Epicurean Mockery of Opposing Philosophers And Schools
| Target | Mockery | Source | Likely Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nausiphanes (Atomist / proto-skeptic; claimed Pyrrhonist sympathies; Epicurus’s former teacher) | “The Mollusk / Jellyfish” (πλεύμων, pleumon); also “The Illiterate,” “The Cheat,” “The Harlot” | Epicurus; Diogenes Laertius X.8; confirmed by Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians I.3 (calling Nausiphanes pleumon “as one without sensation”) | The jellyfish suggests spinelessness and lack of genuine sensation — a double-edged attack on Nausiphanes’s Pyrrhonist-tinged epistemology (suspend all judgment, therefore have no perceptive grip on reality) and his emphasis on hollow oratory over natural philosophy. The additional moral labels (cheat, harlot) reflect deep personal animosity: Epicurus briefly studied under Nausiphanes and emphatically repudiated him. |
| Plato’s followers (Platonists / Academics) | “Flatterers of Dionysus” (Διονυσοκόλακες, Dionusokolakes) | Epicurus; Diogenes Laertius X.8 | Plato made multiple trips to Syracuse to court the tyrant Dionysius I and Dionysius II, seeking to install a philosopher-king. Epicurus mocked Plato’s followers as court sycophants who subordinated philosophy to power and flattery — the very antithesis of the Garden’s principled withdrawal from political life. |
| Plato (Platonist / Academic) | “The Golden” / “Gilded” (χρυσοῦς, chrysous) | Epicurus; Diogenes Laertius X.8 | ”Gilded” implies cheap metal coated to look precious — Plato’s philosophy appears impressive but is superficial decoration over unsound foundations. Plato’s identification of the highest good with pure intellect and virtue, his rejection of pleasure, and his transcendent metaphysics were opposed at every point by Epicurus. |
| Aristotle (Peripatetic) | “The Debauchee / Profligate” (ἄσωτος, asotos) | Epicurus; Diogenes Laertius X.8 | Epicurus claimed Aristotle squandered his inheritance, served as a mercenary soldier, and sold medicines — all unbecoming a philosopher. Beyond biography, Aristotle’s teleology, his identification of the highest good with virtuous activity (energeia), and his treatment of pleasure as merely secondary were antithetical to Epicurean hedonism. |
| Protagoras (Sophist) | “Porter” / “Pack-carrier” (σακκοφόρος?); “Copier of Democritus”; “Village Schoolmaster” | Epicurus; Diogenes Laertius X.8 | Protagoras reportedly worked as a wood-carrier before becoming a philosopher, and Epicurus used this humble origin to demean him. Calling him a “copier of Democritus” impugns his originality. His signature doctrine — “man is the measure of all things” — yielded relativism in which all perceptions are equally true for each perceiver, which was incompatible with Epicurus’s confidence in sensation as providing reliable, objective knowledge. |
| Heraclitus (Pre-Socratic / Obscurantist) | “The Muddler” / “Mudman” (Greek epithet likely a wordplay on his name; Herakleitizein = to speak in riddles) | Epicurus; Diogenes Laertius X.8 | Heraclitus was already nicknamed “the Obscure” (Skoteinos) in antiquity for his riddling, paradoxical style. His philosophy of flux and the unity of opposites was mystifying, practically useless, and in Epicurean eyes, deliberately obfuscatory. Epicurus insisted on plain language aimed at practical human liberation; Heraclitean paradoxes served only to confuse and impress, not to remove fear. See also extensive criticism of Heraclitus in Lucretius. |
| Democritus (Atomist, materialist) | “Lerocritus” (Ληρόκριτος, Lerokritos = “judge of nonsense” / “nonsense-monger”) | Epicurus; Diogenes Laertius X.8 | Despite building his atomic physics on Democritean foundations, Epicurus distanced himself sharply. Democritus’s strict determinism eliminated free will; his epistemology treated sensory qualities as conventional rather than real; his ethics did not identify pleasure as the supreme good. The nickname “nonsense-monger” — a pun replacing Demo- with Lero- (“nonsense”) — captures Epicurus’s verdict: even the founder of atomism reached wrong conclusions from a promising start. |
| Antidorus (philosopher, probable connection to Megarian / Stilponic circle) | “Sannidorus” (σαννιδωρός, Sannidoros = “fawning gift-giver”; Eikadistes at EpicureanFriends proposes the epithet may carry an obscene pun: sannos can denote a phallus, yielding something like “Phallodorus”) | Epicurus; Diogenes Laertius X.8 | The name is a pun on “Antidorus” (“counter-gift”), replacing the prefix anti- with sannos, suggesting either servile flattery toward more powerful figures or crude obscenity. Antidorus’s precise philosophical affiliation and the specific provocation for this attack are unclear. |
