Episode 188 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 40 - Chapter 15 - Extension, Submergence, Revival - 03
Date: 08/24/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3262-episode-188-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-40-chapter-15-extension-submergence/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 188 covers Epicureanism in the Early Empire and beyond, completing the bulk of Chapter 15 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy. Topics include: the transformation of Stoicism under the Empire; DeWitt’s critique of Cato Uticensis’s suicide as “the most stagey of all ancient techniques of suicide”; Joseph Addison’s play Cato (1713) and its influence on the American Founding Fathers, including George Washington at Valley Forge; David Sedley’s article “The Ethics of Brutus and Cassius”; Marcus Aurelius as an Epicurean-Stoic hybrid; Plutarch’s anti-Epicurean works; Julian the Apostate’s hostility to Epicurus despite his attempt to restore Greek philosophy; Celsus’s anti-Christian polemic and the debate about his identity as Lucian’s Epicurean friend; Lucian of Samosata; Thomas Jefferson’s quote on ridicule (letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp); Diogenes of Oenoanda’s inscription (discovered 1884 by Halévy and Paris); Tertullian; Arnobius and Lactantius as possible former Epicureans; the triumph of Christianity through organization (the cursus honorum model); and Epicureanism in the Middle Ages — Cicero’s Latin as a survival vehicle, Poggio Bracciolini’s rediscovery of Lucretius, the “senility of learning,” the Boscoreale silver treasure, and the “Triumph of Saint Augustine” fresco (Serafino di Serafini, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara) depicting Epicurus as emblematic of gluttony. Dante’s sixth circle of Hell with Epicureans in sealed coffins closes the low point of the episode. Next week: the Epicurean Revival (Gassendi, John Locke).
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 188. We’re now closing in on the end of the book, and the topic for today is going to be Epicureanism in the Early Empire, followed by commentary about the decline of Stoicism, the arguments against Epicurus put forth by Plutarch and others — including those who are rising in the world of Christianity. And then we’ll have a few comments about Epicureanism through the Middle Ages and its revival and interest since that time. But we’re coming to the end of the book, and this is another time to sort of put everything in perspective as to where we’ve been and what’s going to happen after the fall of the ancient world.
DeWitt says that with the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Christian era, the history of the Epicurean school entered upon a new phase. There are several trends that he thinks are noteworthy in this period. Roman Stoicism found itself for the first time in opposition to government and underwent the last of several transformations. And then in Greece, the original controversy between Platonism and Epicurus was revived by Plutarch. And then in the Greco-Roman world in general, a new contender arose with Christianity on the upswing, directing many of its jabs against Epicurus as opposed to Stoicism and some of the other philosophies that it was able to absorb within it.
DeWitt says: “The transformation of Stoicism invites attention to the changeability of the Stoics as opposed to the tenacity of the Epicureans. The Stoics from the first had sought publicity. Zeno had chosen the porch. And in making that choice, he was running true to the beginnings of his own philosophy, because Diogenes the Cynic had frequented the Agora and, according to DeWitt, kept his kennel nearby. And from Diogenes was descended the vulgar breed of Stoics, who by defying social conventions placed themselves in the same class as naughty boys who attract attention by sticking out their tongues at company. The Stoics fell into the habit of making a great parade of virtue and of fortitude in particular, even though they sometimes lacked the quality themselves. In prosperity, they would maintain a challenging attitude, but under compulsion, they were capable of crumbling.” And he cites the younger Cato as an example. He says: “Lacking the fortitude to become the beneficiary of the victorious Caesar’s clemency, Cato resolved upon suicide, but out of vanity dramatized this event for posterity. After banqueting with his friends, he retired to his quarters, read Plato’s Phaedo on the immortality of the soul, and then took his leave of life by the most stagey of all ancient techniques of suicide, falling upon the sword, lustful for attention. He may have given the cue to the greatest actress of ancient times, Cleopatra, who dramatized her own demise with a like sense of the spectacular.”
