B 171 ,M83 More, Paul Elmer Hellenistic philosophies \ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/hellenisticphiloOOmore HELENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES / THE GREEK TRADITION From the death oj Socrates to the Council oj Chalcedon 399B.C. TO A.D.451 too introduction: platonism VOLUME I. THE RELIGION OF PLATO VOLUME II. HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES BY PAUL ELMER MORE Author of “Shelburne Essays” JAN 28 1924 &J6 !CAL PRINCETON PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS London: Humphrey Milford. Oxford University Press 1923 Copyrighted 1923 By The University Press PRINTED AT THE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS CONTENTS Aristippus 1 Epicurus 18 Cynics and Stotcs 65 Epictetus 94 Plotinus 172 Diogenes 260 Scepticism 304 Appendix A 371 Appendix B 374 Appendix C 376 Appendix D 378 Appendix E 384 CHAPTER I ARISTIPPUS Or the life of Aristippus, who founded the phi¬ losophy of pleasure which was to be developed and altered by Epicurus, not much is known. He was born in Cyrene, whence the name of his sect, but apparently abandoned his home at an early age. For a while, at least, he belonged to the cir¬ cle that gathered about Socrates in Athens. In these year s he seems to have been both learner and teacher, for, according to a story derived from Phanius, the Peripatetic, he was not only the first of Socrates’ pupils who exacted money for his lessons, but on one occasion aroused the in¬ dignation of the master by sending him twenty drachmas from his earnings. For some time he was in Syracuse at the court of the younger, perhaps also of the elder, Diony¬ sius, where he exercised his wit at the expense of Plato. Once at a banquet, as the gossip runs, the i 2 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES tyrant bade his guests dance in purple robes; whereupon Plato refused, declaring, “I could not well a woman’s garment wear.” But Aristippus complied, excusing himself with the apt quotation, “Even in Bacchus’ wild alarm The modest woman suffers still no harm.” On another occasion, when Dionysius presented Plato with a book and Aristippus with gold, the wily Cyrenaic defended himself against the jeers of a friend with the observation: “I want money, Plato books.” These anecdotes are from the in¬ exhaustible storehouse of Diogenes Laertius; but Plutarch also tells us that the tyrant offered Plato money often and in large sums, and that Aris¬ tippus commented on Plato’s refusal of the gifts was canny in his munificence, since he proffered little to those who needed much, and much to Plato who would take nothing . 1 with the remark that Dionysi 1 Dion 19.—A good jest never dies. Dr. Johnson once undertook to browbeat a Cantabrigian by repeating the famous epigram: “Our royal master saw, with heedful eyes, The wants of his two universities: Troops he to Oxford sent, as knowing why That learned body wanted loyalty: But books to Cambridge gave, as well discerning That that right loyal body wanted learning.” To which the Cantabrigian made retort: “The king to Oxford sent his troop of horse, For Tories own no argument but force; With equal care to Cambridge books he sent, For Whigs allow no force but argument.” ARISTIPPUS 3 If the life of Aristippus is summed up in a few anecdotes, it is not much better with his philos¬ ophy. The books he wrote have been lost, and for the knowledge of his principles we have lit¬ tle more than a few sentences of Diogenes Laer¬ tius and of Sextus Empiricus, and even so it is impossible to distinguish clearly between what was taught by Aristippus himself and what was added by his successors. In general, the princi¬ ples of the sect are thus summarized by Diog¬ enes: “Those who abode by the Aristippean rule of life and were called Cyrenaics held the follow¬ ing opinions: There are two affections which we feel ( pathe ), pain and pleasure, the former be¬ ing a rough state of motion, the latter a smooth state of motion. Pleasure does not differ from pleasure [in quality, they mean], nor is one more a pleasure than another. Pleasure is approved by all living creatures, whereas pain is avoided. And the pleasure of the body, which they make their chief good, or end, is not that continuous and unperturbed state of repose arising from cessation of pain which Epicurus accepted as the end. They believe that the end is a different thing from happiness ( eudaimonia ) ; for the good we aim at is pleasure ( hedone) in particu¬ lar, but happiness is the sum of particular pleas¬ ures, in which are included those of the past and those of the future. The particular pleasure is 4 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES desirable for itself, whereas happiness is not de¬ sirable for itself but for the particular pleasures that compose it. As a proof that pleasure is the end, we have the fact that from childhood we are attracted to it involuntarily, and that obtaining it we seek nothing further, whereas there is noth¬ ing we so avoid as its opposite, pain. And pleas¬ ure, they assert, is a good even when it arises from most unseemly causes; for even if the act is disreputable, still the pleasure in itself is desir¬ able and good. The removal of pain they do not account pleasure, as does Epicurus; neither is the absence of pleasure pain. For both pleasure and pain consist in motion, or sensation, and neither the absence of pain nor the absence of pleasure is a motion, or sensation; in fact the absence of pain is a state like that of one asleep. . . . The absence of pleasure and the absence of pain they called middle states. Moreover they held pleasures of the body to be better than those of the mind or soul, and distresses of the body to be worse. . . . But however pleasure in itself may be desirable, the causes of some pleasures often result in the contrary state of distress, so that the assemblage of pleasures which produces happiness seems to them a matter of extreme difficulty. The life of the wise man, they admit, is not one of continuous pleasure, nor the life of the fool one of continuous pain; it is a question of predominance. . . . Nothing, they say, is just or beautiful or ugly intrinsically and by na¬ ture, but by law and convention. Nevertheless a ARISTIPPUS 5 sensible man will not do anything shocking, by reason of the penalties imposed and for the sake of popular opinion.” Sextus in his treatment of the school dwells naturally more on the rational basis of their the¬ ory. The only criterion of knowledge we have is in the sensations, or immediate affections ( pa- the) ; these alone are comprehensible and intrin¬ sically true, whereas of the causes of these sen¬ sations we have no sure knowledge. We know when we have the sensation of white or sweet, and can affirm that we have at this moment such or such a sensation, veraciously and with no fear of contradiction; but of what lies behind or be¬ yond this sensation we can say nothing certain. We cannot even say that a particular object is white or sweet, for in another person, or in our¬ selves at another moment, this same object may produce quite a different sensation. Nor have we any right to suppose that the particular sen¬ sation which we call white or sweet is the same as that which another person calls by the same name. We know only our own sensations, and all that is common in such abstractions as white¬ ness or sweetness is merely the word . 2 Fitted together the expositions of Diogenes and Sextus maybe summed up in the three max- 2 Adv. Math. VII, 191. 6 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES ims: Sensations alone are comprehensible, sen¬ sations and not their causes; The end of life is to live pleasurably; The particular pleasure is de¬ sirable for itself,whereas happiness is not desir¬ able for itself but for the particular pleasures which compose it. Of all philosophies this, I take it, is the easiest to understand; and, granted its hypothesis that the only certain facts in our experience are the immediate sensations of pleasure and pain as these come and go and come again, granted so much as that Plato’s Ideal world, or its equiva¬ lent, is a vapour raised by hope and nothing more, the “dream of a shadow,” it is of all dog¬ matic philosophies the most rigidly logical and the most thoroughly consistent and the most im¬ mediately persuasive. It is the wisdom of the world, preached in effect and practised long be¬ fore Aristippus reduced it to a formulary. You shall find it in the poets of the old times, Mi ni¬ ne rmiis and Theognis and their kind, who sang in various notes to the refrain of carpe diem. Whether Aristippus really quoted much from them, we do not know; but it can be asserted of his hedonism that it was rooted in their voluptu¬ ary principles, and his admonitions, as Sextus said of other philosophers, might have been ARISTIPPUS 7 sealed by the authority of many a gnomic verse and stanza . 3 And it was equally a possession of the future to be followed by innumerable Cy- renaics who had never heard the name. As a man¬ ner of life it is of all time; as a reasoned theory it is affiliated manifestly with the principles of the more sceptical Sophists, particularly with the famous doctrine of Protagoras that man is the measure of all things, as this was taken in conjunction with the widely accepted aphorism of Heraclitus: All things pass and nothing abides . 4 How these two principles flowed to¬ gether in a purely sensational and atomistic the¬ ory of knowledge, Plato has shown at length in the Theaetetus. The puzzling question is rather to understand how two such divergent schools as the Academic and the Cyrenaic could have been created by men who professed allegiance to one and the same person. Plato’s relation to his master is clear enough; but what business had this denier of the gods, this repudiator of the living reality of jus¬ tice and all moral law, this hardened materialist, with the honest disciples of Socrates? Yet it is a 3 Adv. Math. 1,071. 4The historical affiliation cannot be doubted. The logical relation of the various schools of sensationalism and scepticism to Hera¬ clitus, Democritus, and Protagoras will be discussed in our last chapter. 8 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES fact, as we learn from the Plfiaedo, that he was close to the master, so close that his absence was noted from the little band who stayed with Soc¬ rates through the last day in gaol. The explanation, one may say, is that in Soc¬ rates’ mind the various elements of the Platonic philosophy lay side by side without having been merged together into a homogeneous system; hence it was possible for men of such utterly divergent tempers as Aristippus and Euclides and, as we shall see, Antisthenes to find in his words substance for their reflexion and confir¬ mation of their aims. For his part, Aristippus simply laid hold of the hedonism which, if we ac¬ cept the Protagoras of Plato as historical in this respect, formed an integral part of the Socratic doctrine, and developed this independently in a manner which Socrates certainly would have re¬ pudiated. Socrates apparently took happiness as the criterion of right conduct, and understood happiness rather naively as a balance of pleas¬ ures, without attempting to reconcile such a cri¬ terion with his affirmation of the everlasting re¬ alities of good and evil. He left it to his great disciple to effect such a reconciliation, or per¬ haps we should say modification, by drawing a distinction between pleasure in the ordinary ARISTIPPUS 9 sense and another feeling, which he called hap¬ piness (eudaimonia ), akin to pleasure superfi¬ cially but associated with an essentially differ¬ ent sphere of the soul’s activity. Such was not the way of Aristippus. The apparent paradox of Socrates he escaped by accepting only the hedonism and rejecting everything that might conflict with it. And then, having attained this point of consistency, he further altered the So- cratic point of view by defining pleasure in terms of the Protagorean sensationalism and the Hera- clitean flux. So it was that the Socratic hedon¬ ism became the Cyrenaic pursuit of the passing pleasures of the body. It is true that Aristippus saw, as anyone must see who thinks at all, that some pleasures bring very disagreeable conse¬ quences, and must be forgone; yet it was still the momentary sensation he made his end, as the one thing sure and desirable. So far one can see how Aristippus may be called a perverted, or at least an imperfect, So¬ cratic, but on another side he was truer to the spirit, if not the spirituality, of the master. Prob¬ ably, after all, what drew and held the inquisitive young men who congregated about this strange teacher and preacher of the streets was not so much any particular doctrine as it was the power 10 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES of his life, his imperturbable courage and cheer in a world where these were terribly needed, a sense of mastery that emanated from his glance and his very gesture, the central calm in his heart beyond the reach and understanding of idle cu¬ riosity yet strangely visible and fascinating to those who approached him nearly,—the embodi¬ ment, as it were, of everything summed up in the Greek tradition by those hauntingly beauti¬ ful words eleutheria and asphaleia , liberty and security. Here was liberty, the free man, the man secure in himself against all the chances of life, the man sufficient unto himself, autarkes. Now it is evident that Aristippus was impressed by the need of attaining something like this same liberty and security of mind in his pursuit of what the fleeting moment might yield; other¬ wise, he saw, there could be no joy in the pursuit but only a tortured dependence on the fluctua¬ tions of success and failure. It is, indeed, this conception of liberty and security meeting to¬ gether in self-sufficiency as a necessary factor of the life of pleasure, that makes him a philoso¬ pher and something more, if not better, than the idle voluptuary. To this end he would be always master of himself, and, so far as possible, mas¬ ter of events by adapting himself voluntarily ARISTIPPUS 11 and adroitly to the changing conditions of for¬ tune and society—“every colour and condition became Aristippus.” And so it was that Horace could say: Nunc in Aristippi furtim praecepta relabor, Et mihi res non me rebus subiungere conor. The formal precepts by which Aristippus in¬ culcated this theory are gone with his books, but we have a sufficient number of anecdotes which indicate how he put his philosophy into practice. One day Diogenes the Cynic , 5 who was washing some potherbs, ridiculed him as he passed by, and said, “If you had learnt to satisfy yourself with these you would not have been serving in the courts of tyrants.” To which Aristippus replied, “And you, if you knew how to behave among men, would not be washing potherbs.” Being asked once what advantage he had derived from philosophy, he said, “That I am able to associate confidently with any man.” To the question of Dionysius why philosophers haunted the doors of the rich but the rich did not frequent those of philosophers, he retorted, “Because philosophers know what they need and the rich do not.” An¬ other time, at dinner, when the tyrant was try- slt is important to distinguish between this Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic, and Diogenes of Laerte, the historian of philosophy, who lived much later. 