THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 MRS. VIRGINIA B. SPORER
 
 PHILOSOPHIES ANCIENT AND MODERN 
 
 EPICURUS
 
 RELIGIONS: ANCIENT AND MODERN 
 
 Animism. By EDWARD CLODD, author of The Story of Creation. 
 Pantheism. By JAMES ALLANSON PICTON, author of The Religion of the 
 
 Universe. 
 The Religions of Ancient China. By Professor GILES, LL. D. , Professor 
 
 of Chinese in the University of Cambridge. 
 The Religion Of Ancient Greece. By JANE HARRISON, Lecturer at 
 
 Newnham College, Cambridge, author of Prolegomena to Study of Greek 
 
 Religion. 
 Islam. By the Rt, Hon. AMEER ALI SYED, of the Judicial Committee of His 
 
 Majesty's Privy Council, author of The Spirit of Islam and Ethics of Islam. 
 Magic and Fetishism. By Dr. A. C. H ADDON, F.R.S., Lecturer on 
 
 Ethnology at Cambridge University. 
 The Religion of Ancient Egypt. By Professor W. M. FLINDERS PETKIE, 
 
 F.R.S. 
 The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria. By THEOPHILUS G. PINCHES, 
 
 late of the British Museum. 
 Early Buddhism. By Professor RHYS DAVIDS, LL.D., late Secretary of 
 
 The Royal Asiatic Society. 
 Hinduism. By Dr. L. D. BARNETT, of the Department of Oriental Printed 
 
 Books and MSS., British Museum. 
 Scandinavian Religion. By WILLIAM A. CRAIGIE, Joint Editor of the 
 
 Oxford English Dictionary. 
 Celtic Religion. By Professor ANWYL, Professor of Welsh at University 
 
 College, Aberystwyth. 
 The Mythology of Ancient Britain and Ireland. By CHARLES 
 
 SQUIKE, author of The Mythology of the British Islands. 
 
 Judaism. By ISRAEL ABRAHAMS, Lecturer in Talmudic Literature in Cam- 
 bridge University, author of Jewish Life in the Middle Ages. 
 
 The Religion of Ancient Rome. By CYRIL BAILEY, M.A. 
 
 Shinto, The Ancient Religion of Japan. By w. G. ASTON, c. M. G. 
 
 The Religion of Ancient Mexico and Peru. By LEWIS SPENCE, M.A. 
 
 Early Christianity. By S. B. BLACK, Professor at M'Gill University. 
 
 The Psychological Origin and Nature of Religion. By Professor 
 J. H. LEUBA. 
 
 The Religion of Ancient Palestine. By STANLEY A. COOK. 
 
 ManiCheeism. By F. C. CONYBEARE. (Shortly.) 
 
 PHILOSOPHIES 
 
 Early Greek Philosophy. By A. W. BENN, author of The Philosophy of 
 
 Greece, Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century. 
 Stoicism. By Professor ST. GEOROE STOCK, author of Deductive Logic, 
 
 editor of the Apology of Plato, etc. 
 Plato. By Professor A. E. TAYLOR, St. Andrews University, author of 
 
 The Problem of Conduct. 
 Scholasticism. By Father RICKABY, S. J. 
 Hobbes. By Professor A. E. TAYLOR. 
 Locke. By Professor ALEXANDER, of Owens College. 
 Comte and Mill. By T. WHITTAKER, author of The Neoplatonists Apollo- 
 
 nius ofTyana and other Essays. 
 Herbert Spencer. By W. H. HUDSON, author of An Introduction to 
 
 Spencer's Philosophy. 
 Schopenhauer. By T. WHITTAKER. 
 
 Berkeley. By Professor CAMPBELL FRASER, D.C.L., LL.D. 
 Swedenborg. By Dr. SEWALL. (Immediately.) 
 Lucretius and the Atomists. By EDWARD CLODD. 
 Nietzsche : His Life and Works. By ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI.
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 By 
 
 A. E. TAYLOR 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 2I4-22O EAST 23RD STREET
 
 Printed in Great Britain by 
 
 T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty 
 
 at the University Press, Edinburgh
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 THIS little volume is, as its title proclaims, a brief 
 study of the thought and temperament of a remarkable 
 man, not the history of a scientific school. The band 
 of comrades who gathered round Epicurus in his 
 Garden were held together not so much by a common 
 intellectual interest in the pursuit of truth as by the 
 ties of personal affection among themselves and per- 
 sonal devotion to a master whom they regarded more 
 as a Redeemer from the ills of life than as a mere 
 thinker. That the feelings of the Epicurean society 
 of a later date were of the same kind is amply proved 
 by the tone of the poem of Lucretius. Atomism as 
 a scientific hypothesis owes nothing to Epicurus or to 
 any of his followers ; he found it already in existence, 
 and every innovation which he made upon its existing 
 form was, from the scientific point of view, a change 
 for the worse. As a man of science, his place is with 
 the circle-squarers and the earth-flatteners. This, 
 together with the fact that a volume on ancient 
 Atomism is announced to appear in due time in the 
 present series, will explain why I have said no more 
 about the really scientific Atomism of the fifth 
 century B.C. than was absolutely necessary to place 
 the indifference of Epicurus and his followers to 
 science in the proper light. For similar reasons I 
 
 2042143
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 have avoided dealing with Lucretius, the one man 
 of genius in the Epicurean following, except where 
 it has been necessary to cite him as a mere witness to 
 the Epicurean tradition. The one point of interest 
 to the student of the history of physical theories 
 which has, as I hope, been made clearer than is usual 
 in works on ancient Atomism is that the Epicurean 
 Physics are throughout the result of an unhappy 
 attempt, which no clear-headed thinker would ever 
 have undertaken, to fuse together the radically in- 
 compatible doctrines of Democritus and Aristotle. 
 If the establishment of this important point has made 
 my second chapter into something like the exposure 
 of a charlatan, the fault is not mine. For a different 
 reason I have said little as to the few facts definitely 
 known about the illustrious obscurities of the Epi- 
 curean succession. I trust some compensation may 
 be found in the chapter on the anti-Epicurean polemic 
 carried on by the Platonic Academy. 
 
 The volume has been throughout written from the 
 original sources with little use of any modern works 
 on Epicurus, except, of course, Usener's invaluable 
 collection of his extant writings and fragments, and 
 Koerte's compilation of the fragments of Metrodorus. 
 I trust that my treatment in this way may have 
 gained in freshness something of what it has, no 
 doubt, lost in erudition. 
 
 A. E. TAYLOR. 
 ST. ANDREWS. July 1910.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 i. THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 1 
 
 n. THE NATURE OF REALITY 35 
 
 in. THE SALVATION OF MAN 80 
 
 iv. EPICURUS AND HIS CRITICS .... 97 
 
 APPENDIX SELECT APOPHTHEGMS FROM EPI- 
 CURUS AND METRODORUS .... 115 
 
 A CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE USEFUL TO THE READER 
 
 OF THIS BOOK 119 
 
 A SHORT LIST OF BOOKS USEFUL TO THE 
 
 ENGLISH STUDENT OF EPICURUS 121 
 
 vii
 
 EPICUEUS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 WHEN we turn from Plato and Aristotle, the great 
 constructive thinkers of the fourth century before 
 Christ, to the study of the new sects or schools, that 
 of Epicurus was, in date of foundation, slightly older 
 than the others, which came into being early in the 
 third century, under the successors of Alexander, we 
 feel at first as if we had passed into a new moral 
 atmosphere. 
 
 Philosophy seems to have dwindled from the 
 magnificent attempt to arrive at scientific knowledge 
 of God, man, and nature into a mere theory of conduct; 
 and, in the theory of conduct itself, the old conception 
 of the individual man as essentially a member of a 
 community freely banded together to live the 'good 
 life,' in virtue of which Plato and Aristotle could treat 
 what we call ' ethics ' as a mere part of the wider study 
 of society, its aims and institutions (Politics), to have 
 A I
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 given place to a purely individualistic doctrine of 
 morals which has lost the sense of the inseparable union 
 of the civilised man with the civilised society. So 
 keenly has this difference of tone been felt that writers 
 on philosophy have almost always adopted the death 
 of Aristotle as one of those historical land-marks 
 which indicate the ending of an old era, and the 
 beginning of a new, like the English Revolution of 
 1688 or the French Revolution of 1789. The cause 
 of so great a change has been variously sought in the 
 special conditions of life in the third century. Under 
 the hard pressure of the Macedonian dynasts, it has 
 been said, Philosophy naturally became identical with 
 the theory of conduct, because, in such untoward times, 
 the effort to understand the world had to be abandoned 
 for the task of making life bearable. The theory of 
 statesmanship shrank into a mere doctrine of morals 
 because with the battle of Chaeronea the free life of 
 the independent city-states came once for all to an 
 end. Others, again, have seen the key to the 
 developments of Philosophy in the third century in 
 a return of Greek thought from the 'idealism' of 
 Plato and Aristotle into the materialism, which, as 
 is alleged, was natural to it. There is an element 
 of truth in these views, but they are none the less, 
 as they stand, thoroughly unhistorical. 
 
 It is true, to be sure, that under the Macedonian 
 rulers the ordinary man was cut loose from the im- 
 mediate participation in public affairs of moment 
 
 2
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 which had been characteristic of the life of the 
 sovereign city-state, and that individualism in ethics 
 is the natural counterpart of cosmopolitanism in public 
 life. It is also true that both the Epicurean and the 
 Stoic systems regarded the theory of the chief good 
 for man and the right rule of life as the culminating 
 achievement of Philosophy, and that both tended, in 
 their doctrine of nature, to revert to views which are 
 curiously reactionary as compared with those of Plato 
 and Aristotle. But it is false to suppose that the 
 death of Aristotle or the appearance of Epicurus as a 
 teacher really marks any solution of historical 
 continuity. From the time of Pythagoras at least 
 Philosophy had always been to the Greek mind what 
 personal religion is to ourselves, a ' way of life,' that 
 is a means to the salvation of the soul, and this 
 conception is no less prominent in Plato and Aristotle, 
 when they are rightly read, than in Epicurus and 
 Zeno. And, with regard to the alleged effects on 
 Philosophy of the disappearance of the old life of the 
 free city-state, it is important to recollect that Aristotle 
 composed his Politics under the Macedonian regime, 
 and that the Athens of Pericles had ceased to exist, 
 except as a mere shadow of its former past, before 
 Plato wrote the Republic. If any single date can be 
 taken as signalising the end of the old order, it should 
 rather be that of the surrender of Athens to Lysander, 
 or even that of the defeat of Nicias before Syracuse, 
 than that of the collapse of the anti-Macedonian agita- 
 
 3
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 tion of Demosthenes and Hypereides on the field of 
 Chaeronea. 1 
 
 Similarly the cosmopolitanism and individualism 
 of the Epicurean and Stoic ethics is no new de- 
 parture, nor even a reaction to the attitude of the 
 ' Sophists ' of the fifth century, but a direct continuance 
 of traditions which had never died out. Epicurus is 
 directly connected by a series of discernible though 
 little known predecessors with Democritus, just as 
 Zeno is with Antisthenes and Diogenes. Nor is it true 
 that the third century was a period of intellectual 
 stagnation. It is the age of the foundation of the 
 great Museum and Library at Alexandria, of the 
 development of literary criticism into a craft, of the 
 creation of the organised and systematic study of 
 history and chronology, and the compilation of full 
 and exact observations of natural history in the widest 
 sense of the term. Above all, it is the time to which 
 belong the greatest of the Greek mathematicians, and 
 astronomers, Eudoxus, Euclid, Eratosthenes, Aris- 
 tarchus of Samos, Apollonius of Perga, Archimedes. 
 
 The notion that a century so full of original scientific 
 work was one of intellectual sterility is probably due 
 
 1 The conception of Chaeronea as par excellence the ' bad 
 victory, fatal to liberty ' comes in the end from Plutarch to 
 whom it was natural as a Boeotian. Boeotia's hour of glory, 
 the brief and brilliant career of Epameinondas, belonged to 
 the fourth century, and her political importance ceased for 
 ever with the annihilation of the ' sacred band ' at Chaeronea. 
 For Greece at large the Macedonian victory had much less 
 significance. 
 
 4
 
 to a simple historical accident. For the most part the 
 writings of the successors of Plato and Aristotle, as 
 well as those of the early Stoics, happen not to have 
 been preserved to us. Hence we readily tend to 
 forget that the scientific and philosophical work of 
 the Academy and Lyceum was vigorously propagated 
 all through the period in which the new schools were 
 seeking to establish themselves, and that the Stoics, 
 the most important of the new sects, were not merely 
 keenly interested in 'Physics,' but were also devoted 
 to minute researches into Formal Logic, much of which, 
 in the shape in which the Middle Ages have handed 
 it down to us, has been inherited directly from them. 
 Hence we come to look on the indifference to logic 
 and scientific Physics which was characteristic of the 
 temperament of Epicurus as if it was a universal 
 feature of 'Post-Aristotelian' thought, and falsely 
 ascribe to the age what is really true of the man. Of 
 the age it would be much more true to say that it was 
 one of devotion to the advancement of special sciences 
 rather than to the elaboration of fresh general points 
 of view in Philosophy. In this respect it is closely 
 parallel with the middle of our own nineteenth 
 century, Avhen the interest in philosophical speculation 
 which had culminated in the ' absolute Philosophy ' of 
 Hegel gave place to absorption in the empirical study 
 of Nature and History. 
 
 Having said so much to guard ourselves against a 
 common misunderstanding we may proceed to consider 
 
 5
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 what is known of the personal life and habits of 
 Epicurus. Our chief source of information is the so- 
 called Life of Epicurus which forms the last section of 
 the ill-digested scrap-book known as the Lives of the 
 Philosophers by Laertius Diogenes. 1 (Of additional 
 matter from other sources we have little beyond one 
 or two unimportant letters of Epicurus himself which 
 have been preserved, along with much later Epicurean 
 materials, under the lava which overwhelmed the city 
 of Herculaneum). In its present form the work of 
 Diogenes only dates from the middle of the third 
 century A.D., and, indeed, hardly deserves to be called 
 a ' work ' at all, since it can be shown to contain notes 
 which must have been made by generations of succes- 
 sive readers, and seems never to have been subjected 
 to the final revision of a single editor. Its value, for 
 us, depends on the fact that it is largely made up of 
 notices drawn from much more ancient authorities 
 who are often quoted by name. This is particularly 
 the case with the Life of Epicurus which is, in the 
 main, drawn from the statements of Epicurus himself, 
 his intimate friends, and his contemporary opponents, 
 
 1 The view of Cobet followed in my Plato in the present 
 series, that ' Laertius Diogenes ' means Diogenes of Laerte, is 
 mistaken. The double name is a mere instance of the fashion, 
 current among the Greek-speaking citizens of the Roman 
 Empire, in the third century A.D., of copying the Roman 
 practice, according to which a man had, besides his personal 
 name (praenomen), a second name (nomen) indicating his gens 
 or clan, e.g. Gnaeus Pompeius, Titus Livius, Gains Manlius, 
 Marcus Antonius.
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 and may thus be taken as, on the whole, a fair repre- 
 sentation of what was known or inferred about him 
 by the Alexandrian writers of 'Successions,' or Hand- 
 books to the history of Philosophy, the earliest of 
 whom date from the latter part of the third century 
 B.C. For this reason, and for the sake of giving the 
 reader a specimen of the biographical material avail- 
 able in the study of ancient Philosophy in a specially 
 favourable case, I proceed to give a complete rendering 
 of the strictly biographical part of Diogenes' account 
 of Epicurus from the text of Usener. 
 
 ' Epicurus, an Athenian, son of Neocles and Chaeres- 
 trata, of the township of Gargettus, and of the 
 house of the Philaidae, 1 according to Metrodorus in his 
 work On Good Birth. Heracleides, in the Epitome of 
 Sotion, and others say that he was brought up in 
 Samos, where the Athenians had made a plantation, 
 and only came to Athens at the age of eighteen when 
 Xenocrates was conducting his school in the Academy 
 and Aristotle at Chalcis (i.e. 323/2 B.C.). After the 
 death of Alexander of Macedon and the expulsion of 
 the Athenians by Perdiccas, he followed his father 
 (they say) to Colophon. He spent some while there 
 and gathered disciples round him, and then returned 
 to Athens in the year of Anaxicrates. For a time he 
 pursued Philosophy in association with others ; after- 
 
 1 The Philaidae were a well-known house of old-established 
 nobility with a legendary pedigree going back to Ajax and 
 Aeacus.
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 wards he established the special sect called by his 
 name and appeared on his own account. He says 
 himself that he first touched Philosophy at the age 
 of fourteen. But Apollodorus the Epicurean says 
 in Bk. i. of his Life of Epicurus, that he was led to 
 Philosophy by dissatisfaction with his schoolmasters 
 who had failed to explain to him Hesiod's lines about 
 Chaos. Hermippus says that he had been an ele- 
 mentary schoolmaster himself but afterwards fell in 
 with the books of Democritus and threw himself at 
 once into Philosophy, and that this is why Timon 
 says of him : 
 
 From the island of Saruos the loudest and last 
 
 Of the swaggering scientists came ; 
 'Twas a dominie's brat whose defects in bon ton 
 
 Might have put the creation to shame. 
 
 His brothers, too, were converted by him and 
 followed his Philosophy. There were three of them, 
 and their names were Neocles, Charidemus, and 
 Aristobulus, as we are told by Philodemus the Epi- 
 curean in his Compendium of Philosophers, Bk. x. 
 Another associate was a slave of his called Mys, as 
 Myronianus says in his Summary of Historical Parallels. 
 Diotimus the Stoic, who hated him, has calumniated 
 him savagely by producing fifty lewd letters as the 
 work of Epicurus. So has he who collected under the 
 name of Epicurus the correspondence ascribed to 
 Chrysippus. Other calumniators are Poseidonius the 
 Stoic, Nicolaus and Sotion in the twelve books entitled 
 
 8
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 An Answer to Diodes, which deal with the observance 
 of the twentieth day of the month, 1 and Dionysius of 
 Halicarnassus. They actually say that he used to 
 accompany his mother on her rounds into cottages, 
 and recite her spells for her, and that he helped his 
 father to teach children their letters for a miserable 
 pittance. Nay, that he played the pimp to one of his 
 brothers, and kept Leontion the courtesan. That he 
 gave out as his own the atomic theory of Democritus 
 and the Hedonism of Aristippus. That he was not a 
 true born Athenian citizen, as we learn from Timo- 
 crates and the work on The Early Years of Epicurus by 
 Herodotus. That he heaped shameful adulation on 
 Mithres the intendant of Lysimachus, addressing him 
 in correspondence as Gracious Preserver, and My very 
 good Lord. Nay, he even bestowed the same syco- 
 phantic flatteries on Idomeneus, on Herodotus, and on 
 Timocrates, who exposed his secret abominations. In 
 his correspondence he writes to Leontion, 'Gracious 
 God, darling Leontion, how your sweet letter set me 
 clapping and cheering when I read it'; and to Themista, 
 the wife of Leonteus, ' If you do not both pay me a visit, 
 I shall prove a very stone of Sisyphus to roll at a push 
 wherever you and Themista invite me ' ; and to Pytho- 
 cles, then in the bloom of his youth, ' Here I shall sit 
 
 1 The twentieth of each month was a regular school holiday. 
 Epicurus enjoined in his will that the day (as well as his birth- 
 day) should be celebrated as a feast in honour of himself by all 
 his followers.
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 awaiting your delightful and divine advent.' In 
 another letter to Themista, according to Theodoras in 
 Bk. iv. of his work Against Epicurus, he calls her 
 ' Queen and huntress chaste and fair.' l 
 
 He corresponded, they allege, with a host of 
 courtesans, particularly with Leontion, with whom 
 Metrodorus also fell in love. Further, in the work 
 On the Moral End, he writes : ' For my part I can form 
 no notion of the good if I am to leave out the pleasures 
 of taste and sex, of hearing and of form.' And (they 
 say) in the letter to Pythocles he writes, 'For God's 
 sake, crowd on sail and away from all "culture"!' 
 Epictetus calls him a lewd writer and reviles him in 
 round terms. Nay, worse, Timocrates, the brother of 
 Metrodorus, a disciple who had deserted the School, 
 says in his Paradise of Delights that Epicurus used to 
 vomit twice a day in consequence of his riotous living, 
 and that he himself escaped by the skin of his teeth 
 from the 'midnight lore' and 'mystical fellowship.' 
 Further, that Epicurus was grossly ignorant of science 
 and even more ignorant of the art of life ; that he fell 
 into so pitiable a habit of body as not to be able to rise 
 from his litter for years on end ; that he spent a mina 
 a day on his table, as he writes himself to Leontion and 
 
 1 The text here is purely conjectural. My rendering follows 
 Usener's suggestion, according to which the scandal consisted 
 in applying to Themista an epithet (dpidyvij, 'most virginal') 
 which could only be used properly of a maiden goddess, 
 and specially of Artemis the virgin huntress and protector of 
 maidens. 
 
 10
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 to the philosophers at Mytilene. That he and Metro- 
 dorus enjoyed the favours of Mammarion, Hedeia, 
 Erotion, Nicidion l and other courtesans. That in the 
 thirty-seven books of his treatise on Nature he is nearly 
 always repeating himself and transcribing the ideas of 
 others, especially of Nausiphanes, and says in so many 
 words, ' But enough of this ; the fellow's mouth was 
 always in labour with some piece of sophistic braga- 
 doccio, like those of so many others of the slaves.' 
 And Epicurus is charged with having said himself of 
 Nausiphanes in his letters, ' this threw him into such 
 a passion that he started a personal polemic against 
 me, and had the face to call me his scholar." Indeed 
 he used to call Nausiphanes a 'mollusc,' a 'boor,' a 
 'quack,' and a 'strumpet.' The Platonists he called 
 'Dionysius' lickspittles,' and Plato himself 'that thing 
 of gold.' Aristotle, he said, was a rake who ran 
 through his patrimony and then turned mountebank 2 
 and druggist. Protagoras was styled 'the Porter' 
 and 'Democritus' scrivener,' and reproached with being 
 a village dominie. Heracleitus he called ' the Muddler,' 
 Democritus 'Dumb-ocritus,' Antidorus 'Zany-dorus,' 
 the Cynics 'the national enemy,' the dialecticians 'a 
 general pest,' Pyrrho 'Block' and 'Boor.' 3 
 
 1 The form of the names stamps the ladies in question as 
 'demi-mondaines.' We might venture on translating Leontion 
 and Nicidion, with Wallace, by Leonie and Victorine. For 
 the other three names try Maimie, Cherisette, and Desire's. 
 
