, you had a body of writing that was developed in Alexandria in which there are references that can still be found to the Epicurean influence. So I think what DeWitt’s doing there to some extent is pointing out that for those who are interested in doing additional research on it, there are connections out of Alexandria in which Epicurean philosophy is mentioned.
Joshua: Right. Now Cleopatra died in 30 BC. So Epicurus died in, I think, 270 BC. This is 240 years after Epicurus’s death, but Epicureanism has now spread to every corner of the Mediterranean and well beyond, just about every direction. So it arrived in Alexandria through the Greeks, but what we’ll now talk about in the next subsection of this chapter is the Roman influence and Epicureanism in Italy specifically.
Cassius: It’s making the point that in the initial years there was no formal opposition to it. It says: “For the space of a century, the new creed spread and flourished openly and unforbidden.”
Joshua: Right. So it’s Amafinius and Rabirius who were the two early Epicurean Latin writers. This was unusual because it wasn’t very common to write philosophy in Latin at the time they were writing, which was in about the late second to early first century BC — this crucial period of the spread of Epicureanism. Cicero thought that their style was deplorable, but he also thought that Epicurus’s own style was deplorable. So that’s not at all surprising. But this crucial period — we’ve got now two Epicureans working in Italy, writing in Latin about philosophy — in which it would have been much more common to write about philosophy in Greek.
Cassius: Right. And in terms of the Greek influence, the southern part of Italy — this references the Naples area as being particularly congenial to the Epicurean influence.
Joshua: Yes, particularly the island of Sicily. That’s where you’ve got the city of Syracuse, which is where Archimedes was working when the Romans laid siege to that city and he was killed. Actually, this is interesting — his grave, they lost his grave to the point where a few hundred years later they were thinking that, oh, his life must have been mythical, they didn’t even believe he existed. But there was a description of his grave, and Cicero, when he was the quaestor in a city called Lilybaeum on the island of Sicily, went to Syracuse and actually found Archimedes’s grave. So it’s not just that Greek influence was coming into Rome in Sicily — it was already there long before Rome became a great power.
Cassius: And now DeWitt starts talking about Siro. DeWitt says Naples itself was not originally on the coast. The port adjacent to it was named Parthenope after one of the sirens whose haunt was located by local mythology upon the neighboring peninsula of Sorrento. Thus it seems plausible that the Epicurean philosopher Siro was named for her — being, as it were, the male siren; the bewitching doctrines of Epicurus himself had been compared to the voices of the sirens. As for the change of name, parallels are afforded by Plato and Theophrastus, whose given names had been Aristocles and Tyrtamus respectively. Whatever the fact may be, the school of Siro seems to have been located at Parthenope, the burial place of Virgil.
Even Naples, however, preserves memory of Epicurus. The name of the beautiful district called Posillipo is derived from a Greek phrase meaning “respite from pain.”
Joshua: And it was that latter phrase — “Sans Souci” — that was the name of Frederick the Great’s summer pleasure palace, wasn’t it, where he had Voltaire and other thinkers gather? Frederick the Great was considered to have been Epicurean as well.
Cassius: So the Bay of Naples is incredibly important because this is where you have Mount Vesuvius, of course. You have Pompeii. You also have Herculaneum. One of the greatest sources of evidence you can ever get from the ancient world is surviving books — not just texts, but actual papyrus scrolls surviving from the ancient world. And a cache of these was found in what’s called the Villa of the Papyri, in something like the 17th or 18th century, in the Bay of Naples, in Herculaneum. And the Villa of the Papyri was found to contain a library. And so what they found was a bunch of works by someone they were very disappointed to find — they found works by an Epicurean named Philodemus. They were hoping to find more works by Cicero, for example, but that was not to be.