12 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES ing to drag him into philosophical talk against his will, he defended himself by saying, “It is absurd if you are learning from me to discourse, yet are teaching me when I ought to discourse.” Dionysius was vexed at this, and showed his dis¬ pleasure by sending the philosopher to the bot¬ tom of the table. Whereupon Aristippus: “You wished to make this place more respectable.” At another time, when Dionysius asked him why he had come to Sicily, his reply was: “When I wanted wisdom I went to Socrates, but now, wanting money, I have come to you”; or, as the story is otherwise related, “I went to Socrates for instruction (paideia ), to Dionysius for di¬ version ( paidia ).” Again, he was begging a favour for a friend, and, being refused, fell at the tyrant’s feet; and when someone reproached him for his conduct, his retort was: “I am not to blame, but Dionysius who has his ears in his feet.” Whether this biting retort was made in the presence of the tyrant himself, does not ap¬ pear from the record; but certainly in the ruler’s absence he could take down the arrogance of a misguided courtier in a manner worthy of the cynic Diogenes, whose savage disregard of the proprieties he seems indeed sometimes to have forestalled. And he was equally quick to defend ARISTIPPUS 13 his own indulgences. A certain sophist, visiting him and seeing the women he had about him and the lavishness of his table, was unwary enough to express censure. Aristippus waited a mo¬ ment, and invited the sophist to pass the day with him, and then, when the invitation was ac¬ cepted, observed: “You seem to have a quarrel with the expense and not the luxury of my din¬ ners.” Another time his servant murmured at the weight of a sack of money he was carrying for him on the road, and Aristippus merely said, “Pour out what is too much for you and carry what you can.” Perhaps some apology is needed for stringing together these tales out of the only history of Greek philosophy that has come down to us. But in fact they are not so irrelevant as they may seem; they show probably as well as any of the author’s works would have done the kind of ver¬ satility which the wily philosopher of Cyrene, like another Odysseus, acquired in his search for pleasure through many cities and many species of men. They might perhaps all be summed up in his one famous saying when reproached for living with Lais the courtesan: “I possess her, I am not possessed by her, since the best thing is not to forbear pleasures, but to grasp them with- HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES H out suffering their mastery.” Habeo, non habeor: that is the key by which the Cyrenaic would open the door to the liberty and security of philoso¬ phy, while acknowledging no good beyond the indulgence in whatever the swift-flowing cur¬ rent of time might lay at his feet. Hedonism was no new thing in Greece, or in the world; but the poets who were its professing votaries had been so weakly uncertain of their tenure, rather had been so positively certain that happiness was the flower of one brief moment of life, and, going, left behind only the winter of discontent. “Gather my youth, O heart, before it fly ! Soon other men shall be, no doubt; but I An earthen clod in the dark earth shall lie”— was the admonition of Theognis; and Mimner- mus had sung the same truth in more despondent language: “What then is life, what pleasure, when afar Sinks golden Aphrodite’s star ? Ah, death for me, when love in secret lifts No more the heart, and honeyed gifts Charm not, and slumber fails, and all the flowers That fill the garden of young hours. So as the leaves put forth upon the boughs, In springtide, when the sun allows, Like these a little time the bloom of youth Delights us, and we know no truth ARISTIPPUS 15 Of good and evil from the gods. Yet still The Fates are near to work their will,— One with the term of age and palsied breath, One with the blacker term of death.” Call no man happy until the end! Not only are such pleasures ephemeral at the best, but there is always the danger that they may escape us entirely. A little change, a grain of dust blow¬ ing into the eye, a slip of the foot, pestilence walk¬ ing in the street, the betrayal or the misfortune of friends, the tyranny of enemies,—and the power of enjoyment is gone, while the capacity of suffering remains. Man is terribly subject to chance in these matters, his will has the feeblest grasp upon them, and in the end chance throws off its mask and shows itself as a remorseless fa¬ tality. It was against this treachery of accident and despotism of fate that Aristippus sought a brave defence by the shifts of an infinitely clever versatility and by calling himself the master and not the slave of pleasure. Habeo, non haheor. In his practice there was no doubt a latent dual¬ ism, an unacknowledged trust in some resource of the soul apart from and superior to the suc¬ cession of sensations evoked by contact with the world; but at the last we are as we believe we are, and our destiny is in the creed we profess. If i6 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES physical sensation is pronounced to be all, if we have no secure place save in the feeling of the moment, what is left but a dull vacuity when pleasure is absent, unless pain rushes in to fill the void? The boasted liberation of our philoso¬ phy turns out under the stress of life to be some¬ thing very like mockery: Habeor , non habeo . The inevitable end of the Cyrenaic creed if held sincerely and unflinchingly—as however in the complexity of nature few men actually do hold it—is the kind of grim jesting that runs through so much of the Greek Anthology: “ All is laughter, and all is dust, and all is noth¬ ing; for out of unreason spring all things that are.” “You speak much, O man, but after a little you are laid in the ground. Be silent, and while still alive turn your thoughts upon death .” 6 It is an oft-repeated truism that extremes meet; and so we see the Cyrenaic, who has staked his hopes on the accidental favours of this world, subscribing the same lesson as the Platonist, who was ready to risk all on his belief in another sGlycon: IldvTa /cat irdvra kSvis /cat irdvra rb p.r/dtt' • irdvra yap akoywv earl rot yiyvopLeva. Palladas: IloXXd XaXets, tivdptoTre, %a/aat 8b n6rj p.era puKpbv • alya, Kal yaeX^ra %G>v eri rbv d&varov. ARISTIPPUS 17 world,—life is a study of death. It is the same precept, but with what a change! Cicero tells of a certain Cyrenaic named Hegesias, who argued so eloquently for death as a release from evils that he was forbidden by King Ptolemaeus from teaching in the schools a philosophy which per¬ suaded many of his pupils to commit suicide . 7 iTusc. Disp. I, 34. CHAPTER II EPICURUS I Of Epicurus, whose name has become a syno¬ nym for the philosophy of pleasure, we know not a great deal, but rather more than of his pre¬ decessor from Cyrene. He was horn of an Athe¬ nian father, a school teacher, in Samos in 341 b.c. His mother, according to the chronique scanda- leuse which passed in ancient times for the his¬ tory of philosophy, was engaged in the disrepu¬ table business of selling charms and practising magical rites for the propitiation of the gods; and the boy helped both his parents in their trades. One can surmise that from his mother’s occupation Epicurus acquired an early hatred of superstition. At the age of eighteen he went to Athens, where he stayed but a short time, and then led a more or less wandering life until he returned to the city in 306 as a teacher of phi¬ losophy with several adherents. Here he bought 18 EPICURUS 19 a garden beyond the walls for 80 minae (about $1600), where he set up his school, or where, one might say more precisely, he lived with his friends and pupils, men and women, in what might he called a state of plain living and moderately high thinking. At the time of his settling Plato had been dead forty-one years and Aristippus some¬ what longer; Polemo was the head of the Acad¬ emy and Theophrastus of the Lyceum; Zeno, a slightly younger man, was living in Athens, and probably had already opened his school in the Painted Porch. Death came to him in 270, at the age of seventy or seventy-one. Epicurus was a voluminous writer, leaving be¬ hind him some three hundred separate treatises. It is curious that the great advocate of ease and pleasure should have cared little for the comfort of his readers. Ancient critics complained of his disorderly composition, and the modern student finds his language one of the most difficult, not to say repellent, styles of all the Greek philoso¬ phers. His primary works are lost, as is the so- called larger epitome of them made by his own hand. There was also a smaller epitome, parts of which, apparently, are preserved by Diogenes Laertius. We have besides this a remarkable sum¬ mary of his doctrine in forty aphorisms or Mas- 20 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES ter Sayings. The poem of Lucretius is based probably on the larger epitome, and there are a great number of allusions to and quotations from his works in other Greek and Latin authors. Al¬ together we have a pretty full report of the main tenets of his philosophy; how far we understand them is another matter. The difficulty that confronts us when we try to understand Epicurus is the extraordinary paradox of his logic. What, in a word, is to be said of a philosophy that begins with regarding pleasure as the only positive good and ends by emptying pleasure of all positive content ? There is no possibility, I think, of really reconciling this blunt contradiction, which was sufficiently ob¬ vious to the enemies of Epicurus in antiquity, but it is possible, with the aid of Plutarch’s shrewd analysis , 1 to follow him step by step from his premises to his conclusions, and so to discover the source of his entanglement. Epicurus began with the materialistic and monistic theses which had allured Aristippus, and which, mingled in varying proportions from the teaching of Heraclitus and Protagoras and Democritus, had come to be the prevailing be¬ lief of the Greek people; they were, indeed, no 1 Non Posse Suaviter Vivi Secundum Epicurum. I draw freely on the racy language of the old English translation. EPICURUS 21 more than the essence refined out of the voluble lecturing and debating of the so-called sophists against whom Socrates and Plato had waged a relentless but unsuccessful warfare. This visible palpable world of bodies is the only reality, and the only thing which to man, in such a world, has any certain value is his own immediate physical sensations. Pleasure we feel and pain we feel, in their various degrees and complications; and we know that all men welcome pleasure and shrink from pain by a necessity of nature. Pleasure, in fact, is simply a name for the sensation which we do welcome, and pain for the sensation from which we do shrink. The example of infants and animals is before us to nullify any attempt to argue away this primary distinction. These are the premises of Epicurus, as they had been of Aristippus, and to these he will cling through thick and thin, whatever their conse¬ quences may be and however they may entangle him in self-contradictions.He seems even to have gone out of his way at times to find the grossest terms to express the doctrine, whether his mo¬ tive was to shock the Philistines of morality or to fortify himself and his friends in their posi¬ tive belief. The avowed programme of the school was “not to save the Greeks, but to indulge the 22 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES belly to the limit of safety with meat and drink”; and in a letter to a friend Epicurus says: “I in¬ vite you to continuous pleasures, not to virtues that unsettle the mind with vain and empty hopes of fruition.” The programme is simple enough in all conscience, and might satisfy the most cyn¬ ical votary of the flesh, but, desiring like his pre¬ decessor to be a voluptuary, Epicurus was driven despite himself to be a philosopher, even more a philosopher than the Cyrenaic, whether his wis¬ dom came from deeper reflection or greater ti¬ midity. His experience might be described as the opposite of that of Johnson’s humble acquaint¬ ance who had been trying all his life to attain phi¬ losophy but failed because cheerfulness would break in. Aristippus could make a boast of his HabeOj non habeor, but, however he might twist about, his dependence on the fleeting sensation of the moment left him at last a prey to the haz¬ ards of circumstance. Clearly the hedonist who was enough of a philosopher to aim at liberty and security must embrace a wider view of life than the Cyrenaic; and so the first step of Epi¬ curus was to take happiness, conceived as a con¬ tinuous state of pleasure, rather than particular pleasures, for the goal. This is the initial, and perhaps the most fundamental, difference be- EPICURUS ^3 tween the strictly Epicurean and the Cyrenaie brand of hedonism. But how, taking individual pleasures still in the grossly physical sense, was a man to assure himself of their consummation in happiness ? It was well to make a god of the belly and, in the Epicurean language, of any other passage of the body that admitted pleasure and not pain, but, as soon as he began to reflect, the philosopher was confronted by the ugly fact that the en¬ trances of pain are more numerous than those of pleasure, and that the paroxysms of pain may surpass in intensity any conceivable pleasure. He saw that there was something ephemeral and insecure in the very nature of pleasure, whereas pain had terrible rights over the flesh, and could dispute her domain with a vigour far beyond the power of her antagonist. Evidently, in a world so constituted, the aim of the philosopher will be lowered from a bold search for sensations to the humbler task of attaining some measure of se¬ curity against forces he cannot control; and so, I think, we shall interpret the curious phenome¬ non that the greatest of all hedonists was driven to a purely defensive attitude towards life. On the one hand he knew, as Plato had shown, that the recovery from disease and the relief from an- HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 24 guish do bring a sense of active well-being, and hence it was possible for him to define pleasure in negative terms without seeming to contradict flagrantly his grosser views about the belly and other bodily organs. Again, since positive pleas¬ ure and pain by some law of nature are so inti¬ mately bound together that the cessation of one is associated with access of the other , 2 then, clear¬ ly, the only pleasure free of this unpleasant ter¬ mination is that which is itself not positively in¬ duced but comes as the result of receding pain. For the content of happiness, therefore, the Epi¬ curean will look to sensation ota negative sort: “The limit of pleasure is reached by the removal of all that gives pain,” and “Pleasure in the flesh admits no increase, when once the pain of want is removed; it can only be variegated .” 