158 On Stilpo, see 2.113–20.
159 The life and views of Pyrrho (c. 365–275 BC) are discussed earlier in Book 9.
160 The ancient term for the Sea of Marmara.
161 A city in Asia Minor near Byzantium, today part of the city of Istanbul.
162 Antigonus II Gonatas (c. 320–239 BC) was a king of Macedonia, who sought to fill his court at Pella with philosophers, poets, and intellectuals.
163 Ptolemy II Philadelphus (308–246 BC) was the second ruler in the Ptolemaic dynasty that dominated Hellenistic Egypt; he founded the famous Library and Museum at Alexandria.
164 Not the king Antigonus just mentioned, but Antigonus of Carystus, a Hellenistic source often consulted by Diogenes (including later in this paragraph).
165 The Greek word kinadoi normally refers to people, not poems, and is translated “catamites” elsewhere in this volume. Only here does it denote a literary genre, if the text is sound (some editors have emended it).
166 This is the work that Diogenes has quoted throughout for scurrilous verses about the philosophers he discusses.
167 On Xenophanes, see 9.18–20.
168 The meter is dactylic hexameter, so the conventions of Greek epic, according to which a muse is invoked in the opening lines, are being parodied.
169 Plutarch and Lucian immortalized the fifth-century BC Athenian misanthrope named Timon, and Shakespeare relied on their portraits for his play Timon of Athens.
170 The Scythians, dwelling north of the Black Sea, were known for their skill as archers, including an ability to fire arrows backward while riding away from battle.
171 Both Alexander of Pleuron (b. c. 315 BC) and Homer of Byzantium were members of the so-called Pleiad, a group of seven Alexandrian poets.
172 Aratus of Soli (c. 315–c. 240/39 BC), the author of Phenomena, an extant didactic poem about the constellations.
173 That is, by worms or insects.
174 Arcesilaus of Pitane is discussed at 4.28–45.
175 In mythology the Cercopes were mischievous apelike creatures, and the market in Athens named for them was evidently an unsavory place frequented by slaves.
176 In Greek, attagas and noumenios are both types of birds; they are also the proper names of known thieves. Timon’s phrase has been interpreted variously, but since he uses it to discredit the idea that the mind is able to assist the senses, its point may lie in the idea that the two birds (or thieves) can agree without being correct.
177 An obscure figure, perhaps of the first century AD.
178 In antiquity, the term “empiric” was applied to a school of medical thought that emphasized observation and experiment over theory.
179 The only thinker in this list whose works are still known today, Sextus Empiricus lived in the late second and early third centuries AD. His second name is an epithet indicating his allegiance to the empiric school of medicine.
180 Perhaps the work we know today as Against the Mathematicians is meant. That work, in its surviving form, has eleven books rather than ten, but two of these books may have been conjoined in antiquity.
Book 10
EPICURUS
341–270 bc
One Who Understands, by Paul Klee, 1934.
Epicurus
1,2 Epicurus, son of Neocles and Chaerestrate, was an Athenian of the deme of Gargettus and a member of the Philaedae,1 as Metrodorus says in his work On Noble Birth. Others, including Heraclides in his Epitome of Sotion, say that he was raised at Samos2 after the Athenians had established a cleruchy there,3 and that he came to Athens at the age of eighteen, at which time Xenocrates was living at the Academy4 and Aristotle was living in Chalcis.5 When Alexander of Macedon died and the Athenians were expelled from the cleruchy by Perdiccas,6 Epicurus went to live with his father in Colophon.7 After living there for a time and gathering students, he returned to Athens during the archonship of Anaxicrates.8 For a while he pursued his philosophical studies in company with others, but afterward advanced his own views <…>, when he founded the school that bears his name.
3 He himself says that he took up philosophy at the age of fourteen. Apollodorus the Epicurean,9 in the first book of his Life of Epicurus, says that Epicurus turned to philosophy out of contempt for his schoolmasters, who were unable to explain the passages about Chaos in Hesiod.10 But Hermippus says that Epicurus became a schoolmaster himself, and then, after coming upon the works of Democritus,11 turned eagerly to philosophy. This is why Timon refers to him as:
Two views of a marble head of Epicurus. Second-century Roman copy of a Greek original of the first half of the third century B.C.
The last and most shameless12 of the natural philosophers, hailing from Samos,
A schoolmaster, and the most ill-bred of animals.
Epicurus was joined in his philosophical pursuits, at his urging, by his three brothers—Neocles, Chaeredemus, and Aristobulus—as Philodemus the Epicurean says in the tenth book of his collection On Philosophers, and by a slave named Mys (“Fly”), as Myronianus says in his Historical Parallels.