 2 Following the reading suggested by Usener. 
 
 3 I have done my best to reproduce the effect of these abusive 
 
 II
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 Now all this is stark madness, There are abundant 
 witnesses to his unsurpassed goodwill to all mankind : 
 his native city, which honoured him with statues of 
 bronze ; his friends, who were too numerous to be 
 reckoned by whole cities ; his followers, who were all 
 held spellbound by the charms of his doctrine except 
 Metrodorus of Stratonice, who deserted to Carneades, 
 perhaps because he was depressed by his master's un- 
 rivalled merits ; l his school, which has maintained an 
 unbroken existence, though almost all others have had 
 their seasons of eclipse, and has been under a succes- 
 sion of innumerable heads, all of them faithful to the 
 persuasion ; his gratitude to his parents, beneficence 
 to his brothers, and the humanity to his servants 
 
 distortions of names and vulgar epithets. Heracleitus is called 
 a 'Muddler,' because he held that everything is changing into 
 something else, and so, in his own phrase, looks on the world 
 as a great olla podrida. Democritus was called Lerocritus 
 because all he said was \fjpos, 'bosh.' So we may render by 
 Dumb-ocritus, with the insinuation that no word of sense ever 
 came from his mouth. The 'dialecticians' \villbetheformal 
 logicians of the Megaric school, Stilpo and Diodorus and 
 their associates, or possibly Zeno of Cittium, the founder of 
 Stoicism. 
 
 1 This sentence gives a good illustration of the way in which 
 ' Diogenes ' has been put together. As the words stand, the 
 ' master' deserted by Metrodorus of Stratonice cannot gram- 
 matically be other than Epicurus. This is historically absurd, 
 since Carneades belongs to a time a full century later than 
 Epicurus. It is manifest that we have here incorporated with 
 the text a note on the defection of Metrodorus, in which 
 mention was made of the merits of his immediate ' master,' the 
 head of the Epicurean school in the time of Carneades. 
 
 12
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 which may be seen from his will, and from the fact 
 that they shared in his Philosophy, the most notable 
 of them being the aforesaid Mys ; in a word, his 
 universal benevolence. As for his piety towards the 
 gods and his native land, words cannot describe them. 
 'Twas from excess of conscientiousness that he would 
 not so much as touch political life. Consider, too, 
 that though Hellas had then been overtaken by most 
 troublous times, he spent his whole life at home, except 
 that he made one or two flying visits to Ionia to see 
 his friends in that quarter, who, in their turn, flocked 
 from all parts to share the life in his Garden, as we are 
 told particularly by Apollodorus, who adds that he 
 payed eighty minae for the site. The life they led 
 there, so says Diocles in Bk. in. of his Brief Relation, 
 was of the simplest and plainest. They were amply 
 content, so he says, with half a pint of vin ordinaire 
 their regular drink was water. Epicurus, he says, 
 disapproved of the community of goods sanctioned by 
 the saying of Pythagoras, ' what belongs to friends is 
 common.' Such a system, he thought, implies distrust, 
 and where there is distrust there can be no true friend- 
 ship. He says himself in his letters that he can be 
 satisfied with water and coarse bread. And again, 
 ' Pray send me part of a pot of cheese, that I may be 
 able to enjoy a varied table when I am in the mind.' 
 Such was the character of the man who made ' Pleasure 
 the end 'an article of his creed. So Athenaeus cele- 
 brates him in the following epigram : 
 
 13
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 Alas, we toil for nought ; the woful seed 
 Of strife and wars is man's insatiate greed : 
 True riches harbour in a little space, 
 Blind Fancy labours in an endless chase ; 
 This truth Neocles' deep- considering son 
 From heavenly Muse or Pytho's tripod won. 
 
 \Ve shall see the truth of this still better, as we pro- 
 ceed, from his own writings and sayings. 
 
 Among the ancients, says Diocles, his preference 
 was for Anaxagoras, though he controverted him on 
 some points, and for Archelaus the teacher of Socrates. 
 He says further that he trained his followers to learn 
 his compositions by heart. Apollodorus says in his 
 Chronology that he had heard Nausiphaues and Praxi- 
 phanes, but he himself denies it in his letter to 
 Eurylochus, where he says he had no master but him- 
 self. He even declares (and Hermarchus agrees 
 with him), that there never was any such philosopher 
 as Leucippus 1 whom Apollodorus the Epicurean and 
 others speak of as the teacher of Democritus. 
 Demetrius of Magnesia adds that Epicurus had heard 
 Xenocrates. 
 
 His style is plain and matter of fact, and is cen- 
 sured by the grammarian Aristophanes as very tame. 
 But he was so lucid that in his Rhetoric he insists on 
 no stylistic quality but lucidity. In correspondence 
 he used ' Fare-well ' and ' Live worthily ' in place of the 
 customary formula of salutation. 
 
 1 On this assertion one can only remark in the language of 
 Dr. Johnson, that ' If Epicurus said that, Epicurus lied.'
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 Antigonus says in his Life of Epicurus that he copied 
 his Canon from the Tripod of Nausiphanes, and that he 
 had heard not only Nausiphanes but Pamphilus the 
 Platonist in Samos. That he began Philosophy at the 
 age of twelve, and became head of his school at 
 thirty-two. 
 
 According to the Chronology of Apollodorus he was 
 born in Olympiad 109/3, in the archonship of Sosigenes, 
 on the 7th of Gamelion, seven years after Plato's death. 
 That he first collected a school in Mytilene and Lam- 
 psacus at the age of thirty-two. This lasted for five 
 years, at the end of which he migrated, as said, to 
 Athens. His death fell in Olympiad 127/2, in the 
 year of Pytharatus, at the age of seventy-two. He 
 was followed as head of the School by Hermarchus of 
 Mytilene, son of Agemortus. The cause of death was 
 strangury due to calculus, as Hermarchus, too, says in 
 his correspondence. The fatal illness lasted a fort- 
 night. Hermarchus further relates that he entered a 
 brazen bath filled with hot water, called for some neat 
 wine which he took off at a draught, enjoined his 
 friends not to forget his doctrines, and so came to his 
 end. I have composed the following lines upon him : 
 
 Farewell, my friends ; be mindful of my lore ; 
 Thus Epicurus spoke, and was no more : 
 Hot was the bath, and hot the bowl he quaffed ; 
 Chill Hades followed on the after-draught. 1 
 
 Such then was the tenour of his life, and the manner 
 1 Sad doggerel but not more so than the original. 
 15
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 of his end. His will runs as follows. [The main pro- 
 visions are that the 'Garden and its appurtenances' 
 are to be held in trust for the successors of Epicurus, 
 and their associates. A house in the suburb Melite is 
 to be inhabited by Hermarchus and his disciples for 
 the former's lifetime. Provision is made for the due 
 performance of the ritual for the dead in memory of 
 the parents and brethren of Epicurus, for the regular 
 keeping of his birthday, for the regular festival of the 
 twentieth of each month, and for annual commemora- 
 tion of his brothers and his friend Polyaenus. The 
 son of Metrodorus and the son of Polyaenus are to be 
 under the guardianship of the trustees on condition 
 that they live with Hermarchus and share his Phil- 
 osophy. The daughter of Metrodorus is to receive a 
 dowry out of the estate on condition that she behaves 
 well and marries with the approval of Hermarchus. 
 Provision is to be made for an aged and needy member 
 of the community. The 'books' of Epicurus, i.e. pre- 
 sumably the manuscripts of his works, are bequeathed 
 to Hermarchus. If Hermarchus should die before the 
 children of Metrodorus come of age, they are to be 
 under the guardianship of the trustees. Mys and 
 three other slaves are to receive their freedom.] 
 
 The following lines were written to Idomeneus on 
 the very point of death : ' I write these lines to you 
 and your friends as I bring to a close the last happy 
 day of my life. I am troubled with strangury and 
 dysentery in unsurpassable degree, but I can confront 
 16
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 it all with a joy of mind due to remembrance of 
 our past discussions. To you I leave the injunction to 
 take care of the children of Metrodorus as befits your 
 lifelong association with me and Philosophy.' 
 
 ' He had numerous disciples. Specially distinguished 
 were Metrodorus of Lampsacus, son of Athenaeus, 
 (or Timocrates) and Sande, who never left him after 
 making his acquaintance except for one six months' visit 
 to his birthplace, whence he returned to him. He was 
 an excellent man in all respects, as is attested by 
 Epicurus himself in sundry Dedications and in the 
 Timocrates, Bk. in. With all these excellences he 
 bestowed his sister Batis on Idomeneus, and took 
 Leontion the Athenian courtesan under his protection 
 as a morganatic wife. He was imperturbable in the 
 face of troubles and death, as Epicurus says in his 
 Metrodorus, Bk. I. They say he died in his fifty-third 
 year, seven years before Epicurus. Epicurus himself 
 implies that he had predeceased him by the in- 
 junction in the aforesaid will to care for his children. 
 Another was the aforesaid Timocrates, a worthless 
 brother of Metrodorus. [Here follows a list of the 
 works of M.] 
 
 'Another was Polyaenus of Lampsacus, son of 
 Athenodorus, according to Philodemus an upright 
 and amiable man. Also Hermarchus of Mytilene, son 
 of Agemortus, who succeeded to the headship of the 
 school. He was born of poor parents, and originally 
 a teacher of rhetoric by profession. The following 
 B 17
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 admirable works are ascribed to him. [The list 
 follows.] He was an able man and died of a palsy. 
 
 ' Item, Leonteus of Lampsacus and his wife Themista, 
 the same with whom Epicurus corresponded. Item, 
 Colotes and Idomeneus, both of Lampsacus. These 
 are the most eminent names. We must include Poly- 
 stratus who followed Hermarchus, and was succeeded 
 by Dionysius, and he by Basileides. Apollodorus, the 
 'despot of the Garden,' who composed over four 
 hundred books, is also a man of note. Then there 
 are the two Ptolemies of Alexandria, the dark and 
 the fair; Zeno of Sidon, a pupil of Apollodorus and 
 a prolific author ; Demetrius, surnamed the Laconic ; 
 Diogenes of Tarsus, the author of the Selected Essays ; 
 Orion ; and some others whom the genuine Epicureans 
 decry as Sophists. 
 
 ' There were also three other persons of the name 
 Epicurus: (1) the son of Leonteus and Themista, 
 (2) an Epicurus of Magnesia, (3) a maitre d'armes. 
 Epicurus was a most prolific author.' [Follows a list 
 of his works, and the writer then proceeds to give a 
 summary of his doctrine.] ' 
 
 The preceding pages have given us a fairly full 
 account of the life and personality of Epicurus as 
 known to the students of antiquity. I may supplement 
 it with a few remarks intended to make the chronology 
 clear, and to call attention to one or two of the salient 
 points in the character which it discloses to us. 
 
 First as to chronology. Of the authorities used in 
 18
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 the Life far the best is Apollodorus, whose versified 
 Chronology embodied the results of the great Eratos- 
 thenes. His data make it clear that Epicurus was 
 born on the 7th of Gamelion (i.e. in our January) 
 341 B.C., and died in 270 B.C. They also enable us 
 to fix his first appearance as an independent teacher 
 in Mytilene and the neighbourhood, approximately 
 in 310, and his removal to Athens in 306/5 B.C. We 
 may take it also as certain, from other sources as well 
 as from the evidence of Timon, that the place of 
 Epicurus' birth was the island of Samos, where a 
 colony or plantation was established by the Athenians 
 in the year 352/1, Neocles, the father of Epicurus, 
 being, as we learn from Strabo, one of the settlers. 
 When the Athenians were expelled from Samos by the 
 regent Perdiccas in 322, Neocles for unknown reasons 
 preferred emigrating to the Ionian town of Colophon 
 to returning to Athens, and Epicurus followed him. 
 The assertion of his enemies that he was no true 
 Athenian citizen (this would be their way of explaining 
 his lifelong abstention from public affairs), may have 
 no better foundation than the fact of his birth at a 
 distance from Athens, or, again, may be explained by 
 supposing that Neocles had some special connection 
 with the Ionic cities of the Asiatic coast. In any 
 case the salient points to take note of are that Epicurus 
 must have received his early education in Samos (itself 
 an Ionian island), and that his philosophical position 
 had been definitely settled before he left Asia Minor 
 
 19
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 to establish himself at Athens. This will account for 
 the attitude of aloofness steadily maintained by the 
 society of the ' Garden ' towards the great indigenous 
 Athenian philosophical institutions, and also for the 
 marked lonicisms of Epicurus' technical terminology. 
 It is clear from the narratives preserved by Diogenes 
 that the family of Neocles was in straitened circum- 
 stances, but there is no more ground to take the 
 polemical representation of Neocles and his wife as a 
 hedge dominie and village sorceress seriously than 
 there is to believe the calumnies of Demosthenes on 
 the parents of Aeschines. That Neocles was an 
 elementary schoolmaster may, however, be true, since 
 it is asserted by the satirist Timon, who belongs to 
 the generation immediately after Epicurus, and the 
 schoolmaster, as we see from the Mimes of Herodas, 
 was not a person of much consideration in the third 
 century. With regard to the date of the establishment 
 of Epicurus at Athens one should note, by way of 
 correcting erroneous impressions about 'Post-Aris- 
 totelian Philosophy,' that when Epicurus made his 
 appearance in the city which was still the centre of 
 Greek intellectual activity, Theophrastus, the immedi- 
 ate successor of Aristotle, had not completed half of 
 his thirty-four years' presidency over the Peripatetic 
 school, and Xenocrates, the third head of the Academy, 
 and an immediate pupil of Plato, had only been dead 
 some eight years. The illusion by which we often 
 think of the older schools as having run their course 
 
 2O
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 before Epicurus came to the front may be easily dis- 
 pelled by the recollection that Epicurus's chief disciples, 
 Metrodorus, Hermarchus, Colotes, all wrote special 
 attacks on various Platonic dialogues, and that 
 Hermarchus moreover wrote a polemic against Aris- 
 totle and Epicurus himself one against Theophrastus, 
 while, as we shall see later, we still possess a ' discourse 
 of Socrates' in which an anonymous member of the 
 Academy sharply criticises Epicurus as the author of 
 superficial doctrines which are just coming into vogue 
 with the half-educated. 
 
 With regard to the personal character of Epicurus 
 one or two interesting things stand out very clearly 
 from the conflicting accounts of admirers like the 
 original writer of the main narrative which figures in 
 Diogenes, and again Lucretius, and enemies, like the 
 detractors mentioned by Diogenes, or unfriendly critics 
 like Plutarch and his Academic authorities. We may 
 disregard altogether the representation of Epicurus 
 and his associates as sensualists who ruined their con- 
 stitutions by debauchery. There is abundant testimony, 
 not solely from Epicurean sources, for the simplicity of 
 the life led in the Garden, not to say that most of the 
 calumnious stories are discredited by the fact that 
 the worst of them were told by personal or professional 
 enemies like Timocrates, the Judas of the society, and 
 the Stoic philosopher who palmed off a fictitious 'lewd 
 correspondence ' on the world under the name of 
 Epicurus. Abuse of this kind was a regular feature 
 21
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 of controversy, and deserves just as much credit as 
 the accusations of secret abominations which Demos- 
 thenes and Aeschines flung at each other, that is to 
 say, none at all. What we do see clearly is that 
 Epicurus was personally a man of clinging and winning 
 temperament, quick to gain friendship and steadfast in 
 keeping it. There is something of a feminine winsome- 
 ness about his solicitude for the well-being of his 
 friends and their children, and the extravagant grati- 
 tude which the high-flown phrases quoted from his 
 letters show for the minor offices of friendship. At 
 the same time Epicurus and his 'set' exhibit the 
 weaknesses natural to a temperament of this kind. 
 Their horror of the anxieties and burdens of family 
 life, their exaggerated estimate of the misery which 
 is caused in human life by fear of death and the 
 possibilities of a life to come matters with which we 
 shall find ourselves closely concerned in later chapters, 
 testify to a constitutional timidity and a lack of 
 moral robustness. The air of the Garden is, to say 
 the least of it, morally relaxing ; one feels in reading 
 the remains of Epicurus and Metrodorus that one is 
 dealing with moral invalids, and that Nietzsche was 
 not far from the truth when he spoke of Epicurus as 
 the first good example in history of a 'decadent.' 
 Partly we may explain the fact by the well-attested 
 physical invalidism of the founders of the school. 
 Epicurus, as we see from Diogenes, though he lived 
 to a decent age, was for years in feeble health, and it 
 
 22
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 is significant that Metrodorus and Colotes, two of his 
 chief disciples, died before him at a comparatively 
 early age. We shall probably find the key at once to 
 the Epicurean insistence on the life of simple and 
 homely fare, and to the violence with which, as we 
 shall see, he and his friends insisted on the value of 
 the 'pleasures of the belly,' to the great scandal of 
 their later critics, in the assumption that they were 
 life-long dyspeptics. (The ancients simply inverted 
 the order of causation when they observed that the 
 bad health of Epicurus and Metrodorus might be 
 regarded as God's judgment on the impiety of their 
 tenets.) 
 
 The ugliest feature in the character of Epicurus, as 
 revealed in his life and remains, is his inexcusable 
 ingratitude to his teachers, and his wholesale abuse 
 of all the thinkers who had gone before him. This 
 tone of systematic detraction was taken up by his 
 friends ; the quotations given in Plutarch's Essay 
 against Colotes are a perfect mine of scurrilities 
 directed against every eminent thinker of the past or 
 the present who had in any way strayed from the 
 path of rigid orthodoxy as understood by Epicurus. 
 There can be no doubt that the object of all this 
 abuse was to make Epicurus appear, as he claimed to 
 be, no man's pupil but his own, the one and only 
 revealer of the way of salvation. And yet it is quite 
 clear, as we shall see, that Epicurus is in every way 
 the least independent of the philosophers of antiquity. 
 
 23
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 There is no reason to doubt that he had originally 
 been instructed in Samos by a member of the Platonic 
 school, and the bitterness with which the Academy 
 afterwards attacked his character and doctrines may, 
 as has been suggested, have been partly due to the 
 sense that he was, in some sort, an apostate from the 
 fold. His treatment of the teachers from whom he 
 had learned the Atomism which has come to be 
 thought of as his characteristic doctrine is absolutely 
 without excuse. 
 
 We shall see in the next chapter that the whole 
 doctrine is a blundering perversion of the really 
 scientific Atomism of a much greater man, Democritus, 
 and that Epicurus had undoubtedly derived his know- 
 ledge of the doctrine from Nausiphanes, a philosopher 
 whose importance we are only now beginning to learn 
 from the Herculaneum papyri. Yet both Democritus 
 and Nausiphanes are, on the showing of Epicurus' 
 own admirers, covered by him with the coarsest abuse, 
 and one may even suspect that we have to thank 
 Epicurean anxiety to conceal the dependence of the 
 adored master on his teacher for the fact that until 
 Herculaneum began to yield up its secrets, Nausiphanes 
 was no more than an empty name to us. This vulgar 
 self-exaltation by abuse of the very persons to whom 
 one is indebted for all one's ideas distinguishes 
 Epicurus from all the other Greek thinkers who have 
 made a name for themselves, Plato is almost over- 
 anxious to mark his debt to his Pythagorean teachers, 
 24
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 and the way in which he does so, by putting dis- 
 coveries of his own into the mouth of the Pythagorean 
 astronomer Timaeus, has played sad havoc with the 
 histories of Greek science. Aristotle has undoubtedly 
 rather more self-importance then is good for most men, 
 but even he stops short at regarding his own system 
 as the final philosophy towards which his predecessors 
 were unconsciously progressing. It was reserved for 
 Epicurus to put forward a clumsy amalgam of incon- 
 sistent beliefs, and to trust to bluster to conceal the 
 sources of his borrowings. 
 
 A few words may be said here as to the amount of 
 the extant remains of Epicurean literature, and the 
 later fortune of the School. Of the actual works of 
 Epicurus the whole has perished, apart from scattered 
 fragments preserved in quotations of later authors, 
 mostly unfriendly. We possess, however, two un- 
 doubtedly genuine letters, one to Herodotus on the 
 general principles of Epicurean Atomism, and another 
 to Menoeceus containing a summary of ethical teaching, 
 both inserted in Diogenes' Life. The Life also contains 
 two other documents, purporting to be by Epicurus, 
 (1) a letter to Pythocles on astronomy and meteorology, 
 and (2) a set of Kvptai So<u or Select Apophthegms forming 
 a brief catechism of the main points of the doctrine. 
 
 The accuracy of the first of these is evinced by its 
 close agreement with what we are told by later authors 
 of the physical doctrine of Epicurus, particularly with 
 the corresponding sections of the poem of Lucretius. 
 