Somewhat recently — within the last, I think, 20 or 30 years — they were going through the scrolls, and what they found actually was that there were very short excerpts from maybe four of the six books of Lucretius in the Villa of the Papyri. Almost unreadably short, but distinct enough — based on unusual usages of Lucretius or neologisms that he had created — that they were able to prove actually that De Rerum Natura, On the Nature of Things, was in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. That leaves that area around Naples and Herculaneum to be one of the key areas of Epicurean development. If you’ve got Philodemus working at the villa with Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, and then you’ve got Siro with apparently an assembly of some kind not far away outside of Naples at this location called Parthenope, then you’ve got a lot of activity in the southern part of Italy.
Joshua: Yeah, it’s a crucially important area. Now, the Villa of the Papyri — there is a reconstruction of the villa in California called the Getty Villa, so that if you wanted to get as close as you could to what that might have looked like before the volcano, you could find that in California at the Getty Villa and the Getty Museum. We have not spent a lot of time talking about the Herculaneum Library and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and all the things that go with that, but clearly that’s a huge source of information about Epicurean philosophy that we hopefully will even gain more from as more scrolls are able to be read. It really is sort of the spiritual home of Roman Epicureanism.
Cassius: Now, DeWitt says that there are Epicureans also in the north of Italy. He talks about the epitaph that we talked about last week — the one that says “I was not, I was, I am, I am unconscious of it” — as being discovered in the north of Italy, and that there were inscriptions found at the head of the Adriatic, and that from Cremona comes Quintilius Varus, who was an Epicurean and friend of Horace and Virgil, and that Cicero’s Epicurean friend Marcus Fadius was surnamed Gallus, and the best writer of the sect, Cassius Insuber, commended by Quintilian, was of Insubrian Gaul by birth or extraction.
Joshua: Yeah, one more point on the Villa of the Papyri: because what they’ve found are works by Philodemus, who wrote in Greek. So it’s thought possible — because the villa is only very partially excavated — that they stumbled into the Greek library, but that possibly there might still be undiscovered in there a Latin library in a separate room. So that’s unknown, but the possibility is a very enticing one.
Cassius: He goes on to say: from Etruria came the patron of the Augustan poets, Maecenas, who, as Epicurus recommended, took measures to neutralize aristocratic jealousy. This issue of getting along with potentates is one that comes up in Epicureanism — in part because we’ve been talking about the Vatican Sayings recently, and also the Principal Doctrines, and there’s a lot about safety in there. Most recently there have been discussions on Principal Doctrine 6 and this question as to whether political power is in the original text on that, and what it means to be safe in a world in which some people have immense power and some people don’t — and whether aligning yourself with powerful figures for the sake of safety is a good thing to do.
So DeWitt here on page 342 quotes from Maecenas as saying: “Cripple me in the arms, make me lame and crippled a foot, raise my back in a hideous hump, if only life is left, it is well with me — preserve this life even though I sit on a piercing cross.”
Now DeWitt gives his explanation. He says Epicurus had declared life to be the greatest good, and that even though blinded, the wise man will not resort to suicide. One of DeWitt’s central theses in this book is that for Epicurus, it is life itself that is the summum bonum. Life is the greatest good; pleasure is the telos — it is the goal or the guide by which we live our lives — but the greatest good, the thing that allows you to experience pleasure in the first place, is life itself. So the other side of the sentence of course is whether or not the wise man will resort to suicide. As usual when we talk about suicide, I would say don’t listen to philosophers on whether this is a good idea or not — talk to the relevant professionals who are better suited to help with that, and not just relying on old books.
Joshua: Yeah, it’s interesting after all the time we’ve spent going back and forth on some of these issues. I think my read on it today would be: I don’t know that I’d even consider it to be necessary to address DeWitt’s question about whether life is the greatest good or not — because, as you said, it is a requirement in order to have pleasure that you be alive. Earlier in the book there was a question posed by some philosopher: “How many limbs can you lose before you really should just go ahead and die? If you lose an eye, if you lose a hand, if you lose an eye and a hand, if you lose a leg…” — and you can go down the list of how many of your limbs can you lose before life is no longer worth living. It seems that Epicurus is to some extent addressing that question as well, by saying that as long as you’re alive — depending on the amount of pain that you’re in — life is still preferable to non-existence. The key issue apparently being: if you’re constantly in some kind of excruciating pain, then that is one thing. But just to have lost a leg, or lost both legs, or lost an arm, or lost both arms, or lost an eye — going deaf, dumb, blind and so forth — Epicurus would be arguing that as long as you’re alive and have your mind and the memories of good things that have happened to you in the past and potentially some new good things that can still happen to you despite your decrepit position, you’re still better off alive than you are dead, when at that point nothing good will ever happen to you again.
