EPICURUS. - I. LIFE. - Greek philosopher, founder of the school that took its name from him, b. of Athenian parents, on the 10th of Gamelion (Jan.-Feb.) of 342 B.C. on Samos, d. in 270 at Athens. On Samos he heard the Platonist Pamphilus, and, by his own testimony, devoted himself to philosophy at the age of 14. At 18 (323) he came to Athens for the ephebia, and, when, after Alexander's death, Perdiccas drove the Athenians from Samos, he joined his father at Colophon. In nearby Teos he heard the Democritean Nausiphanes. At 32 he opened a school at Mytilene, but shortly thereafter moved to Lampsacus, where he stayed until 306. In these two cities he found his most faithful disciples: Hermarchus at Mytilene; Metrodorus, Polyaenus, Colotes at Lampsacus, the four who in later tradition are designated by the name of "princes" (καθηγημένες). In 306 he moved to Athens and established the school in a garden. Hermarchus and Metrodorus followed him and lived together with him.
The teaching had a dogmatic character and of the disciples in general nothing else was asked except to commit to memory the truths discovered by the master and by him for this purpose reduced into formulas and maxims (cf. Epist., i, proem.). But far more important than the theoretical and didactic activity was the practical one. E. made his school the center of a fellowship, whose principles were general adherence to his vision of life and the commitment to mutual aid. The members, where they were in a position to do so, paid the school an annual contribution of 120 drachmas, equal to 2 obols a day, "the earnings of a slave," as E. himself writes in a letter to Mitre. The sums collected served, besides the maintenance of the "garden," to assist the needy and for charity.
Except for some journeys in Asia to see his friends again, E. remained in Athens until his death, caused by cystitis.
II. WORKS
E. wrote a great deal: his works comprised about 300 volumes. Diogenes Laertius has preserved for us a selection of 41 titles: the first place is occupied by the Περὶ φάστω in 37 books, the last by the Letters; the other titles are of psychological, ethical and polemical works; only one work was devoted to logic: the Canon and on the criterion. The works that have come down to us must be divided into two groups: those preserved for us by the manuscript tradition and those recovered from the papyri discovered at Herculaneum in 1752-54. The first group consists of 3 summaries in epistolary form and of a collection of maxims (both in Diogenes Laertius, X). The three letters deal respectively with: meteorology and ethics. The "maxims" (40 in all) bear the title Κύριαι δόξαι, Sentences chapters, and are made up for a good half of extracts from the works of E. To all this was added a gnomologium discovered in 1888 by K. Wolke in a Vatican codex, and which, besides sentences of E. (some repeat the Κύριαι δόξαι), also comprises passages of his first disciples; they are cited under the designation of Senteutiae Vaticanae. New fragments have come to light in a large inscription caused to be made in the 2nd century A.D. by Diogenes of Oenoanda (in Lycia) and discovered in 1884. Sentences and passages of varying length are collected from various ancient writers. The Herculaneum papyri, amid works of various Epicurean writers, especially of Philodemus, contain the remains of about nine books of the Περὶ φύσεως.
III. THE SCHOOL
The immediate successor of E. in the direction of the "garden" was Hermarchus of Mytilene, but superior to him in talent and output was Metrodorus of Lampsacus, who died in 277. Among the scholarchs, whose series is known to us down to the middle of the 1st century B.C., mention should be made of Apollodorus, nicknamed "the tyrant of the garden," who composed more than 400 books and flourished in the 2nd half of the 2nd century B.C. His disciple was Zeno of Sidon (b. ca. 150 B.C.), who was heard by Cicero and by Atticus in 79 B.C. After him we know the names of Phaedrus, who was in Rome in 90 B.C., of Patro, scholarch until 51 B.C., and of Philodemus of Gadara, who lived in Naples and whose library was rediscovered at Herculaneum. Among the Roman Epicureans the only one whose work survives is Titus Lucretius Carus (d. in 55 B.C.), who in the De rerum natura, a poem in six books, has left us an almost complete and admirably precise exposition of the physics of E. Little or nothing is known of Epicureanism in the 1st century A.D. The works of E. are nevertheless commonly read and provide material for frequent citations in Seneca. There was a revival in the 2nd century. To this century belongs Diogenes of Oenoanda (between Pisidia and Lycia), who had his works engraved on the wall of a portico of his native city. In the age of St. Augustine Epicureanism was dead, but its influence can still be recognized in Marcianus.
IV. DOCTRINE
E. had an organically constructed system, and every part of it can be more or less rigorously traced back to a single principle: the immediate opposition of being and non-being, from which Leucippus and Democritus had derived their atomism (v.). Formally and genetically, however, his thought follows the opposite path: not only because he, unlike Democritus, places the criterion in the senses, but because the problem from which he starts is practical and not theoretical — the determination of the end and the preparation of the means suited to attaining it. For him science has no value other than that of an instrument (frg. 219), or, if it were possible, he would do without it (S. C., XI).