Joshua: What’s interesting, Cassius, because when people memorialized Cato for this act, they called him Cato Uticensis, because it was in Utica, this small hamlet in Africa. We were talking before the show about Roman naming conventions — so Scipio Africanus was given this name as an honorific because he conquered Carthage, which is on the Mediterranean coast of Africa. So by a similar convention, Cato was given the name Uticensis because his action in his suicide was seen to have been a great victory — although not a victory with weapons and with opponents, but a great moral victory. That rather than be Caesar’s slave, he would be a free man in the only way that was left to him, and in that way would encapsulate that kind of Stoic ideal of liberty, of not becoming tied down to any one position. But that is not DeWitt’s interpretation at all here.
Right, but another bit of trivia. The story of Cato’s suicide was written into a play by an Englishman by the name of Joseph Addison. There’s a Wikipedia entry that says it premiered in 1713, and Wikipedia says: “The play continued to grow in popularity, especially in the American colonies for several generations. Indeed, it was almost certainly a literary inspiration for the American Revolution, being well known to many of the founding fathers.” In fact, George Washington allegedly had the play Cato performed for the Continental Army while it was encamped at Valley Forge. So there’s sort of an interesting connection there — that this understanding of Cato’s triumphant decision to remain true to virtue even after being defeated by Caesar has been something that’s carried on down the centuries as a sterling example of Stoic strength and fortitude — which DeWitt is interpreting as rather than a great thing to emulate, the most stagey of all ancient techniques of suicide.
Cassius: I didn’t know that story, Joshua, but it’s interesting that this comes from Addison, because Addison and his co-publisher Steele — I think it was Addison and Steele — put out this literary journal or magazine called The Spectator, which was very popular in coffee house culture at that time period. And the purpose of this journal was to show these up-and-coming city dwellers how to live, what was good etiquette, what should you do in certain situations, how should you behave. And so it’s interesting that he would write a play that would go on to inform opinion on exactly those lines.
Joshua: One other bit of trivia that I recall is that David Sedley has written an article entitled “The Ethics of Brutus and Cassius.” If I recall correctly, he doesn’t attack Cato’s display of suicide like DeWitt is doing here. But I remember that Sedley makes the comment in that article that when Brutus and Cassius were gathering people to participate in the overthrow of Julius Caesar, they specifically did not go after the Stoics. And David Sedley makes the comment that the Stoics had no tradition of fighting against tyranny because you wouldn’t necessarily fight against tyranny as a Stoic. Stoicism is a centralized type of approach to life. When you have a God who’s in charge of everything, you’re not going to necessarily attack every example of a centralized form of government, because that’s essentially what Stoicism promotes. There is a right way and a wrong way, and they’re going to go the right way according to them. And even if it is the wrong way, you’re going to just practice the Stoic practice of indifference, right? Indifference to circumstance.
Cassius: Yes. DeWitt ends that section with the discussion of Cleopatra, whom he says dramatized her own demise with a like sense of the spectacular. I should note that scholars are divided about the account of Cleopatra’s death and how accurate it is. One of the stories is that her servants smuggled in a poisonous snake into her chambers at her own request, and that’s how she died — by provoking the snake to bite her. I don’t think people really know at this distance how she died, but there are a lot of stories out there.
DeWitt goes on to talk about what Stoicism was going through at the time and commented that with the swing to the Empire, the aristocrats with their Stoicism found themselves in the opposition rather than any longer being the leaders of Rome themselves. And that Seneca was at one point forced to leave Rome. Musonius Rufus was exiled three times, and Epictetus accepted this condition as his permanent lot in life — exiled from the power centers of Rome.
Before we pass on to Plutarch, of course it seems like everyone’s favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. And DeWitt comments that Marcus Aurelius passes for Stoic but is really a hybrid. He stressed the virtue of gratitude, which the Stoic school distrusted as a yielding to emotion. He commended courtesy joined with unflinching veracity, which was typical of Epicurean ethics. He exhibits none of the sourness of Zeno and rather resembles Virgil — majestic in his sadness at the doubtful doom of humankind. He betrays no inclination to jab at Epicurus, and in general his writings constitute the best amalgam of the doctrines of the schools.