 25
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 This letter cannot possibly be a genuine work of 
 Epicurus, and we know from Philodemus that even 
 in his own time (first century B.C.) its authenticity 
 was doubted. It is pretty certainly an excerpt made 
 by some early Epicurean from the voluminous lost 
 work on Physics and thrown into epistolary form in 
 imitation of the two genuine letters. As to the 
 second document, it was known to Philodemus and 
 Cicero under its present title, and appears, as Usener 
 holds, to be an early compendium made up of verbal 
 extracts of what were considered the most important 
 statements in the works of Epicurus and his leading 
 friends. There are also a large number of moral 
 apophthegms either quoted as Epicurean or demon- 
 strably of Epicurean authorship embedded in Cicero, 
 Seneca, Plutarch, Porphyry, the Anthology of Stobaeus 
 and elsewhere. Usener has shown that the chief source 
 of these sayings must have been an epitome of the 
 correspondence between Epicurus and his three chief 
 friends, Metrodorus, Polyaenus, and Hermarchus, the 
 four recognised Ka^ye/xoi'es or 'doctors' of the sect. 
 From later Epicureans we have the great poem of 
 Lucretius who can be shown in general to have 
 followed his master very closely, though in what 
 strikes a modern reader as his highest scientific 
 achievement, his anticipations of the doctrine of the 
 evolution of species, he is probably reproducing not 
 Epicurus but his own poetical model Empedocles. The 
 excavation of Herculancum, and the subsequent deci- 
 26
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 pherment of the papyri found there, has also put us 
 in possession of a great deal of very second-rate stuff 
 from the hand of Philodemus. 
 
 A word as to the subsequent fate of the School. 
 The two chief characteristics of the sect, as remarked 
 by the ancients, were the warmth of the friendship 
 subsisting between its members, and their absolute 
 unity of opinion, which last, however, had its bad 
 side, since, as the ancients complain, the chief reason 
 of the absence of controversies is that the Epicureans 
 read nothing but the works of Epicurus and the 
 Ka^ijye/xdves, and treat them as infallible scriptures, 
 even being expected to learn the Catechism by 
 heart. A third peculiarity was the almost idolatrous 
 adoration paid to the founder who, as we see from 
 Lucretius, was regarded as all but divine, as the 
 one and only man who had redeemed the race from 
 universal misery by pointing out the path to true 
 happiness. 
 
 It has been remarked that the Epicurean society in 
 many ways is more like the early Christian Church 
 than it is like a scientific school. Thus (1) it is not 
 so much a band of thinkers as a group of persons 
 united by a common rule of life. (We must re- 
 member, however, that this 'religious' side to the 
 association between the members of a ' school ' belong 
 equally to Pythagoreanism and Platonism.) (2) Like 
 the Christians, the Epicureans are primarily united by 
 the ' love of the brethren,' and by a common devotion 
 27
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 to a personal founder who is regarded rather as a 
 Redeemer from misery than as an intellectual teacher 
 (though here, too, we must not forget that Pythagoras 
 was equally to his early disciples a divine or semi- 
 divine Redeemer, with the difference that with them 
 it was largely by revealing scientific truth that he was 
 believed to have effected the redemption). (3) Like 
 the Church, the Epicurean society is indifferent to 
 differences of nationality, sex, social status. (4) As 
 Wallace says, the correspondence of Epicurus and his 
 friends mixes up high speculative theories with homely 
 matters of every-day life, such as the regulation of 
 diet, in a way which is equally characteristic of the 
 New Testament. (5) Epicureanism has also its 
 analogue to the Christian ' love-feasts ' in the monthly 
 common meals which are provided for by Epicurus in 
 his will. Similarly his concern for the children of 
 Metrodorus and for the support of needy and aged 
 brethren reminds us of the care of the early Christians 
 for the 'poor saints,' the widows, and the orphans. 
 The two societies also correspond on their unfavourable 
 side, in what has always been the great intellectual 
 sin of the Church, undue readiness to treat its 
 formulae as infallible and exempt from all examina- 
 tion. The Epicurean who read nothing but the 
 Ka.d-iiytp.ovts is the prototype of those modern Christians 
 who read nothing but the Bible and the approved 
 commentaries, and regard criticism and free inquiry 
 as the work of the devil. If the Philosophy of the 
 28
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 Garden bad ever become a widely diffused and in- 
 fluential theory of conduct, it must necessarily bave 
 plunged the ancient world into the same conflict 
 between ' science ' and ' religion ' of which we hear too 
 much to-day. 
 
 These analogies though most of them can be to 
 some extent found in other philosophical schools make 
 it all the more interesting to note that the Epicureans 
 and the Christians, though representing diametrically 
 opposite types of thought, met on common ground as 
 being the only sects who openly repudiated the estab- 
 lished religion and scoffed at its apparatus of public 
 ceremonial. The Sceptic avoided the collision easily 
 enough. Precisely because he held that unreasoning 
 faith is involved in all judgments he felt no call to 
 deny the theological belief of his fellows. The 
 Platonist and the Stoic stood to a large extent on 
 common ground with popular religion in their de- 
 votion to their belief in Providence and the moral 
 government of the world, to which the Platonist added 
 a fervid faith in Theism and immortality : like Broad 
 Churchmen to-day, they could always acquiesce in the 
 details of popular religion by putting a non-natural 
 interpretation on everything which, in its plain sense, 
 seemed objectionable or absurd. But the Epicurean 
 was cut off from these expedients by the fact 
 that it was one of his cardinal doctrines that 'the 
 gods ' exercise no influence on human affairs, as the 
 Christian was by his belief that they were 'idols' or 
 29
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 even devils who could not be worshipped without 
 blasphemy against the true God. Not that the 
 Epicureans, like the Christians, refused to take part 
 in the public ceremonial of worship. Philodemus 
 expressly appeals to the exemplary conduct of 
 Epicurus himself on this point. But they made no 
 secret of their scorn for the popular belief in Provi- 
 dence, prayer, and retribution, and hence no amount 
 of external compliance could clear them from the 
 charge of atheism with persons for whom religion was 
 a vital affair. 1 Lucian (second century A.D.) illustrates 
 the point amusingly in his account of the ritual 
 instituted by the charlatan Alexander of Aboni 
 Teichos who set up an oracle which gained great 
 repute and was even once formally consulted by the 
 Emperor Marcus. Among other things, Alexander 
 started a mystical ceremonial from which he used 
 formally to exclude all 'infidels, Christians, and 
 Epicureans.' In the course of the worship he used to 
 cry, ' Away with the Christians ! ' the congregation 
 giving the response, ' Away with the Epicureans ! ' 
 the Christians and Epicureans being the two bodies 
 who were persistently infidel from Alexander's point 
 of view. Lucian adds that Alexander solemnly burned 
 the works of the objectionable teacher, and that it 
 was an Epicurean who first exposed the fraudulent 
 
 1 As Plutarch says, the Epicurean may go through the 
 ritual of religion, but it can bring him no inward joy, since he 
 regards it as an empty mummery. 
 
 30
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 trickery of his oracle, and narrowly escaped being 
 lynched by the devout mob for doing so. 
 
 Much earlier, probably about 200 B.C., there appear 
 to have been actual persecutions, and perhaps even 
 martyrdoms, of Epicureans in various Greek cities, and 
 we know that works were published in the style of the 
 religious tracts of our own day, relating the judg- 
 ments of Heaven on Epicureans and their miraculous 
 conversions. 
 
 As to the internal history of the sect there is not 
 much to be said, since, as we have seen, they were 
 too indifferent to speculation to make any important 
 innovations on the original teaching of the ' doctors,' 
 though, as we have yet to see, there was at least some 
 attempt to lay the foundations of an Inductive Method 
 in logic. The School continued to flourish as a distinct 
 sect well down into the third century after Christ. 
 The names of a number of prominent Epicureans of 
 the first century B.C. are well known to us from 
 Cicero, who had himself attended the lectures of two 
 of them, Phaedrus and Zeno of Sidon. (It should be 
 mentioned that before Cicero's time the house of 
 Epicurus in Melite had fallen into ruins and the 
 gardens of the philosophical sects had been ruined in 
 the cruel siege of Athens by Sulla.) 
 
 When Greek philosophy began to make its appear- 
 ance in Rome itself the first system to be so trans- 
 ferred was the Epicurean. Cicero mentions as the 
 first Latin writers on Epicureanism Gains Amafinius 
 
 31
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 (Tusculan Disputations, iv. 6) and Rabirius (Academics, 
 i. 5), and speaks vaguely of their being followed by 
 many others. He finds much fault both with the 
 literary style of these writers and with the want of 
 arrangement in their works, but says that the doctrine 
 made rapid headway owing to its unscientific character 
 and apparent simplicity. It is not clear whether these 
 Latin prose works were earlier or later than the great 
 poem of Lucretius. Lucretius, according to St. Jerome, 
 lived from 94 to 53 B.C., wrote his poem in the 
 intervals of an insanity brought on by a love-potion, and 
 ended by his own hand. The poem was polished up 
 by Cicero. A comparison with Donatus's Life of Virgil 
 shows that Jerome's dates are a few years out, and 
 that the real dates for the poet's birth and death 
 should probably be 99/98 55 B.C. The meaning of 
 the remark about Cicero is probably that Cicero 
 edited the poem for circulation after the author's 
 death. Munro has shown that the Cicero meant is 
 pretty certainly the famous Marcus, and the fact of 
 his connection with the work is made all the more 
 likely since the only contemporary allusion to it 
 occurs in a letter from Marcus to his brother Quintus, 
 then serving on Caesar's staff in Britain and Gaul, 
 written early in the year 54 (Epp. ad Quintum Fratrem, 
 ii. 11). The ' editing ' cannot have been at all carefully 
 done, as the poem is notoriously in a most disjointed 
 state. According to the manuscripts Cicero tells his 
 brother that it is a work exhibiting both genius and art 
 32
 
 THE LIFE OF EPICURUS 
 
 (which is, in fact, the case), but most modern editors 
 make him underrate the poem by inserting a negative 
 with one or other of the two clauses. The influence of 
 Lucretius on the poets of the Augustan age, such as 
 Virgil, Ovid, Manilius, belongs to the history of 
 literature, not to that of philosophy. 
 
 To the same general period as Lucretius belongs 
 Philodemus from whom so many fragments have been 
 discovered in the rolls brought from Herculaneum, and 
 who lived under the protection of Cicero's enemy 
 L. Calpurnius Piso, the father-in-law of Caesar. An- 
 other well-known Roman Epicurean is Titus Pomponius 
 Atticus, the life-long friend and correspondent of 
 Cicero. Gaius Cassius Longinus, the real author of 
 the conspiracy against Caesar, is also said to have 
 belonged to the sect, to which, it must be owned, he 
 did no credit. Horace's profession of Epicureanism is 
 well known, though we may be sure that his interest 
 in the system was confined to its ethical side. A later 
 and greater writer who, without being a member of 
 any sect, was largely in sympathy with the spirit of 
 the Epicureans and shared their veneration for 
 Epicurus as the deliverer of mankind from degrading 
 superstition, is Lucian of Samosata (second century 
 A.D.). There is some evidence that the popularity of 
 the doctrine was augmented in the second century of 
 our era. Plutarch and Galen, in this century, found 
 it worth while to revive the polemic against Epicurus 
 which had been originated in his own lifetime by 
 c 33
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 Plato's Academy, and steadily kept up until it took a 
 Latin dress in the ridicule which Cicero's Academic 
 and Stoic characters are made to pour on the School in 
 his philosophical dialogues. When the Emperor 
 Marcus endowed the chairs of Philosophy at Athens at 
 the expense of the state, Epicureanism, as well as 
 Platonism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism figured among 
 the state-supported doctrines. 
 
 Naturally enough, as the Christian Church became 
 more powerful and more dogmatic, it found itself in 
 violent conflict with the anti-theological ideas of 
 Epicurus, and such writers as Lactantius (end of third 
 century A.D.) made him a special object of invective, 
 thereby unconsciously contributing to increase our 
 stock of Epicurean fragments. By the middle of the 
 fourth century the School had fallen into oblivion, and 
 the Emperor Julian (reigned 360-363 A.D.) congratu- 
 lates himself on the fact that most even of their books 
 are no longer in circulation. Towards the end of 
 the century St. Augustine declares that even in the 
 pagan schools of rhetoric their opinions had become 
 wholly forgotten. (Epist., 118, 21). 
 
 34
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 1 . Tlw parts of Philosophy. It is specially character- 
 istic of Epicurus that his conception of the end to be 
 aimed at by Philosophy is narrowly and exclusively 
 practical ; in fact, his School might be named not 
 inaptly the Pragmatists of Antiquity. As Sextus 
 Empiricus puts it (adv. Mathematicos, xi. 169) : ' Epicurus 
 used to say that Philosophy is an activity which by 
 means of reasoning and discussion produces a happy 
 life.' And we have a saying of Epicurus himself that 
 ' we must not make a mere pretence of Philosophy, 
 but must be real philosophers, just as we need not the 
 pretence but the reality of health.' And again, 'The 
 discourse of philosophers by whom none of our passions 
 are healed is but idle. Just as medicine is useless 
 unless it expels disease from the body, so Philosophy 
 is useless unless it expels passion from the soul.' In 
 this conception of the philosopher as the healer of the 
 sick soul, and of Philosophy as the medicine he 
 employs, Epicurus is, of course, saying no new thing. 
 The thought that the work of Philosophy is to produce 
 health of soul, and that virtue is to the soul what 
 
 35
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 health is to the body, goes back in the last resort to 
 the Pythagorean medical men of Magna Graecia, and 
 is, for the attentive student, the key to the whole 
 moral doctrine of Plato and Aristotle. Where 
 Epicurus is at variance with Plato and Aristotle is in 
 holding that mental enlightenment, the understanding 
 of things as they truly are, is not itself an integral 
 part of 'salvation,' or the 'soul's health,' but a mere 
 means to it. Hence he sets no store on science except 
 as a means to something beyond itself. He despises 
 history, mathematics, and literary cultivation on the 
 ground that they do not bear upon conduct. In an 
 extant fragment of a letter he says, with a heated out- 
 burst of language, ' For God's sake, crowd on sail and 
 flee from all "culture"' (Usener, Fr. 163); and in 
 another, 'I congratulate you on having come to 
 Philosophy undefiled by any "culture"' (Fr. 117). 
 Epicurus is constantly attacked by his later critics for 
 this contempt of polite education, but he may, of course, 
 mean no more than that his mission is not only to the 
 wise and prudent, but to all who fear and suffer. 
 There is to be a place in his scheme for the homely and 
 humble, the babes and sucklings, as well as for the 
 wise in the wisdom of this world. 
 
 The only science to which he attaches any value is 
 Physics (<wio /Voyi'a, the general theory of the consti- 
 tution of the universe), and he values Physics simply 
 for its moral effect. By giving a purely naturalistic 
 theory of the world, Physics frees us from all belief in 
 36
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 the agency of God or the gods, and thus delivers us 
 from the dread of God's judgments, and from anxious 
 striving to win His favour. By proving the mortality 
 of the soul it sets us free from superstitious terror 
 about the unknown future. By teaching us to dis- 
 tinguish between what is necessary to support our 
 health and what is superfluous, it teaches us to limit 
 our desires to things convenient for us, and emancipates 
 us from bondage to the lust of the eye and the pride of 
 life. But for these services, Physics would have no 
 worth. As Epicurus himself puts it in 10 of his 
 Catechism : ' If our apprehensions about appearances in 
 the heavens, and about death and its possible conse- 
 quences, and also our ignorance of the limits of pain 
 and desire, gave us no uneasiness, AVC should have had 
 no need of a science of nature.' Similarly Lucretius 
 explains that the whole object of his poem is to show 
 that the world has been produced without divine 
 agency (opera sine divom), and that there is no pain to be 
 feared after death. Science is, in fact, valuable solely 
 because it banishes God from the world, and proves 
 the mortality of the soul, and so, as Lucretius puts it, 
 'religion the vague dread of the unknown is put 
 under foot and man brought level with heaven.' 
 
 Hence, along with all speculative science, Epicurus 
 professed to reject as useless the syllogistic Logic of the 
 Academy and Aristotle. Of the three divisions of 
 Philosophy as fixed by Xenocrates, Logic, Physics, 
 Ethics, the doctrines of discourse, of nature, of conduct, 
 
 37
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 Epicurus dispenses wholly with the first, and retains the 
 second simply as a necessary introduction to the third. 
 Still, of course, though agreeing with our modern 
 empiricists in the rejection of formal deductive Logic, 
 he requires some doctrine of method, some theory of 
 the way in which true generalisations may be obtained, 
 and some standard of truth and falsehood. To meet 
 this need, Epicurus and his followers tried to lay down 
 rules of what we should call inductive Logic, rules 
 showing how a true inference may be drawn from the 
 data of sense-perception. This rudimentary theory of 
 induction they called Canonics, the doctrine of the 
 KO.VWV or rule by which inferences may be drawn from 
 particular observations. Hence, finally, the school 
 divided Philosophy into three parts, Canonics, Physics, 
 Ethics, of which the two former are only valuable 
 because they are requisite for the last. This is what 
 Seneca means when he says (Ep. t 89. 11), 'the 
 Epicureans hold that there are two parts of Philosophy, 
 the Natural and the Moral, but reject the Rational 
 part [i.e. Formal Logic, the doctrine of syllogism]. But 
 since they were forced by the nature of things to 
 remove ambiguities, and to detect falsities concealed 
 under an appearance of truth, they too introduce a 
 branch of study which they call the doctrine of 
 judgment, and its standard (de iudicio d regula=Trepl 
 TOV /cavovos), which is the rational part of Philosophy 
 under another name. But they regard this as a mere 
 complement of Natural Philosophy.' 
 
 38
 
 2. Canonics the Rules of Philosophising. The Epicu- 
 rean doctrine of the KO.VMV or rule of generalisation is 
 so crude that one would not naturally expect it to 
 exhibit signs of having been borrowed from a foreign 
 source. Yet here, as everywhere in Epicurus, we 
 come on signs of indebtedness to others for the views 
 on which he plumed himself. We have already 
 read in the Life by Diogenes that Antigonus of 
 Carystus regarded the whole doctrine of the Canon 
 as a plagiarism from Nausiphanes. Now the fact that 
 before Epicurus set up for himself as an independent 
 philosopher he had been a pupil of Nausiphanes may 
 be regarded as certain, since the statement comes to us 
 on the double authority of Antigonus and Apollodorus, 
 the latter of whom may fairly be taken as representing 
 Eratosthenes. From the frequent recurrence of it in 
 writers like Cicero and Plutarch we may infer that 
 the later Epicureans were unable to deny it, and the 
 extreme scurrility with which Epicurus himself spoke 
 of Nausiphanes as a person who claimed to have 
 taught him his Philosophy is enough to show that he 
 had at some time stood in a relation of dependence on 
 the former which he wished afterwards to disguise. 
 We have further the warrant of two of Epicurus' chief 
 friends, Leonteus and Metrodorus, for the positive 
 statement that Epicurus originally called himself a 
 Democritean (Plutarch Against Colotes, 3), though he 
 afterwards reviled Democritus with his usual coarse- 
 ness. When we come to deal with the Epicurean 
 
 39
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 doctrine of atoms we shall see that these statements 
 must in the main be true; Epicurean Atomism is 
 unintelligible except as a clumsy attempt on the part 
 of an incoherent thinker to adapt the general physical 
 doctrine of Democritus to views which had been made 
 current in Athens by Aristotle, which are really incom- 
 patible with it. Nausiphanes, of whom we know that 
 he combined the physics of Democritus with the 
 ethical agnosticism of Pyrrho, thus appears as the 
 indispensable link of connection between Epicurus and 
 the early science of Ionia, and we may see reason to 
 think that there may be a great deal of truth in a 
 statement made by Sextus Empiricus about the origin 
 of Epicurus' blind hatred of mathematics. It was due, 
 Sextus says, to his 'animosity against Nausiphanes, 
 the disciple of Pyrrho, who had a large following of 
 younger men, and made serious studies of mathematics, 
 and even more specially of rhetoric. Epicurus had 
 been his pupil, but from a desire to be thought a self- 
 taught philosopher of original genius did his best to 
 deny the fact. He was anxious to obliterate the 
 reputation of Nausiphanes, and so volubly denounces 
 the mathematical studies in which the latter enjoyed 
 great renown' (adv. Matkematicos, i. 2). Sextus then 
 goes on to quote the abusive letter to ' the philosophers 
 of Mytilene,' in which Epicurus nicknames Nausiphanes 
 ' the Mollusc,' and winds up by saying that ' he was a 
 worthless fellow and devoted to pursuits from which 
 one cannot possibly arrive at wisdom ' ; by which, says 
 40
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 Sextus, he means mathematics. Some information 
 about the contents of the work called the Tripod has 
 been preserved in Philodemus On Rhetoric. Most of 
 what Philodemus has to say is very vague, but we can 
 make out quite clearly that Nausiphanes was anxious 
 to show that the combination of an eloquent and 
 attractive style with mathematical and physical 
 research is both feasible and desirable. He aims, in 
 fact, at such a combination of these qualities as we see 
 in a man like W. K. Clifford, who united high mathe- 
 matical gifts with the ability to make the general 
 results of abstruse research intelligible and attractive 
 to the ordinary man of average education. It is 
 strongly corroborative of the assertions of Antigonus 
 and Apollodorus that we find Nausiphanes employing 
 the very term which was afterwards used by Epicurus 
 as the technical word for ' inductive generalisation ' 
 (eVtAoyio-TiJo) Netopia = induction from the known facts 
 of sense, the Epicurean eTriAoyur/ios). 1 It has even been 
 suggested that Nausiphanes had anticipated Aristotle 
 in appropriating the word ' syllogism,' the casting up 
 of an account, computation of a sum total, in the 
 
 1 See the full text of the relevant passages of Philodemus in 
 Diels, Fragmente dcr Vorsokratiker, i. 4C4-465. As to dates, 
 Nausiphanes is regularly said to have ' heard' Democritus in 
 person. If this is true he must have been at least some years 
 older than Aristotle (born 384 B.C.), since Democritus was 
 certainly born about 460, and even if he lived, as tradition 
 asserts, to over a hundred, he can hardly have been actively 
 teaching in the last decades of his life. 
 