And especially in our recent discussions about life in the absence of pain being pleasure — the Torquatus statement, that Cicero was trying to badger him into saying that surely you recognize that some people are in pleasure and some people are in pain, but those people who are in the middle who are not experiencing either pleasure or pain — and Torquatus is coming back and flatly saying no: if you’re not in pain, the state that you’re in we consider to be pleasure. And if you’re not in any pain, then you’re in the greatest pleasure that you can possibly be in. So to me, as I look back at this formulation of the issue, I see those going in the same direction — that unless you’re suffering some type of pain specifically making your life more painful than is worth living, then it doesn’t matter if you’re crippled. It doesn’t matter if you’re lame. It doesn’t matter if your back has a hideous hump. It doesn’t matter even if you’re sitting on a piercing cross. Now, that’s some degree of pain. But as long as you have your life and the amount of pain that you’re suffering remains manageable — which we are taught in Principal Doctrines 3 and 4 that pain is generally short if intense and manageable if it’s not intense — then it seems to me that all goes in the same direction.
We know that the non-existence after life is the same as the non-existence before life. But while you’re alive, you have the ability to experience pleasure. And despite unfortunate circumstances you may find yourself in, it’s still worth living — up to the point where you’re just certain that the pain that you’re encountering cannot be alleviated and that it’s not worth living any further. So this is, I think, the first time DeWitt has introduced this particular comment from Maecenas as relevant to that. But regardless of whether you take some formulaic position that life is the greatest good or not, it still remains true that you cannot experience pleasure without life, and therefore you want to keep your life if at all possible.
Cassius: Yes, he says here that the reception of what was written by Maecenas — he doesn’t really say whether Maecenas is actually really pro-Epicurean in what he’s writing. He says: “As treated by Maecenas, this question became fantastic and elicited the desired contempt.” DeWitt says: “The hostility that menaced him was nullified as effectively as posterity has been mystified. No mystery should exist, however, for one who has pondered the advice of Epicurus on the control of environment.” So we get back to that issue of safety once again.
Joshua: Yeah, one sentence that started the section that you just quoted: “Thus it became a crux of discussion at what point of deprivation life ceased to be desirable.” That’s a reference to what I said earlier — how many eyes can you lose, how many ears, how many legs and fingers and toes — and still have a desirable life? Apparently the point of all that is that the more you itemize the question and ask how many toes and how many fingers and how many ears and how many eyes and how many feet and how many legs and how many elbows — the more you itemize it, the more it should become clear to you that it’s a ridiculous question to try to itemize like that. Because the value of life is so important — to have life itself — that it doesn’t matter how many of these things you subtract. If you still have that life and some possibility of pleasure that’s more worth it to you than the pain you’re suffering, then you keep your life. You should never even go down this road of having to ask that, because life is so critically important that it supersedes all these other losses.
Cassius: So when he says “no mystery should exist for one who has pondered the advice of Epicurus,” that’s what DeWitt is saying — because you’re going to be so certain about how important your life is to you, you’re not going to be entertaining the possibility that “maybe I’ll be stringing some harps in heaven after I die and I should go ahead and die.” You’re going to be clear-eyed about the fact that when you die, your life is over. And so you’re going to have to make your decisions on that basis — and not on anxiety or doubt about what might happen to you after you die — because you’re certain that nothing’s going to happen to you then.
Okay, moving on past that. The next section is Epicureanism in Rome. And again, DeWitt has strings of names of people who we’re not going to have time to talk about, but he gives a lot of good references here.