3 But the philosopher cannot stop here. Such a state of release, though in itself it may not be subject to the laws of alternative pleasure and pain, is yet open to interruption from the haz¬ ards of life. And so Epicurus, in his pursuit of happiness, is carried a step further. Not on the present possession of pleasure, whether positive 2This association of pleasure and pain was familiar to Plato. He refers to it in Phaedo 60 b, and deals with it at greater length in the Philebus. 3 Sayings 3 and 18. In my quotations I sometimes adopt the lan¬ guage of the excellent versions in R. D. Hicks’s Stoic and Epi¬ curean. EPICURUS 25 or negative, will he depend for security of hap¬ piness, but on the power of memory. Here, at least, we appear to be free and safe, for memory is our own. Nothing can deprive us of that recol¬ lected joy, “which is the bliss of solitude”; even what was distressful at the time may often, by some alchemy of the mind, be transmuted into a happy reminiscence: “Things which offend when present, and affright, In memory, well painted, move delight.” 4 The true hedonism, then, will be a creation in the mind from material furnished it by the body. Plutarch describes the procedure of Epicurus thus, and exposes also its inadequacy: — Seeing that the field of joy in our poor bodies cannot be smooth and equal, but harsh and bro¬ ken and mingled with much that is contrary, he transfers the exercise of philosophy from the flesh, as from a lean and barren soil, to the mind, in the hopes of enjoying there, as it were, large pastures and fair meadows of delight. Not in the body but in the soul is the true garden of the Epi¬ curean to be cultivated. It might seem as if by the waving of a magic wand we had been trans¬ lated from a materialistic hedonism to a region like that in which Socrates and Plato looked for 4 Cowley, Upon His Majesty’s Restoration. 26 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES unearthly happiness. But in fact there is no such magic for the Epicurean. The source of the pleas¬ ures which compose our happiness is still phys¬ ical, and only physical; the office of the soul, so- called, is merely to retain by an act of selective memory the scattered impressions of sensuous pleasure and to forestall these by an act of selec¬ tive expectation. If you hear the Epicurean cry¬ ing out and testifying that the soul has no power of j oy and tranquillity save in what it draws from the flesh, and that this is its only good, what can you say but that he uses the soul as a kind of ves¬ sel to receive the strainings from the body, as men rack wine from an old and leaky jar into a new one to take age, and so think they have done some wonderful thing. And no doubt wine may be kept and mellowed with time, but the soul preserves no more than a feeble scent of what it takes into memory; for pleasure, as soon as it has given out one hiss in the body, forthwith ex¬ pires, and that little of it which lags behind in memory is but flat and like a queasy fume, as if a man should undertake to feed himself today on the stale recollection of what he ate and drank yesterday. What the Epicureans have is but the empty shadow and dream of a pleasure that has taken wing and fled away, and that serves but EPICURUS 27 for fuel to foment their untamed desires, as in sleep the unreal satisfaction of thirst and love only stings to a sharper lust of waking intem¬ perance. Memory, though it promise a release from the vicissitudes of fortune, is still too dependent on the facts of life, too deeply implicated in the re¬ currence of passionate desires. There is no final¬ ity of happiness here, and so the Epicurean is driven on to further refinement. If pushed hard, he will take refuge in imagining a possible pain¬ lessness of the body and a possible stability of untroubled ease. Life itself, in some rare in¬ stances, may afford the substance of this com¬ fort, and memory then will be sufficient; but if the substance eludes us, we have still that within us which bv the exercise of free will can lull the •/ mind into fancying it remembers what it never possessed. Step by step the reflective hedonist has been driven by the lessons of experience from the pursuit of positive pleasure to acquiescence in pleasure conceived as the removal of pain; from present ease in the flesh to the subtilizing power of memory in the mind, and, when memory is starved, to the voluntary imagination that life has gone well with him. The fabled ataraxy, or imperturbable calm, of the Epicurean turns out 28 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES to be something very like a pale beatitude of illusory abstraction from the tyranny of facts, the wilful mirage of a soul which imagines itself, but is not really, set apart from the material uni¬ verse of chance and change. Habeo , non Jicibeor, was the challenge of Aristippus to the world; the master of the Garden will be content with the more modest half: No?i habeor. There is something to‘ startle the mind in this defensive conclusion of a philosophy which opened its attack on life under such brave and flaunting colours. There is much to cause reflec¬ tion when one considers how in the end hedon- V/ ism is forced into an unnatural conjunction with the other monistic philosophy with which its principles are in such violent conflict. For this ataraxyof the avowed lover of ease and pleasure can scarcely be distinguished from the apathy which the Stoic devotees of pain and labour glorified as the goal of life. This is strange. It is stranger still, remembering this negative con¬ clusion of Epicurean and Stoic, by which good becomes a mere deprivation of evil, to cast the mind forward to the metaphysics of another and later school of monism which led the Neopla- tonist to reckon evil as a mere deprivation of good. Into such paradoxical combinations and antag- EPICURUS 29 onisms we are driven as soon as we try to shun the simple truth that good is good and evil is evil, each in its own right and judged by its im¬ mediate effect in the soul. It may appear from the foregoing that the hedonist, in his pursuit of the summrnn bonum , argues from point to point in a straight line; in practice he seems rather to follow no single guide, but to fluctuate between two disparate yet inseparable motives. At one time, in a world where physical sensation is the only criterion of truth and the basis of all reality, the liberty of enjoyment is the lure that draws him on; at an¬ other time, in a world of chance and change or of mechanical law which takes no great heed of our wants, it seems as if security from misad¬ venture must be the limit of man’s desire. Other philosophers, the Platonist in his vision of the world of Ideas, the Christian in his submission to the will of God, may see their way running straight before them to the one sure goal of spir¬ itual happiness, in which liberty and security j oin hands. The path of the hedonist wavers from side to side, aiming now at positive pleasure and now at mere escape from pain; and this, I take it, is one of the curious reprisals of truth, that the dualist should have in view a single end, HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 30 whereas the monist should be distracted by a double purpose. Whether one or the other of the revolving objects shall stand out clearer before the hedonist’s gaze, will depend perhaps chiefly upon his temperament. With an Aristippus the pleasure of the moment is supreme, though he too will have his eye open for the need of safety; with an Epicurus, more timid by nature and more reflective, the thought of security at the last will almost, if never quite, obliterate the en¬ ticement of pleasure. It was still as a good Epi¬ curean that Horace could write: Sperne voluptates, nocet empta dolore voluptas. II Certainly, when we pass from consideration of the chief good to the philosophical theories which Epicurus developed to explain and jus¬ tify his choice of that good, the idea of security becomes altogether predominant; it is the key¬ note equally of his ethics, his science, and his at¬ titude towards religion. The ethical ideal of the Garden is summed up in the famous maxim, “Live concealed” (lathe biosas ), or, as Horace exquisitely phrases it, the EPICURUS 3 1 fallentis semita vitae . In this way alone would the perfect ataraxy be attained. Now the hidden way is not that which we admire today, much as in other respects our thoughts have kept the colour of hedonism and utilitarianism. On the one hand, the pleasures pursued by the modern voluptuary are likely to be that of the busy and aggressive sort which cannot easily be dissociated from the noise of crowds and the distraction of ceaseless motion, and in comparison with which the Garden of Epicurus would seem to offer but a wan image of life. On the other hand, the only useful career w r e commonly understand today is one equally involved in the restless business of doing, and our commendation is reserved for those who are engaged in promoting the welfare or regulating the morals of other men. To shrink from the hazard of public adventure or to prize the re¬ finement of secrecy is branded as cowardly, while concern for the salvation of one’s own soul is likely to be reprehended as selfish and immoral. Hence it happens that both the vices and the virtues of the present age have brought into dis¬ repute the ancient ideal of withdrawal from the distractions of life. That is as it may be. But at least we ought to keep the mind clear in these HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 3 2 matters, and not to lose the sense of distinctions. The hidden way of the Epicurean has at first sight a startling resemblance to the Platonic and the Christian flight from the world, and to a cer¬ tain point the two ideals are rooted in the same soil; but to ignore their difference while seeing their similarity, or to unite them in the same praise or condemnation, would be the error of a very blind psychology. When Gregory of Naz- ianzus, in accordance with the direct methods of the day, had been captured bodily and or¬ dained a priest against his will, he first fled from this act of “spiritual despotism” to the monastic retreat of his friend Basil in Pontus, and then, admitting the obligation thrust upon him, re¬ turned to his charge. And this was in part his apology to the people for his precipitate flight: “Info my heart had come a certain longing for the beauty of the quietness of solitude. Of this, indeed, I had been a lover from the beginning, as I know not whether any other votary of let¬ ters had ever loved it; and this, amid great diffi¬ culties and trials, I had made my vow to God. Some taste of it I had already known, having stood, as it were, in its vestibule, so that my de¬ sire was the more enkindled by experience; and I could not tolerate the tyranny that was thrust¬ ing me back into the midst of noise and tumult, and dragging me by violence from the better life EPICURUS 33 as from a sacred asylum. For nothing appeared to me so desirable for a man as this, that, closing the eyes of the senses, and withdrawing from the flesh and the world into his inner self, and hay¬ ing no contact with all that concerns humanity, save as need compelled, conversing with himself and with God,—that so he should live above the plane of visible things, and bear within him the signs of divinity, pure always and unmixed with earthly vagrant impressions, presenting his soul as a clean mirror to God and the heavenly lights .” 5 Gregory’s apology, delivered in the remote church of Cappadocia, might seem almost to be a sermon on the Epicurean text, “Live con¬ cealed,” which no doubt he had heard discussed from every point of view during his student days at the university of Athens. Yet if the se¬ ductive phrase of Epicurus, as we may suppose, had sunk into his mind so as never to he absent from his thoughts, it is no less true that the hid¬ den life for which he pined was divided, as pole is separated from pole, from that, in some ways not ignoble, withdrawal of the Athenian hedon¬ ist into his garden. For Epicurus the purpose of retirement was primarily the desire to escape so far as possible the incursions of society, with no thought of fit- sOratio II, 6, 7. HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 34 ting himself for citizenship in another world. To this end political life was to be utterly eschewed; for how, indeed, could the philosopher maintain his precious calm of soul, while suffering the anxieties of ambition or the envies of office? To the same end marriage and the cares of a family were to be avoided, though not so rigorously as political entanglements. In one respect Epi¬ curus was better than his creed. It is notorious that his school made much of friendship, theo¬ retically and practically; and their kindly com¬ radeship, even their readiness to sacrifice ease and possessions for a friend, threw something like a glow of romance over their otherwise un¬ lovely profession of egotism. No doubt Epi¬ curus could find logical excuses for this hu¬ man weakness in the mutual protection offered by such unions; but in fact some inextinguish¬ able nobility of mind carried him here quite be¬ yond the bounds of his boasted principles. His hedonism might leave a place open for friend¬ ship as the greatest felicity which wisdom pro¬ cures for the whole of life , 6 but he was surely forgetting the claims of the flesh when he added that it was of more account to know with whom we were to eat and drink than what we were to 6 Diog\ Laert., Epicurus 148. EPICURUS 35 eat and drink . 7 And his rejection of the Pytha¬ gorean community of goods (which had been so alluring to Plato), because it shows some lack of confidence in the generosity of friendship, is one of the finest and, in the French sense of the word, most sjnrituel of ancient maxims . 