So the next section that DeWitt goes into here is titled “Plutarch, Anti-Epicurean,” and he says while Stoicism in Italy was undergoing its final transformation, the learned tradition of interscholastic rivalry was being revived across the Adriatic in Boeotia by the famous Plutarch. He says his importance for the understanding of Epicureanism equals that of all other external Greek sources combined. He’s referring here to so much of the fragmentary evidence that comes from these other commentators like Plutarch — hostile in many cases. It says his library was enormous and amply stocked with Epicurean rolls. References to Epicurean doctrines are to be found in at least a score of his writings, and it is probable that more remain to be identified. Two essays in particular are devoted to the refutation of Epicurean teaching. The first is entitled “Against Colotes,” and the second — which is I guess the one I’m more familiar with — is “Epicurus Makes the Pleasant Life Impossible.” It was possibly something like this that Erasmus had in mind — or one of these Christian writers of the Renaissance — when they wrote that only Christians can truly be Epicureans, because it is only Christians who are choosing the most pleasure and the best pleasure in the long run by choosing heaven, in other words. But of course Plutarch doesn’t have that in mind necessarily. What he has in mind is Epicurus’s denial of the supernatural as it relates to the Greek gods.
So he says: “We ought, it is true, to remove superstition from the persuasion we have of the gods as we would the gum from our eyes. And if that be impossible, we must not root out and extinguish with it the belief which the most have of the gods. Nor is that a dismaying and sour one either, as these gentlemen, the Epicureans, feign, while they libel and abuse the blessed providence, representing her as a hobgoblin or as some fell and tragic fury.” So it’s the attack on Greek paganism that is his main problem with Epicureanism, and that by running afoul of the gods — who according to Plutarch really do exist, who really do intervene — that it really makes it impossible to live happily.
Even later in the Roman Empire, we’ll probably read about the closing down of the schools of philosophy and Christianity ascendant. And then there’s the later Roman Emperor called Julian the Apostate, who wanted to bring back paganism. His goal is to reopen schools of philosophy. His goal is to rededicate the temples to the pagan gods — in other words, to bring the empire back from the brink of Christianity. There are surviving letters between him and his ministers, and in these letters he makes it very clear that his goal of bringing back paganism and Greek philosophy is not meant to include Epicureanism, because Epicureanism is not, in his view, representative of the best of Greek and Roman thought, and is actually hostile and in some senses foreign. And it’s that attitude, I think, that Plutarch, before Julian the Apostate, is latching on to here.
Joshua: Yes. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that Plutarch’s main works against the Epicureans are: “That One Cannot Live Happily Following Epicurus” and then “Against Colotes,” which is subtitled “Is ‘Live Unnoticed’ Well Said?” All these works are marked by the use of a distinct polemical tone against assumed adversaries and of recognizable polemical strategies. They are often captious and in many instances betray a less than fair engagement with the views being opposed. It says that Plutarch is an outright Platonist in his attitude towards Epicurus, and his writings should remind us that the original quarrel was between the Academy and the Garden. Recognition of this fact is essential to a correct appraisal of the long contention. The distortions of modern viewpoints must be ascribed chiefly to Cicero. In spite of the fact that like Plutarch he was drawing upon the archives of the Academy, he was living in the closing years of the fight between the Stoics and the Epicureans, and he put the Stoic and Epicurean contest in the forefront. After Cicero’s time, these contentions died down, and then Christianity emerged as an antagonist to both of them in the second century AD.
Joshua: Right. Now part of our project, Cassius, after we finish this book, is to go through some of the material in Cicero. So that’s something we’ll have to keep in mind — that he’s presenting a sort of conflict between Epicureanism and Stoicism. But the real conflict is and always has been between Epicureanism and this sort of Platonist idealism, in contrast to an Epicurean materialism. We’ll try to keep track of the forest while we’re examining the trees in Cicero.
Cassius: Yes. When we move to On Ends, we probably will stick mostly with Books One and Two. But anyone who reads all the way through all five will see that Cicero is not taking the Stoic position. He would prefer the Stoic position to the Epicurean position, but at the end of On Ends, you come to the realization that Cicero perceives himself as a descendant of Plato and the Academy and not of Stoicism itself. He has biting critiques against Stoicism in On Ends.