DeWitt starts out with Gaius Fabricius, who learned the views of Epicurus on pleasure apparently many years before the age of Cicero. What DeWitt says is that a small amount of information may have reached Rome as early as 278 BC. So Epicurus died in, I think, 270. So he was still alive, apparently, according to DeWitt, when news of Epicureanism might have reached Rome, and that some of the Roman aristocrats and well-educated people were horrified — you look to Greek culture for Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, and instead what we’re getting is a third-rate pleasure seeker named Epicurus. And they were somewhat dismayed by that. So that’s kind of the theme here in the early part.
Joshua: So the next paragraph, which I find in some ways more interesting: DeWitt says, in the first decade of the ensuing century, hostility was whipped up against the teaching of rhetoric in Latin. Again, like what I was saying about Amafinius and Rabirius — writing philosophy in Latin and not in Greek, and how that would be received. Apparently there was some trouble in Rome in part because of the teaching in Latin, and DeWitt may be thinking here of a parallel with, of course, the Renaissance approach to the question as to whether the Bible should be in Hebrew, Latin, or Greek rather than in the vernacular language of the people.
So what’s the problem? The problem is: for educated Romans who have learned Greek, this was a way — much like educated people in Europe in the Renaissance and afterwards learning Latin — to keep some things in their own circle without it going too far into the hoi polloi, let’s say. To the extent that in the Elizabethan period in England, there was an old law from the medieval period called “benefit of the clergy” — “benefit of the clergy” meant that any accusation leveled at a prelate of the Catholic Church would have to be tried not in the secular court system, not by English or British law. Any accusation against a prelate of the Catholic Church would have to be tried by ecclesiastical tribunal. And so of course what this means is that clerics in the church are probably going to get more lenient sentences at the hands of the Church than they would ordinarily be if they were tried just like everybody else by the state.
So the test — because it’s not really, you know, they don’t have identification cards — how do you know who is a deacon of the church, who is a priest, and who is not? The test was whether you could translate into English a passage from the Bible that was in Latin. So they would give you this test, and if you passed it, then the state could not try you for any alleged crime. It turned out to be very useful in 1598 for an Elizabethan playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare named Ben Jonson, who killed another actor in a duel and was charged with manslaughter, which was a hanging crime. However, he pleaded benefit of the clergy because he could read Latin, was educated, and could not be sentenced to hanging — and instead spent a few weeks in prison. So this idea that using language, particularly the lingua franca of the educated, as a way to separate those higher-echelon groups from the great mass of people who have different rules.
But that’s what DeWitt is alleging here — that Epicurus, and later Epicureans, were sort of blurring those lines by teaching in Latin instead of in Greek.
Cassius: Yes, that seems to be what DeWitt’s introducing here. He’s talking about that measures were taken in 92 BC to close the school of someone named Aurelius Opillius, freedman of a noble Epicurean, which was forced to close along with a number of other schools. But the point DeWitt’s making here is that they were apparently teaching in Latin, and that this kind of influence and conflict between Greek and Roman affections, perhaps, was part of what factored into the social wars of that period, leading eventually into the civil war that Cicero was involved in, and of course other convulsions that were in the decades before that.
Joshua: Right. And so what’s the problem? The language of the people is Latin. Doesn’t it make sense to teach them in Latin? Well, to an aristocrat or to a senator — to an optimas, as the Roman nobility were called — no. Because you don’t want the plebeians to be exposed to some of this stuff. You need this for yourself. The upper class, the aristocrats and the nobility, need the ability to study philosophy, study war — they need to study politics and government and religion and law, because they’re trying to run a state, they’re trying to run a government. What you don’t want — just like what the Catholic Church didn’t want when some of the Protestants and others were translating the Bible into the vernacular — you don’t want people, particularly people who have not been educated in your regime, to come at these questions with an open mind and with an ability to interpret them. What is the position of the Catholic Church? Where do they find themselves if people no longer need the Church to read the Bible or to come into contact with the Divine? So that’s the question. The Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth, but if you can read the Bible in your own language, what do you need him for? That’s the challenge that is being presented by teaching in the vernacular.