8 Such was the social ideal of Epicurus, and his rules for private conduct were of a piece with it—they were directed as completely, consider¬ ing the place of friendship in his social scheme even more completely, towards the attainment of that outer and inner security on which the continuous state of pleasure must depend. To this end morality of a sort is necessary: “It is not possible to live pleasantly without living wisely and fairly and justly, nor to live wisely and fairly and justly without living pleasantly.” The exordium is well, and might lead one to ex¬ pect a code of morals not altogether unlike the Platonic eudaemonism; but such an expectation is soon dispelled. In the Epicurean scheme there is no conception of wisdom as a good to be sought for itself, or of justice as a possession which of itself brings peace and happiness to the owner; how, indeed, could such a conception rind place in a purely materialistic philosophy? Not virtue 7Seneca, Ep. xix, 10. sDiog. Laert., Epic. 11. 36 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES for its own sake is desirable, nor is justice con¬ ceivable for its own immediate reward in the soul; the law of safety is the supreme law of conduct, and “any means is a natural good by which a man may acquire a sense of security from other men.” The state of nature would be like that which a Thrasymachus and a Callicles up¬ held at Athens, and a Hobbes was to expound in England. So far as justice exists as an obliga¬ tion, it is merely a kind of compulsory engage¬ ment by which we agree not to deprive others of their possessions and comfort in order that we may enjoy from them the same immunity. And if men live up to such a compact it is only because of the penalties imposed upon disobedience. “In¬ justice is not an evil in itself,” and he would be a fool who did not covertly grasp for himself what he could, while preaching abstention to his neigh¬ bours, were it possible to do this with impunity. “No one who in secret violates any article of the social compact of mutual forbearance can be con¬ fident that he will escape detection, even though hitherto he has escaped a thousand times; for to t the end of life he cannot be sure that he is safe .” 9 9 Mr. Hicks undertakes to condone this code of morality as being “just the position taken up by modern international law and just the attitude adopted by Christian nations” (Stoic and Epicurean 177). He has a word of protest against the Stoics who presented the code “in an unfavourable light, as does Epictetus when he EPICURUS 37 And as it is with justice between man and man, so it is with the more personal virtues of prudence and temperance and courage. “The virtues are not taken for themselves but for the pleasure they bring,”—prudence because it sees the folly of striving for the unattainable, tem¬ perance because it protects us against perilous indulgences, courage because it enables us to overcome pain and to escape from empty fears. At the best, virtue becomes such a barter of pleasure against pain and of pleasure against pleasure as seemed to Socrates, in gaol and awaiting death, to miss all the nobler chances of life. At its ordinary level virtue is the caution of a soul that sees no real distinction between good and evil, but shrinks back from the bold adven¬ ture of licence: “If the acts that give pleasure to the profligate absolved him from fears, ... if they showed him the limit of desires, we should have nothing to censure in such a man; for his life would be says: ‘Not even does Epicurus himself declare stealing to be bad, but he admits that detection is; and because it is impossible to have security against detection, for this reason he says, Do not steal.’” I cannot see that the Stoics (to whom might be added the Platonists and Christians and all the other moralists save the followers of Epicurus) presented the code in a more unfavour¬ able light than did he who first promulgated it. Discredit the be¬ lief that injustice by its own nature, and apart from any conven¬ tional penalties, works mischief in the soul that harbours it, and the position of Epicurus as interpreted by his enemies is the only logical one to take—though Epicureans might on occasion be illogical. 38 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES filled with pleasures flowing in from every side, and would have no pain of body or mind—pain which is the evil thing.” But there was another disturbance of human life more serious than that which came from the entanglement of the individual in society—viz. the disturbance from the tyranny and terror be¬ gotten by false notions of the universe. Security from the encroachments of society Epicurus sought, as we have seen, in his ethics; to attain like security from the world at large he looked to some formula for the universal nature of things which should enable the mind to pursue its even course without anxiety. “For,” as he says, “there would be no profit in establishing security from men so long as we suffered from forebodings of what goes on overhead and under the earth and anywhere in the infinity of space.” Now the great enemy of ataraxy, as Epicurus saw it, was religion. It is superstition that has filled our human life with hideous fears of the world to come and with criminal passions in this world, and to free mankind from these he will lay his axe at the root of the evil. EPICURUS 39 As for the sense of terrors to come it is hard for us, with our impatience to admit the force of any mythology but our own, to comprehend how large a part it played in the life of the ancients, how it hung like a lowering cloud in the air of Greece, which we are wont to picture to our¬ selves as perfectly serene and untroubled by those spectral portents that haunted the Middle Ages and our own age until a very recent date. Yet a little reading and a slight acquaintance with the human heart ought to warn us against such an error . 10 Plato saw clearly the havoc made in the imaginations of his countrymen by the gruesome tales of Hades, and undertook to lib¬ erate men by moralizing the future life and by placing the fate of the soul within the power of each man, as he chose the upward path of virtue or the downward path of vice and misery. But such a deliverance required the belief in moral laws which were not recognized in the hedonistic monism of Epicurus; the only way of escape open to him was to find what comfort he might in the conclusions of his naturalistic creed. There is no future life, no immaterial soul which will live and continue to suffer when the visible body is dissolved; therefore the dread of what may ioFor the sort of terrors current in antiquity, see, e.g., Lucian’s Lover of Lies 22, 25. HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 40 happen after that final event is as idle as the shuddering that inflicts our dreams. But what of the horror that still is left of empty darkness, of annihilation, the thought of sinking into an abyss of nothingness? why, that too is causeless: “Death is nought to us; for that which is dis¬ solved [as the body and soul are dissolved into their elements at death] feels not, and that which feels not is nothing to us.” This was an argu¬ ment to which Epicurus recurred again and again , 11 as if by repetition of a charm he might benumb the heart into a dull acquiescence. And one recalls the retort of Plutarch, that such a thought does not remove the terror of death, but rather adds to its sting by demonstrating its cause; for it is just this anticipation of complete insensibility in the future that fills men with a present distress . 12 The tyranny of the future is but an extension, uSo Cicero, De Fin. ii, 31. i 2 Non Posse 110'4e. —It might seem that Epicurus could have made out a better case for himself by regarding death as the great surcease of pain and so as the fitting consummation of pleasure as he conceived pleasure. He might have quoted the beautiful line of Electra in Sophocles: Tous yap divovTas ou% opuj \vTrovpibvovs — “Therefore receive me in thy narrow home, As nought to nothing, in that world below To dwell with thee forever . .. For this I see, the dead have rest from pain.” But the spirit of religious resignation, even in its negative as¬ pect, cannot be wedded to Epicureanism. EPICURUS 4 1 so to speak, of the monstrous oppression under which man’s present life labours from his belief in the gods and in Providence. And here at least Epicurus was dealing with an undeniable evil. Cruel persecutions, the smouldering fires of re¬ ligious bigotry, malignity dressed in the garb of spiritual love, the passion of egotism stalking about as a divine inspiration, the grovellingdread of supernatural portents, the paralysis of the human will,—who can think of these and what they have done through the long course of his¬ tory, without shuddering? All this Lucretius, translating Epicurus into the language of poet¬ ry, summed up in one fiery picture of the sacri¬ fice of Iphigenia on the altar of Artemis, with its last stroke of indignation, terrible and unfor¬ gettable : Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. Here again Epicurus had been anticipated. Plato too was keenly alive to the sum of evils for which religion must be held responsible, but for release from this oppression he could find a way quite barred to the materialist. It was his privi¬ lege to liberate religion from the dark over¬ growth of superstition by purifying our notion of the gods and by moralizing the work of Provi¬ dence; whereas for the pure hedonist the only 42 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES escape was simply to deny the fact of any inter¬ vention from above in the life of mankind, and this Epicurus did absolutely and unflinchingly. It might have been expected that he would follow the logical consequences of such a creed into pure atheism; but here, for one reason or another, he drew back. Though the thought of Providence was utterly repugnant to him, and though he swept away, with one grand gesture of disdain, the whole fabric of signs and portents and proph¬ ecy, he still in a fashion clung to the existence of the gods. It is easy to accuse him, and antiquity did not fail to accuse him, of insincerity, as if he were an atheist but, for fear of popular resent¬ ment, concealed his genuine views. Possibly he may have been influenced to some extent by this motive, but his theology is capable of another and more generous explanation; he really had a need of the gods in his philosophy, and of pre¬ cisely the kind of gods whom he admits, as may be seen from his arguments. In the first place, granted the existence of gods, granted that their state is one of untroubled felicity, granted that felicity is dependent on that withdrawal from cares and obligations which was the ideal of Epicurean hedonism, then it follows that the gods will pass their time in unconcern EPICURUS 43 for the business of this vastly laborious world of ours. “The motion of the heavenly bodies, their solstices, eclipses, risings and settings, and what goes with these, all such things we must believe happen without the present or future interven¬ tion of any being who at the same time enjoys perfect felicity with immortality .” 13 Nor will the gods suffer themselves to be affected and swayed by the distracted affairs of mankind: “That which is blessed and immortal neither has any trouble¬ some business itself nor brings such trouble upon another; it is exempt from movements of anger and favour, for all this implies weakness.” There is no room in such a theology for a divine Provi¬ dence of creation or preservation. The gods, if they exist, will not be “good” in the sense which Plato attached to this word, but simply happy in the enjoyment of complete indifference and security; their home will be set apart in a Para¬ dise beyond the shock and conflict of opposing forces, where, as in a celestial counterpart of Epicurus’ own garden, they will spend the long aeons in pleasant intercourse one with another. Such the gods must be, if we grant their exist¬ ence,— !3 Epist . Prima 76. 44 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES “The gods, who haunt The lucid interspace of world and world, Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind, Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans, Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar Their sacred everlasting calm ! and such, Not all. so fine, nor so divine a calm, Not such, nor all unlike it, man may gain Letting his own life go.” And in these lines from Tennyson’s Lucre¬ tius we see not only how Epicurus 14 adapted Homer’s picture of Olympus for his home of the gods, but why he admitted the gods into a phi¬ losophy which might have been expected to abut on pure atheism. After all, the divine state was no more than a carrying out by the imagination of that which Epicurus aimed at in this troubled world, but never could quite achieve. The maka - j'ios bios , “the blessed life,” “the life of felicity,” is a phrase often on his lips, and he was not un¬ willing to accept from his pupils terms of hom¬ age which fell little short of deification; yet withal how imperfect was the security he could actually attain against the encroachments of society and i^Tennyson’s lines are taken from the third book of the De Re- rum Natura, where Lucretius borrows from the sixth book of the Odyssey; but Epicurus, though he was not fond of Homer or the other fabricators of myth, would not have repudiated this picture. EPICURUS 4? the pangs of disease, and that last agony of dis¬ solution, however bravely he might argue that agony away. He needed this ideal of the divine tranquillity to strengthen his own heart and to put courage into his band of worshippers. He, also, must have his religion, his dream of imitat¬ ing God, at whatever price he bought it. { IV Having freed man from the terrors of super¬ stition by removing the gods far off from the actual world, it remained for Epicurus to sub¬ stitute some theory of nature’s course which should at once fill the place of Providence and offer a secure foundation for his ethics. To this end, being no inventor, he was content for his physics to take over bodily, with, however, one important addition, the atomic system of De¬ mocritus. And from his Letter to Herodotus one can see the process by which his mind settled upon this particular hypothesis as suitable to his gen¬ eral philosophy. All that we know is given to us by the momentary sensations of the body. Hence the world is corporeal, and the dividing reason will cut this corporeal substance into ever smaller and smaller particles until it reaches the concep- HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 46 tion of ultimate atoms which correspond to the atomism of our sensations. If you ask why he stays the dividing reason at this point and does not permit it to proceed ad infinitum he will re¬ turn the simple and sufficient answer that, if we do not pause somewhere, all things will be ana¬ lysed into nothingness. But empty space also is necessary for his system, since without it the atoms would be crowded together; there would be no division, but a solid mass, and there would be no possibility of that motion of matter which is a fact of observation. Hence the universe for Epicurus is composed of an infinite void where¬ in are moving an infinite number of solid atoms. And here it is in place to observe that this con¬ clusion reached by the unrestrained action of the analytic reason is as thoroughly monistic as is the conclusion reached by the unrestrained ac¬ tion of the synthetic reason. Plutarch was keen enough to note this, and to lay it against the school: “For when Epicurus says that ‘the whole is infinite and uncreated and incorruptible with¬ out increase or diminution/ he certainly speaks of the universe as a unity. And when in the be¬ ginning of his treatise he declares that ‘the nature of things consists of bodies and the void/ he has made an apparent division where there is really EPICURUS 47 only one nature; for of his two terms one really does not exist at all, but is called by you the im¬ palpable and the void and the bodiless. So that for you the universe is a unity .” 