| The Cynics (Cynic school) | “Enemies of Hellas / Greece” (Ἑλληνοκάκοι, Hellenokakoi) | Epicurus; Diogenes Laertius X.8 | The Cynics rejected conventional society, education, culture, and social bonds, living like animals (kynos = dog) to demonstrate radical self-sufficiency. Epicurus, who valued community, civilization, refined friendship, and the pleasures of culture, saw this systematic rejection of Greek civilization not as liberating asceticism but as genuine cultural sabotage — an attack on the very conditions that make a pleasant life possible. |
| The Dialecticians / Logicians (Megarian school and related logicians) | “The Destroyers” (φθορεῖς, phthoreis) | Epicurus; Diogenes Laertius X.8 | The Megarian dialecticians were celebrated for logical paradoxes (the Liar’s Paradox, the Sorites, the Veiled Man) that appeared to dissolve ordinary reasoning. Epicurus regarded their elaborate verbal puzzles as purely destructive — corrosive of the sensations and common-sense inferences that are the real foundation of knowledge, and productive of nothing useful for living a pleasant life. Philosophy’s purpose is living happily and liberation from fear, not endless logical gymnastics. |
| Pyrrho (Pyrrhonist / Radical Skeptic) | “The Uneducated Fool” / “Ignorant and Unlearned” (ἀγράμματος, agrammatos) | Epicurus; Diogenes Laertius X.8 | Pyrrho’s radical suspension of judgment (epochē) — claiming that nothing can be affirmed and that we must withhold assent on all matters — was the polar opposite of Epicurus’s epistemology, which affirmed sensation as the bedrock of certain knowledge. Calling Pyrrho “unlearned” expresses contempt for a position Epicurus found not merely wrong but philosophically primitive: a man who denies the reliability of sensation understands nothing about the foundations of knowledge. |
| Socrates (Socratic school; founder of the tradition of moral philosophy through ironic questioning) | “Attic Buffoon” (Latin: scurra Atticus; Greek equivalent likely βωμολόχος Ἀττικός or similar) | Epicurean tradition; attributed to Epicurus and his immediate circle, especially Colotes; attested via Plutarch, Adversus Colotem; see Kleve, “Scurra Atticus: The Epicurean View of Socrates” (1983) | Socrates’ profession of ignorance (“I know only that I know nothing”), his method of ironic questioning that reached no positive conclusions, and his theatrical feigned naivety appeared to Epicureans as philosophical clowning masquerading as wisdom. A man who denies all knowledge while making himself the center of Athenian intellectual life is not a sage but a performer. The epithet captures Epicurean contempt for Socratic irony as the jester of philosophy: intellectually irresponsible and practically useless. |
Notes on Sources
Section titled “Notes on Sources”This Table Is Currently Under Revision. Entries Are Believed To Be Correct But Should Be Verified. Submt Suggested Corrections Here.
Primary source for most entries: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book X, section 8 — preserving a list drawn from (hostile) reports by Timocrates and from Epicurus’s own letters and writings.
Plutarch, Non Posse 1086D — identifies categories of insults (“buffooneries, trollings, arrogancies, whorings, assassinations, whining counterfeits, black-guards, and blockheads”) deployed against Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras, Protagoras, Theophrastus, Heraclides of Pontus, Hipparchus, and others. The pairing of specific epithets to individual targets from this passage is, as Bryan Harris notes in the EpicureanFriends forum thread on this topic, “higgledy-piggledy.”
Additional targets named by Plutarch (Pythagoras, Theophrastus, Heraclides of Pontus, Hipparchus) as receiving abuse from Epicurus and Metrodorus are not clearly paired with specific surviving epithets in the record that survives, and are therefore omitted from the table pending further research.
The Epicurea 2026 document (Usener’s collection with annotations by Bryan Harris, available at Internet Archive) contains the most complete modern scholarly treatment of these epithets and should be consulted for the full picture.