Cassius: The reason for the Epicureans — their decision to teach in the vernacular — is important because they’re trying to reach the widest number of people, because they think they can help them. That’s why Diogenes of Oenoanda has this massive inscription in the marketplace where people can just go up and read it. So that’s the approach of the Epicureans, but you can see why it would ruffle some feathers among the establishment.
Joshua: Yes, it’s a viewpoint that was escaping from the halls of the academy into the wider population.
Cassius: And that’s where DeWitt carries the discussion. On page 343, he says: “As for men of action, a special brand of Epicureanism became popular with them, which Cicero described as ‘pleasure combined with distinction.’” He says Calpurnius Piso — prominent senator and provincial governor, father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and patron of Philodemus — besides Titus Torquatus, who was chosen as the speaker for Epicurus in On Ends.
And we should not go past all this without mentioning perhaps the most interesting and no doubt controversial. It says that Julius Caesar was very partial to Epicureanism. His boasted clemency is an Epicurean virtue. And here’s the evidence that I’ve seen argued the most: he opposed the death penalty for the Catilinarian conspirators on the ground that death was no punishment, but rather the end of human troubles. If you look into the records of the Catilinarian conspiracy that still exists from the Latin writings, you’ll see that Cicero was not happy with Julius Caesar, because they had captured these conspirators. Cicero wanted them put to death, and Caesar — for political reasons perhaps more than philosophical — did not want to put them to death. And he explicitly argued to Cicero and to the Senate that putting them to death would be easy on them, because once they were dead they would no longer exist and not be punished. But if they were kept in prison, they would be punished longer because they would be conscious of their wrongdoing and conscious of living in prison. So whether Julius Caesar was just using an Epicurean argument for practical purposes or whether he believed it or not, people used that as an argument that Caesar was at least familiar with — and did not agree with the idea that death was the end of life.
And upon leaving the Capitol for his first absence in five years, he chose to have his Epicurean father-in-law, Piso, to be a successor as Consul. And on planning to depart for the campaign against Parthia, he chose two Epicureans — Hirtius and Pansa — to succeed him in that office. The outstanding member of his civil suite in Gaul had been Gaius Matius, a loyal Epicurean friend. And this is something I’ve also seen cited: the winter camp in Gaul had exhibited the aspect of an Epicurean colony. The brilliant lawyer Gaius Trebatius had become a convert there, as had Cassius Longinus at the same time as well. So Julius Caesar was surrounded by a lot of Epicureans who were close friends and allies.
Joshua: Right, and it’s thought that his father-in-law was the owner of the Villa of the Papyri.
Cassius: Absolutely. That’s the key connection there — Julius Caesar’s father-in-law is the famous patron of Philodemus who made possible the facilities which Philodemus was working in and which were preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It’s a close connection there. I believe Piso was the one that Cicero in one of his speeches referred to by saying something like, “Why don’t you just send them a pamphlet, Piso?” — which is taken to be a reference to his Epicureanism and use of pamphlets to spread Epicurean philosophy.
Joshua: Right, and it was Cicero who said — using military language — that the Epicureans are like an invading army. Usually it’s translated as “taking Italy by storm,” but what it really means in the Latin is that the Epicureans are laying siege to Italy. It’s like the barbarians are at the gates. They brought their cheese and their figs. And I guess in that context we really could see Cicero’s arguments against the Epicurean philosophy in On Ends and other things he wrote. Cicero was probably the minority at that point, or at least the Epicureans were very strong in that period of time. It’s interesting to think how prominent the Epicureans were among these leaders of Rome at the time. And in looking back at what Cicero’s writing, he’s not sneering down at an unpopular extremist group of people who he thinks have no possibility of influence. He’s talking about many of his closest friends and political allies and people who were right in the middle of running the Roman Republic at his time.