 41
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 technical logical sense, but in the absence of precise 
 dates it would be rash to be dogmatic on the point. 
 It is equally possible that the word came to both 
 Aristotle and Nausiphanes from the Platonic Academy. 
 For the present we had better confine ourselves to the 
 statement that the Epicurean theory of knowledge 
 probably comes from the same source as the Epicurean 
 borrowings from the Physics and Ethics of Democritus, 
 viz., Nausiphanes. We shall see, as we go on, that 
 the theory is not that of Democritus, and is really 
 inconsistent with physical Atomism. 
 
 Epicurus starts then, just like a modern empiricist, 
 with the unproved assertion that all our knowledge 
 and all our concepts are derived solely from sensation. 
 ' Whatever we cognize,' so Cicero expresses the doctrine 
 in De Finibus, i. 64, 'has its origin in the senses.' 
 Epicurus himself says in 23 of the Catechism, that 
 unqualified scepticism about the veracity of sensation 
 is self-destructive. ' If you attack all sensations you 
 will have no standard left by which to condemn those 
 of them which you pronounce false.' Thus, be it 
 noted, he supposes it conceded that some sensations at 
 least are veridical, the very point which the theory of 
 Democritus had quite consistently denied. Since the 
 atomic theory, which Democritus regards as absolutely 
 true, is obviously at variance with the testimony of the 
 senses, Democritus had drawn the conclusion that it is 
 only reflection or reasoning, never sensation, which 
 apprehends things as they really are. No thing really 
 42
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 has the character which it seems to our senses to have, 
 and the fundamental proposition of a true theory of 
 knowledge is that sensation is inherently misleading. 
 'There are two types of cognition, the one genuine, 
 the other bastard. To the bastard kind belong all 
 such things as sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch ; but 
 the genuine is separate from it' (Sextus Empiricus, 
 adv. Math., vii. 135, who explains rightly that the 
 contrast is between sensation and 'understanding'). 1 
 Some such view is, of course, indispensable to any 
 Philosophy which holds that the physical world con- 
 sists simply of atoms in motion, and the rejection of 
 it by Epicurus is only a sign of his entire lack of 
 intellectual thoroughness. 
 
 All knowledge then begins with, and can be analysed 
 back into, actual sensations. And Epicurus is as 
 confident as Locke that sensation always has a real 
 external object, and is not a mere subjective affection 
 of our mind or our nervous system. Unlike Locke, 
 he goes so far as to hold that sensation not only has 
 such an object, but that it always represents its object 
 exactly as it really is : ' it is a property of sensation 
 
 1 Democritus, Fr. 11 (Diels). The names for the two kinds 
 of cognition are yv-^alrj (legitimate), ffKorir) (lit. ' dark '). I 
 assume that ffKorirj here is used metaphorically in the sense of 
 'bastard,' 'begotten under the cover of secrecy,' as in the 
 common tragic periphrases cub-nov \t\os, Kpii^tov X^x* for 
 ' concubine.' So Diels renders the word by unecht, 'spurious.' 
 I find that the right rendering has also already been given by 
 Professor Burnet and others. 
 
 43
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 alone to apprehend the present object which arouses 
 it' (Fr. 247). Or more precisely, to quote Sextus 
 again, ' Sensation, because it apprehends the objects 
 which fall under it without subtraction, addition, or 
 transposition, since it is irrational, is always completely 
 true, and apprehends existence as it veritably is' 
 (op. tit. viii. 9). Sensations were therefore called 
 ej/apycicu, 'clear and evident' cognitions, and it was 
 maintained that even the sensations of dreamers and 
 lunatics are strictly veridical, because they are ' changes 
 in consciousness,' and a change must always have a 
 real cause (Fr. 63). We see, then, that Epicurus, like 
 Locke, holds that there is an indefinable something 
 about every actual sensation which distinguishes it 
 from any other mode of being conscious, such as memory 
 or imagination ; you cannot say what this difference 
 consists in, but you directly feel it; every sensation 
 carries with it the stamp of its own ' reality.' It is 
 interesting to observe the reason given for the view 
 that sensation always has an external object. The 
 argument is that the sensation is always caused by 
 some thing. Leaving on one side the question of fact 
 raised by some modern psychologists as to the existence 
 of ' centrally initiated sensations,' we see at once that 
 Epicurus is thus attempting to guarantee the objec- 
 tivity of sense-qualities by appealing to a universal law 
 of causation. This is quite inconsistent with his 
 empiricist starting-point, but the inconsistency is one 
 in which he has inevitably been followed by all later 
 
 44
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 empiricists. We see also that he falls into the very 
 common error of confusing the objects perceived by 
 the senses with the physical stimuli which arouse 
 sensation, (like modern writers who talk of the eye as 
 perceiving light-waves, forgetting that what we per- 
 ceive is not vibrations but colours). 
 
 To the question why he holds that sensation not 
 only has an external existing cause, but always per- 
 ceives that cause just as it is, Epicurus replies that 
 a sensation is aXoyov n, non-rational, and therefore 
 neither adds to, takes away from, nor transposes the 
 parts of its object, since all these are operations of 
 the reflective understanding. Hence the very non- 
 rational character of sensation becomes a guarantee 
 of its fidelity as a record of external fact. Hence 
 Epicurus, thanks to his indifference to the theory of 
 knowledge, cannot like Locke distinguish between the 
 primary sensations and the secondary, and does not 
 even appear to see that there is any problem involved, 
 though one would have thought that his adherence to 
 Atomism must have forced the question on his notice. 
 
 For the full explanation of the theory that sensation 
 is always unerring we need for a moment to anticipate 
 our account of the Epicurean Physics. The explana- 
 tion turns on a distinction between the immediate 
 and the mediate object in sense- perception. When a 
 distant tower which is really square appears round, 
 have we not an illusion of sight ? Epicurus says no ; 
 there is only a fallacy of inference. The square tower 
 45
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 throws off a series of images, or atomic skins from its 
 surface. These images are originally square also, but 
 being material, like the tower itself, they clash with 
 other bodies as they travel from the tower towards 
 the eye, and thus get their angles rounded off. What 
 we actually perceive, the inner or immediate object 
 as we might call it, is one of these ' skins,' and this 
 has become round before it strikes on the sensory 
 organ, and is therefore perceived exactly as it is. The 
 error lies simply in the judgment that the mediate 
 object, the body from which the ' skin ' was thrown 
 off, is round too, and so the fallacy belongs entirely to 
 reason and not to sense. This explains also what was 
 meant by saying that the sensations of a dreamer or a 
 lunatic are veridical. Like all sensations, they have a 
 cause external to the percipient, and this cause is, as 
 always, a ' skin ' composed of atoms. The dreamer or 
 lunatic apprehends this ' skin ' just as it is when it acts 
 on his sensory system, and his sensation is therefore 
 ' true ' ; his error lies in the inference he makes as to 
 the body from which the 'skin' has been projected. 
 For example, some of the 'skins' may never have 
 been thrown off from any single actual body at all. 
 They may be accidental agglomerations of atoms 
 originally coming from different sources, formed in the 
 process of transit through the intervening space, e.g. 
 the images of a three-headed giant or of a centaur. If 
 the madman takes these for 'skins' thrown off from 
 real bodies of giants or centaurs, he commits a fallacy 
 46
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 of inference. Hence it is essential to the theory to 
 distinguish very sharply between actual sensation and 
 its reproduction in memory or imagination, which may 
 be distorted by such fallacies to any extent. (See 
 Epicurus' own words in Fr. 36.) Unfortunately 
 Epicurus gives us no rule by which to make the 
 distinction. 
 
 The next step taken by Epicurus is to explain the 
 nature of what he calls a TrpoXv) i/as, or pre-notion. By 
 this he means the general notion or concept of a class 
 of things. He takes it, precisely in the fashion of 
 Huxley, to be the same thing as a mental ' composite 
 photograph,' resulting from the blending into one 
 memory-image of a number of residues of individual 
 sensations. ' All our concepts,' he says (Fr. 36), ' have 
 been derived from sensations by contiguity, analogy, 
 similarity, and composition, reasoning also contribut- 
 ing to the result.' His view then, like that of our 
 Associationists, is clearly that perception of concrete 
 things begins with an association in thought of sense- 
 qualities which have been presented together. Further 
 association by similarity, whether of relations or of 
 qualities, as well as conscious combination in accord 
 with what we should call some category or principle 
 of order, supervenes, and so, in the end, out of a 
 number of individual sensations, occurring at different 
 times and having individual qualitative differences, is 
 formed a general or typical image, not corresponding 
 exactly to any one presented object, but representing 
 
 47
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 the features in which the members of a kindred group 
 of objects are alike. (I seem to trace in this account 
 a psychologically crude reproduction of Aristotle's 
 account of the way in which ' many memories of the 
 same thing' give rise to a single experience.) This 
 'generic image' is what Epicurus calls a TrpoAij^is or 
 pre-notion and defines as ' a true conception, or belief, 
 or general notion stored up in the mind, that is, the 
 recollection of what has frequently been presented 
 from without; for as soon as the word "man" is 
 uttered, we think by a "pre-notion " of the generic type 
 of " man," our sensations being the origin from which 
 this is derived' (Diogenes, x. 33). Now Epicurus 
 demands of a correctly-formed ' pre-notion,' just as he 
 did of sensation, that it shall be ivapyis, 'clear and 
 distinct'; and by this he means not that it shall be 
 logically well-defined, but that we shall have a clear-cut 
 picture of it before the imagination. Hence, like 
 Berkeley, he holds that if words are to have a mean- 
 ing, the simple and primary senses of them must repre- 
 sent perfectly definite mental pictures. The primary 
 meaning of a name is always ' clear and distinct ' ; we 
 never could apply a significant name to anything, if 
 we had not first become acquainted with the type or 
 class to which the thing belongs by a 'pre-notion.' 
 Hence ' pre-notions ' are all ' clear and distinct.' Clearly 
 we have here a theory of the formation of concepts 
 which is virtually that commonly ascribed to Locke, 
 except that Epicurus actually believes the processes of 
 48
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 association and combination of which he speaks to be 
 quite literally actions of a material thing (a complex 
 of atoms which has made its way into the organism 
 through the sense-organs), on a second material thing, 
 the so-called soul. We have also the same confusion 
 which besets the modern psychologising empiricists 
 between a logically universal concept and a mental 
 'composite photograph' which leads to the error of 
 supposing that what cannot be pictured cannot be 
 well defined. In fact it is often just the things which 
 are hardest to picture which can be most readily 
 defined for the understanding. Thus in arithmetic a 
 'rational number,' in geometry a curve which passes 
 through all the points of a given area, are notions 
 which are clear and distinct for the understanding, 
 since we know exactly what we mean by them, but 
 they can be imagined, if at all, only in the vaguest 
 way. Or again, I may know perfectly well what the law 
 means by 'wilful murder,' but the mental picture which 
 I form on hearing the words may be absurdly sketchy 
 and indistinct, or I may even form no picture at all. 
 
 We see now what the Epicurean standard of 
 ' reality ' or ' truth ' will be in the case of the sensation 
 and the general notion. The individual sensation 
 carries an assurance of objective reality with it in 
 an indescribable way; we feel that it is real, just as 
 Locke says that we have an immediate feeling of the 
 difference between actually being in the fire and 
 merely imagining ourselves there. And Epicurus 
 D 49
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 goes on to argue that if you have apparently conflict- 
 ing sensations, you must not deny the reality of either. 
 One sensation cannot prove the falsity of another of 
 the same kind, for both have exactly the same evidence 
 for them, nor can the truthfulness of a sensation be 
 disproved by an appeal to those of a different sense, 
 since the objects apprehended by the different senses 
 are disparate. (This seems meant to exclude, e.g. 
 the correction of a visual judgment of form by appeal 
 to experiences of touch. Presumably both experiences 
 are regarded as equally ' real,' but as concerned with 
 different immediate objects.) Nor can you be argued 
 out of your sensations by reasoning, since all reasoning 
 is founded on sensation (Fr. 36). 
 
 So in the case of the 'pre-notion,' its objectivity, 
 like that of the sensations from which it is com- 
 pounded, is supposed to be shown by its possessing, 
 like them, an irresistible ' clearness and distinctness ' ; 
 it is clear-cut and definite and, as Hume would say, 
 strikes the mind with a peculiar force and liveliness, 
 and it is this liveliness which guarantees that it is 
 objectively 'true' i.e. based on genuine sensation. 
 Similarly with feeling in the modern sense ; pleasures 
 are held to carry in themselves the stamp of their own 
 reality (see Fr. 260). Hence the summary statement 
 of the doxographers that 'according to Epicurus the 
 " criteria " are sensations, pre-notions, and feelings ' 
 
 But now, to come to what is the fundamental point 
 50
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 in the whole theory, what is the standard of ' reality 
 or ' truth ' in opinions, i.e. in beliefs or judgments ? 
 (It is really only in relation to beliefs that we can 
 rationally ask for such a standard ; there is no sense 
 in calling a sensation or a generic image, as distinct 
 from a belief about it, true or false at all.) It cannot, of 
 course, be maintained that all beliefs are true. Some 
 of them are certainly false ; but is there any means of 
 knowing the false beliefs from the true 1 Epicurus says 
 ' if a belief is witnessed to, or at least not witnessed 
 against by our clear and evident perceptions, it is true ; 
 if it is witnessed against, or not witnessed to, it is false ' 
 (Fr. 247). Or, in other words, a belief is true when it 
 is confirmed by the evidence of the senses, false when 
 it is contradicted by that evidence ; where there is 
 neither confirmation nor contradiction, the belief may 
 be true or may be false. This is, to be sure, the view 
 regularly taken by pure empiricists as to the conditions 
 under which a scientific hypothesis may be regarded 
 as established. It is established when its consequences 
 are found to be verified by sense-experience, confuted 
 when they are found to be in conflict with sense- 
 experience. The point is of special moment for 
 Epicurus because, with all the sensationalism of his 
 theory of cognition, his Physics are entirely built on 
 a doctrine about certain things (the atoms and the 
 empty space in which they move), which admittedly 
 cannot be perceived at all. How then can we have 
 any test of its truth ? The Epicurean answer to 
 51
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 this question is quite different from that given by 
 Democritus. Democritus, as we saw, regarded sense- 
 perception as inherently illusory; consequently he 
 makes no attempt whatever to appeal to the senses in 
 support of the atomic theory. With him, as with his 
 predecessor Leucippus, the doctrine is put forward as a 
 metaphysical deduction from the two premisses (1) What 
 is is immutable ; (2) motion is a fact. The immediate 
 conclusion from these premisses is that what is con- 
 sists of absolutely unchanging units moving about, 
 approaching, and receding, in empty space. Epicurus 
 is bound, on the other hand, to achieve the impossible 
 task of showing that Atomism is compatible with the 
 view that our sensations are the criteria of reality. 
 'We must draw our inferences,' he says,' 'from the 
 perceptible to the imperceptible' (Fr. 36). What he 
 urges is, in effect, that the doctrine of atoms is 
 established if it leads to a conception of the world 
 conformable to our sense-experience, and if the pro- 
 perties and motions we suppose in the atoms are 
 analogous with our sense-experience of those of per- 
 ceptible things. But here a difficulty at once arises. 
 The atomic hypothesis of the world's structure might 
 not be the only one which would yield results con- 
 sonant with sense-experience ; a plurality of different 
 theories might all be ' witnessed to, or not witnessed 
 against, by our senses.' Why then should we give 
 any one of them a preference over any other ? It is 
 clearly with a view to this difficulty that Epicurus puts 
 52
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 forward a theory in which he anticipates both Hobbes 
 and may we not say ? our modern Pragmatists. 
 Two inconsistent explanations of the same fact may be 
 equally true and equally valuable, if either would yield 
 results conformable with sense-experience. Now the 
 sole utility of the study of Physics was to lie in its 
 power to produce serenity of mind by expelling the 
 fear of a judgment after death and the belief in 
 Divine control of the course of events. Hence if 
 there are several theories about the cause of a natural 
 event which all agree in being purely naturalistic, 
 and if the result would equally occur on any one of 
 these suppositions, Epicurus teaches that any one of 
 them is as good as any other, and we have no reason 
 to decide between them, since the practical con- 
 sequences for life are the same. Thus, while certain 
 theories are laid down as absolutely true, e.g. the 
 doctrine of Atoms (on the ground that they are 
 requisite for any purely mechanical theory of nature), 
 alternative causes are assigned for most of the special 
 phenomena. This comes out repeatedly in the epitome 
 of the work on Physics which forms the so-called 
 second 'letter' given by Diogenes. We are there 
 told that appearances in the heavens are capable of a 
 plurality of different explanations all equally accordant 
 with sense-perception, and we must not prefer one of 
 these to another. ' For Philosophy should not proceed 
 in accord with empty dogmas and postulates but only as 
 actual appearances demand. For what life requires is 
 
 53
 
 EPICUKUS 
 
 not unreason and idle opinion, but a tranquil exist- 
 ence' ([Ep.] ii. 3 ; Usener, p. 36). Thus Epicurus not 
 merely says what is true enough, that in our present 
 state of knowledge ascertained facts may often be 
 accounted for on rival hypotheses ; he actually forbids 
 the extension of science by the devising of experiments 
 to reduce the number of possible explanations. Any 
 explanation will do, if it only excludes Divine agency. 
 We may fairly say, then, that what recommends the 
 atomic theory to Epicurus is not its scientific advan- 
 tages, but its utility as a means of getting rid of 
 Theism. And we must further note that his reason 
 for wishing to banish theistic hypotheses from science 
 is not the legitimate one that as descriptions of how 
 events succeed one another they leave us just where 
 they found us, but the illegitimate one that he 
 personally dislikes the thought of a God whose 
 judgments may possibly have to be reckoned with 
 hereafter. 
 
 Whether Epicurus devised for himself the singular 
 combination of two such incompatibles as Democritean 
 Atomism and absolute sensationalism or borrowed it 
 from Nausiphanes there appears to be nothing to show, 
 unless we may regard the evidence of Philodemus, 
 which proves that Nausiphanes had been interested in 
 the inductive problem of inferring the unperceived 
 from the perceived, as an indication of borrowing. 
 Such a problem could hardly have appealed to a 
 disciple of Democritus unless he had entered on the 
 
 54
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 path of trying to combine his master's Physics with 
 sensationalism. Hence it may well be that Epicurus is 
 as unoriginal here as he shows himself everywhere else. 
 We may also note that the Epicurean doctrine of 
 the criterion, taken as it stands, is quite inconsistent 
 with the rejection of Formal Logic. Before we can say 
 whether the results which 'follow from' an hypothesis are 
 1 confirmed by sense-experience,' we must know what 
 results do follow and what do not, and how are we to 
 know this without any doctrine of deductive Logic 1 ? 
 How can we tell whether we are reasoning rightly or 
 wrongly from the perceptible to the imperceptible 
 without some doctrine of the conditions under which 
 generalisation is sound 1 Later Epicureans appear to 
 have tried to fill the gap left at this point by Epicurus. 
 Among the remains of Philodemus we find in particular 
 some notes of the teaching of Zeno of Sidon (flor. c. 
 80 B.C.) on this very matter. Zeno admits that a few 
 unusual instances of a sequence are insufficient to 
 establish a general rule, while a complete examina- 
 tion of all relevant cases is usually impossible. So 
 he holds that in order to make a safe generalisation 
 we require to examine a number of instances which, 
 though alike in some one respect, vary among them- 
 selves in other respects. By comparison we may then 
 discover what has been the one regular concomitant in 
 all these cases of the result we are interested in, and 
 then reason by analogy to the presence of this con- 
 comitant in other cases. This is, of course, the same 
 55
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 method afterwards called by J. S. Mill the Method 
 of Agreement, and, like that method, is too vague to 
 be of any great value except as a basis for mere 
 suggestions of possible connections in Nature. As 
 Wallace says, Zeno (and we may say the same of Mill) 
 evades the difficulty of saying how much resemblance 
 warrants us in regarding a number of facts as forming 
 one ' kind ' or ' class ' of cases. We may add, I think, 
 a further criticism against the whole conception of 
 'analogy' from the perceptible as the only method of 
 discovering the 'latent processes' in Nature. Why 
 need the behaviour of ultimate molecular or atomic 
 bodies (if there are such things) be analogous at all 
 with the facts of sense-perception ? In fact most 
 theories of Physics ascribe to the simple ultimate 
 elements motions which seem strikingly unlike those 
 which fall under direct sense-perception. E.g. Newton's 
 first law of Motion or the law of the Conservation of 
 Energy seems at first sight to be contradicted by sense- 
 perception. We accept them, not because the pro- 
 cesses they assume are like what we actually see, but 
 because we can deduce the results we see from them. 
 
 3. Physics The Structure of the Universe. 
 
 From Plutarch (adv. Coloiem, 3) we learn that 
 Epicurus had at one time, like his teacher Nausiphanes, 
 been content to call himself a Democritean, and when 
 we examine his physical theory we shall find that it is, 
 in fact, merely that of Democritus altered for the 
 worse and cut away from the anti-sensational theory 
 56
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 of knowledge with which Democritus had rightly 
 connected it. As Cicero says (De Finibus, i. 17), 'In 
 his Physics, of which he makes a special boast, Epicurus 
 is absolutely dependent on others. He repeats the 
 views of Democritus with a few minor changes, and, 
 in my judgment, his pretended improvements are 
 really changes for the worse.' Epicurus then, like the 
 fifth-century philosophers to whom he goes back for 
 his view of the world, is in principle a pure materialist. 
 His two fundamental doctrines, like those of Leucippus 
 and Democritus, are (1) nothing is created out of 
 nothing or annihilated into nothing, (2) nothing exists 
 except bodies and empty space. ' The whole universe 
 is bodies and space, for sensation itself universally 
 testifies that there are bodies, and reason must infer to 
 the imperceptible on the analogy of sensation. And 
 if there were not place, or void, or room, or the 
 intangible as we may also call it, bodies would have 
 nowhere to exist nor wherein to move ' (Ep. i., 
 Usener, p. 5). 
 