So the next section is Epicureanism in the Greco-Roman world, and it says: the evidences from the second century are remarkable. Parallel to the previous refutation of the Epicurean Diocles by the Peripatetic Socion, one can find Origen of Caesarea refuting the Roman Epicurean Celsus in eight books which survive. Celsus was the attacker — a man of varied scholarship. He composed the most devastating assault upon Christianity ever made in ancient times. Now, there’s a lot surviving from that controversy between Celsus and Origen. Joshua, how much about that do you know?
Joshua: Well, what I mostly know is what DeWitt says in that sentence here. And I did not know, by the way — DeWitt actually addresses the question — but modern scholars actually think that this Celsus who wrote the book against Christianity and the friend of Lucian of the same name: modern scholars think those were two different people. DeWitt, of course, is writing here in like 1954. He thinks that they’re the same person. What he says here is modern scholars have doubted whether a mere Epicurean would have been capable of such a feat — writing this sort of long, erudite, important work against Christianity. DeWitt says: “But this judgment is based upon the false assumption of hostility to learning in the sect. Origen himself classified his opponent” — this is Celsus again — “as Epicurean, and the satirist Lucian of the same age mentions an Epicurean friend of this name.” So DeWitt is aware of the controversy and is coming down hard on the opinion that this is Lucian’s friend who is writing this book.
Cassius: Yeah, so I know that there’s a lot of material out there in that controversy that can be mined for data about Epicurean philosophy by those who have the time to do it.
Joshua: Yep. Now it’s interesting that he mentions Lucian here, because Lucian wrote this essay — or article, actually it was a letter, I should say — called “Alexander the Oracle Monger,” or “Alexander the False Prophet,” and that letter was addressed to this Celsus who wrote this anti-Christian polemic, according to DeWitt, if they’re the same person. And of course that launches us into a discussion of Lucian, and there’s just a tremendous amount of good material about Epicurus in Lucian. There’s always a similar debate about whether Lucian was himself an Epicurean, but clearly Epicurus figures sympathetically in many of Lucian’s dialogues and his writings. We constantly quote “Alexander the Oracle Monger” for the good things that Lucian has to say about Epicurus there, and there’s probably seven or eight other dialogues in which Epicurus is mentioned favorably. And then other dialogues where he’s not even mentioned — for example, in Hermotimus, Epicurus is mentioned tangentially, but the arguments that Lucian is making have a very Epicurean ring to them.
Cassius: I should just note in passing that that paragraph where he’s talking about Lucian also talks about satire and ridicule as Epicurean literary forms when confronting absurd positions. Satire as a literary form associated with Epicureanism — because, as Thomas Jefferson said — and I’ll quote from his letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp — he says: “Although I rarely waste time in reading on theological subjects, as mangled by our pseudo-Christians, yet I can readily suppose it may be amusing, because ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Doctors must be distinct before reason can act upon them, and no man ever had a distinct idea of the Trinity.” So this is representative of the Epicurean attitude toward satire, which is: it’s useful because you’re living in a world where people are just making nonsense claims — claims that cannot be appraised based on the evidence because there’s no evidence for them. So you fall back on the old standby, which in this case is ridicule.
I think there are a number of clichés that go in the same direction, Joshua. One of them that comes to mind is calling something “not even wrong” — to indicate that what is being said on the other side is so vacuous and so empty of meaning that you can’t even classify it as right or wrong. It’s just unintelligible.
Joshua: Yep. I’ve heard that one.
Cassius: And after that, we move on to Diogenes of Oenoanda. He says here: “In the same second century of the Empire when Lucian was extolling the wisdom of Epicurus, a unique monument of his philosophy was being erected by an obscure old man in an obscure old town in Lycia in Asia Minor. The place was Oenoanda and the man bore the name of Diogenes” — which, he notes, so often recurs. In other words, there are a lot of Diogeneses in the ancient world. He quotes Diogenes here: “Having arrived at the sunset of life, not far from the hour when he should take his leave with a paean of victory upon his lips, having experienced the fullness of happiness, he wished to do something for the happiness of his own townsmen, for visitors, and even for those who were not yet born — because the whole universe is just one country and the whole earth a single household.” DeWitt says: “To this end it was his choice to have carved on the wall of a portico in the marketplace his own version of the teachings of Epicurus, along with certain doctrines of the master verbatim. After the lapse of seventeen centuries, this extraordinary inscription was discovered in 1884 by a pair of French archaeologists, Halévy and Paris. The stones, even in their battered condition, have yielded sufficient text to make a small volume, and their original extension in the portico may have measured as much as 300 feet. No more eloquent testimony to the popularity of Epicureanism in this age has yet come to light.”