15 The point of Plutarch’s argument is that naturalism, in so far as it excludes from its view anything positive and radically different from matter, is equally monistic, equally arbitrary, whether it divides its material substratum into innumerable atoms, after the fashion of Democritus and Epicurus, or conceives a continuous substance in a state of everlasting flux, after the mode of Heraclitus and Zeno. Upon this hypothesis of atoms moving in the void Epicurus built up a purely mechanistic ex¬ planation of all the phenomena of the world and of life. Omitting the details of his exposition, we may say, briefly, that by the mutual shock and repulsion of the atoms, which vary indefinitely in shape and size, more or less durable aggrega¬ tions of matter are formed and vortical motions are started, out of which are produced the solar and sidereal systems. Living organisms owe their origin to the same cause, the soul, or principle of life, being simply a compound of finer atoms, a sort of fiery vapour, enmeshed in the corporeal Adv . Coloten 1114a. HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 48 structure of grosser atoms and dissipating when its vessel is dissolved. Even the gods are mater¬ ial and subject to decay. So far Epicurus seems to have followed pretty closely in the steps of the naturalists who pre¬ ceded him. But in one momentous point he struck out for himself. In the Democritean theory the atoms were supposed to be moving primarily all in one downward direction, and the collisions out of which the aggregations arose were supposed to occur by reason of the fact that the heavier atoms would overtake the lighter. Now Epicurus was sagacious eriough to see that no universe like this of ours could arise on such a basis. A regular and uniform flux of atoms might create a con¬ glomeration of absolute law and order, but it would be a world without variety or variation of form, or indeed without any forms whatsoever, properly speaking. To escape this conclusion he added a significant modification: the atoms should all be falling downwards by their own weight as in the Democritean system (though he failed to give any intelligible meaning to the word “downwards” in space of infinite exten¬ sion), but besides this primary motion each in¬ dividual atom swerves a little to one side or the other by some principle of arbitrary declination EPICURUS 49 within itself. Lucretius states the matter thus: “This point of the subject we desire you to apprehend, that when atoms are borne straight downwards through the void by their ownweights, at quite uncertain times and uncertain places they push themselves a little from their course, only just so much that you can call it a change of in¬ clination. If they were not wont to swerve thus, they would fall down all, like drops of rain, through the deep void, and no clashing could have been begotten, nor any collision produced, among the first-beginnings; thus Nature never would have produced anything .” 16 By this clever device Epicurus shuns the im¬ passe of absolute determinism, and introduces the possibility at once of order and variety— order from the systematic motion of the atoms, variety from the spontaneous motion of each indi¬ vidual atom. The masses, organic and inorganic, of which the world is composed are thrown out by nature without design and in infinite variety. Those which happen to be constructed suitably and are fitted to their environment endure and, in the case of living creatures, propagate their kind; while the rest are broken up and perish i $De Ber. Nat. ii, 216-224. The translation is from John Mas¬ son’s Lucretius, Epicurean and Poet. How far Epicurus was justified in assuming that Democritus held the atoms to be fall¬ ing eternally downwards is a question we need not consider. See Burnet’s Greek Philosophy 1, 96. HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 50 amidst the unceasing clash and conflict. In the sphere of organic life, at least, Epicurus con¬ nected the law of survival with the conception of development in time, and the fifth book of Lu¬ cretius presents a magnificent and really as¬ tounding picture of man's progress from the primitive state of savagery to that of a complex civilization . 17 But for one omission, Epicurus would have anticipated in principle the theory of Darwinian evolution; if we may judge from Lucretius, he had no hint of the gradual trans¬ formation of one species into another, but each species, as it was thrown out by chance, so en¬ dured if it was fit, or perished if it was unfit. The omission is large, no doubt; yet in view of the apparent inability of modern biologists to come to any agreement upon the law of variation, per¬ haps it will not be held so damaging to the intel¬ ligence of our ancient philosopher as at first it might appear. And apart from this, the Epicu¬ rean doctrine agrees surprisingly with the mod¬ ern attempt to explain the nature of things on a purely materialistic and mathematical basis. In both the ultimate source of phenomenal evolu¬ tion is reduced to the mechanical law of chance 17M. Joyau (Epicure 118) thinks that the picture of progress in Lucretius should not be carried back to Epicurus; it is certainly, I think, implicit in the Epicurean physics. EPICURUS 5 1 and probability, and endurance is made to de¬ pend on the law of fitness. Both fail to explain how there can be a law of probability in the se¬ quences of chance, and both equally shirk the difficulty of giving any meaning to the word “fit” in a world not governed by an intelligence which is superior to mechanical forces, and which acts selectively in accordance with a self-justi¬ fying principle of rightness, or order. It is a question how far Epicurus’ anticipa¬ tion of the atomic theory in its present form and of evolution should be set down to mere philo¬ sophical guessing, and how far in general he can be regarded as a precursor of the modern scien¬ tific spirit. According to Froude Epicureanism was “the creed of the men of science” in the time of Caesar; Sir Frederick Pollock held it to be “a genuine attempt at a scientific explanation of the world”; for Professor Trezza it “summed up in itself the most scientific elements of Greek antiquity”; Renan praised Epicureanism as “the great scientific school of antiquity,” and to Dr. Woltjer “the Epicureans, with respect to the laws and principles of science, came nearest of all the ancients to the science of our own time.” On the other side Mr. Benn, from whom I bor¬ row these quotations, regards such comments as HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 52 “absolutely amazing ”; 18 he can find in Epicu¬ rus no spark of the true scientific spirit. Perhaps it would be fairer to put it this way, that Epi¬ curus was a great anticipator of science, but, like the hero of Moliere’s play, malgre lui. In fact not the least paradox of his logic rich in surprises was his adoption of a scientific, or semi-scientific, mode of explaining the world for the avowed purpose of undermining the very foundation of what we understand by science. It was the last thing he had at heart that, having adopted a the¬ ory of creation which eliminated Providence from the world, he should suffer his physics to set up a law of mechanical determinism in its place. Between the personal tyranny of theology and the impersonal despotism of science, if he had to choose, he would prefer the former as the less absolute and inhuman: “Destiny, which some introduce as sovereign over all things, he [the wise man] laughs to scorn, affirming that certain things happen of neces¬ sity, others by chance, others through our own agency. For he sees that necessity destroys re¬ sponsibility and that chance or fortune is incon¬ stant ; whereas our own actions are free, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach, It were better, indeed, to accept the legends of i^The Greek Philosophers 2 367. EPICURUS 53 the gods than to bow beneath that yoke of des¬ tiny which the natural philosophershave imposed. The one holds out some faint hope that we may escape by honouring the gods, while the neces¬ sity of the philosophers [of science] is deaf to all supplications .” 19 It was strictly in harmony with this hostile attitude towards the postulates of science that Epicurus denied the possibility of formulating a single and final explanation of any phenome¬ non of nature. Only in the general law of atoms and the void, upon which his whole philosophy rested, did he admit any exception to this rule; in all other cases, dealing with particular phe¬ nomena, we are simply to accept whatever the¬ ory may suit the conditions of our life and con¬ firm our tranquillity, remembering always that the theory accepted does not exclude an infinity of others equally possible. So far his interest in investigation would go, and no further; for the pure inquisitiveness of reason, here as every¬ where, he expressed unmitigated contempt . 20 From any point of view it appears that Epi¬ curus shaped his system of physics, not in the interest of science, but as an aid to his ethical 19 Epist . Tertia 133 (Hicks’s translation).—For a similar atti¬ tude of a modern Epicurean, Samuel Butler of Erewhon, towards science and religion, see Shelburne Essays XI, 198. 20 Epist. Secunda 87, 93, 97, 104. HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 54 purpose; he was seeking here, as in his theology (which indeed to the Hellenist is a branch of physics), for such a liberation from the inroads of the outer world as would enable him to attain the equanimity, the ataraxy, which seemed to him the only secure ground of pleasure. Hence his famous declination, or arbitrary swerving, of the atoms performed a double function: on the one hand it broke the rigidity of what other¬ wise would have congealed into a system of ab¬ solute determinism, and on the other hand it opened the door to a freedom of will which places the life of pleasure within a man’s own choice. The nexus between atomic declination and hu¬ man freedom is not clear . 21 They both, no doubt, imply spontaneity; but in the one case a spon¬ taneity of pure chance, and in the other case a spontaneity of conscious purpose, and these two are more than different in kind, they are intrin¬ sically incompatible from the Epicurean point of view. A dualist may solve this difficulty by 2 iSee Masson, Journal of Philology XII, 1883, pp. 127-135.—In the second of his Boyle Lectures the great Bentley commented thus on the Epicurean attempt to deduce free will from a me¬ chanical deviation of the atoms: “’Tis as if one should say that a bowl equally poised, and thrown upon a plain and smooth bowling-green, will run necessarily and fatally in a direct mo¬ tion; but if it be made with a bias, that may decline it a little from a straight line, it may acquire by that motion a liberty of will, and so run spontaneously to the jack.” (Quoted in Jebb’s Life of Bentley, p. 31.) EPICURUS 55 attributing mechanical chance to the material world and conscious purpose to the realm of spirit; but no such division was legitimately open to a consistent monist. Apparently Epicurus undertook to bully the logic of the situation by a transparent device. His primary atoms are described, as a true materialist should describe them, in purely quantitative terms; they have size and form, but no qualities, no sensation, nothing inducive of sensation. Then, suddenly, by the mere fact of aggregation,they have become endowed with qualities and with sensation, and in the finer atoms which constitute the soul me¬ chanical chance has become converted into con¬ scious free will. The transition is arbitrary, in¬ comprehensible, subversive of the principles of the Epicurean physics, as Plutarch was not slow to point out ; 22 but, then, logic is the last strong¬ hold of tyranny, and Epicurus was ready to pur¬ chase liberty at the price of any self-contradic¬ tion. y This, indeed, is the staggering fact, that a phil¬ osophical theory, which in the name of rea¬ son begins with a repudiation of the dualistic 22 Adv. Coloten 1111b, 1118e. HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 56 paradox in the nature of things, should end in a set of self-imposed and utterly unreasonable paradoxes. Here is a philosopher who puts his faith solely and unconditionally in the senses, yet for the basis of his system goes beyond the senses to an hypothesis of invisible atoms and the void; who accepts all sensations as true, yet holds part of the qualities given to us by sensa¬ tion to be purely relative; who despises the forms and rules of logic, yet argues on from syllogism to syllogism; who recognizes only physical causes and laws, and rejects all arbitrary and fanciful effects, yet in his own doctrine of atomic deflec¬ tion and human free will makes a law of unac¬ countable spontaneity; who reduces all pleasure and pain to corporeal feelings, yet looks to the soul as the seat of the higher satisfaction; who sees no motive but self-seeking egotism, yet in practice followed the precepts of humanity, jus¬ tice, disinterested friendship, even of self-sacri¬ fice . 