 From this he infers that the ultimate bodies are 
 atomic, or indivisible (i.e. physically indiscerptible, 
 not geometrically unextended), by the argument, that 
 if bodies were infinitely divisible, all bodies could be 
 ultimately broken up into infinitely small parts and 
 thus annihilated. 'We may not believe that a finite 
 body contains an infinite or an indefinitely great num- 
 ber of particles; so we must deny the possibility of 
 infinite subdivision . . . lest we should be forced to 
 57
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 admit that what is can be annihilated by the constant 
 pressure of surrounding bodies ' (Ep. i., Usener, p. 5). 
 Atoms, again, must be incapable of change, since, if 
 there is to be no annihilation of what is, there must 
 be a permanent substratum which persists under all 
 change. Hence, while we may attribute to atoms, as 
 to sensible bodies, bulk and shape and weight, we must 
 not ascribe to them any further sensible qualities. 
 
 Here we are led into a difficulty due to the incon- 
 sistency between Atomism and the sensationalistic 
 theory of knowledge. Democritus had drawn from 
 the variability of the colours, tastes, etc., of the bodies 
 we perceive the conclusion of Locke and Descartes, 
 that such sense-qualities are mere subjective effects of 
 the mechanical properties of bodies on our organism. 
 Hence he had held that judgments about the sensible 
 qualities of bodies have no objective validity ; they 
 belong to the 'bastard ' form of conviction. ' Things 
 are only sweet or bitter, etc., by convention ; in reality 
 there are only atoms and the void.' Epicurus could 
 not follow him here, since to do so would be fatal to 
 the fundamental doctrine of his Canonic, that sensation 
 always represents its immediate external object just as 
 it is, without addition, subtraction or modification. 
 He seems to have tried to reconcile the two views in 
 this way. In every composite body there are atoms 
 of very, different sizes and shapes, and consequently 
 these varieties are reproduced in the ' skins ' (etSwAa) 
 thrown from bodies, which are the immediate stimuli 
 58
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 and objects of sensation. But owing to the differences 
 in the constitution of organisms, only some of these may 
 be able to act on a given sense-organ. Hence a thing 
 may appear to different persons to be of different 
 colours, red to you, gray to me (if I am colour-blind). 
 The ' image ' or ' skin ' itself contains both atoms 
 suited to evoke the sensation c red ' and other fitted to 
 evoke ' gray ' ; but the one set make their way into 
 your sense-organs the other into mine. The thing 
 actually is at once red (and thus your sensation is 
 ' true/) and gray, (and so mine is true also). Colour, 
 therefore, is not a subjective illusion, but a ' variable 
 quality ' (o-v/xTrrw/xa, the word seems to be medical, and 
 to mean a ' fit,' or sudden seizure,) of the external body, 
 as distinguished from its o-D/x/Se/ifyKOTa, viz. : the 
 permanent predicates, which do not thus vary, but, as 
 their name implies, always ' go with ' the thing, its 
 primary qualities. Cf. Ep. i. (Usener, p. 11): 'We 
 must hold that we see and recognise the shapes of 
 things in virtue of the entrance of something from 
 actual bodies. For bodies outside us could not have 
 set the stamp of their colour and shape upon us by 
 means of the air between us and them, or of effluences 
 of any kind proceeding from ourselves to them [this 
 is directed against Aristotle and Plato], so well as on 
 the hypothesis that certain imprints enter into us 
 from external, things, preserving their colour and 
 shape, and making their way in accord with the 
 appropriate magnitude into the eye or the mind ' ; and 
 
 59
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 ib. (Usener, p. 22) : ' Further, the shapes, colours, 
 magnitudes, and all that is predicated of bodies as an 
 attribute of all bodies, or of all visible bodies, and as 
 knowable by bodily perception, must neither be held to 
 be realities per se (which is inconceivable), nor to be 
 simply non-existent, nor to be incorporeal predicates of 
 body, nor parts of it . . .' Immediately on this follows 
 the definition of the a-vfj.TTTWfj.aTa, or variable accidents 
 as distinct from the permanent properties of bodies. 
 
 Of course we may retort that this is no solution of 
 the difficulty. A mechanical configuration which 
 awakens the perception of red is not the same as a red 
 thing, and moreover, on Epicurus' own showing, if a 
 thing is both red and gray, and I only perceive it as 
 red, I am not apprehending it ' without subtraction.' l 
 
 I do not know how to account for the inconsequence 
 of Epicurus in thus making the doctrine of Democritus 
 absurd by combining it with sensationalism, except 
 perhaps on the ground that his theory aims at incor- 
 porating the view of Nature which had been just made 
 popular by Aristotle. According to Aristotle, who 
 reverted in this respect to the standpoint of pre- 
 Democritean natural science, the fundamental distinc- 
 tions in Nature are not geometrical or mechanical, but 
 qualitative, the distinctions between hot, cold; dry, 
 moist ; white, black, and the other contrary opposites 
 of sense-perception. The attempt to fuse this point 
 
 1 The indications afforded by Lucretius, ii. 795-816, point to 
 the interpretation I have given in the text. 
 
 60
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 of view with the rigidly mechanical theory of Atomism 
 was bound to produce strange results, and we shall 
 see that it is probably responsible for another grave 
 departure from Democritus. 
 
 Epicurus next infers, like Democritus, that the 
 number of atoms is infinite. The All must be infinite, 
 because whatever is finite has limits, and so has some- 
 thing outside itself, but there can be nothing outside 
 the All. The argument, like most of those we have 
 hitherto seen produced by him, is an old one, as it goes 
 back to the famous Eleatic, Melissus of Samos. It 
 seems to be, when applied to prove the conclusion 
 Epicurus draws from it, a sophism, since it does not 
 follow that because the All has nothing outside it, 
 the number of things it contains must be infinite. 
 (Melissus, in fact, used the argument to prove that 
 the All must be one just because it is infinite.) But 
 Epicurus adds a further physical reason. 'The All 
 must be infinite both in respect of the number of 
 bodies, i.e. atoms), and in respect of the extent of void. 
 For if the void were infinite, but the number of bodies 
 finite, the bodies would never have remained anywhere, 
 but would have been scattered and dissipated through 
 the void, having nothing to support them and fix them 
 in position when they rebound from collision, and if 
 the void were finite it would not contain the infinity 
 of bodies ' (Ep. i., Usener, p. 7). I do not see that the 
 argument, which has all the appearance of coming 
 from the fifth century Atomists, is conclusive. It is 
 61
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 true that you cannot find room for an infinity of atoms 
 in a limited space, but the proof that the number of 
 atoms must be infinite if space is unlimited seems un- 
 satisfactory. Even on the supposition of an infinite 
 space with a finite number of atoms in it, why might 
 not the attractive forces, however you conceive them, 
 hold the atoms together indefinitely ? Or even if you 
 grant the consequence proved, why should it be absurd 
 to hold that it really will be the fate of the universe to be 
 disintegrated into individual atoms each at an infinite 
 distance from every other 1 To make it absurd, you 
 would need to prove that the world has already ex- 
 isted for an infinite time, so that the disruption, if it 
 were possible, ought to have occurred already. But 
 Epicurus merely assumes the eternity of the world 
 without proof. 
 
 When we come to the theory of the motion of the 
 atom we get at once a fundamental divergence from 
 Democritus which, as the Academic critics observed, 
 shows the inferiority of Epicurus as a scientific thinker. 
 To judge from the criticism of Aristotle, who com- 
 plains that Democritus had never explained what is 
 the natural movement of atoms (i.e. how an atom would 
 move if it were not deflected by collision with other 
 atoms), we should suppose that Democritus started 
 with an infinite number of atoms moving in every 
 direction, and we know for certain that he held that 
 atoms move with different velocities, the bulkier more 
 rapidly than the less bulky In this way, when they 
 62
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 come to collide the less bulky atoms are squeezed out- 
 wards, and form a kind of film round a denser centre. 
 Whether Democritus believed in absolute direction 
 in space we are not told, but we have, I think, the 
 right to infer from the data before us that he made no 
 use of the antithesis of up and down in his theory, and 
 did not regard his atoms as ' falling.' In other words, 
 the ancient tradition, for which we have the express 
 testimony of Theophrastus, is absolutely correct in 
 asserting that Democritus did not regard weight as 
 an inherent property of the atom. According to him 
 the inherent properties of the atom are two, shape and 
 bulk. Weight was added as a third by Epicurus. In 
 this Democritus was, of course, right, since the weight 
 of a body is purely relative to its surroundings, while 
 its mass (which is invariable) would, in the case of an 
 atom, be strictly proportional to its bulk. 
 
 Now Epicurus makes both the assumption (1) that 
 all atoms have weight, but irrespective of their weight, 
 move with the same velocity through the void, because 
 it offers no resistance to them ; (2) and that they all 
 move, until deflected by collision in one and the same 
 direction, viz. down, the reason why they move down- 
 wards, rather than in any other direction, being their 
 weight. Thus we have to think of all atoms as 
 primarily falling in parallel straight lines, with equal 
 velocities, towards a fixed plane at an infinite distance, 
 in the direction from our heads to our feet. Apparently 
 the assumption of the uniform direction rests on a bad 
 
 63
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 generalisation from our experience of the falling of 
 bodies to the earth. The blunder made in this as- 
 sumption is not, as is often said, that Epicurus believes 
 in an absolute and not merely a relative difference of 
 directions in space, but that he treats gravity as an 
 inherent tendency in material particles to move to- 
 wards a fixed plane in empty space, whereas it is really 
 a tendency to move in the direction of other material 
 particles. What he does not see is that a single par- 
 ticle, alone in infinite space, would not gravitate at all, 
 and that the direction of gravity at different places is 
 not the same. As to the point about equal velocity, 
 Democritus was clearly thinking in the right scientific 
 spirit when he began with the assumption of atoms 
 moving with every degree of velocity, since no valid 
 reason can be given for supposing uniformity. Epicurus' 
 apparent ground for asserting the uniformity, viz., 
 that there can be no friction between empty space and 
 the atoms, is obviously worthless, since it proves no 
 more than that the velocity of an atom falling through 
 empty space would, in the absence of all other bodies, 
 be constant ; not that for two atoms, let us say at an 
 immense distance from each other, it must be the same. 
 But it is noticeable that he has accidentally stumbled 
 on a truth about gravity which is not suggested by our 
 sensible experience. It is true that in a perfect vacuum 
 particles would fall towards the centre of a large at- 
 tracting mass from equal distances in equal time. But 
 this does not show that all atoms originally move with 
 64
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 equal velocity ; it only shows that that part of the velo- 
 city of two bodies which is due to gravitation towards 
 the same fixed third body would be equal in empty 
 space. Of course, neither Democritus nor Epicurus 
 could have worked out a really satisfactory cosmical 
 mechanics, as neither possessed the conceptions of mass 
 and momentum. 
 
 We may perhaps conjecture the reason for Epicurus' 
 unscientific depravation of the atomic doctrine as to the 
 movement of the atom. The doctrine that 'up 'and 
 'down' correspond to the distinction between move- 
 ment from the centre of the universe towards its 
 circumference, and that from its circumference to its 
 centre is a prominent feature in the philosophy of 
 Aristotle, who combines it with the view that ' heavy 
 bodies' naturally move 'down,' towards the centre, 'light 
 bodies' 'up,' perpendicularly away from the centre. 
 As Professor Burnet says, this doctrine led to no serious 
 difficulties in the Aristotelian Physics, because Aristotle 
 thought that there is only one world, and does not 
 attribute weight to the ' heavens ' which bound it. 
 The real confusions only come out when the theory of 
 the tendency of heavy bodies to fall ' down ' towards 
 a fixed centre is combined with the belief in an infinite 
 void. This unhappy combination of incompatibles 
 looks, as Burnet says, as though it were definitely in- 
 tended to meet Aristotle's unwise criticism of Demo- 
 critus and Leucippus by ascribing one and the same 
 'natural' movement to all atoms. In that case we 
 E 65
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 must ascribe the doctrine to Epicurus, not to any prede- 
 cessor, and it will be clear that the only original feature 
 of his system is just the most illogical thing in it. 1 
 
 We come now to the crowning absurdity of the 
 whole scheme. If the atoms all fall perpendicularly, 
 from all eternity, in the same direction and with 
 uniform velocity, obviously no atom should overtake 
 another, and no compound bodies should ever be 
 formed. Instead of a world or worlds of such bodies 
 there ought to be at every moment a downward rain 
 of atoms preserving their original distances from each 
 other, and the condition of the universe at any moment 
 ought to be indistinguishable from its condition at any 
 other. This is obviously not the case, though it is 
 exactly what would happen if the whole motion of each 
 particle were due solely, as we should say, to gravita- 
 tion. To reconcile his first hypothesis about the motion 
 of the atom with sensible fact, Epicurus has to make a 
 second assumption which virtually ruins his funda- 
 mental theory that the course of Nature is mechanical. 
 He assumed that at certain moments which we cannot 
 predict, and for no assignable cause, the atom may 
 swerve to a very slight degree out of the path of per- 
 pendicular descent. These incalculable swervings, 
 often enough repeated, may lead to a notable defiec- 
 
 1 See Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 396-397. I have tried 
 to show that his theory of Epicureanism as a conflation of 
 Democritus with Aristotle is confirmed by other inconsistencies 
 in Epicurus which are most naturally explained in the same 
 way. 
 
 66
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 tion of the atom's path. In this way atoms may come to 
 collide and adhere, and so, in process of time, to form 
 a world of perceptible compound bodies. This is the 
 doctrine of the declination (irapeyK Ato-is, dinamen) of the 
 atom expounded by Lucretius in Book ii. 217 ff. No 
 confirmation of the theory is offered except that given 
 by Lucretius, the existence of unmotived free-will in 
 animals. On the theory that the soul, like everything 
 except the void, is made of atoms, Lucretius argues, you 
 cannot account for volition, or escape fatalism, except 
 by endowing the atoms with the capacity for capricious 
 deviation from their regular paths. Now the Epicu- 
 reans were determined to uphold free-will in the sense 
 of absolutely unmotived volition against the Stoic de- 
 terminism. Epicurus himself had said (Ep. iii., Use- 
 ner, p. 15), ' It would be better to believe the tale about 
 the gods than to be enslaved to the Destiny of the 
 physicists ; the former leaves a prospect of changing the 
 purposes of the gods by propitiating them, the latter 
 sets up a necessity which cannot be propitiated.' Thus 
 the source of the doctrine was simply a desire to avoid 
 a practically uncomfortable conclusion. Instead of 
 trying to show that rigid determinism is false, Epicurus 
 merely declines to believe in it, though it is a logical con- 
 sequence of the mechanical view of things, because he 
 dislikes the influence of the belief on human happiness. 
 He then uses this appeal to prejudice, to bolster up his 
 absurd natural science. (That the free-will of Epicurus 
 really means pure caprice, not, as has been sometimes
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 fancied, rational self-determination, is shown e.g. by 
 Lucretius ii. 299, where the poet adds to his previous 
 mistaken assertion that weight is an internal cause of 
 movement the remark that the 'declination' of the 
 atom at uncertain times and places shows that there is 
 no internal necessity in the behaviour of the mind. 
 Carneades, the great sceptic, correctly remarked (Cicero, 
 de Fato, 23) that Epicurus might have defended freedom 
 without the extravagant fiction of Trapey/cAicm, if he 
 had simply said that the cause of a voluntary action is 
 not external to the mind. This, however, would have 
 been fatal to his materialistic theory of the mind as a 
 complex of atoms.) 
 
 The unscientific character of this method of saving 
 one improvable hypothesis by a second which really 
 contradicts the first formed one of the standing grounds 
 for censure of Epicurus in antiquity. Cicero sums up 
 the Academic criticism when he says, ' He holds that 
 solid atoms fall downward by their own weight in 
 straight lines, and that this is the natural movement 
 of all bodies. Then it occurred to this truly acute 
 thinker that if all things fall downwards in straight 
 lines, no atom would ever overtake another, and so he 
 availed himself of a pure fiction. He said that the 
 atom swerves slightly from its path (a most ridiculous 
 suggestion), and that this leads to combinations, aggre- 
 gations, and adhesions of atoms, which, in their turn, 
 lead to the formation of a world ' (De Natura Deorum, 
 i. 69). 
 
 68
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 The infinite worlds. The Epicurean definition of a 
 'world,' or orderly system of atoms, is 'a region of the 
 heavens, containing stars, an earth, and all perceptible 
 bodies, cut off from the void and terminated by a 
 boundary which may be in rotation or at rest, and 
 may have a round, a triangular, or any other figure. 
 For all figures are possible, since no evidence can be 
 found to the contrary in our own world, since its 
 boundary is not perceptible ' ([Ep.] ii., Usener, p. 37). 
 In this definition the words 'cut off void ' are known 
 to be a quotation from Leucippus, and what precedes 
 them probably comes from the same source ; the addi- 
 tion that such a ' world ' may or may not be moving 
 as a whole, and may have any shape, is partly at least 
 original, since it alludes to the peculiar Epicurean 
 theory of knowledge. Epicurus also borrows from 
 Leucippus and Democritus the doctrine that the 
 universe contains an infinite number of such worlds. 
 'We see that the number of such worlds is infinite, and 
 that such a world may arise cither within another 
 world, or in the intermundial spaces, by which we mean 
 the intervals of empty space between different worlds.' 
 As we have scon, Epicurus maintained that any number 
 of divergent explanations of the formation of the 
 things composing a world might be equally good, pro- 
 vided that they only exclude all divine agency and 
 conform to the general principles of atomism. Of the 
 movements of the heavenly bodies it is expressly said, 
 ' To assign one single explanation of these facts when 
 69
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 the phenomena suggest several is the action of a 
 lunatic, and a very improper proceeding of those who 
 emulate the follies of the astronomers' (i.e. the scientific 
 astronomers of the Platonic school). He even scan- 
 dalised the scientific by the ridiculous assertion that 
 the heavenly bodies are approximately of their apparent 
 size. ' Relatively to us the size of the sun and moon 
 and the other heavenly bodies is just what it appears 
 to be ; absolutely it is either a little larger or a little 
 smaller, or as the case may be.' His argument is that 
 a bonfire seen from a distance appears about as big as 
 it really is, and we may conclude to the case of the 
 sun and moon by analogy. So generally we find the 
 ' second letter ' full of alternative explanations of facts 
 in which the results of the latest science and the crudest 
 guesses of the earliest Milesians are treated as much on 
 a par. 
 
 I do not propose to enter here into the details of 
 these ludicrous theories, but there is one point on 
 which a word should be said. The Epicureans have 
 sometimes been unduly belauded as pioneers of the 
 doctrine of 'evolution.' In point of fact, the general 
 conception of the origin of species by gradual develop- 
 ment is as old as Anaximander of Miletus in the early 
 part of the sixth century, and had been specially 
 expounded by Empedocles in the fifth. Hence, as 
 there is, so far as I know, no evidence that Epicurus 
 concerned himself much with the subject, I think it 
 most probable that the remarkable anticipations of 
 70
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 Lamarck which we find in the fifth book of Lucretius 
 come from Empedocles, whom he regarded as his 
 literary model, rather than from Epicurus. The real 
 way to put the matter is that Epicurus, like the 
 evolutionists, rejects all teleological explanation of 
 natural facts. Eyes and ears have not been 'given 
 to us,' as Plato had asserted, in order to lead us to 
 philosophic reflection and scientific knowledge. We 
 do not have eyes and ears that we may see and hear ; 
 AVC see and hear merely because we happen to have 
 eyes and ears. Function does not create organisation, 
 as modern biologists ure teaching us; organs create 
 function. 
 
 Psychology. The soul is, of course, material and 
 made of atoms. The only immaterial existent is 
 empty space, but empty space cannot act or be acted 
 on as the soul can. ' Hence those who call the soul 
 immaterial talk nonsense. If it were so, it could 
 neither act nor be acted upon. But in fact it is clear 
 and evident that both these states belong to the soul ' 
 (Ep. i., Usener, p. 21). More particularly, it is made 
 of the finest and roundest particles, and this accounts 
 for its quickness of sensibility and volition, such 
 particles being more mobile than any others. (This 
 is merely Democritus repeated.) 'We can see by 
 appealing to sensation and feeling, the surest of 
 criteria, that the soul is a subtle body scattered 
 through our whole frame, similar to breath, with an 
 admixture of warmth, and that in some parts it is 
 71
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 more like the one, in some like the other, but in one 
 special part [I read ITT! Se TOV /xepovs for Usener's e:ri 
 Se TOV p.., which may be an oversight,] it far surpasses 
 even breath and heat themselves in fineness, and is 
 consequently all the quicker to be affected by the 
 condition of the rest of our frame ' (Ep. i., Usener, 
 pp. 19-20). According to the still more precise account 
 followed by Lucretius (iii. 227 ff.) and the Placita of 
 Aetius (iv. 3, 11), the soul is 'a mixture of four things, 
 one of a fiery nature, another of the nature of air, 
 a third of the nature of breath, and a fourth which 
 has no name. It is this last which is the sensitive 
 principle; the "breath" is the source of motion, the 
 "air" of rest, the hot element of the sensible heat of 
 the body, while the nameless principle produces sensa- 
 tion in us, for there is no sensibility in any of the 
 elements which have got names.' 
 