Cassius: It continues on and says that it’s during this time period that Siro established his school somewhere in the Naples area. It says Virgil wrote a poem expressing his glee at bidding farewell to Rome and going to the blessed haven of Siro’s school. And that it was in that “fruitful fellowship,” as Tacitus called it, that Virgil lived for years in cultured leisure, enjoying to a singular degree the harmonious and intimate friendship — Quintilius, Tucca, and Varius, following the sect of Epicurus. Virgil calls Siro a great man, and Siro wrote of him with respect as well.
And DeWitt says this: “If only the historian were capable of viewing this last century of the Republic with the unbiased gaze of a first explorer, it would seem even more predominantly Epicurean than the previous age had been Stoic. The new philosophy spread more widely, penetrated deeper, and left a permanent stain beneath the Stoic varnish.”
Joshua: There’s an article, Cassius, by M.S. Slaughter from the University of Wisconsin called “Virgil and Interpretation.” And in his second paragraph, he says: “To Virgil, philosophy did not mean metaphysics nor yet psychology. It meant a study of de rerum natura, of the nature of things — concerning the nature of the universe, that is, natural philosophy. His attention was early directed to the Epicurean explanation of the universe by his favorite teacher Siro; the writer who made the deepest impression upon him was Lucretius — unquestionably the most important influence in forming his mind and shaping his thought in the first half of his life.” And in the next paragraph it says: “In an early poem written before the Eclogues, Virgil bids farewell to the Muses and sets sail — that’s an important point — to the happy haven of philosophy, to devote himself to a life of tranquil contemplation.”
Cassius: This is the last paragraph before we start to get into the more negative developments that occurred. So let me read a couple more of the bits of trivia that DeWitt includes in this last paragraph. He’s saying that Panaetius, being a Stoic or Academician, DeWitt says: “The career of Panaetius was brief and circumscribed compared with that of the Epicurean Philodemus, who was an outstanding man for 30 years from 70 to 40 BC and who deeply influenced the poets. Even longer was the prominence of the Epicurean physician Asclepiades, who once stopped a funeral procession and revived the corpse. He flourished from 91 to 40 BC.” That’s got to be an interesting story and there is a footnote number, but we can maybe look that up later on. “In the year 56 BC, Cicero admitted in a public court that hardly any doctrine was being then taught in Rome except what may be called a Romanized Epicureanism — political distinction joined with pleasure. At the very time that he made this admission, some of the finest poetry of all antiquity was being composed by Lucretius under the aegis of Epicurus. In the later years of Cicero, the school of Siro was to flourish in Epicurean seclusion, grooming the young poets for the production of a literature surpassing all Republican standards of excellence.”
Joshua: We had a conversation maybe a few years ago now about your proposals for what would have been the high watermark for Epicureanism in the ancient world. And I think the period you selected was around this period — the period at the very end of the Republic and before the Empire, the period just preceding, as I said at the beginning of today’s conversation, the death of Cleopatra. This critical half century or so — or even just a few decades — is so, so central to the story. And it’s actually really good to be able to go through it here in this book.
Cassius: Yes, that’s interesting you bring that up. I remember that at the time I picked out — and I could probably still defend — the Battle of Philippi, where Brutus and Cassius were defeated by Augustus and Mark Antony, as being the last time that a prominent Epicurean was largely viable within the Roman Empire. I wouldn’t necessarily change that, but I’ve read since then that there’s an argument that Mark Antony himself had Epicurean leanings, even though he was fighting against Cassius. So perhaps what you’ve been mentioning lately, Joshua — the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra in Egypt by Augustus’s forces — would be a slightly later time period when someone who was potentially friendly to Epicurus was a leading figure of Rome. It’s really Augustus, it seems like, who decided to clamp down on independent thought and the teaching of certain schools of philosophy where the reaction against Epicureanism really set in. But it does seem that it’s that period after the end of those civil wars that indicated certainly a cresting of Epicurean influence. It certainly seems to have declined after that.