23 All this is undeniable; but it is equally true that the conclusions of Epicurus are no more contradictory than are those of Stoicism and Neoplatonism, or, indeed, of any monistic meth¬ od. And, after all, it may be said that the physics 23Zeller, Geschichte 2 IV, 422. EPICURUS 57 and metaphysics of Epicurus are only the outer fortifications thrown up, with whatever success, to protect the inner citadel of his philosophy. In taking pleasure as his starting point and end, he chose what all men do naturally aim at and desire—pleasure, or something corresponding to it in the spirit. That is the simple fact to which we must hold fast through all the shifts of rea¬ son ; and those subtle logicians who have tried to escape this law of nature by discriminating be¬ tween pleasure itself as the end of action and the object or act which results in pleasure have mere¬ ly quibbled over a word. By grasping so firmly this fundamental truth—though it be but half the truth—of human life, Epicurus gave his name to one of the broad and enduring philosophies of life; and men of old and men of today call them¬ selves Epicureans who have never read a line of the master’s writings. That, in fact, is character¬ istic of his influence. No founder of a sect was ever more revered by his followers, and of all the schools of Greece his was the only one which, theoretically, underwent no change; although in practice no men who call themselves by the same name have so differed in their lives, as the pleasure of their desires shifts from colour to colour. HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 58 The great multitude, indeed, of those who have called themselves, or whom we call, Epicureans have been anything but scholars or sages or, in any proper sense of the word, philosophers. This is so true that it was common among the early Christians, while making many concessions to the other pagan sects, to deny utterly to Epi¬ cureanism the name of philosophy; among the Jews the Greek name of the master of the Gar¬ den was used to denote a heretic or unbeliever of any sort. “Be diligent,” said Rabbi Lazar, “to learn Thorah, wherewith thou mayest make answer to Epicurus .” 24 What the creed of pleas¬ ure too often means to the world Cicero has told in his oration against Piso, the despoiler of Mace¬ donia. In his disorderly youth this Piso met with a Greek philosopher who undertook to expound to him the doctrines of the Garden. But the teach¬ er did not get far. “No doubt you have heard it said that the Epicureans measure all things de¬ sirable to men by pleasure”—it was enough; like a stallion neighing in excitement the youth leapt at the words, delighted to find an authority for lust where he had expected a sermon on virtue. The Greek began to distinguish and divide and explain; but “No,” cried the young man, “stop 24 Sayings of the Jewish Fathers 40, edited by Charles Taylor. EPICURUS 59 there, I subscribe, your Epicurus is a wonderful fellow!” And the Professor, with bis charming Greek manners, was too polite to insist against the will of a Roman senator . 25 Pleasure is a power that needs no encomium to inflame the desires and to fascinate the under¬ standing, and a philosophy which throws such a word about broadcast, however it may modify and protest, cannot be absolved from a terrible responsibility. It will be said that such a charge may be fair enough against the Cyrenaics, who were rather voluptuaries than philosophers, but is a grave injustice when applied to the true Epicurean brand of hedonism. And, no doubt, there is some force in this excuse. As for Epi¬ curus himself we have seen that the craving for security prevailed so strongly with him over the grasping at positive indulgence in the com¬ pound which he called by the name of ataraxy, that the body in the end is almost refined out of his philosophy. By whatever devices of logic and ambiguities of definition, however he came by the possession, one cannot but feel that in his heart he did hold a treasure of wisdom. He was tried by bereavement and in his later years by 25 j n Pisonem 28.—Lucian (The Parasite 11) shows that the pro¬ fessional toady has laid hold of the telos of Epicureanism better than Epicurus himself. 6o HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES painful disease, yet through it all he seems to have remained lord of himself and of that tran¬ quillity of soul which he preached as the genuine fountain of pleasure. To one of his friends, just before his death, he sent a letter of which this fragment is preserved: “And now as I am passing this last and blessed day of my life I write to you. Strangury has laid hold of me, and wracking torments beyond which suffering cannot go; but over against all this I set my joy of soul in the memory of our thoughts and words together in the past. Do you care for the children of Metrodorus, in a manner worthy of your devotion to me and to philosophy.” Strange termination, you will say, to a creed which began by denying reality to everything except the immediate sensations of the body; yet there it is. Were it not for the flaunting paradox of the phrase, one would declare that of all Epi¬ cureans he who gave them their name was the least an Epicurean. And the world has seen many other noble souls who have found a measure of comfort and strength and grace and something very like spir¬ itual elevation in the more refined philosophy of hedonism. Transplanted to Rome, such a creed could inspire Lucretius with a passionate long¬ ing to liberate mankind from the slavery of im- EPICURUS 61 aginary fears, and with an agony of adoration, one might say, for that Nature by whose will the atoms were maintained in their everlasting ma¬ jestic dance, and who offered to the souls of men one fleeting glimpse of her tremendous face and then dropped upon them the thick curtain of annihilation, kindly in what she granted, kind¬ lier in what she withheld. The same creed could carry a sensitive lover of the earth’s bounties like Atticus unscathed through the brutalities of the Civil Wars, a man of infinite resourcefulness in the service of his friends by virtue of his com¬ plete abstention from the hazard of public af¬ fairs. In England of the nineteenth century the tra¬ dition could still rouse a Pater to break the calm of Victorian propriety for the valorous adven¬ ture of an artistic hedonism distilled out of the i more positive doctrines of Aristippus and the stricter discipline of Epicurus. “Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intel¬ lectual excitement is irresistibly real and attrac¬ tive to us—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.” And so the pursuit of philosophy shall be no 62 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES cold consultation of books or dull hoarding of wisdom; for, with a “sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gath¬ ering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.” 20 Under a new name the old philosophy of the Garden could teach Mill, as a utilitarian, to look for private happiness in devotion to the well¬ being of others, and, as a hedonist, to grade the 26Ancient Epicureanism covers every form of hedonism except the artistic. I can find nothing in antiquity quite corresponding to the philosophy developed by Pater on the principles of Aris¬ tippus, or to the aesthetic of Croce, nothing corresponding to the theory of art for art’s sake of modern times. As for Epicurus himself, he was so far from conceiving an artistic hedonism that he virtually rejected aesthetics altogether from his doctrine. He will admit a kind of pleasure in music, but will not take it seriously and forbids any discussion of it as an art. He excludes the study of rhetoric and commands his pupils to have nothing to do with rrjv i\evd£piov Ka\ov/jLtvrjv TroubeLav. For Homer he has only abuse. Sextus Empiricus was referring mainly to the Epi¬ curean views when he said ( Adv . Math. I, 298) that, so far as it lies with the poets, their art is not only useless to life but actually injurious; for poetry is a stronghold, or confirmation, of men’s passions. (Aristippus was probably more liberal; see preceding chapter, p. 6). The breakdown of ancient hedonism is owing to the fact that it fails to give the desired security from the chances of life on which its happiness depends. Just this security the modern theory of aesthetic hedonism proposes to offer by seeking the source of pleasure in an art entirely dissevered from the business of life. But the result is an art denuded of solid con¬ tent and a life without meaning. Epicurus was nearer to the truth than is Pater or Croce. For a profound criticism of the source of the modern theories in Hegel’s aesthetic I may refer to the work of my friend Prosser Hall Frye, Romance and Tragedy. EPICURUS 63 kinds of pleasure by a scale of spiritual values which theoretically he denied. Epicurus can number among his followers a sufficient line of artists and scientists, great sol¬ diers and statesmen, sages and prophets; and if a philosophy is to be rated by its finest fruit, he¬ donism may hold up its head among the schools. But even so, taken at its highest, as a true phi¬ losophy and not as a mere incentive to the in¬ stinctive lusts of the flesh, Epicureanism still suffers a grim defeat by any genuine pragmatic test. At the best it was founded on a half-truth. Its error is deep-rooted in the initial assumption of a materialistic monism, and that fault it could never entirely correct, though in practice it elud¬ ed by an inconsistency the grosser consequences of its origin. Certainly, the heart of man craves happiness as its inalienable right; but the hedone which Epicurus could offer as the reward of wis¬ dom, the pleasure whose limit is determined by the elimination, or even by the mental conquest, of all physical pain, is a poor possession in com¬ parison with the eudaimonia which Socrates and Plato found in the soul that has raised its eyes to the everlasting beauty of the Ideal world; or beside that “joy in the Holy Ghost” which leaps out of the language of St. Paul. No doubt the 64 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES human heart needs to be liberated from the vicis¬ situdes of fortune and the visions of a disordered imagination and the terror of death; but the se¬ curity of the Epicurean is a pale substitute for the fair and great hope of the Platonist, or for the assurance of the Christian: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” 27 It was the final charge of Plutarch against the philosophy of hedonism that a life of pleasure was impossible under the rule of Epicurus; and Professor Martha closes his penetrating and generous study of Lucretius with the judicial sentence, that “the true refutation of the doctrine which preaches pleasure is the sadness of its greatest interpreter.” So much must be weighed against any theory of the world which ignorant¬ ly or wantonly shuts its eyes to the reality of “Things more sublime than mortal happiness.” 28 27The Christian was not afraid of the Epicurean watchword. So Basil (l etter ccxlv) : MyjSev irporLporepov rrjs aXrjOela s Kal tt)s oiKelas eavT&p acrcpaXeias Ti.dep.evoi. See The Religion of Plato 301. 28 William Chamberlayne, Pharonnida III, ii, 52. CHAPTER III CYNICS AND STOICS I The long line of Cynics and Stoics, in ^ome respects the most important and significant of the Hellenistic sects, begins with Antisthenes, an Athenian, born about the year 440 b.c. At one time he was a pupil of Gorgias, and to the end his doctrine retained a strong sophistic bias; but later in his career he succumbed, like his an¬ tagonist Aristippus, to the Socratic spell. It is said that, living in Piraeus, he used to walk daily the forty furlongs up to the City to hear Soc¬ rates, and we know from Plato that he became intimate enough with the master to form one of the faithful group who stayed with him through the last day in gaol. At some date, probably after the death of Socrates, he set up his own school in the gymnasium Cynosarges. Hence, presum¬ ably, the name Cynic which attached to his fol¬ lowers, although popular etymology delight- 65 66 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES ed to connect it with the word for dog ( kyon ). In one respect the father of the Cynics agreed with his fellow-pupil from Cyrene: they both, as imperfect Socratics, rejected all the spiritual side of Socrates’ teaching. Both were material¬ ists and sensationalists, in whom the master’s deep concern with the human soul and with its eternal rights and responsibilities struck no answering chord. Antisthenes, apparently, was what Plato would call a semi.-atheist: some kind of God he accepted as a power more or less iden¬ tical with Nature; but it was a God remote from mankind, while the popular worship, to which Socrates conformed, with a shade, it may be, of ironical reservation, was to the Cynic a matter of jest and contempt. So also he repudiated vehemently the Ideal philosophy which Plato developed from the spiritual affirmations of Socrates. “O Plato,” he is said to have exclaimed, “a horse I see, horseness I do not see.” He was the first of the avowed nominalists, or concep- tualists, for whom Ideas have no objective real¬ ity, but are only names or conceptions in the mind. And he was honest enough to carry this nominalism out to its logical conclusion. If our Ideas are pure conceptions of the mind, evoca¬ tions only of our own thinking power, with no CYNICS AND STOICS 67 corresponding reality outside of the mind to which they should conform, and by which they should be controlled, then all Ideas are equally real and equally justifiable, and there is no dis¬ tinction between true and false, no place for con¬ tradiction. “Whatever we say is true: for if we say, we say something; and if we say something, we say that which is; and if we say that which is, we say the truth.” Here was room for a pretty feud, the memory of which remained as a source of amusement to the scandal-mongers of a late generation. 1 Antisthenes satirized Plato in a scurrilous book; and though Plato mentions his antagonist only once, and then merely to include him among those who were present at the death of Socrates, yet the later dialogues are much concerned with refuting this fundamental here¬ sy, which makes a mockery of the philosophic quest of truth. And if Antisthenes was at one with Aristip¬ pus in rejecting the whole spiritual half of the Socratic doctrine, we can see, I think, how he was still drawn to Socrates by the same traits which fascinated the young visitor from Gyrene. He too was looking for freedom and security, freedom from inner perturbations, and secur- iSee e.g., Athenaeus v, 63; xi, 115. 