 It is this fourth 'nameless' part which Lucretius 
 regularly calls the anima (mind), as distinct from the 
 animus or soul as a whole. Thus to the other three 
 constituents Epicurus assigns the functions of respira- 
 tion, motion, and the like. They constitute the vital 
 principle ; the unnamed fourth part is the principle of 
 sensation, and, since all mental activity is based on 
 sensation, of consciousness generally. We have to 
 think of the soul as not localised in any one part 
 of the body but diffused through it, particles of the 
 soul-stuff being everywhere mixed up with the grosser 
 particles Avhich form the 'flesh,' as Epicurus prefers 
 72
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 to call the body. But consciousness is more definitely 
 located in a special region, that of the heart, since the 
 atoms of the 'nameless part' are held to be con- 
 gregated there. The difference between the soul and 
 the body thus becomes one of degree. The soul is no 
 longer, as with Plato, different in kind from and in- 
 commensurable with the body, nor, as with Aristotle, 
 the true reality of which the body is the mere indis- 
 pensable condition. As with Democritus, the soul is 
 itself a body composed of smaller and more mobile 
 atoms than the gross visible body. Sensation and all 
 the other mental processes are thought of as actual 
 movements belonging partly to the ' flesh,' partly to 
 the soul. The bodies of the outer world are always 
 shedding off skins or coats of surface-atoms, which for 
 a while cohere and retain the shape of the body from 
 which they are emitted. And, in course of time, some 
 of these atoms may be dissociated from their original 
 setting and joined with others to form a new skin or 
 image. When a ' husk ' of either of these kinds comes 
 in contact with a sense-organ, it may literally force a 
 passage through into the organism. If it can hang 
 together until it reaches the 'nameless' part of the 
 soul and impinges on it, there arises a conscious 
 sensation. This theory of sensation as due to the 
 actual entrance of atomic ' skins ' into the body comes 
 from Democritus, except that, whereas Democritus had 
 supposed the ' skins ' to be formed out of the air or 
 water which surrounds bodies, and to be propagated 
 
 73
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 through air or water to the percipient, Epicurus holds 
 that they are formed of atoms actually detached from 
 the perceived body itself, and propagated through 
 empty space with an infinite velocity. The whole 
 theory, of course, ignores the fundamental fact of 
 which a doctrine of perception has to take account, the 
 personal individuality of the perceiving self. 
 
 Since the soul is formed of the smallest and most 
 mobile atoms, it would naturally be more quickly 
 dissipated into its constituents than anything else in 
 Nature, if it were not that it is shielded during life by 
 the integument of grosser atoms which surrounds it. 
 Thus it is not the soul which holds the body together, 
 but the body which holds the soul together. Hence, 
 at death, when the soul is eliminated from its covering, 
 the body, it is instantly disintegrated, and conscious- 
 ness and personality are finally annihilated. 'When 
 the whole complex is dissolved, the soul is dispersed 
 and no longer has the same powers, no longer is moved 
 nor has perception. For that which perceives can no 
 longer perceive anything, since it no longer belongs to 
 this complex nor has these motions, since the things 
 which envelope and surround it are not such as those 
 in which it now exists and possesses these motions ' 
 (Ep. i., Usener, p. 21), The ethical inference is then 
 drawn that it is folly to fear death, since there is no 
 consciousness after death. 'Death is nothing to us, 
 for when we are, death is not ; and when death is, we 
 are not.' 
 
 74
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 'Accustom thyself to reflect that death is nothing 
 to us, since good and bad depend entirely on sensation, 
 and death is privation of sensation. Hence the true 
 knowledge that death is nothing to us makes mortal 
 life enjoyable, not by adding endless duration to it, 
 but by taking away the craving for immortality. 
 There is nothing terrible in life for one who really 
 comprehends that there is nothing terrible in not 
 living. Hence he who says he fears death, not because 
 it will be painful when it comes, but because our present 
 assurance that it will come is painful, is a fool. It is 
 but an idle pain that comes of anticipating a thing 
 which will give us no uneasiness when it has come. 
 Death, then, that most dreaded of ills, is nothing to 
 us. For while we are, death is not ; and when death 
 has come, we are not. Death, then, is nothing to the 
 living nor yet to the dead, since it does not affect the 
 former, and the latter no longer exist. The crowd, 
 to be sure, at one time shrink from death as the worst 
 of evils, at another choose it as a refuge from the 
 miseries of life. But the wise man neither declines 
 life nor shrinks from death, since life is not distasteful 
 to him, nor does he think it an evil not to live ' 
 (Ep. iii., Usener, p. 60). Thus Epicurus uses his 
 borrowed Psychology to achieve the extirpation of 
 the fear of death as a prime disturber of human 
 happiness. 1 
 
 1 The famous dilemma, ' Death cannot concern us, for so long 
 as we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not,' seems 
 
 75
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 Theology. The climax of the Epicurean Physics is 
 to be found in its theory of the gods, which, by cutting 
 them adrift altogether from human life, rids us of all 
 fear of their anger or anxious concern to win their 
 approval. Epicurus and his followers were often 
 denounced as Atheists, and the accusation is just if 
 it means that they denied the existence of gods from 
 whom we have anything to hope or fear, gods who 
 can be objects of our love or can help humanity in its 
 hour of need. They admit the existence of gods in 
 the sense of superhuman beings who lead a life of 
 unending blessed calm. They even insist on their 
 existence and anthropomorphic character. Epicurus 
 himself in his letter to Mcnoeceus has the words, 
 ' Follow and dwell on what I used constantly to 
 declare to you, and believe that these things are the 
 foundation of a worthy life. Believe, in the first 
 place, of God that he is an imperishable and blessed 
 living being, as the universally diffused idea of God 
 testifies, and ascribe to him nothing inconsistent with 
 his immortality nor unworthy of his blessedness. But 
 
 to be no more original than the rest of Epicurus' philosophy. 
 The pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axioclius (a polemic against 
 Epicurus by a contemporary Platonist) asserts that the words 
 were a saying of Prodicus the sophist, and the statement may 
 very possibly be true, since the author's aim is to show that 
 Epicureanism, which he describes as the superficial talk of 
 conceited young men, is merely a reproduction of the dis- 
 credited ideas of an older time. Unless the saying really came 
 from Prodicus, he has made a literary blunder in putting it 
 into his mouth in auch a connection, 
 
 76
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 believe everything which can consist with his immor- 
 tal blessedness. For gods there certainly are, since our 
 cognition of them is clear and evident. But gods such as 
 the vulgar believe in there are not. . . . The impious 
 man is not he who rejects the gods of the vulgar, but 
 he who ascribes to the gods the things which the 
 vulgar believe of them.' 
 
 The Epicurean gods are thus thought of as magnified 
 and 'non-natural' Epicurean philosophers, enjoying, 
 like the Epicurean sage, a life of perfect tranquillity, 
 with the added advantage of being immortal. They 
 are human in figure and there are many of them, so 
 that they can pass their time in pleasant social inter- 
 course. Epicurus is said to have declared that in 
 their converse they speak the noblest of languages, a 
 pure and refined Greek. There is an obvious difficulty 
 about their immortality for expositors who take 
 Epicurus seriously as a thinker. For they are material, 
 like everything except space itself, and Epicurus 
 explicitly declared that their bodies are formed of the 
 subtlest matter. How then do they escape the general 
 law that all atomic complexes are destructible, and the 
 finer the atoms, the less permanent the complex? It 
 is partly, no doubt, to meet this difficulty that Epicurus 
 provided them with abodes in the intermundial empty 
 spaces, where they would be least subject to collision 
 with grosser atoms. At least Lucretius gives this 
 reason for the localisation. 
 
 Now Epicurus held that tranquillity is only possible 
 77
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 to one who is neither anxious for others nor gives others 
 anxiety. Hence it is a consequence of the felicity of 
 the gods that they neither influence earthly affairs by 
 their providential care, nor concern themselves with 
 the deeds of men. This is laid down in the very first 
 words of the Catechism : ' The blessed and immortal 
 has no anxieties of its own, and causes none to others. 
 Thus it is constrained neither by favour nor by anger.' 
 Lucretius is constantly recurring to the same point 
 with an earnestness which shows that the inherently 
 anti-religious doctrine of Epicurus was, in his case at 
 least, accepted in part from a real religious indignation 
 against the immoral features of popular theology. 
 Yet one wonders whether the amiable invalids of the 
 garden would not have been seriously perturbed in 
 their 'feasts on the 20th' by the apparition of a 
 disciple aflame with the zeal of a missionary. I cannot 
 help thinking that Epicurus would have given his 
 worshipper the counsel of Voltaire, Surtout point de zele. 
 The moral fervour of Lucretius must not blind us to 
 the facts that he stands alone among the Epicureans of 
 whom we know, and that the real issue at stake in the 
 Academic polemic against Epicurus is the momentous 
 one whether or not religion shall continue to be of 
 practical significance for life. Yet in justice to 
 Epicurus it may be said that, after all, his rejection of 
 Providence and prayer leads to something not unlike 
 the Neo-Kantian view that while we cannot know 
 whether God exists or not, the concept of God is none 
 
 78
 
 THE NATURE OF REALITY 
 
 the less valuable as embodying an ethical ideal of 
 perfection. The gods of Epicurus are, at least, an 
 embodiment of the ideal ' wise man,' and thus the con- 
 templation of them may be of actual use in framing 
 one's own mind to something like their peace and 
 serenity. This is, perhaps, why Epicurus speaks of 
 the thought of the gods as bringing the greatest 
 benefits to the good. 
 
 79
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE SALVATION OF MAN 
 
 WE come now to the central citadel of Epicurean 
 doctrine, the part which, as Epicurus holds, gives all 
 the rest its value the theory of human conduct, 
 variously styled by him the doctrine of Lives, of Ends, 
 of Choice and Avoidance. Here again we shall find the 
 attempt to replace high and difficult ideals by some 
 more homely and apparently more easily compassed 
 end of action. Epicurus wants a principle of conduct 
 which is not for the elect few only, but can be 
 immediately understood and felt by the common man. 
 Like many moralists before and after him, he thinks 
 he finds what he wants in the notion of pleasure as 
 the only good and pain as the only evil. The Platonic 
 conception of life as 'becoming like unto God,' the 
 Aristotelian identification of the best life with one in 
 which, by means of science, art, religious contempla- 
 tion, we put off the burden of our mortality, may be 
 inspiring to the chosen few, but to the plain average 
 man these are noble but shadowy ideas. And for 
 what is shadowy the prosaic Epicurus has no taste. 
 ' The consecration and the poet's dream ' are to him 
 80
 
 THE SALVATION OF MAN 
 
 empty nothings. ' I call men,' he writes in one letter, 
 ' to continual pleasures, not to empty and idle virtues 
 which have but a confused expectation of fruit' (Fr. 
 116); and in another place, ' I spit on the noble and 
 its idle admirers, when it contains no element of 
 pleasure' (Fr. 512). But pleasure and pain are things 
 we all know by immediate experience, and what could 
 seem a simpler basis for conduct than the rule that 
 pleasure is good and pain bad ? So Epicurus seeks 
 once more to bring down moral philosophy from 
 heaven to earth by reverting to Hedonism. The 
 naturalness of the view that pleasure is the only 
 ultimate good, says Epicurus, borrowing an argument 
 from Plato's pupil Eudoxus, is shown by the spon- 
 taneity with which all animals seek it. 'His proof 
 that pleasure is the end is that animals delight in it 
 from their birth and object to pain spontaneously, in- 
 dependently of any process of education.' Like other 
 Hedonists, he has been roundly abused for degrading 
 morality by his doctrine, but some of the abuse at 
 least may be pronounced undeserved. When we con- 
 sider how many philosophies and religions have done 
 their best to make life miserable by representing the 
 tormenting of ourselves and others as admirable in 
 itself, we may feel that some credit is owing to any 
 man who is not afraid to maintain that happiness is 
 itself a good thing, and that to be happy is itself a 
 virtue. And, as we shall see, Epicurus does not in 
 the least mean that the best life is that of the 
 F 81
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 voluptuary. He taught and enforced by his example 
 the doctrine that the simple life of plain fare and 
 serious contemplation is the true life of pleasure, and 
 in the main, with one great exception, the practical code 
 of action he recommends does not differ much from that 
 of the ordinary decent man. The main objection to 
 his Hedonism is a theoretical one ; as he regards the 
 feeling of pleasure as the only good, he is bound to 
 deny that virtue or beauty has any moral value except 
 as a necessary means to pleasure, and thus his ethics, 
 while demanding an innocent and harmless life, can 
 afford no inspiration to vigorous pursuit of Truth or 
 Beauty, or strenuous devotion to the social improve- 
 ment of man's estate. The air of the Garden is relax- 
 ing ; it is a forest of Arden where nothing more is 
 required than to 'fleet the time carelessly.' There is 
 a touch of moral invalidism about the personality of a 
 teacher who could declare that 'the noble, the virtuous, 
 and the like should be prized if they cause pleasure ; 
 if they do not, they should be left alone ' (Fr. 70). To 
 be more precise, in saying that pleasure is the good, 
 Epicurus is not telling us anything new. Hedonism 
 as a moral theory is dealt with in Plato's Protagoras, 
 had been advocated by Democritus, and expressly 
 put forward within the Academy itself by Eudoxus. 1 
 What does look at first sight more original is the 
 
 1 It is usual at this point to bring the Cyrenaic school into 
 the story as precursors of the Hedonism of Epicurus. This is, 
 however, historically wrong. The ancients do not appear to 
 82
 
 THE SALVATION OF MAN 
 
 way in which Epicurus conceives of the highest pleasure 
 attainable by man. He holds the curious view that, 
 though pleasure is a positive thing not to be con- 
 founded with mere absence of pain, yet the moment 
 pain is entirely expelled from the mind and body we 
 have already attained the maximum degree of pleasure. 
 Any further increase in the pleasure-giving stimulus, 
 according to Epicurus, can only make pleasure more 
 variegated, not increase its intensity. 'The (upper) 
 limit of pleasures in magnitude is the expulsion of 
 all pain. Where pleasure is present, and so long 
 as it is present, pain and grief are, singly and con- 
 jointly, non-existent' (Catechism, 3). 'Pleasure 
 receives no further augmentation in the flesh after 
 the pain of want has once been expelled; it admits 
 merely of variegation' (ib. 18). The source of this 
 pessimistic estimate of the possibilities of pleasure 
 is patent; the doctrine comes from Plato's Philebus. 
 Plato had taught that the satisfactions of appetite are 
 
 have known of a Cyrenaic doctrine before the time of the 
 younger Aristippus ; and in Plutarch, Adv, Colotem, we find 
 Arcesilaus and the Cyrenaics specifically contrasted with Plato, 
 Aristotle, Stilpo, and Theophrastus as the contemporaries of 
 Colotes. This, presumably, like most of the statements in 
 Plutarch's anti-Epicurean essays, goes back to a much earlier 
 Academic source (very possibly Carneades), and is therefore 
 not likely to be a misapprehension. The earlier philosophers 
 who have influenced Epicurus in his theory of the end are 
 demonstrably Democritus and Eudoxus. It was exactly the 
 same blunder in chronology which long led scholars to suppose 
 that the anti-Hedonist polemic of Plato's Philclm was aimed 
 at the Cyronaics. 
 
 83
 
 never purely pleasurable; they are 'mixed' states, 
 half-pleasurable, half-painful. They depend for their 
 pleasantness upon a pre-existing painful state of want, 
 and the process of satisfaction only continues so long as 
 the pain of the want is not completely assuaged, but still 
 remains in the total experience as a stimulus to go on 
 seeking more and more satisfaction. The ' true ' 
 pleasures i.e. those which do not depend for their 
 attractiveness on the concealed sting of unsatisfied want 
 belong to the mind, not to the body. It is to meet 
 this depreciation of the everyday pleasures of satisfy- 
 ing bodily appetite that Epicurus declares the complete 
 expulsion of pain and want to be already the maximum 
 attainable degree of pleasure, and denies the existence 
 of the ' mixed ' experiences. The alma voluptas of his 
 school thus comes to mean a life of permanent bodily 
 and mental tranquillity, free from disquieting sensa- 
 tions and from the anticipation of them a view which 
 he has merely taken over from Democritus, who spoke 
 of tvOvpia, 'cheerfulness of temper,' as the true end of 
 life. What he has done is simply to express the 
 Democritean theory in a terminology specially intended 
 to mark dissent from the Platonic and Aristotelian 
 doctrine. His own words are : ' The end of all our 
 actions is to be free from pain and apprehension. 
 When once this happens to us, the tempest in the soul 
 becomes a calm, and the organism no longer needs to 
 make progress to anything which it lacks, or to seek 
 anything further to complete the good for soul and 
 84
 
 THE SALVATION OF MAN 
 
 body. For we only need pleasure so long as the 
 absence of it causes pain. As soon as we cease to be 
 in pain we have no need of further pleasure. This is 
 why we call pleasure the beginning and end of the 
 happy life. It is recognised by us as our primal and 
 connatural good, and is the original source of all choice 
 and avoidance, and we revert to it when we make 
 feeling the universal standard of good. [Eudoxus.] 
 Now it is because this is our primal and connatural 
 good that we do not choose to have every pleasure, 
 but sometimes pass by many pleasures when a greater 
 inconvenience follows from them, and prefer many 
 pains to pleasures when a greater pleasure follows 
 from endurance of the pain. Every pleasure then is a 
 good, as it has the specific character of the good [i.e. 
 to attract us for its own sake], but not every pleasure 
 is to be chosen ; so also every pain is an evil, but not 
 every pain should be always avoided ' (Ep. iii., p. 62, 
 Usener). Hence he differs from his Cyrenaic contem- 
 poraries, who preached a robuster type of Hedonism, 
 in three points. (1) The end of the individual action 
 is not the pleasure of the moment, but a permanent 
 lifelong condition of serene happiness. So, unlike 
 Aristippus, he does not accept the doctrine of taking 
 no thought for the morrow, but says 'we must 
 remember that the future is neither wholly our own, 
 nor wholly not our own, that we may neither await it 
 as certain to be, nor despair of it as certain not to be' 
 (Ep. iii., Usener, p. 62). (2) Epicurus insists strongly 
 85
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 that pleasures are not all ' transitions ' from one con- 
 dition to another ; besides the pleasures of transition 
 there are Karao-T^/xaTiKou r)8ovai, pleasures of repose, 
 a point which had already been made by Plato and 
 Aristotle. He says : ' Freedom from mental dis- 
 quietude and from pain are pleasures of repose ; joy 
 and delight we regard as activities of change ' (Fr. 2). 
 Hence he is often wrongly classed among those who 
 regard mere freedom from pain as the highest good. 
 (3) He definitely gives the preference to pleasures of 
 mind over pleasures of body, arguing that ' in bodily 
 pain the flesh is tormented merely by the present, but 
 in mental pain the soul is distressed on account of the 
 present, the past, and the future. Similarly mental 
 pleasures are greater than bodily' (Fr. 452). They 
 are greater, that is, because they include the memory 
 of past and the anticipation of future happiness. In- 
 deed, Epicurus carried this doctrine to the point of 
 paradox, saying that a ' sage ' would be happy on the 
 rack, since his pleasant recollections of the past would 
 outweigh his bodily sufferings (Fr. 601). Later writers 
 like Seneca are never tired of making merry over the 
 Epicurean ' sage ' who must be able to say, even while 
 he is being roasted alive, ' How delightful this is ! 
 How I am enjoying myself ! ' Epicurus, as we have 
 seen, illustrated the doctrine practically by the serenity 
 of his last painful days. But, as the Academic critics 
 are careful to remind us, we must recollect that all 
 the mental pleasures of memory and anticipation, to 
 86
 
 THE SALVATION OF MAN 
 
 which Epicurus attributes such value, are resoluble 
 into the recollection or anticipation of pleasurable ex- 
 periences which are themselves analysable into sensa- 
 tions, and therefore corporeal. 
 
 As we should expect, Epicurus is never tired of 
 denouncing all ascetic views about the pleasures of 
 bodily appetite. He insists ad nauseam that man has 
 a body as well as a soul, and that the happy life is 
 impossible if we neglect the claims of the body. He 
 and his friends often put the point in coarse and 
 vigorous language, which scandalised persons of 
 refined turn of mind. Metrodorus said in a letter to 
 his brother Timocrates, 'The doctrine of nature is 
 wholly concerned with the belly ' (Fr. 39), and 
 Epicurus that 'the beginning and root of all good 
 is the pleasure of the belly, and even wisdom and 
 culture depend on that' (Fr. 67). Metrodorus, pro- 
 bably using a formula devised by his master, asks 
 'what else is the good of the soul but a permanent 
 healthy condition of the flesh, and a confident expecta- 
 tion of its continuance ? ' (Fr. 5), a definition which is 
 a perpetual subject for denunciation by the Academic 
 critics. The real meaning of sayings like these is more 
 innocent than it looks to be. Epicurus is, after all, 
 only saying in exaggerated language, that even a 
 philosopher cannot afford to neglect his digestion. 
 The fact that both he and Metrodorus were confirmed 
 dyspeptics goes far to explain the vehemence of their 
 language about the ' pleasures of the belly.' Carlyle 
 
 87
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 might easily have said the same sort of thing, and 
 Dr. Johnson, who was far from being a voluptuary, 
 actually did. 
 