So as we’re just talking about in terms of the turning point of the tide, DeWitt goes into that on page 344 under “The Tide of Reaction against Epicureanism.” DeWitt says: “The turning point in the fortunes of Roman Epicureanism arrived with the publication of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things in 54 BC.” Now DeWitt’s taking the position that Cicero’s reaction against it is the turning point. He says: “The effect of it upon the intelligentsia of the capital was dismay rather than delight. If the citizens of small towns chose to study Epicurus in bad translations, this was tolerable. It was also tolerable if a section of the nobility chose to adopt an idle philosophy. But when a new Epicurean literature written in Latin of the highest excellence began to threaten the supremacy of the classics, the limit of endurance was drawing near.”
Joshua: Right. You can get away with anything except writing well — that’s the claim being made there for the Epicureans.
Cassius: So it doesn’t really matter where you put the thumbtack here as to whether it’s the death of Cleopatra marking the end of the Hellenistic period or the Battle of Philippi or the publication of Lucretius’s poem — it’s this century, the middle of this century, that On the Nature of Things was published in about 54 BC. This is the period where things start to change all over the Mediterranean. And the Republic of Rome is gone, Octavian’s new empire will soon be in full swing, and at that point it becomes somewhat difficult and almost dangerous to be a full-fledged Epicurean. Because just like later Christianity — and I’m sure DeWitt would love this analogy — it becomes a kind of threat to imperial state religion.
Joshua: Yes, it does. And Cicero’s the leader of the forces who try to deal with that threat.
Cassius: DeWitt says that Cicero, the spokesman of the intelligentsia, though irked by the complaints of the Epicureans about the poverty of the Latin language, confined himself for the time being to grumbling. It was only when the death of his beloved daughter stung him from his complacence in 45 BC that he really took up the challenge. Thereafter, by strenuous activity, he assayed to mend the damages of delay. During his remaining two years of life, he poured forth a stream of anti-Epicurean propaganda, the true nature of which he endeavored to screen by a facade of philosophy. But he skimped his interlocutors for space in expounding the tenets of Epicurus, while allowing their respondents more ample room for discharging the ammunition of rebuttal. His true intent was further cloaked by the avowal of a desire to create an indigenous literature of philosophy for the benefit of Roman youth, but this pretense is easily penetrated. He was an elderly man and no such project had previously been announced. Moreover, during the previous four years from 49 to 45 BC, his pen had been idle and much of his recent leisure had been spent in the company of many Epicureans.
So what DeWitt is saying here is that Cicero had been grumbling and unhappy about what was going on with the rise of Epicurean philosophy, but it was when his daughter died that he really changed his tune and realized that he was not going to give up a belief in immortality and the possibility potentially of seeing his daughter after death. He was going to fight against that viewpoint — which is characteristic of Epicurean philosophy — with everything he had. And his polemics against Epicurus have survived for 2,000 years and presumably not only were leading the intelligentsia in his own time but have continued to be greatly influential even up to today.
Joshua: Right, and there’s a quote from Cicero that survives. He says: “If I err in my belief that the souls of men are immortal, then I err gladly, and I would not have this belief taken from me while I was still alive.” So you’re right — I think it’s the death of his daughter that is affecting him, and his relationship with and his understanding of human mortality — and also probably his own. You know, it says the last two years of his life — it’s not like that was probably a massive shock to him that he was drawing close to his own end. And the philosophy that said that death is nothing to us is not one that gave him any peace or rest.
This is why — for people who are accustomed to Epicurean philosophy, it can seem like honey. But to people who are new to it — like Cicero — it was the wormwood. It was bitter. The idea that you only get one life and that’s it, that you’re done. That’s bitter to some people. And none of Lucretius’s fine honey could make that medicine go down for Cicero.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, and the point that DeWitt goes to next is one that you’ve raised numbers of times — referencing Thomas More’s Utopia, referencing other examples in subsequent literature. What DeWitt focuses on next is how Cicero saw not only the challenge of defending the idea of life after death, but to defend the Republic. He was attempting to perpetuate his existing social order in the face of changes that were threatening it. And as DeWitt says here, Cicero went on a campaign against Epicureanism, saying that it was so ridiculous and so depraved that you could never display the argument in the Senate, in the Forum, or in the camp — and that if the restoration of the government to the Senate and the people was to flourish, not for a moment could a philosophy of political indifference be tolerated. If the old religion was to be revived, not for a moment could a philosophy of divine indifference be tolerated. And against Lucretius was inaugurated a conspiracy of silence.