[The end, according to the Aristotelian definition that E. accepts, is that toward which the will tends. Aristotle, in order to determine it, had started from the definition of man; E. turns to experience and asks the animal for the answer. From this he concludes that the end is pleasure. "Every animal, in fact, as soon as it is born, rejoices in pleasure and recoils from pain" (Diog. L., X, 137). The ethics of pleasure had already been proclaimed by the Cyrenaics (v.), who by pleasure meant only the actual pleasure of the senses. E. goes further and, in a certain sense, overturns their doctrine. The pleasure of the senses is indeed pleasure, but it is so not insofar as it is motion, but insofar as it is "gentle and favorable motion" to the nature of the organ on which it is exercised: pleasure in its essence is εὐστάθεια, equilibrium and harmony of the being with itself, and it exists wherever there is no pain. As such, it is perfect in the instant, and all that the motion of the senses can add to it "varies" its content, it does not increase its "magnitude" (S. C., III; XVIII). "The health of the body and the absence of disturbance in the soul constitute the goal of the happy life. And it is to this that all our actions aim, to have neither pain nor disturbance" (Epist. to Menoeceus, § 128). Wisdom, therefore, is nothing but the art of measuring the harms and advantages of each action, a calculation (λογισμός) in which the quality of pleasure is sacrificed to the quantity (ibid., §§ 129-30), sumptuous tables to the crust of bread (frg. 181), power and glory to a retired and tranquil life (S. C., XIV, cf. VII). The supreme maxim is: be content with little (frg. 478) and live hidden, Λάθε βιώσας (fr. 551). But these are only the subjective conditions of the happy life; there is too much uncertainty: "in the things of the world," so that the wise man may protect himself by himself from the blows of men (τὰ ἐξ ἀνθρώπων) and of fortune (τὰ ἔξωθεν). Once his desires are limited, he must therefore procure for himself security (ἀσφάλεια), and he seeks it in friendship (S. C., XXVII-XXVIII). Friendship is a pact of mutual assistance and is born from utility (S. V., 23); but, like every pact, it has its law and demands to be observed: E. therefore does not shrink from the conclusion that the wise man will die for a friend (Diogenes Laertius, X, 121).
If the cause of human errors lay only in desires, this wisdom founded on prudence (φρόνησις) alone would suffice. But, besides desires, there are fears (frg. 485), and two are the greatest: the fear of death and the fear of the gods. Hence the necessity of science (S. C., XI). But to construct it a method is needed, and the method (the object of the Canon) comes down to this: full confidence in perceptions, the source and criterion of all knowledge, and the use of induction. With these means, and starting from the existence of bodies, E. arrives at the atoms of Leucippus and Democritus; but he arrives at them with Aristotle's problematic, and profoundly modifies their conception. The universe of his predecessors was dominated by mechanical necessity and by chance; he adds to it the concept of a natural necessity, the foundation of the order that is in things, and to which he gives par excellence the name of "nature"; and that of free causality (cf. Ep., III, 133), necessary to explain the freedom of motion that is in man and in the animal.
To this end he distinguishes first of all in atoms three forms of motion: a natural one of falling by effect of weight, a forced one due to collisions, and a free and wholly undetermined motion of "declination" (παρέγκλισις) from the straight line. In the second place he makes finite the number of forms proper to atoms. This serves as the foundation for the finite number of phenomenal qualities; but by itself it is not enough, because, the number of similar atoms being infinite, that of possible aggregations would also turn out to be infinite. Here E. makes his greatest speculative effort and also the biggest leap of his logic: passing from the concept of negative infinity, proper to the preceding atomism, to the positive one of the infinite as "sum" ("summa summarum," Lucretius, V, 361), he derives from it the law of the universal compensation of all forces, "isonomia" (Cicero, Nat. d., I, 50; Lucretius, II, 522 ff.). On it, closing the circle of events, he founds a theory of cyclic returns, analogous to that of the Stoics (frg. 266; Lucretius, II, 297 ff.; III, 854 ff.), which allows him not only to justify without teleology what Lucretius calls the "aeterna foedera" of nature and the harmony of its parts, but, what is still more important, to create in his universe of atoms the conditions for the existence of blessed and eternal beings, such as were the gods whom he held to be attested by the evidence of the representations men have had of them at all times (Cicero, loc. cit.; Ep., III, 124; Lucretius, III, 123 ff.). Anthropomorphic and constituted of atoms of the most tenuous structure, these gods live in infinite number in the infinite intermundane spaces, caring for nothing but their own blessedness. Like all other bodies, they are knowable through the atomic images that emanate from them, except that, given their subtlety, these are perceived by the mind and not by the senses (Cicero, Nat. d., I, 51; scholium to S. V., I). In them the wise man sees the models to which to make himself like, and from their contemplation he draws his purest joys (Philodemus, De pietate, p. 124, 1 ff.).