So this is actually, interestingly enough, the longest inscription of any kind on any subject to survive from the ancient world. And it happens to be this very extraordinary Epicurean inscription.
You know, Joshua, I’d like to relate something you said a few minutes ago to what you’ve just said about Diogenes of Oenoanda — the issue being the employment of satire. The part you quoted from Diogenes of Oenoanda a moment ago is very sincere and very straightforward and very direct about what he’s wanting to do, his concern about his fellow men who are going to come after him and who might even be strangers at that time. It’s a very direct and sincere approach. But there are sections that are very biting and satirical. So it’s an interesting point on its own to think about people like Lucian. And of course you can go back even as far as Epicurus himself, with what is recorded in Diogenes Laertius, and Epicurus’s characterizations of other philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and the biting characterizations he used against them. So it’s kind of an interesting observation to realize that even though we’re being direct and positive and upbeat in our ultimate expression of what Epicurean philosophy is all about, there’s a time and a place to go on the attack. As Thomas Jefferson was saying, when you’re dealing with nonsense, there’s not a way to rationally unwind nonsense. At some point you must take a confident position that nonsense is nonsense, and the best way to attack nonsense is frequently through the use of humor, ridicule, sarcasm. And you find that throughout the writings of all the Epicurean authors.
Joshua: Right. And you know what, it almost makes sense to skip down here to just above the next section — third and fourth centuries — where he’s talking about Tertullian. Because it was Tertullian who wrote that one of the keenest pleasures of Judgment Day would be watching the people who had mocked him and his fellow Christians so ruthlessly — that the keenest pleasure would be watching them as they were sent to burn in hell for all eternity. Satire of a different kind, perhaps. So this is what’s coming for Epicureanism and for the Roman Empire here: a world in which Christianity is really ascendant and making quite large claims for itself, among those being that the pagan philosophers who mocked Christianity will themselves be mocked on the day of their judgment when they are sent to their final punishment.
Cassius: Yes, DeWitt says that Tertullian, whose life overlapped the turn of the second and third centuries, seemed to think it worthwhile to accord to Epicurus a dozen unfriendly references in his works.
DeWitt then continues on into the third and fourth centuries and discusses Tertullian briefly, talking about how they were writing in Latin primarily. Then he talks about Arnobius and Lactantius, associated as master and pupil, who resembled each other in displaying a very deficient knowledge of Holy Scripture combined with a rather abundant knowledge of Epicureanism. And the former, Arnobius, seems to have known his Lucretius by heart, and it’s suggested that he was an Epicurean before his conversion. The same may be suspected of his pupil Lactantius, who not only shows himself at home in handling the repudiated doctrines of Epicurus but also exhibits the sort of zeal that is proper to a deserter. In AD 310, he thought it worthwhile to assemble a long list of invidious reasons for the wide appeal of Epicureanism. I think we can find that and put a link to that in the show notes for today.
Well, no one will be surprised by Lactantius and his desire to assemble a list of all of the horrible reasons why people would choose to be Epicurean, because we still hear this argument today, don’t we? “The only reason that you left Christianity is because you wanted to sin” is one that you will hear constantly. And so the same essential argument is still employed. So it is actually, to my view, somewhat cheering to know that it was employed against the Epicureans as well. That might be an interesting list to go through. So hopefully we can pull that out and maybe have some comments about that on the forum.
Joshua: Right. Christopher Hitchens starts his book God Is Not Great with a sort of satirical reference to the people who will read the book with a view to discovering the moral horrors of its author — as a way of refuting it. So this is still in vogue: this view of looking to moral deficiency to explain a disagreement over doctrine or dogma. That you couldn’t possibly reject the claim that I’m making about the divinity of God if you were not in the clutches of Satan and a moral monster — because it’s so overwhelmingly obvious that Christianity is true that any possible disagreement has to be due to some monstrosity in the soul.