68 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES ity from a world that seemed indifferent, if not hostile, to man’s happiness; and in the autarheia of Socrates he saw these qualities embodied in a manner that piqued his curiosity and dominated his will. So far Antisthenes and Aristippus, as natu¬ ralistic monists, were in harmony, but at this point their paths diverged. To the Cyrenaic it appeared that liberty and security might be ob¬ tained, at little cost, by a prudent calculation in the pursuit of pleasure, through the hedonism, that is to say, which formed a part undoubtedly, but not the whole, of the Socratic teaching. To the Cynic, with his different temper and mind, such a creed appeared not exactly subordinate to a higher truth, as it did to Plato, but intrinsi¬ cally dangerous and subversive of life. He saw that the boasted Habeo , non habeor of Aristip¬ pus was no more than the gilding on the chains of servitude. He felt too clearly the seductions and enervation of pleasure, the pitfalls it dug for unwary feet, and turned from it as from an implacable foe. To such an extreme he went in the expression of this antipathy that he used to say, “Rather let me be mad than feel pleasure”; 2 by which he meant, apparently, not that he was 2 Diog. Laert. VI, 3: M avelrjv /maWov t) rjcdeLrjv. CYNICS AND STOICS 69 opposed to the mere gratification of the senses, for in some respects he was ready enough to in¬ dulge the flesh, 3 but that he refused to distin¬ guish between pleasure and pleasure in such a way as to suffer his conduct to be governed by the need of choice. Virtue ( arete ), not the free dalliance with pleasure, was the parent of self- sufficiency ; that should be the goal of his striv¬ ing, and all things between virtue and vice should be disregarded as indifferent, except as they contributed to this or that end. If anyone aspect of the Socratic doctrine is to be isolated from the rest, this at least is a more orthodox code than the Cyrenaic or the Epicurean hedonism. But for Antisthenes, who discarded the pur¬ suit of pleasure as a snare, and to whom the Ideal happiness of Plato could have no meaning, vir¬ tue was necessarily left without a positive mo¬ tive or outcome, and took the form of a mere hardening of one’s resolve against any accom¬ modation with the world. It could go no further than that quality of steady endurance ( karteria) on which alone the indomitable valour of Socra¬ tes might seem to depend. Or if virtue assumed a positive character at all, it would be by inten¬ sifying passive endurance into a deliberate wel- 3 E.g. ibid.: Xprj toicujtcus Tr\Tjv Kad’ vpias iron)TU)v eip'fjKaai^ ToO yap Kal yhos ia/xiv. The last clause is taken from Aratus (Phaenomena 5), but Paul’s use of the plural “poets” may indicate that he had also in mind the equivalent words of Cleanthes, as indeed by his time the sen¬ timent was a commonplace of philosophy. Mr. Adam, comment¬ ing on the clause, “in him we live and move and have our being,” observes that a Stoic would rather have said, “God lives in us.” CYNICS AND STOICS 83 On earth’s broad ways that wander to and fro, Bearing thine image wheresoe’er we go. Wherefore with songs of praise thy power I will forth shew. Lo ! yonder Heaven, that round the earth is wheeled, Follows thy guidance, still to thee doth yield Glad homage; thine unconquerable hand Such flaming minister, the levin-brand, Wieldeth, a sword two-edged, whose deathless might Pulsates through all that Nature brings to light; Vehicle of the universal Word, that flows Through all, and in the light celestial glows Of stars both great and small. O King of Kings Through ceaseless ages, God, whose purpose brings To birth, whate’er on land or in the sea Is wrought, or in high heaven’s immensity; Save what the sinner works infatuate. N ay, but thou knowest to make crooked straight: Chaos to thee is order: in thine eyes The unloved is lovely, who didst harmonize Things evil with things good, that there should be One Word through all things everlastingly. One Word—whose voice alas ! the wicked spurn; Insatiate for the good their spirits yearn: Yet seeing see not, neither hearing hear God’s universal law, which those revere, By reason guided, happiness who win. The rest, unreasoning, diverse shapes of sin Self-prompted follow: for an idle name Vainly they wrestle in the lists of fame: Others inordinately riches woo, Or dissolute, the joys of flesh pursue. 84 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES Now here^ now there they wander, fruitless still. For ever seeking good and finding ill. Zeus the all-bountiful, whom darkness shrouds, Whose lightning lightens in the thunder-clouds ; Thy children save from error’s deadly sway: Turn thou the darkness from their souls away: Vouchsafe that unto knowledge they attain; For thou by knowledge art made strong to reign O’er all, and all things rulest righteously. So by thee honoured, we will honour thee, Praising thy works continually with songs. As mortals should; nor higher meed belongs E’en to the gods, than justly to adore The universal law for evermore.” For the basis of his logic Zeno took the or¬ ganon of Aristotle, but consistently with the materialism of his physics, made sensation the ultimate source of all thought and knowledge. This department of the Stoic philosophy was for many decades the subject of fierce attack from the sceptics on the one side and from the idealists on the other side. It is not within my province to trace the long and tangled course of this his¬ tory ; only a word must be said in regard to the phantasm kataleptike as the Stoic criterion of knowledge, since with it is involved the ethical system which is our real concern. Now the use of the phrase phantasia katalep - CYNICS AND STOICS 85 tike was more or less modified to meet the hos¬ tile criticism it evoked, but in the main and ulti¬ mately its meaning is clear enough. A phantasia is the impression made in the mind by some ex¬ ternal object through the senses, and this im¬ pression was often understood in a gross manner as resembling the figure made upon wax by a seal. Kataleptike ordinarilywould signify grasp¬ ing, or comprehending; but it may also, in ac¬ cordance with the common ambiguity of active and passive in Greek, signify grasped, or com¬ prehended; and there has been a good deal of dispute among modern critics as to whether a phantasia so defined implies an impression made when the sense clearly grasps and comprehends the object perceived, or when it is grasped by the object, or indeed as to which of the two grasps or is grasped . 10 In either case it was an impres¬ sion so distinct and vivid and consistent and per¬ manent as to carry its own conviction of certain¬ ty and to be its own criterion of truth. Through such impressions the objects of sense are, so to speak, exactly reproduced in the mind, and we loSextus Emp., Adv. Math. vii, 257, describes the kataleptic pro¬ cess vividly: M 6vov oi>x l tcov Tpix&v, (pavt, \ap,(3dveTcu, KaTcunracra hp^ds eis crvyKaTadeaiv. 86 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES attain to a perfect comprehension, katalepsis, of the nature of the world as it is . 11 It is no wonder that the malicious critics of the Porch jumped at such a thesis and worried it as a cat plays with its victim. By such a criterion, they would ask, how do you distinguish between a wise man and a fool, when each swears with equal conviction to the vigour of his impression and the clarity of his opinion? It was apparently Arcesilas, founder of the Middle Academy, who started the mischief, and for a century and more there was a running battle between the Stoic supporters of katalepsis and the sceptical main- tainers of akatalepsia (“non-comprehensibil¬ ity”), which seems to have afforded vast enter¬ tainment to all concerned. One of the stories of this warfare is commonly passed over by the his¬ torians of philosophy as too frivolous for their graver Muse; but as it was quoted by the godly Eusebius in his Preparation for the Gospel, and as it really has some significance—at least for nThe part played by judgment as distinct from sensation in the final act of comprehension, the existence or not of phantasies de¬ rived from an immaterial source, are questions much agitated. I do not pretend to have any firm foothold on this quaking ground where Stoic psychology and epistemology meet. At bottom it should seem that the Stoics were trying to find some equivalent for Plato’s definition of knowledge (Tlieaetetus 2 08b) as opdij do£a per a \6yov, but by their monism, which leaves no place for a dis¬ tinction between 56£a ( i.e . atcrOrjcns) and \6yos, were driven about in a vicious circle. Fortunately my theme absolves me from en¬ tering upon this argument; Bonhoffer ( E'pictet und die Stoa 222 ff. et al.) discusses it at sufficient length. CYNICS AND STOICS 87 any one who is inclined to take lightly all the¬ ories of knowledge, ancient or modern,—it may find a place in these pages. It is related of a cer¬ tain Lacydes, the successor of Arcesilas as head of the Academy, and so, nominally, a follower of Plato. Now this Lacydes, we are told, was a stingy fellow who used to dole out the stores to his household with a tight fist. But though he acted as his own steward, he did not like to carry the keys about with him; and so he adopted this habit. Having locked the pantry, he would put the key in a desk, seal the desk with his signet, and then throw the signet through the keyhole into the pantry. When next he wished to enter the room, he would break the seal of the desk, get the key, and so on. Naturally the slaves soon got wind of this procedure, and took ad¬ vantage of it. In his absence they would raid the pantry, and then lock the room just as their master had done. Lacydes to his surprise would find empty vessels where he had left them full, and could not understand how this happened unless his eyes deceived him. However he had heard that Arcesilas, of the Academy, was ex¬ pounding the doctrine of incomprehensibility ( akatalepsia ) against the Stoics, that is to say, 88 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES was teaching that we can derive no certain know¬ ledge from what we see and hear. So to school to Arcesilas our Lacydes went, and was convinced that the new doctrine of incomprehensibility ex¬ plained the deception of his eyes. One day he in¬ vited a friend to his house, and began to lay bare the mysteries of scepticism, giving his experi¬ ence with the pantry as a proof of the fact that our senses are no criterion of knowledge. “What, he argued, “could Zeno himself answer to my demonstration of incomprehensibility? With my own hands I lock up everything, seal the desk, and throw the signet into the room; and then when I come back, there are the signet and the key just where they should be, but the stores have all the appearance of not being as I left them. What’s to be made of it? No thief could have got in, because the key is sealed up. It’s just that we can’t put any dependence on our senses.” At this tale the friend, who was a merry wag, broke out into uproarious laughter, and explained to the victim what had happened. Lacydes thought it prudent to carry the signet about with him after that, and no longer used his storeroom as a demonstration of incomprehen¬ sibility ; nevertheless, he continued his sceptical studies just the same. But the slaves were not to CYNICS AND STOICS 89 be outdone. Whether from some wicked Stoic or otherwise, they got their instruction, and made their plans accordingly. They simply broke the seal on the desk, took the key, pilfered the pan¬ try, locked it up, put the key back in the desk, which they then left unsealed or sealed with any signet they could find. When Lacydes saw the state of the desk and accused them of tampering with the seal, they calmly assured him that his senses deceived him and that everything was exactly as he had left it. “For you know,” they would say, “one can’t form any sound opinion from what one sees; and as memory is a kind of opinion, that too is quite untrustworthy. You yourself were saying as much to a friend in our hearing.” Then Lacydes would argue, and the slaves would counter-argue, until it sounded as if all the denizens of the Academy and the Porch were at one another’s throats, and no one could tell who was Academician and who was Stoic. Lacydes kept this up until he got into a state of utter distraction, and could only cry out in rage to gods and neighbours. At last he settled the difficulties by staying at home and keeping watch on the door. To the slaves who tried to ply him with the old doubting questions, he would say: “My boys, that’s the way we talk about these HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 90 things in the schools, hut we live differently .” 