Joshua: Right, and it’s notable. One of the stories that’s told from the ancient world is that Lucretius died sometime in October — I think on the very same day that the poet Virgil assumed the toga of manhood. He reached his 17th birthday, in other words, and became a full Roman adult citizen. Whether it’s true or not, it’s interesting because what it symbolizes is that Virgil, in a sense, is taking the baton from Lucretius as the preeminent long-form poet of Latin literature. And Virgil, as we’ve been talking about in his early life, is really drawn toward Epicureanism. But of course his magnum opus is the Aeneid, which is a sort of political poem about the founding of Rome descended from the survivors of Troy and how Rome would become a great nation that would rule the world. So it becomes, in a way, imperial propaganda. And you see something similar happening to Horace as well. So it becomes dangerous not just to be an Epicurean, but to write Epicurean poetry. And so the early works of Virgil and some of the somewhat earlier works of Horace are Epicurean in nature, but they both have a turn.
Cassius: Yes, it’s a very interesting mix of issues that are just churning in this time period — political, philosophical, social. All sorts of questions are just turning the Rome of that time period into total turmoil. And what DeWitt’s saying here is that Cicero launched this attack on Epicurean philosophy in large part because of his personal interest that he was seeking to perpetuate — the restoration of the Republic, the old religion, the respect for involvement in government and politics and so forth were things that he was certain were needed in order to save the Roman Republic of his time period against these ideas that he saw as a challenge to it. And what DeWitt’s saying here is that Cicero was denouncing Epicurean philosophy at the same time that he was ending up counting on Cassius Longinus, the Epicurean himself, to defend the Republic in these battles against Mark Antony and Octavian. And Cicero himself, in that correspondence with Cassius, admits that he seems to have misunderstood the amount of vigor within Epicurean philosophy. There’s a lot of interesting material to go through there.
Joshua: Right. It turned out, in that series of wars, to be virtue that was founded on sand, as the last words of Brutus suggest. He says: “Oh, virtue, I thought that you were something real, but it turned out you were only words after all.” Even though Rome as a center of Epicureanism is starting to diminish around this period, we find Epicureanism in the following centuries where we found it right when it got started — which is particularly in Asia Minor. This is where you have Lucian of Samosata writing. This is where you have Diogenes of Oenoanda with his inscription. So Epicureanism is very much alive in this period, but once again it’s in the east rather than in the west.
I’m going to plug once again this book — it’s a collection of academic scholarly articles called Epicurus in Rome: Philosophical Perspectives in the Ciceronian Age, so exactly the period that we’ve been talking about today. It was edited by Sergio Yona and Gregson Davis. And this is the book that has T.H.M. Gellar-Goad’s article on Lucretius and the size of the sun. There’s also an article in there discussing as to whether Julius Caesar was an Epicurean. So there’s a lot of good stuff in there. Most of these articles are presumably also on JSTOR or wherever. So a good place to start if you’re looking into late Republic Roman era Epicureanism.
Cassius: Yeah, there’s a lot of good material in this last chapter that DeWitt is bringing out. This, I guess, is one of DeWitt’s strengths with the breadth of his classical knowledge — he’s able to bring out and cite for us examples about which we know very little more than just one or two sentences, but which clearly link a lot of these Romans of the period to Epicurean philosophy. Because again, this is a period of great flux for the Epicurean movement of the time. It was cresting, but then it began to subside. And how that happened, what forces were involved, how it did respond, how it could have responded — all of those things are of significant interest to us even today. There’s a lot of good material there for us to study and bring out over time.
So in the meantime between now and next week, please drop by the forum at any point, come to this episode or any other section, and let us know your comments and questions on what we’re talking about. We’ll be back next week. Thanks, and see you then.