Cassius: You know, one thing I could say in response to that: DeWitt mentions next Julian the Apostate, who was just a fascinating figure, and who — despite the fact that he died in 363 AD and who had all the evidences of Christianity in front of him, all the different martyrs and the saints and so forth who at that period of time were attesting to the genuineness of Christianity — for some reason Julian the Apostate did not agree that Christianity was the right way forward for the Roman Empire, and he attempted to roll back Christianity even at that late date. A fascinating story if people are not familiar with him — well worth researching his background and his viewpoint.
The one discordant note about Julian the Apostate, however, is that he apparently did not like Epicurus very much. He seems to have taken the position that Cicero was taking — that in order to restore his empire to the traditional Roman viewpoints and worship of the gods, he couldn’t go along with Epicurus’s view of the gods to do that. He needed to go back and re-establish a more primitive paganism that Epicurus had fought against. And so, as DeWitt records here, one of the comments that Julian makes about Epicurus is that he was happy when he was looking for some of Epicurus’s books to find that they were so very difficult to locate at that point in time.
But yes, the argument that you can’t be moral unless you’re Christian — and that it is so obvious that to be an Epicurean is to make you a monster — is infuriating. But Julian was someone who lived a whole lot closer in time to the events described in the New Testament than we do today, had a lot more access to the original writings, the original teachers, the original traditions of Christianity. And had every reason in the world to want to continue the theological, top-down centralization that Christianity offered to him. But he didn’t buy it and went off in another direction, attempting to roll the whole thing back. And he would have had a much better chance of succeeding had not — as the story goes — he been assassinated by one of his own troops who was suspected of being Christian, in the middle of a battle.
I do know that there is correspondence between him and one of his chief ministers regarding his project of restoring classical paganism. If we can find that stuff, it would be good to link to it.
So in the next paragraph, DeWitt has this to say. He says: “If in retrospect the question be raised by what particular superiority Christianity triumphed over Epicureanism and all other rivals, one answer is easy to find. It was organization.” He continues at the bottom of the paragraph: “The really effective device was organization. Deacons, elders, bishops, archbishops, and popes.” So you have this clear, almost military hierarchy in the Church, and that is what allows it to prevail in the ancient world over every other alternative. He says: “Epicureanism likewise had a ladder of titles, but these were based upon reverence, and this was feeble in comparison with a ladder of titles based upon authority. The Church had available a model of organization which Epicurus never knew, the Roman Empire, and the imitation of this was a main reason for its survival.”
Now DeWitt is not inclined to pursue this line of argument very far, and he goes on to the Middle Ages after that statement. But I think this is a fascinating point that we really should attempt to think about and expand — not only here but also on the forum — because the question is an obvious one: why did Christianity prevail? Many of us do not think Christianity prevailed because it was true and therefore had to prevail; it therefore had to prevail for some other reason. And DeWitt, being friendly to Christianity, is still willing to observe that what might explain the triumph of Christianity and the decline of Epicureanism — or even Stoicism — was not the truth of the doctrine but the method of organization. And in fact, as time goes by, even the force that’s employed to expand the viewpoints of Christianity — again following the example of the Roman form of organization — DeWitt is saying that Epicurus did not have that example to go by. I doubt that Epicurus would have chosen force as a method of spreading Epicurean philosophy. But the Church and the Christians did not have any problem doing that, and they proceeded to do so, and they used the organization of the Roman Empire to spread Christianity and to suppress other religions throughout the rest of the world for centuries to come.
In the case of the Roman Empire, it’s following upon the heels of course of the Roman Republic. And even during the time of the Republic, the ladder of office that ultimately ended with the Consul — of which there were two at the top — was called the cursus honorum, or the course of honor. So as a formalized idea, it already existed in the Republic period and was totally formalized and solidified under the Empire. But of course we’re coming to the period now where all of that is falling away.
DeWitt’s next section is called “Epicureanism in the Middle Ages,” and he says it was impossible for a name so long notorious as that of Epicurus to drop from memory in the Middle Ages, because in part the writings of Cicero — who is the chief source of information about Epicureanism in Latin — never really passed out of knowledge. We have this idea that there was a great rediscovery of books, and there was — but some books remained in circulation even through the Middle Ages. DeWitt goes on to say: “In the course of time, as Latin became the sole language of learning, Christian writings in Greek were either lost or confined in their circulation to the east. Yet in the west, there were still to be had — beside Cicero — the numerous Latin works of Tertullian, Arnobius, Lactantius, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine, all of whom preserved the memory at least of Epicurus.”