Having eliminated, on the basis of this physics and the consequent theology, the fear of the gods, E. removes, with the psychology he derives from it, the fear of death. The soul, in fact, is and can be nothing but a body within another body: only in the envelope of the flesh are the atoms that compose it capable of sensation; as soon as death has dissolved it, the soul too dissolves and with it every sensibility (Ep., I, 65). Death is nothing but this "privation of sense": it therefore "is nothing to us, since, when we are, death is not, and when death is here, we are no more" (Ep., III, 124;
Lucretius, III, 828 ff.). True it is that death is a
source of fear not only for what may be awaited in the
afterlife, but also and above all in itself, as eternal nonbeing. This feeling, very widespread, is the cause, in
E.'s eyes, of all the passions that disturb the life of
man (Lucretius, III, 58 ff.; Porphyry, De obst., I,
54). Against this fear the arguments must be drawn from
ethics and precisely from the nature of pleasure. If pleasure
is in fact perfect in the instant, and "finite time and
infinite time have an equal measure of enjoyment" (S. C.,
XIX), every craving for immortality is vain (ibid., XX):
with respect to the end, "each man departs from life as
if he had just been born" (S. V., 60). Hence Horace's "carpe diem," hence the Epicurus of Metrodorus, which Horace
repeats in the well-known verse: "ille potens sui laetusque deget cui licet in diem dixisse vixi" (Carm., III, 29, 41). The
conviction that death is nothing to us and that "the
end proper to human nature" is reached in the
first instant of life, also makes pain contemptible,
since "if it is long it is light, and if it is severe it is brief" (S. C.,
IV; Ep., III, 133) and it leads to death. While it lasts,
since for E. sensation is in place, and what the
body experiences is absolutely distinct and independent from what
the soul experiences and vice versa, and the latter has in its power
the representations that are the cause of its affections, the
wise man has only to substitute for the image of present
pain that of past pleasures (S. V., 55; fr. 444).
In this regard, the soul is the last stronghold of the
wise man's pleasure, who can be happy even in the
bull of Phalaris" (Cicero, Tusc., II, 17). E. gives an example
of this in the letter written at the point of death to Idomeneus:
"Happy and at the same time the last day of my life is this
on which I write to you. The pains present to my consciousness and to my
bowels are of such intensity that greater they could not
reach. But against all this is arrayed the joy
that the soul feels on its own at the memory of our conversations of former times." All of E.'s wisdom is condensed in the so-called "Tetrapharmakos" preserved
by Philodemus: "The gods are not to be feared: death is not a thing
of which one should be suspicious: the good is easy
to procure: the evil is easy to endure" (Pap. Herc.,
1005, col. IV, 8).
E.'s physical atomism was at his time an anachronism, not so his ethical atomism, which responded
to a general tendency of his age and gave for the
first time form to one of the typical attitudes
of human life. His disciples venerated him as
a name, his followers of every century of antiquity
saw in him the "revealer" and the "savior." Bitterly
the Stoics, the Cynics, and later
the Fathers of the Church fought against him. In the modern age
his rehabilitation has been attempted several times: Valla (in the De
voluptate) went so far as to place his morality alongside
that of Christ. Today there are not a few who
exalt themselves over his asceticism, his maxims on
friendship, the innocence of his life. It is an error:
a doctrine that places the supreme good in the "stable
equilibrium of the flesh" and refers every value back to it,
is the perfect antithesis of Christian doctrine. To
dispel every equivocation E. himself has provided
by proclaiming "the pleasure of the belly the source and root of every good." What he means is the pleasure of "not
being hungry," and not of gluttony, but the maxim does not
become better for this. If, according to the testimonies, he affirmed that "the wise man will die for a friend,"
he saved in himself the man, but placed the philosopher in contradiction and showed the insufficiency of his principles.
V. EPICUREANISM
Under this name is understood every current of thought and every attitude to life that directly or indirectly can be traced back to the principles of E.'s philosophy or repeats its doctrines. As an attitude to life it is one of the more or less unreflective forms that human conduct can assume, and not only does it not need the corresponding theory, but, where the disposition is lacking, that theory remains without effect: such is the case of Lucretius, who, an Epicurean in doctrine, is not one in the feeling for life that inspires his poetry. More or less widespread in all ages, it dominates in those in which the vision of the universal grows dim and the religious sense of things and of life decays. As a current of thought, Epicureanism is characterized by three notes: nominalism in logic, materialism in ontology and utilitarianism in morals. In open and conscious forms it reappears in the Renaissance. Already in the 15th century, as has been indicated, Lorenzo Valla, preceded by fleeting hints of Petrarch, had attempted the first revaluation of E., whom the whole Middle Ages had considered as anti-Christian (cf. Dante, Inf., X, 13).
The first two great Epicureans by mentality and in the very center of their doctrines were, in Italy, Guicciardini and, in France, Montaigne. And it was under the influence of Montaigne that E.'s system, while nevertheless preserving the principal truths of the faith, rose again in its entirety, in the work of the Provençal canon Pietro Gassendi (1592-1655). Contemporaneously in England Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) made of it the first great and coherent application to morals and politics. Particularly imbued with Epicureanism were French society and culture of the 17th and 18th centuries (v. LIBERTINES). Among the most characteristic Epicurean moralists must be remembered La Rochefoucauld (1613-79) and Saint-Evremond (1613-1705). A form of experimental science was given to Epicurean ethics by Claude Helvétius (1715-71). From him derive La Mettrie, D'Holbach and, in England, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). In the Epicurean current is the utilitarianism of the 19th century, which had its greatest representative in Stuart Mill.