 More open to attack was Epicurus' trick of abstract- 
 ing from the whole concrete experience of the satis- 
 factions of virtuous action, and asserting that the 
 pleasure which accompanies the right act is the end 
 to which the act itself is merely a means. This leads 
 him to the utilitarian view that if you could only 
 escape the painful consequences which attend on 
 indulgence in a pleasant vice, the vice would no 
 longer be bad. ' If the things which give rise to the 
 pleasures of the profligate could deliver our under- 
 standing from its fears about celestial portents, and 
 death, and future suffering, and could also teach us to 
 limit our desires, we should have no reason left to 
 blame them' (10 of the Catechism). This is, of 
 course, a conscious contradiction of the famous Platonic 
 doctrine, that to have a bad soul is itself the worst 
 penalty of sin. Epicurus, however, holds that this 
 separation of vice from its attendant consequences is 
 not actually possible. The pleasures of sin are always 
 attended by the fear of detection and punishment, 
 and often by other disagreeable consequences. Also 
 they cannot teach us to limit our desires, and thus 
 escape the torment of unsatisfied passion. Nor can 
 they, like science, dispel the fear of death or divine 
 judgment. This, and not any inherent badness in 
 them, is why they must not be admitted into our 
 88
 
 lives. The true conditions of a happy life are two : 
 
 (1) the assurance that all consciousness ends with 
 death, and that God takes no interest in our doings ; 
 
 (2) the reduction of our desires to those which cannot 
 be suppressed and are most easily satisfied ; the simple 
 life. Epicurus accordingly recognises that there are 
 three classes of pleasures : (1) those which are natural 
 and necessary, i.e. those which come from the satisfac- 
 tion of wants inseparable from life, such as the pleasure 
 of drinking when thirsty ; (2) those which are natural 
 but not necessary, e.g. the pleasures of a variegated 
 diet, which merely diversify the satisfaction of our 
 natural appetites ; (3) those which are neither neces- 
 sary nor natural, but created by human vanity, such 
 as the pleasure of receiving marks of popular esteem, 
 'crowns' and 'garlands,' as we might say, knight- 
 hoods and illuminated addresses. The wise man 
 despises the last class, he needs the first, the second 
 he will enjoy on occasion, but will train himself to be 
 content without them. (The basis of this classification 
 is Plato's distinction, in the Philebus, between 'necessary ' 
 and ' unnecessary ' bodily pleasures. The sensualism 
 of Epicurus compels him to take no account of Plato's 
 ' pure ' or ' unmixed ' pleasures, such as those which 
 arise from the performance of noble deeds, or the 
 pursuit of beauty and truth for their own sakes.) 
 
 Epicurus, then, looks on the simple diet not as neces- 
 sary in itself to happiness, but as useful by keeping 
 us from feeling the lack of delicacies which cannot be 
 89
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 procured. ' We regard self-sufficiency as a great good, 
 not that we may live sparingly in all circumstances, but 
 that when we cannot have many good things we may 
 be content with the few we have, in the fixed convic- 
 tion that those who feel the least need of abundance 
 get the greatest enjoyment out of it ' (Ep, iii., 
 Usener, p. 63). Thus in practice the Epicurean ideal 
 comes to be satisfaction with the simplest necessaries 
 of life, and Epicurus could say (Catechism, 15), 
 ' natural richos are limited in extent and easy to pro- 
 cure, while those of empty fancy are indefinite in their 
 compass ' ; and again (Fr. 602), ' give me plain water 
 and a loaf of barley-bread, and I will dispute the prize 
 of happiness with Zeus himself.' So enemies of the 
 theories of the school often praise its practical 
 counsels. As Seneca says, ' my own judgment, how- 
 ever distasteful it may be to the adherents of our school 
 [i.e. the Stoics], is that the rules of Epicurus are virtuous 
 and right, and, on a clear view, almost austere ; he 
 reduces pleasure to a small and slender compass, and 
 the very rule AVC prescribe to virtue he prescribes to 
 pleasure; he bids it follow Nature.' Even of the 
 tortures of disease he holds that they cannot disturb 
 true happiness. If severe, they are brief ; if prolonged, 
 they are interrupted by intervals of relief. 
 
 In practice, then, though not in theory, Epicurus 
 
 refuses to separate pleasure and virtue. ' You cannot 
 
 live pleasantly without living wisely and nobly and 
 
 justly, nor can you live wisely and nobly and justly 
 
 90
 
 THE SALVATION OF MAN 
 
 without living pleasantly. Where any one of these 
 conditions is absent pleasurable life is impossible' 
 (Catechism, 5). 
 
 In respect of the details of his scheme of virtues, 
 Epicurus is enough of a true Greek to give the first 
 place to </>/)d vqo- is, wisdom, reasonable life. 'He who 
 says that it is not yet time for Philosophy, or that 
 the time for it has gone by, is like one who should say 
 that the season for happiness has not yet come, or is 
 over. So Philosophy should be followed by young 
 and old alike : by the old that in their age they may 
 still be young in good things, through grateful 
 memory of the past ; by the young that they may be 
 old in their youth in their freedom from fear of the 
 future ' (Ep. iii., Usener, p. 59). ' When we say that 
 pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures 
 of the profligate, nor those which depend on sensual 
 indulgence, as some ignorant or malicious misrepre- 
 senters suppose, but freedom from bodily pain and 
 mental unrest. For it is not drinking and continual 
 junketing, nor the enjoyments of sex, nor of the 
 delicacies of the table which make life happy, but 
 sober reasoning which searches into the grounds of all 
 choice and avoidance, and banishes the beliefs which, 
 more than anything else, bring disquiet into the soul. 
 And of all this the foundation and chiefest good is 
 wisdom. Wisdom is even more precious than Philo- 
 sophy herself; and is the mother of all other intel- 
 lectual excellences ' (Ep. iii., Usener, p. 64). 
 
 91
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 Of all the fruits of Philosophy the chief is the 
 acquisition of true friendship. ' Of all that Philosophy 
 furnishes towards the blessedness of our whole life 
 far the greatest thing is the acquisition of friendship ' 
 (Catechism, 27). The solitary life is for Epicurus, 
 as for Aristotle, no life for a man who means to be 
 happy. He would have agreed with some recent 
 writers that the highest good we know is to be found 
 in personal affection. We have already seen how 
 closely analogous the Epicurean organisation, bound 
 together by no tie but the personal affection of its 
 members, was to the early Christian Church, in which 
 also love for the brethren replaces the old Hellenic 
 devotion to the ' city ' as the principle of social unity. 
 Hence it is not surprising that Epicurus, like Our Lord, 
 is credited with the saying that it is more blessed to 
 give than to receive. In his attitude towards the 
 State Epicurus naturally represents a view antithetic 
 to that of Plato and Aristotle, who insisted upon 
 common service to the ' city ' as the basis of all 
 social virtue. Unlike Aristotle, who teaches that man 
 is by his very constitution a ' political animal,' a being 
 born to find his highest good in the common life 
 provided by the community into which he comes 
 at birth, Epicurus revives the old sophistic distinc- 
 tion between the ' natural ' and the ' conventional,' 
 taking the purely conventional view as to the origin 
 of political society and the validity of its laws. 
 Societies are merely institutions created by compacts 
 92
 
 THE SALVATION OF MAN 
 
 devised by men to secure themselves against the in- 
 conveniences of mutual aggression. ' Natural justice,' 
 he says, 'is an agreement based on common interest 
 neither to injure nor to be injured.' ' Injustice is not 
 an evil in itself, but because of the fear caused by 
 uncertainty whether we shall escape detection by the 
 authorities appointed to punish such things.' 'It is 
 impossible for one who has secretly done something 
 which men have agreed to avoid, with a view to 
 escaping the infliction or reception of hurt, to be sure 
 that he will not be found out even if he should have 
 gone undetected ten thousand times' (Catechism, 
 31, 34, 35). 
 
 Law, then, has no deeper foundation in human 
 nature than agreement based on considerations of 
 utility. It is only when such an agreement has been 
 made that an act becomes unjust. Hence Epicurus 
 holds that brutes have no rights because, from 
 their lack of language, they can make no agreements 
 with one another. The personal friendship of the 
 ' brethren ' is a thing which goes infinitely deeper and 
 is more firmly rooted in the bed-rock of human nature, 
 though even friendship is held to be founded in the 
 end on mere utility. Of Plato's conception of law as 
 the expression of the most intimately human, and, at 
 the same time, the most divine element in our 
 personality, Epicurus has no comprehension. So 
 though his doctrine, as preserved in the Catechism, 
 is that the ' wise man ' will in general conform to the 
 
 93
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 laws, since some of them are obviously based on sound 
 utilitarian considerations, and even the breaking of 
 those that are not is likely to have unpleasant con- 
 sequences, Epicurus definitely refuses to say that the 
 wise man will never commit a crime. His words, as 
 reported by Plutarch, are : ' Will the wise man ever do 
 what the laws forbid, if he is sure not to be found out 1 
 It is not easy to give an unequivocal answer to the 
 question.' Plutarch interprets this to mean, 'He 
 will commit a crime if it brings him pleasure, but I 
 do not like to say so openly.' It must be allowed 
 that on Epicurus' own showing his ' wise man ' would 
 have no motive for refraining from a pleasant crime if 
 he really could be secure of impunity. The ' sage ' is 
 not a person whom one would care to trust with the 
 ' ring of Gyges.' 
 
 It was a consequence as much of the age as of the 
 Epicurean ideal that Epicurus dissuaded his followers 
 from taking part in public life. They were to leave 
 the world to get on by itself, and devote themselves 
 to the cultivation of their own peace of soul by plain 
 living and anti-religious reasoning. This separation 
 of personal conduct from service to society is the 
 point on which the Epicureans lay themselves most open 
 to attack as representing an ethics of selfishness and 
 indolence. We may plead in palliation that their 
 'quietism' may be regarded as partly a necessary 
 consequence of the substitution of large monarchies for 
 the old city-states. In such monarchies, even when 
 
 94
 
 THE SALVATION OF MAN 
 
 their code of public morality does not keep men of 
 sensitive conscience out of public life, it is inevitable 
 that the direction of affairs of moment shall be confined 
 to a few practised hands. Yet it must also be re- 
 membered that not a few philosophers, Academics, 
 Stoics and others did play a prominent part in the 
 public affairs of the age without soiling their garments. 
 It is impossible to acquit Epicurus and his friends 
 altogether of a pitiable lack of wholesome public 
 spirit. It was only reasonable that a noble temper 
 like that of Plutarch should be outraged by the 
 insults they heaped on the memory of such a states- 
 man and patriot as Epameinondas because he preferred 
 wearing himself out in the service of his country to 
 taking his ease at home. In practice, however, as the 
 ancient critics observed, the apparently contradictory 
 maxims of Epicurus and Zeno were not so far apart 
 as they seem. Epicurus said that the 'sage' should 
 not engage in politics except for very pressing reasons ; 
 Zeno that he should, unless there were special reasons 
 against doing so. But in actual life an Epicurean with 
 a bent for politics, or a Stoic with a taste for retire- 
 ment, could always find that the reason for making the 
 exception existed in his own case. 
 
 By following the rules of life thus laid down the 
 Epicureans hold that any man, without need of special 
 good fortune or high station or intellectual gifts, may 
 learn to lead a life which is free from serious pain of 
 body or trouble of mind, and therefore happy. The 
 
 95
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 'sober reasoning' which teaches him to limit his 
 wants to the necessities of life, to banish fear of God 
 from his mind, to recognise that death is no evil, and 
 to choose always the course of action which promises to 
 be most fruitful of pleasure and least productive of 
 pain, will, in general, leave him with very few pains 
 to endure. And if there are inevitable hours of 
 suffering to be gone through, and if death is the 
 common doom of all, the 'wise man' will fortify 
 himself in his times of suffering and on his deathbed 
 by dwelling in memory on the many pleasant moments 
 which have fallen to his share. Thus prepared, says 
 Lucretius, he will leave the feast of life, when his 
 time comes to go, like a guest who has eaten his full 
 at a public banquet, and makes way without a grumble 
 for later comers ; Metrodorus adds, that he will not 
 forget to say ' grace after meat,' and thank ' whatever 
 gods there be ' that he has lived so well (Fr. 49).
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 EPICURUS AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 WE have already had a glimpse into the polemics 
 waged incessantly by Epicurus and his friends against 
 the adherents of all views but their own, and have 
 made aquaintance with some of the ' Billingsgate ' 
 employed by Epicurus to disparage those who ventured 
 to differ from him or had the misfortune to have taught 
 him something. The first school to take up the battle 
 for the ' religious ' view of the world against the new 
 secularism of Epicurus was the Platonic Academy. 
 Their polemic against the ' Garden ' began, as we shall 
 see, with the definitive settlement of Epicurus at 
 Athens, and was steadily kept up until, in the third 
 and fourth centuries after Christ, as it became more 
 and more clear that the Christian Church was putting 
 itself forward as a rival to Philosophy, the various 
 schools became gradually merged into the Neo- 
 Platonism which represents the last gallant struggle of 
 Greek culture against what was felt as largely a non- 
 Hellenic and ominous invasion of Orientalism. We 
 can form a very fair conception of the way in which 
 the controversy was carried on from the Academic 
 G 97
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 side, if we compare the dialogue Axiochus, falsely attri- 
 buted to Plato, with the tone of the Academic anti- 
 Epicurean speakers in Cicero (such as e.g. Cicero 
 himself in the examination of the Epicurean ethics 
 given in De Finibus Bk. II., or Gaius Cotta in the pole- 
 mic of De Natura Deorum, against their theology), and 
 with the utterances of the biting essays in which 
 Plutarch has set himself to demolish the philosophical 
 reputation of Colotes. In particular the very close 
 correspondence between Cicero and Plutarch, often 
 amounting to verbal self-sameness, shows that both are 
 following the same Academic source (in all probability 
 Cleitomachus, the pupil who preserved for later genera- 
 tions the penetrating inquiries of Carneades, the Hume 
 of the ancient world). As the Axiochus and the essays 
 of Plutarch against Colotes are much less widely read 
 than the De Finibus and De Natura Devrum of Cicero, 
 I shall probably provide the more entertainment for 
 the reader by confining my concluding remarks chiefly 
 to the former. The Axiochus is a singularly interesting 
 specimen of a third-century ' Socratic discourse.' There 
 can be no doubt about the date at which it was written, 
 since it expressly alludes to the Epicurean argument 
 that death is no evil, because it is mere unconscious- 
 ness, and neither good nor evil is possible without 
 consciousness, as the ' superficial talk ' which is for the 
 moment popular with the young, and its language is 
 full of biting sarcasms, the point of which lies in 
 turning specially Epicurean dicta against Epicurus 
 98
 
 EPICURUS AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 himself. Thus the date of the little work cannot be 
 earlier than 306 B.C. the year of Epicurus' final settle- 
 ment in Athens and cannot again be much later, since 
 as Otto Immisch, the one recent editor of the dialogue 
 and the first student to recognise its real purpose, has 
 pointed out, there are several indications in the con- 
 versation that Epicurus had not yet broken with his 
 Democritean teachers or with the pursuit of rhetoric 
 so completely as he did in later life. The dialogue is 
 thus definitely to be dated at about forty years after 
 the death of Plato, but its preservation in Platonic 
 manuscripts means, of course, that it comes from the 
 archives of the Academy, and is therefore a genuine 
 Academic composition. At the time to which we must 
 attribute it the most famous members of the School 
 were Polemon, the fourth head of the Academy, Crates, 
 Grantor, and Arcesilaus, afterwards famous for his 
 brilliant dialectical criticism of Stoicism. Of its author- 
 ship we have no precise indication beyond the fact that 
 the writer must have been an enthusiast for astronomy, 
 and writes in a turgid style full of violent metaphor and 
 poetical reminiscences. Immisch, its last editor, thinks 
 of Grantor, whose essay on Bereavement, famous in later 
 antiquity, was imitated in the lost Consolatio addressed 
 to himself by Cicero, on the death of his daughter, as 
 well as in the extant Consolatio to Apollonius ascribed 
 to Plutarch. But the identification, as Immisch says, 
 is the purest guess. Whoever the writer may have 
 been, it is interesting to observe that the fashion of 
 99
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 composing ' discourses of Socrates ' was still current in 
 the Platonic school a century after Socrates' death. 
 That the dialogue was not a work of Plato was well- 
 known to the ancient critics who included it with 
 a few others in the list of those 'universal!}' 
 rejected.' 
 
 The plan of the little work is transparently simple. 
 Socrates is called in to administer spiritual consolation 
 to his old friend Axiochus, who has just been attacked 
 by what appears to be a kind of epileptic fit, and is in 
 a pitiable condition of mental weakness. He had 
 formerly been in the habit of deriding the cowardice 
 of those who shrink from death, but now that he is face 
 to face with the prospect of dissolution his courage has 
 oozed out of him. He dreads the approaching loss of 
 the good things of life, and shudders at the thought of 
 worms and corruption and the ugliness of the fate 
 which awaits his body. 
 
 Socrates at first ironically puts on the mask of an 
 Epicurean, and, in language which is filled with 
 Epicurean terminology, adroitly employed in such 
 a way as to insinuate that Epicurus is no more 
 than a charlatan who has dressed up the exploded 
 theories of fifth-century ' sophistry ' in a rhetorical garb 
 suited to the taste of the young generation, ' consoles ' 
 Axiochus by the usual Epicurean commonplaces. 
 Death is utter unconsciousness, and therefore all 
 suffering ends in death; it is 'nothing to us, because, 
 so long as we are, death is not, and when death has 
 IOO
 
 EPICURUS AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 come, we are not.' These well-meant efforts at con- 
 solation prove a failure; as Axiochus says, discourse 
 of this kind sounds very fine while you are well and 
 strong, but when you come to face death on a sick-bed, 
 there is nothing in it which can take hold of the heart. 
 Socrates then suddenly drops the mask, and appears 
 as a convinced Platonist. He dwells on the blessed 
 immortality which awaits the soul after its release 
 from its earthly prison, and enforces his doctrine in 
 true Socratic style, by an Orphic myth, setting forth 
 the joys of heaven, the perpetual banquet (the 
 ' marriage-supper of the Lamb '), the angelic harpings 
 and hallelujahs, the trees bearing all manner of fruit, 
 the water of life, the unending raptures of worship. 
 Axiochus finds himself not merely reconciled to his 
 fate, but already ' half in love ' with death. Thus the 
 main object of the author is to urge that the Epicureans 
 can provide only a spurious remedy for the fear of 
 death ; the real cure for it is to be sought in just those 
 beliefs which Epicurus forbids us to entertain, faith in 
 God as the righteous judge of spirits, and in the 
 glorious immortality which awaits the ' saints.' One 
 or two points of this anti-Epicurean polemic call for 
 special notice. The writer makes it specially clear 
 that one of his chief charges against Epicurus is his 
 entire want of originality, thus striking a note which 
 persists throughout the whole controversy between the 
 two schools from first to last. Just as Cicero's Academic 
 speakers insist on the point that the Physics of Epicurus 
 IOI
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 is no more than a bad echo of the doctrine of Demo- 
 critus, the writer of the Axiochus lays special emphasis 
 on the assertion that the famous arguments which 
 were to banish the fear of death are mere borrowings 
 from the supposed wisdom of Prodicus. Indeed, he 
 goes further and seems to insinuate that Epicurus has 
 borrowed these arguments from a professed pessimist 
 without seeing that they are inseparable from a pessi- 
 mistic theory of life quite incompatible with the 
 Epicurean views as to the happiness of the 'wise man.' 
 For Axiochus makes a remark which is obviously very 
 pertinent, but to which the Epicurean theory hardly 
 admits of any reply. The familiar argument about 
 the absurdity of thinking that any evil can befall us 
 when we have ceased to be may be valid enough. 
 But if death is the end of all, we may reasonably shrink 
 from it, not as the beginning of the unknown, but as 
 the end of all the known good things of life. Epicurus 
 has really no answer to this but to reA r ile the greed of 
 those who make such complaints ; but Socrates is 
 ready with a reply which he professes to have got, like 
 the rest of his wisdom, from the discourses of Prodi- 
 cus. It is not true that death is the end of the good 
 things of life, because life is actually evil. There is 
 no age of man, and no profession or calling, in which 
 the inevitable pains are not many and great, while 
 the incidental pleasures are few and fleeting. Death 
 therefore should be doubly welcome, since it not only 
 sets us free from all apprehensions for the future, but 
 
 IO2
 
 EPICURUS AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 delivers us from the miseries of the present. The 
 obvious, and as it seems to me, the correct implication 
 is that in Epicurus we have an illogical combination of 
 Hedonism with a view of death which is only in place in 
 the mouth of a professed pessimist. Equally interesting 
 is another point to which Immisch has rightly called 
 attention. In the ' Platonic ' discourse of Socrates on 
 the hope of immortality we find, besides the Orphic 
 myth of judgment and Paradise, great stress laid on 
 two thoughts. Man's superiority to the rest of the 
 creation and his destination to a life beyond the grave 
 are suggested (1) by the record of his rise from bar- 
 barism to civilisation and (2) by his success in reading 
 the secret of the movements of the heavenly bodies. 
 He can ' despise the violence of mighty beasts, make 
 his way over the seas, build cities to dwell in, establish 
 governments, look up to the heavens, behold the 
 circuits of the stars and the course of moon and sun,' 
 etc. All this he could never have done ' if there were 
 not indeed the breath of God in his soul.' The first 
 part of this argument is directed against the Epicurean 
 doctrine of human progress as a sort of unintentional 
 by-product of an accumulation of slight advances in 
 the adaptation of the organism to its environment, each 
 motivated by considerations of immediate utility. 
 Epicurus, in fact, thought of man as merely an 
 animal among others, endowed with an inexplicable 
 superiority in taking advantage of favourable varia- 
 tions and learning by his past mistakes. ' We must 
 103
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 suppose that Nature herself learns and is constrained 
 to many things of many kinds in the course of events 
 themselves, and that reflection afterwards takes over 
 what is thus handed down to it by Nature and puts a 
 further finish on it, and makes further discoveries ' 
 (Ep. i., Usener, p. 26-7, with which we may compare 
 the account of human progress in Lucretius, v. 925 
 and what follows). The Platonist argument against 
 Epicurus, which is identical in spirit with T. H. Green's 
 argument against the 'naturalism' of Spencer and 
 Lewes, is that this very tendency to progress bears 
 witness to a ' divine ' or ' spiritual ' principle in 
 man. 
 