Joshua: Yes, we discussed a lot how the rediscovery of the full manuscript of Lucretius was a major influence on the times after it was rediscovered. But there’s a tremendous amount of information about Epicurus in Cicero and these other Latin writers that never would have passed out of existence and availability to the learned people for those many centuries up until Lucretius was rediscovered.
Cassius: Right, and what’s interesting is that it’s partly because of these surviving Latin books that Poggio and the other book hunters even knew the names of, for example, Lucretius. Lucretius’s book was mentioned by Cicero, which is probably how Poggio knew it even had existed — and so when he laid his hands on it, knew that he had found something worth finding, as opposed to what they were usually finding, which is mostly copies of stuff they already had in Florence.
But of course in the Middle Ages what you don’t have is a surviving Epicurean school. And St. Augustine, when he was alive, gave us the famous quote where he says the ashes of Epicureanism are so cold that not a single spark can be struck from them.
Joshua: Yes, you don’t have any organizational framework. You didn’t have the internet, obviously — you didn’t have newspapers, you didn’t have all the different technologies that developed in later years for the communication of one group of people with another to allow them to share ideas and collaborate. You basically had the Church and whatever civil structure there was.
Cassius: There’s a strange passage here in DeWitt: “Such writings are symptomatic of the senility of learning.” What should “senility of learning” mean? Senility refers to the word “senile,” which means old and losing one’s mind — so that learning at this point, according to DeWitt, is well past its prime. It’s well past its period of vigor and it is entering its old age. That’s the metaphor there.
And you know what I’m seeing him say there, Joshua: what he’s criticizing is “the custom of tabulating the opinions of philosophers in the form of succinct statements.” To me he’s really kind of saying that all these people could do at this point was just copy down a couple of lines from Epicurus and combine them into the Vatican Sayings or whatever. And that just copying these sayings is not an advanced form of philosophy. It’s just the last thing you can do when you’re turning senile — is just rotely copy things over and over again.
Joshua: Right. You know, Steven Greenblatt wrote his book The Swerve sometime around 2010, and there has been a lot of pushback from medievalists who think that their period of time is one of the most interesting in human history. But some of the arguments they make even sort of give the lie to their own position. I read in one article the author said that the medieval period was the most bookish period because people believed anything they read in an old book. Well, that’s not evidence of widespread literacy — that is evidence of widespread illiteracy. That is evidence of the death of philosophy as the Greeks would have known it, as an ongoing argument in conversation. When you get to the point where you just have this leather-bound, jewel-encrusted book that sits on a shelf and no one reads it, that is not evidence of a well-read society.
Cassius: Yeah, you could take DeWitt’s point here and aim it close to home, and observe that for those of us who are interested in Epicurus, just simply coming up with new lists of Epicurean sayings over and over arranged in different ways is not exactly a sterling example of how to apply Epicurean philosophy. It’s got to be acted on, discussed, worked with, and not just transcribed over and over again in the same format. Not that the ideas are necessarily going to change, but unless you work with them and talk about them and teach them and then work on applying them, you don’t appreciate the depth of the philosophy. You’re just basically a copyist if all you’re doing is handing down a copy from person to person and from year to year.
Joshua: Right, and the whole project of philosophy in that case becomes ossified. It’s no longer a living, breathing practice — it’s something dead at this point.
Cassius: So what we’ve just been discussing is that at this point during the Middle Ages, there was no extension of Epicurean literature. There were collections that were available, there was information available through Cicero, but as far as we know there was no additional philosophical advocacy for the Epicurean position. And so Christianity’s triumph was complete, Epicurean philosophy is relegated to the shadows — the sixth circle of hell in Dante.