12 Lacydes, at least as he comes to us in the tra¬ dition,^ not much more than a buffoon, playing a farcical interlude on the stage of the Academy between the solemn parts of Arcesilas and Car- neades. But out of the mouths of fools wisdom sometimes proceeds, and perhaps the soundest conclusion to all epistemological debates is the genial ejaculation that we talk one way in the schools and live another way. What else is to be made of any argument on the process of know¬ ing when every step of the argument must be based on an assumption of this same process of knowing? The ethical creed, for the sake of which Zeno built up his physics and logic, can best be studied in the teaching of Epictetus, who in the main returned to the original principles of the sect, though no doubt something of the Platonic tone introduced by certain schismatics still clung to his mind. It will be sufficient to note here two points. In the first place, the Cynical contempt for the conventions of decency remained as a kind of arnari aliquid in the Stoic school, con¬ trasting painfully with its finer vein of moraliz¬ ing. There are sayings quoted from the early 12 I have paraphrased the story as quoted by Eusebius ( Praep. Ev. XIV, vii) from Numenius. CYNICS AND STOICS 91 masters of the Porch expressing their, theoret¬ ical at least, indifference to the most abhorrent of unnatural vices. And this, too, is a logical se¬ quence of a monism which denies all ultimate distinctions, as Plato showed in the Gorgias. In the second place, it is clear that the whole ration¬ al system of Zeno was worked out for the pur¬ pose of achieving that inner and moral security which was the desire also of Cyrenaic and Epi¬ curean but was plainly incompatible with a phi¬ losophy of pleasure and atomistic chance. Only in a world absolutely rational and continuous, absolutely at one with itself, and only by a cri¬ terion of knowledge which enabled us to repro¬ duce such a world exactly in our own reason, could man, as the Stoic believed, be secure in the rational government of his own life. This is the significance of the famous maxim “to live con¬ sistently with nature,” or “in accordance with nature,” which from the time of Cleanthes was repeated as the catchword of Stoic ethics. But— and this is the dire Nemesis that tortured their logic—by the means adopted for attaining such security they deprived themselves of the liberty which was, and is, equally the aim of philosophy. When reason has reduced the world to a fatalis¬ tic machine, any talk of freedom ( and the Stoics HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 9 2 talked much of it) becomes a pitiful mockery. If Cyrenaic and Epicurean saw in the world a place of liberty without security, it may be said that the Stoic universe is for the soul of man a place of security without liberty. Yet both Epi¬ curean and Stoic knew and felt deeply that our security and liberty cannot be severed, but are craved as one thing. Meanwhile, to return to the historical devel¬ opment of Stoicism, it is sufficient for our pur¬ pose to mention the fact that after Cleanthes the leadership of the school passed into the hands of Chrysippus ( ca. 280-205), who remains, when all criticism has been made, one of the supreme masters of dialectic. The task of Chrysippus was to develop and organize the doctrines laid down by Zeno into a vast metaphysical system. It was said of him: “Had there been no Chrysippus, there had been no Porch.” Then came the panic and the defection of the so-called Middle Porch. From the virulent attacks to which the contra¬ dictions inherent in their principles laid the Stoics bare, Panaetius (flllB.c.) and Posido¬ nius (f9l) sought relief by trying to merge a Platonic psychology with the rigid monism of Zeno. 1STo doubt the results of this “conflation,” or “contamination,” were interesting, and since CYNICS AND STOICS 93 the publication of Schmekel’s study of DieMitt- lere Stoa (1892) Posidonius in particular has become for the historians of philosophy a figure of almost superstitious reverence, to whom they are prone to trace in one way or another the spir¬ itualistic currents that prevailed in later Greek thought. But there is a good deal of pure con¬ jecture in all this; and at bottom the changes introduced by Panaetius and Posidonius, so far from relieving the Stoic system of its inherent difficulties, only added a new source of mental confusion. The radical dualism of Plato and the absolute rationalism of Zeno can never be made to lie down comfortably together. CHAPTER IV EPICTETUS 1 I Epictetus was a Phrygian-born slave of Nero’s f reedmanEpaphroditus. He was lame, f rombirth or by disease, as the cause is variously reported. But Celsus, the anti-Christian, has a different story: ‘‘When his master was twisting his leg, Epictetus only smiled, and said calmly, ‘You will break it.’ And when it was broken, ‘I told you so.’ Did your God [Jesus] say anything like that under torture?” 1 Whatever may be the truth of this, Epictetus, at some time, gained his freedom, and set up a school of philosophy in Rome, continuing the Stoic lessons he had learned under Musonius Rufus. His language was Greek, which he spoke with vigour and pre¬ cision, if not with elegance. In the year 94 (?) Domitian banished the philosophers, and Epic¬ tetus transferred his classes to Nicopolis in iQrigen, Contra Celsum vii, 53. 94 EPICTETUS 95 Epirus. He died in old age, having won respect for himself as a man, and wide renown as a teacher. Epictetus wrote nothing. But one of his hear¬ ers, the historian Arrian, took notes of his lec¬ tures, probably in shorthand, and published the gist of these in several books of Discourses , out of which he also compiled a brief compendium, or Manual. Fortunately Arrian, as he declares in his preface and as the text confirms, has repro¬ duced pretty faithfully the direct, unadorned speech of the lecturer, with the result that, though we know so little of Epictetus’ life, he is extra¬ ordinarily vivid to us as a teacher; it is as if we were actually in the class-room, and heard the lame old man, as he calls himself, delivering his rather disjointed, but direct and powerful ap¬ peals. We can almost see the pupils as they sit taking notes, asking a question now and then or putting in an objection. For the most part they would seem to have belonged to the upper and official classes, young men who came over to this provincial town to find some guide which should take the place of the older religious sanctions, or to learn the way to strength and a quiet heart in a world filled with fears and alarms, or mere¬ ly to acquire such readiness of tongue and such HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 96 adroitness in argument as would enable them to shine in a polished and disputatious society. These last were apparently the more numerous; at least their presence vexed the soul of the stern disciplinarian, and over and over again he turns aside to ridicule their vanity and to warn them that they are wasting their time. He is not there to impart cleverness in the exchange of paltry phrases, but to train the will and prepare for the rude contest of life. “The ship is sinking,” he cries out to those who wish to jump immediately into the subtleties of logic, “the sea is breaking over you, yet you would hoist the topsails !” 2 Occasionally some traveller strolls into the hall where this strange professor of philosophy is holding forth, whose fame has reached him through the noise of the Empire’s business; and sometimes the sightseer is greeted with such words about himself as must have sent him out with tingling ears. A notable scholar, who had been detected in adultery, ventures in, and hears a terrible diatribe on the baseness of such a sin. What, one wonders, were the pupils doing while the master was pouring denunciation on the poor victim? How did the victim take it? Did he 2 This is the tone and almost the words of Buddha in regard to metaphysical dispute. EPICTETUS 97 sit patiently, with a Stoic smile, through the storm? Constantly also the master talks about him¬ self, humbly, proudly, with wistful earnestness. Once he has been telling about a pardoned exile who had been in charge of the com-supply in Rome, and who had protested to Epictetus, on his way back, that the rest of his life should be devoted to retirement and tranquillity—only to plunge, as Epictetus predicted, more deeply than ever into ambitious schemes on reaching Rome. And then Epictetus suddenly thinks of himself: “Do I say that the creature man is not to be active? Heaven forbid! But what is it that fet¬ ters our faculty of action? Take myself first: when day comes, 1 remind myself a little as to what lesson I ought to read to my pupils. Then in a moment I find myself saying, ‘But what do I really care what sort of lesson I give to this man or that? The first thing is for me to sleep.’ And yet, how can the business of those world¬ lings be compared in importance with ours? If you attend to what they are doing you will see the difference. They do nothing all day long ex¬ cept vote, dispute, deliberate about a handful of corn or an acre of land, and petty profits of this sort. Is there any resemblance between receiv¬ ing and reading a petition such as this: T beg HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES 98 you to let me export a little corn/ and a petition such as, ‘I beg you to inquire from Chrysippus how the universe is governed, and what position the rational creature holds in it; inquire too who you are and what is good for you, and what is evil’ ? What have these petitions in common? Do both demand the same attention? Is it equally shameful to neglect one and to neglect the other? “What is my conclusion? Are we elders alone indolent and sleepy? 1STay, the fault is much rather with you young men. For, indeed, we old folk, when we see young men playing, are only too eager and ready to join their play. Much more, if I saw them thoroughly awakened and eager to share my studies, should I also be eager myself to take my studies seriously.” 3 II As for the system of philosophy expounded by Epictetus, there was not much of originality here, and, indeed, originality in the matter of his teaching was the last thing he aimed at. In the main his lectures, apparently, took the form of reading and interpreting the Stoic doctrine of Chrysippus, though this formal side of his in- sMost of the quotations from Epictetus in this chapter are from the excellent translation by P. E. Matheson (Clarendon Press, 1916). But in some cases I have altered the language freely, so that Mr. Matheson should not be held responsible for any word or phrase without reference to his work. EPICTETUS 99 struction is for the most part passed over by Arrian. Philosophy for Epictetus, as for the other teachers of his day, was divided into three heads: physics, ethics, and logic; and if he had little to say about the first of these branches, its subject matter, nevertheless, lay in his mind as the background of all his reasoning. The mater¬ ialism of the earlier school had been softened in the course of time; there is scarcely a hint in Epictetus of the primitive stuff of the world, and he would willingly let us forget that the soul is only a finer substance than those of which our bodies are composed. The identification of that fiery element with reason (logos) had be¬ come more complete, and his thoughts turned rather to God and to God’s providential gov¬ ernment of the world than to any mechanical law of nature. Yet if the materialism of the school has been shoved into the background, their monism, theoretically at least, has suffer¬ ed no relaxation. The Providence of God is an absolute fatality, and whatever is, by virtue of its necessity, of its very being, is right. Confronted by the great problem of evil as a disturbing factor in the nature of things, Epic¬ tetus, in what may be called his objective theory of ethics, contented himself with the familiar 100 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES paradox which the Stoics had learnt from Plato, while passing over Plato’s alleviation of its irri¬ tating inadequacy. 4 For the composition of the universe as a whole it is necessary that there should be an infinite number of parts each in¬ complete in itself. What seems evil to any indi¬ vidual member of the corporate body is this inevitable incompleteness. The perfection and well-being of the whole are conditioned by the imperfection and limitation of the parts. To this explanation Epictetus followed his predecessors in adding another, which is nothing more than the same physical paradox expressed in the terms of ethics: our character—and the happi¬ ness springing from character—depends on the strength derived from resistance to opposition; the suffering which we call evil is merely the gymnastic exercise by which we acquire self- mastery, and as such is our good in disguise. So Heracles would never have been himself or real¬ ized his divinity but for his victory of endurance through the twelve labours. It is patent that such an explanation leaves the heart of the mat¬ ter untouched, and affords no answer to the troublesome query why the perfection of the world as a whole should require the conscious *See The Religion of Plato 145 ff., 235. EPICTETUS 101 imperfection of the parts, or why our good must be wrung out of suffering. But we need not be too severe with Epictetus for juggling with a sophism which, time-worn and frayed as it is, still goes on doing duty after these thousands of years. Indeed, Epictetus himself was aware of the insufficiency of such an answer, taken alone, to the insistent problem of philosophy. He was always and above all a moralist, and the voice of conscience was still an ugly fact which he had to meet. Thinking of the world wherein men live, he might say that whatever is is right, but think¬ ing of man himself, speaking from the depths of his own consciousness, he was bound to consider the prolepseis, as the Stoics called them, the primary presuppositions, or preconceptions, of good and evil, the conviction common to all men that some things are well with them and other things are not well with them. The task of the Stoic philosopher, then, was to find some term of reconciliation for the optimism of his monis¬ tic physics and the ethical dualism which as a true moralist he could not escape. So much will be clear from the Stoic point of view: since the world itself is absolutely deter¬ mined and absolutely right, the distinction of 102 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES good and evil lies not in the nature of things, but is purely subjective; it is in ourselves, involved somehow in our act of imagining such a distinc¬ tion. It is we who have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and for ourselves corrupted what is incorruptible. “All things are opinion,” 5 said Marcus Aurelius—which is not equivalent to the Shakespearian maxim: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” but means rather: All things are good although thinking may make them to appear ill. That is the beginning, and that is the end, of Stoicism, summed up in the one word dogma (“judgment,” “opinion,” “the way things seem to us”), which runs through all the chapters of Epictetus like the binding refrain of a chant. What, then, more precisely are these dog¬ mata? The reply to this question breaks into a group of propositions which occur either alone or in various combinations with almost dam¬ nable iteration; they form what I may call the Stoic Wheel, though the phrase itself was not in use. THE STOIC WHEEL 1. What are dogmata? Certain things are ours belonging to us, in a sense we. 5 xii, 8: Ildvra vTrt)\r)\pis. EPICTETUS 103 Other things are not ours, another’s, for¬ eign, alien, not we. 2. What are ours? what not ours? Ours are things in our power, under our control. Not ours are things not in our power, not under our control. 3. What are in our power? whatnotinourpower? In our power are things voluntary, mat¬ ters of our will, choice. Not in our power are things involuntary . 4. What are voluntary? what involuntary? We can exercise our will in the use of impressions, or phantasies. We cannot exercise our will in the im¬ pressions themselves. 6 But what is meant by this “use” of impres¬ sions which we have reached in our attempt to define the nature of dogmata? Now an impres¬ sion, phantasy, phantasia, in the simplest terms is the change produced in the mind by an exter¬ nal object, the image that corresponds with what we perceive and that remains after the imme¬ diate act of perception. The difference between an impression and the use of an impression may be illustrated thus. A man is on a vessel at sea, and looking out receives an image, or picture, of eOurs, l'5ta; not ours, aX\6rpia’, in our power, ra£(p’ rjpup; voluntary, TvpoaipeTiKOL ; will, -jrpoalpecris-, impressions, cpapraaLai-, use of impres¬ sions, x/>? 7