 The argument from astronomy (the supreme venera- 
 tion for this science is a genuine Platonic touch, and 
 comes from the Laws and Epinomis) is, in a like way, 
 specially aimed at the characteristic Epicurean con- 
 ception of the part played by Physics in effecting a 
 happy life. The whole value of Physics for Epicurus 
 lies in the supposed fact that it expels God's Pro- 
 vidence and moral government from the universe, just 
 as Nietzsche has said that the great service of Physics 
 is to have proved the non-existence of God. The 
 Platonist rejoinder is that Physics is, indeed, entitled 
 to the highest honour, but for the very opposite reason, 
 that ' the heavens declare the glory of God/ and the 
 ability to read their lessons testifies to the presence of 
 the 'godlike' in human nature. Thus, as Immisch 
 puts it, we may fairly say that the real issue at stake 
 104
 
 EPICURUS AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 in the controversy of the Academy with Epicurus, an 
 issue raised in the Axiochus and never afterwards lost 
 sight of, is the perennial conflict between a purely 
 secular and a religious conception of the world and our 
 place in it. Hence it is not surprising that the main 
 arguments by which the Platonists support their views 
 are exactly the same as would now be urged by 
 Christians in the controversy with secularism. Little 
 has changed in the conflict except the names adopted 
 by the contending parties; the two rival interpreta- 
 tions of life and the world remain in principle the 
 same. This comes out most clearly of all in the 
 Essays of Plutarch against the Epicurean doctrine. 
 We have already seen some of the reasons for thinking 
 that the basis of Plutarch's attacks, as well as that of 
 Cicero's, goes back as far as Carneades, the great 
 Academic opponent of dogmatic empiricism in the 
 second century B.C. But there are at least two 
 features of Plutarch's work which seem to belong to 
 the man himself : the intense warmth of personal 
 religious feeling, and the local Boeotian patriotism 
 which pervade it. Plutarch's chief contribution to 
 the controversy consists of two essays more specially 
 directed against the early Epicurean Colotes. Of the 
 man himself we know little more than a single anecdote 
 which is a source of standing delight to the ancient 
 critics of the ' mutual admirationism ' of the Epicurean 
 coterie. He joined the school in its early days at 
 Lampsacus, and signalised his ' conversion ' by publicly 
 105
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 venerating ' Epicurus as a god at the end of one of 
 his discourses on Physics. Epicurus returned the 
 compliment by 'venerating' Colotes and calling him 
 ' immortal.' This may have been meant as a piece of 
 good-natured satire on the extravagance of Colotes, 
 but the Academic writers prefer to take the per- 
 formance more seriously, and make merry over the 
 disappointment of Colotes at finding himself promoted 
 only to the rank of a 'hero.' Colotes wrote a work 
 with the title ' That life itself is an impossibility on 
 the principles of the other philosophers,' in which he 
 caricatured and abused impartially all philosophies 
 except that of Epicurus. Plutarch's two essays take 
 the form of an examination and refutation of this work. 
 
 The essay 'against Colotes,' which is largely con- 
 cerned with Colotes' attack on the distinctive tenets 
 of the rival schools, need receive no attention here. 
 The other essay, which exhibits the Academic criticism 
 of Epicurean ethics at its best, bears a title happily 
 parodied from that of the book of Colotes itself, ' That 
 happy life is impossible on the principles of Epicurus ' ; 
 the very suggestion which had already been made in 
 the Axioclius. I propose to conclude this short account 
 with a very brief summary of this acute and penetrating 
 attack on secularistic Hedonism. 
 
 The author begins by defining the precise position 
 
 he intends to sustain. All questions about the moral 
 
 value of the Epicurean life are, for the time, to be 
 
 set aside; the case for or against Epicurus is to be 
 
 1 06
 
 EPICURUS AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 argued on strictly Hedonist lines. He and Colotes 
 profess to regard pleasure as the good. We will not, 
 in the first instance, ask whether this is or is not a 
 satisfactory theory. Our question is whether, admit- 
 ting pleasure to be the good, the Epicurean life affords 
 the best way to secure the most of it. It is then 
 argued (a) that the doctors of the sect expressly hold 
 that the primary sources of pleasure and pain are 
 bodily. It is on the pleasures and pains of the body 
 that the whole superstructure of the mental happiness 
 of memory and anticipation is based. As to this we 
 may remark that bodily pleasures are dependent on 
 the activity of a few specialised organs ; pain, and that 
 in the most cruel forms, may attack any and every part 
 of the body. Bodily pleasures, again, are brief thrills 
 which come and go like meteors ; bodily pain, set up 
 in one part, may spread itself to others and so come 
 to persist for seasons and even years together. As far 
 as the body is concerned, it must be pronounced that 
 its pleasures are as nothing to the pains to which it is 
 exposed. But (b) the Epicureans themselves profess 
 that purely bodily pleasures do not count for much ; 
 they rest their case on the pleasures of the mind, 
 which, they say, can persist under the direst bodily 
 tortures. Now on this we may remark that if bodily 
 pain is as trifling a thing as Epicurus often declares it 
 to be, and if also, as he asserts, you at once enjoy the 
 maximum possible pleasure the moment you cease to 
 be in pain, the pleasures which reach their highest 
 107
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 intensity as soon as pain is expelled must also be 
 very petty things. But we may meet them with an 
 argument which goes much more deeply into the 
 psychology of the School. According to their own 
 doctrine, the contents of the mind are mere paler 
 after-effects of actual sensation. Memory-images are 
 washed-out and blunted sensations, and we may liken 
 the pleasure which they awaken, in comparison with 
 the pleasure accompanying actual sensation, to the 
 scent left behind in an emptied wine-bottle. A ' wise 
 man' who tries to make himself happy by imagina- 
 tively dwelling on the details of past sensual enjoy- 
 ments is like a man who tries to banquet on the 
 stale remains of yesterday's feast. Epicurus, in fact, 
 plays a game of 'hanky-panky' with his disciples. 
 He tells you that the pleasures which are to outweigh 
 all the pains of life are those of the soul ; but when you 
 ask what are the pleasures of the soul they turn out to be 
 only a feebler mental survival of those of the body. Now 
 our bodily frame is so much the sport of circumstance and 
 accident that its ' servility to all the skiey influences ' is 
 a commonplace of literature, and this simple fact makes 
 nonsense of the identification of the good with 'an 
 equilibrium of the flesh conjoined with a confident 
 anticipation of its continuance.' The 'equilibrium' is, 
 in the first place, difficult of establishment and brief 
 in duration, and, in the second place, its continuance, 
 in a world fraught with such dangers as ours, can 
 never be counted on. Thus the ideal of Epicurus and 
 108
 
 EPICURUS AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 Metrodorus is that of fools. Mere freedom from pain 
 and anxiety is not the good, but merely the ' necessary,' 
 an indispensable condition of the attainment of some- 
 thing better, but of no value in itself, (c) And not 
 only is the Epicurean good notoriously unobtainable, 
 but it carefully omits all those pleasures which decent 
 men judge to be the worthiest. Their account of the 
 mental pleasures leaves no room for any except those 
 which accompany, or are fainter reinstatements of, a 
 somatic 'thrill.' Hence they cannot recognise (1) the 
 pleasures of literature and science (in fact Epicurus 
 notoriously tried to keep his young friends from 
 devoting themselves to either), (2) nor those which 
 accompany a life well-spent in the service of the 
 community. In fact, though they use the most 
 extravagant language about the superhuman virtue 
 of an Epicurean who has rendered some very trifling 
 service to a friend, they have nothing but raillery and 
 abuse for the lives of the great statesmen and soldiers 
 who have been the common benefactors of civilisation. 
 In a word, they leave out of their computation of 
 pleasures all those which make life worth living to 
 any one but a moral invalid. 
 
 The argument next proceeds to examine the claim 
 of Epicurus to have made life infinitely more pleasurable 
 by freeing mankind from the fear of God and the 
 dread of hell. Plutarch goes on to give a very in- 
 teresting account of the effects of religious convictions 
 on human happiness, which ought to be carefully 
 109
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 pondered before we make any assertion on the vexed 
 question how far ancient Greek life was really over- 
 shadowed, as Epicurus and Lucretius assume it to have 
 been, by terrors of this kind. His view is that 
 Epicurus has absurdly overrated the extent to which 
 theological beliefs cause unhappincss. That they do 
 so sometimes he allows, but urges that they give rise 
 to an overwhelmingly greater amount of happiness. 
 We may divide mankind, he says, into three classes. 
 (1) There is the small 'criminal' class. Their belief 
 in God and the future must, no doubt, give rise to 
 fear, pure and simple. But it is well that they should 
 be thus afraid, not merely on the ground of public 
 safety, but because, so far as their fear of God's 
 judgments restrains them from actually committing 
 projected crime, it makes them better men by saving 
 them from guilt. Epicurus would be doing a very 
 bad service even to the habitual criminal himself, if he 
 could persuade him that the ' last things ' are mere 
 fables. (2) There is the very large class of mostly 
 decent, but philosophically uninstructed persons. With 
 them the thought of God is tempered with fear (they 
 show this by that scrupulous anxiety to discharge the 
 ceremonial obligations of religion which the Greeks 
 called deisidaimonia), but fear is not the dominant 
 note. Their belief in God as the giver of all good is 
 merely qualified by an undertone of salutary fear. 
 Attendance on the ceremonies of worship is in the 
 main a source of pleasure to them, because they feel 
 1 10
 
 themselves in the presence of wise and kindly powers. 
 Even to the day-labourer and the drudge religion is 
 a boon with its holidays and feast-days. And the 
 rich, who can fare sumptuously every day, are happiest 
 of all when they celebrate the feasts of religion, not 
 because they are faring better than usual, but because 
 they feel the presence of God. A man who denies 
 Providence cuts himself off from all this happiness. 
 He may share in the ritual, but it can give no joy to 
 him, since he looks on it all the while as a mummery. 
 (3) Finally there are the few ' philosophers ' who have 
 really enlightened views about God and the relation 
 of God to man. To them religion is a source of 
 unalloyed delight ; there is no trace of fear in their 
 feelings towards God, since they know Him to be 
 perfectly good, and the author of nothing but good, 
 the ' giver of all good things ' (Zeus Epidotes), ' the 
 God of all consolation ' (Zeus Meilichios), the ' defender 
 of all that put their trust in Him ' (Alexikakos). 
 ' All things are God's, and they are the friends of God, 
 and therefore all things are theirs.' Epicurus' treat- 
 ment of immortality receives a similar criticism. The 
 fear of hell is positively good for the criminal class. 
 As for the mass of decent men, when they think of 
 the life to come, they feel no fear of 'bogies' who 
 have often been paraded on the comic stage for their 
 amusement. Immortality is a thought which fills 
 them with happiness ; it offers a satisfaction for the 
 1 longing to go on living ' which is natural to us all ; 
 in
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 or if the ordinary man is, now and then, disconcerted 
 by the old wives' tales, there are cheap and innocent 
 religious rites which will restore his equanimity. 
 What he really does shrink from is the very prospect 
 which Epicurus holds out as the greatest boon, 
 annihilation. To be always harping on the thought 
 that ' we have been born as men once ; there is no 
 second birth, and we shall never be again to all eternity ' 
 is to 'die many times before our death.' As for the 
 real children of God, immortality means for them the 
 ' prize ' of their calling, the beholding of the beatific 
 vision face to face, and the reunion with their loved 
 ones who have gone before. Even descending from this 
 high strain, we may say that the belief that death is 
 the gateway to a better life adds to the joys of the 
 fortunate and consoles the unfortunate by the thought 
 that their ill-luck here is no more than a troublesome 
 accident on a journey which has home for its goal. 
 On the Epicurean view, death is an evil to fortunate 
 and unfortunate alike ; it is the end of the good things 
 of life to the one class, the end of all hope of a change 
 for the better to the other. The wisdom of Epicurus 
 is thus the merest foolishness. At best it enables a 
 man with difficulty to argue himself into a state into 
 which a brute is born. It is better to be a pig than 
 an Epicurean philosopher, for the pig neither takes 
 thought for the morrow nor fears God nor distresses 
 himself about death and what comes after death ; and 
 as for the 'equilibrium of the flesh,' it is as much his, 
 112
 
 EPICURUS AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 if he is a fairly healthy pig, as the philosopher's. And 
 what better good does the Epicurean buy at the 
 price of his everlasting poring over his master's 
 precepts ? 
 
 If human nature is much the same in all ages, one 
 would suppose that Plutarch's account of the attitude 
 of mankind to Theism and Immortality in the ancient 
 world is much nearer the truth than that of Epicurus. 
 One might almost fancy that when he 'went round 
 with his mother, reading spells for her,' he had imbibed 
 childish terrors from which he had never been able to 
 shake himself free. The pathological character of 
 Lucretius' horrors of the world to come is sufficiently 
 marked for us by the intensity of imagination with 
 which he depicts them. Yet there were, in later ages, 
 men who seem, without the need of salvation from 
 such morbid fears, to have found real consolation in 
 this uninspiring theology. Lucian seems to speak 
 from his heart when he says with reference to the 
 burning of Epicurus' Catechism by the impostor 
 Alexander, ' How little the wretch knew how great 
 good that little book does to those who fall in with it, 
 what peace, what calm, what freedom of soul it effects 
 in them ; how it rids them of terrors and hobgoblins 
 and bugbears, and extravagant and idle fancies ; how 
 it fills them with truth and reason, and purifies their 
 judgments in very deed, not by torches and squills or 
 any such impostures, but by sound discourse, and 
 truth, and frank speaking.' Even more touching is 
 H 113
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 the summary of Epicurean teaching which Diogenes 
 of Oenoanda in Pisidia, a schoolmaster of the early 
 Imperial time, inscribed on the walls of the little town 
 in order that the words which had brought peace and 
 happiness into his own life might remain after his 
 death for the spiritual benefit of his townsmen and of 
 any chance visitors whose eyes they might catch. 
 
 114
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 SELECT APOPHTHEGMS FROM EPICURUS AND 
 METRODORUS 
 
 If you would make Pythocles rich, seek not to add 
 to his possessions but to take away from his desires. 
 (Epicurus to Idomeneus, Us., Fr. 135.) 
 
 You must be the slave of Philosophy if you would 
 attain true freedom. (Seneca, Ep. Men:, 8. 7.) 
 
 If you make nature the rule of your life, you will 
 never be poor, if current opinion, you will never be 
 rich. (Ib., 16. 7.) 
 
 He who follows nature and not empty opinions is 
 content in any estate, for, measured by the standard 
 of what is enough for nature, any property is wealth ; 
 but measuring by our unlimited appetites, even the 
 greatest wealth is poverty. (Us., Fr. 202.) 
 
 We have been born once ; there is no second birth. 
 For all time to come we shall not be at all. Yet, 
 though you have no power over the morrow, you put
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 off the season [i.e. for acquiring Philosophy]. It is 
 this procrastination that ruins the life of us all ; thanks 
 to it each of us dies without tasting true leisure. 
 (Us., Fr. 204.) 
 
 In all things act as though the eye of Epicurus were 
 on you. (Seneca, Ep. Mor. 25. 5.) 
 
 Severe pain soon makes an end of us, protracted 
 pain has no severity. (Us., Fr. 447.) 
 
 Let us give thanks to our lady Nature that she has 
 made things needful easy to procure, and things hard 
 to procure needless. (Ib., Fr. 468.) 
 
 He who least craves for the morrow will go to meet 
 it most happily. (Ib., Fr. 490.) 
 
 Laws are made for the sake of the wise, not to 
 prevent them from inflicting wrong but to save them 
 from suffering it. (Ib., Fr. 530.) 
 
 We can provide ourselves with defences against all 
 things but death ; where death is concerned, all man- 
 kind are dwellers in an unfortified city. (Metrodorus, 
 Fr. 51. The saying is also ascribed to Epicurus.) 
 
 We should not esteem a grey-beard happy because 
 he dies in advanced age, but because he has had his 
 116
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 fill of good things ; in respect of time, we are all cut 
 off in our flower. (Metrodorus, Fr. 52.) 
 
 There are some who spend a life-time in preparing 
 to live, as though they were to have a second life 
 after what we call 'life.' They do not see that the 
 draught of birth poured out for each of us is a deadly 
 poison. (Ib., Fr. 53. The first sentence is also attributed 
 to Antiphon the Sophist. Metrodorus must have the 
 merit of the piquant metaphor.) 
 
 Only the 'wise man' knows how to show himself 
 grateful. (Ib., Fr. 54 ; from Seneca, Ep. Mm: 81. 11.) 
 
 He who wastes his youth on high feeding, on wine, 
 on women, forgets that he is like a man who wears out 
 his overcoat in the summer. (Ib., Fr. 55.) 
 
 If we do not repay the loan of life quickly, Nature 
 comes down on us like a petty Shylock and takes 
 eyesight or hearing, or often enough both, as pledges 
 for the settlement. ([Plato] Axiochus, 367 B ; clearly 
 another of the picturesque Epicurean metaphors.) 
 
 Cheerfulness on a couch of straw is better than a 
 golden couch and a sumptuous table, and disquiet of 
 mind therewithal. (Epicurus, Fr. 207.) 
 
 Retire most of all into thyself when thou art forced 
 to be in a crowd. (Ib., Fr. 208.) 
 117
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 Nothing novel can happen in a universe which has 
 already existed through infinite time. (Epicurus, Fr. 
 266.) 
 
 If God heard men's prayers, mankind would have 
 perished long ago, for they are ever invoking cruel 
 curses on one another. (Ib., Fr. 388.) 
 
 118
 
 A CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE USEFUL TO 
 THE READER OF THIS BOOK 
 
 B.C. 
 
 Plato dies, and is succeeded by Speusippus, . 347 
 
 Epicurus born in Samos, 7th Gamelion, . . 341 
 
 Speusippus succeeded by Xenocrates, . . 339 
 
 Aristotle opens his School in Athens, . . 335 
 
 Stilpo of Megara ' flourishes,' . . c . 330 
 Death of Aristotle at Chalcis ; Theophrastus head 
 
 of the Lyceum, ..... 322 
 
 Expulsion of Athenian settlers from Samos, . 322 
 
 Timon the Sillographer born, . . . 315 
 
 Xenocrates dies ; Polemo head of Academy, . 314 
 Epicurus collects disciples at Mytilene and 
 
 Lampsacus, . . . . c. 310 
 
 Epicurus established at Athens . . . 306-5 
 
 Stoic School founded by Zeno of Cittium, . . c. 300 
 
 Theophrastus dies ; Strato head of Lyceum, . 287 
 Metrodorus dies (Arcesilaus head of Academy 
 
 about this time), ..... 276 
 
 Epicurus dies, ..... 270 
 
 Antigonus of Carystus ' flourishes,' . . . c. 250 (?) 
 
 Carneades born, . . . . . 213 
 
 Sotion of Alexandria writes his ' Successions,' . c. 200 
 
 Chronica, of Apollodorus first published, . . 144 
 
 Carneades dies, . . . . . 129
 
 B.C. 
 
 Lucretius born, ... 99 
 Cicero attends the Lectures of Phaedrus at the age 
 
 of nineteen, 
 
 Cicero hears Phaedrus and Zeno of Sidon at Athene, 79 
 
 Death of Lucretius, ... 55 
 
 Philodemus at Rome, . . c. 52 
 
 (Date of Cicero's attack on Piso) 
 
 Cicero writes the De Finibus, . . 45 
 
 Cicero writes De Natura Deorum, . 44 
 
 A.D. 
 
 Seneca writes his Epistitlae Morales, 59-65 
 
 Plutarch ' flourishes,' . . 68-125 
 
 Lucian ' flourishes,' ... . c. 160 
 
 Sextus Empiricus ' flourishes,' . c. 200 
 
 Inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda, . . c. 200 
 
 or a few years earlier. 
 
 1 2O
 
 A SHOET LIST OF BOOKS USEFUL TO THE 
 ENGLISH STUDENT OF EPICUEUS 
 
 [Works on Ancient Philosophy or on Ancient Atomism in 
 general are excluded, as are also works dealing specially with 
 the exposition of Lucretius.] 
 
 I. Sources. Epicurea ; edidit Hermannus Usener. Leipzig, 
 Teubner, 1887. (Anastatic reprint, 1903.) A complete 
 critical text of all the remains of Epicurus known up to 
 1887, with (Latin) Prolegomena on their authenticity, the 
 form in which the Epicurean correspondence circulated 
 in antiquity, etc. Indispensable to serious study. 
 
 Metrodori Epicurei Fragmenta. Edited by A. Koerte. 
 Leipzig, Teubner, 1890. 
 
 L/iicrdius de Rerum Natura. Text, translation, and com- 
 mentary. H. A. J. Munro. Fourth edition. Cambridge. 
 Deighton, Bell & Co., 1893. (Translation obtainable 
 separately, as a volume of Routledge's New Universal 
 Library.) 
 
 Diogenes of Oenoanda. Ed. J. William. Leipzig, B. G. 
 Teubner, 1907. 
 
 PLUTARCH. The Essays against Colotes will be found in 
 vol. 6 of Plutarchi Moralia. Ed. G. N. Bernardakis. 
 Leipzig. B. G. Teubner, 1888-1896. 
 
 CICERO. De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum. Ed. Madvig, 
 Copenhagen, 1869 (2nd ed.). 
 
 De Natura Deorum. Ed. J. B. Mayor. 3 vols. Cam- 
 bridge, 1880. 
 
 I 121
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 PHILODEMUS. Bhetorica. (2 vols. with supplement.) Ed. 
 S. Sudhaus. Leipzig, Teubner. 
 
 II. WALLACE, WILLIAM. Epicureanism. London, Society 
 for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1880. (A specially 
 fascinating introduction to the study of the Epicurean 
 doctrine and its fortunes.) 
 
 HICKS, R. D. Stoic and Epicurean. New York, 1910. 
 Charles Scribner's Sons. (A volume in the recently pro- 
 jected series, Epochs of Philosophy, edited by J. G-. 
 Hibben.) 
 
 GUYAU, JUAN MARIE. La Morale d y Epicure. Paris, 1878. 
 
 And as a standard work for reference, 
 
 ZELLER, E. The Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics. Trans- 
 lated (from the author's great work Die Philosophie der 
 Grriechen) by 0. J. Reichel. London, Longmans, Green 
 & Co. (The latest edition of the relevant part of the 
 original German work is Philosophie der Griechen, iii. 1. 
 4th edition. Leipzig, 1909.) 
 
 See also the fuller Bibliography in the work of R. D. Hicks, 
 mentioned above. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press
 
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