And as a result of this ossification or decline of Epicurean scholarship, you basically have a total triumph of the position that Epicurus was a sensualist. And when he’s discussed, he’s discussed as a sensualist and nothing else. DeWitt says: “On the other hand, the repudiation of Epicurus as being a sensualist did not depend upon knowledge of Greek. It had been taken over by art. On one piece of the Boscoreale silver treasure rescued from a villa overwhelmed at the same time as Pompeii, Epicurus is represented as reaching out his hands for food while Zeno the Stoic rejects it.” And then there’s a similar motive in a painting now in the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, Italy, which is known as the Triumph of Saint Augustine. We’ve been talking about that on the forum the last day or so — we’ll have some links to that picture. It says: “To the right of the saint in the upper register appears Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and Seneca. In the middle register, the virtues are represented as punishing the sinners, among whom appears Epicurus.”
Joshua: Right. So basically what this painting or fresco is, is an allegory — one of the more dreary forms of art in my own opinion. But at the top you have Saint Augustine. At his right hand you have some notable Christian and even earlier Hebrew figures that are difficult to identify at this distance. On his left hand you have a representation of the ten celestial spheres of the Platonist philosophers. Below that you have, in a neat little row, the seven personifications of the virtues. And then below that you have the personifications of seven vices — people who had fallen afoul of each of those virtues. So what they did in this allegory — the painter — is they took notable figures from classical antiquity as sort of emblematic of a given vice. And for Epicurus, the vice that he is emblematic of in that case is gluttony. I guess anyone who’s followed us this long should know that that is not a good portrayal of Epicurus, but this is what he becomes — a byword for sensuality or gluttony. A cautionary tale more than anything, and completely useless for anything else at this point in time.
So like I said, I really dislike Christian allegory, even. J.R.R. Tolkien has this famous quote — he says “I cordially dislike allegory.” It’s a really kind of dreadful form of art, but this is the position that the name of Epicurus has been reduced to at this period in time.
Cassius: And then sort of in the same vein, the rabbis of Judaism refer to unbelievers and heretics and sinners as Apikoros — Epicureans. So it’s the same problem. And DeWitt mentions the literature you’ve mentioned many times, Joshua, about Dante putting the Epicureans in a particularly revolting situation in his Inferno. It says: “Dante paid to the Epicureans in general the high honor of devising for them a punishment ingeniously unique. On the day of the resurrection, because they had denied the survival of the soul apart from the body, their souls were to be imprisoned in sealed coffins along with their bodies. In anticipation of the execution of this ironic judgment, a cemetery of lidless coffins was exhibited in the sixth circle of the Inferno.”
Joshua: Right. So we talk about Epicureanism becoming this ossified collection of lists basically — but that’s true for everything from the ancient world. It’s all essentially dead at this point, to the point where Virgil can become a tour guide of a Christian hell that he didn’t even have anything to do with in his lifetime. It is ridiculous. It’s absurd. And, thank goodness, we’ve managed to find our way out of it to the extent that we have.
Cassius: Okay, we’re beginning to close in on the very end of the book, but we’re not going to leave our podcast series at a negative position here. We’ll come back next week and go into the section entitled “The Epicurean Revival” — talk about what DeWitt has to say about the stirrings of new interest in Epicurus through the period from Gassendi to John Locke and so forth — and then we’ll finally come to the end of the book and put together some closing thoughts for this part of our podcast series. So let’s begin to close for today. Joshua?
Joshua: Nothing for me, though I will say that painting is something that people are going to want to at least glance at to get a sense of what we’re talking about. But anyone well acquainted with Christian iconography will probably already have an image in their mind. So I recommend that people go look at this painting. It is by Serafino di Serafini, and the title is “Allegory of St. Augustine as Master of the Order.” Don has a link to a website called Christian Iconography — go look at it there, or you can just look at the thread on the forum. It gives an idea of what has become of classical culture: to be subjected in this way to allegorical treatment as typifying Christian sins and vices is where we are now as we end the episode.
Cassius: Right. We have a lot more to come next week. One of the doctrines of Epicurus is there’s no fate — nothing necessary about what happened during those centuries and where we are today. And the fresco you’ve mentioned there is a fitting way for us to end this episode. We’re basically at the bottom. Next week we’re going to come back and bring you the details of the resurgence of interest in Epicurus. We’ll do that next week. Thanks for your time today. Come by the forum and let us know any thoughts or questions that you have. We’ll see you next week.