4,5 Diotimus the Stoic, who is hostile to Epicurus, has slandered him harshly, citing fifty licentious letters that he claimed were written by the philosopher; and so has the writer who ascribed to Epicurus the letters allegedly written by Chrysippus.13 He was also slandered by Posidonius the Stoic and his school, Nicolaus, Sotion in the twelfth book of his Refutations of Diocles,
6 They say that in his letters to Leontion he writes, “O Lord Healer! My dear Leontion, your letter, as we read it, filled us with thunderous applause,” and that in a letter to Themista, the wife of Leonteus, he says, “I am capable, if you don’t come to me, of spinning round three times and being whirled to any place that you and Themista propose.”22 And to the beautiful young man Pythocles23 he says, “I will sit down and await your lovely, godlike approach.” On another occasion, writing to Themista, he supposes it right <…>,24 as Theodorus says in the fourth book of his work Against Epicurus. He is also said to have written to many other courtesans, but particularly to Leontion, with whom Metrodorus was also smitten. And in his work On the Goal he writes thus: “For I, at any rate, do not know what I would consider good apart from the pleasures derived from taste, sex, sound, and beautiful form.” And in his letter to Pythocles, he writes, “Hoist every sail, my dear boy, and flee from all education.” Epictetus calls Epicurus a writer of obscenities and utterly reviles him.25
7,8 And Timocrates, the brother of Metrodorus, who studied with Epicurus and then left his school, says in his work Festivities that Epicurus vomited twice a day from overindulgence, and relates that he himself had difficulty extricating himself from those nocturnal philosophy seminars and that gathering of the Mysteries.26 He adds that Epicurus was unacquainted with reasoning and knew even less of life; that his body was in a sorry state, since for many years he had been unable to rise from his litter; that he spent a mina27 a day on his table, as he himself says in his letter to Leontion and in the one he wrote to the philosophers at Mytilene; and that other courtesans consorted both with him and with Metrodorus, including Mammarion, Hedia, Erotion, and Nicidion.28 Timocrates also claims that Epicurus, in the thirty-seven books of his work On Nature, often repeats himself and write
s primarily to refute others, especially Nausiphanes.29 Here are Timocrates’ own words: “But <…>30 for he too, when laboring with an idea, had the sophist’s long-winded boastfulness, like many other slaves.” Timocrates mentions that Epicurus himself, in his letters, says of Nausiphanes, “This so infuriated him that he abused me and called me ‘schoolmaster.’” Epicurus used to call Nausiphanes “jellyfish,” “illiterate,” “fraud,” and “whore”; he called Plato’s followers “flatterers of Dionysius,” and Plato himself “golden”;31 Aristotle “a spendthrift, who after consuming his patrimony sought employment in the army and as a druggist”; Protagoras “porter,” “scribe of Democritus,”32 and “village schoolmaster”; Heraclitus “the agitator,”33 Democritus “Lerocritus,”34 Antidorus “Sannidorus,”35 the people of Cyzicus36 “enemies of Greece,” the dialecticians “full of envy,” and Pyrrho37 “ignorant and uneducated.”
Epicurus and Leontion, by Ludwig Gottlieb Portman, 1803.
Attic red-figure cup by the Foundry Painter, c. 470 BC, designed for use at a symposium. According to the Greek orator Demosthenes, symposia were largely exercises in “revelry, sex, and drinking.” The cup, with its explicit depiction of a sexual encounter between a young man and a woman who is probably a hetaira, or courtesan, lends credence to Demosthenes’ characterization.
9,10 But these people38 are out of their minds. For there are a great many witnesses who attest to the man’s matchless courtesy toward everyone: his native land, honoring him with bronze statues; his friends, so numerous they could not be measured by entire cities; and all who knew him, captivated as they were by the siren spells of his doctrines (with the exception of Metrodorus of Stratonicea,39 who defected to Carneades,40 perhaps because he found Epicurus’ incomparable goodness oppressive); the school itself, which, at a time when all the others have nearly died out, lives on forever as one leader succeeds another; his gratitude to his parents, his generosity to his brothers, his gentleness to his servants, which is clear both from the contents of his will and the fact that they themselves studied philosophy with him, the most distinguished of them being the above-mentioned Mys;41 and, in general, his kindness toward everyone. His piety toward the gods and his devotion to his native land defy description. For it was on account of his exceptional honesty that he did not engage in public life at all.
11 And at a period when Greece was afflicted with her worst calamities42 he continued to live there, traveling only two or three times to Ionia to visit friends. And they, in turn, flocked to him from all sides and lived with him in his garden, as Apollodorus says (Epicurus purchased the garden for eighty minas, as Diocles mentions in the third book of his Epitome), living very frugally and simply. “They made do, at any rate,” he says, “with a half pint of weak wine; otherwise, all they drank was water.” He says that Epicurus did not think it right that their property should be held in common, as did Pythagoras, who said that the possessions of friends are common property;43 for such a practice, according to Epicurus, implied mistrust, and without trust there could be no friendship. He himself says in his letters that he managed on a diet of plain bread and water. Elsewhere he says, “Send me a small pot of cheese, that I may feast luxuriously whenever I like.” Such was the man who asserted that pleasure is the goal of life—the man whom Athenaeus commemorates in this epigram:
12 You toil, men, at worthless tasks, and in your greed
For gain you start quarrels and wars;
But nature’s wealth has its modest limit,
Though empty judgment treads a limitless path.
So heard the wise son of Neocles, either from the Muses
Or from the holy tripod of Pytho.44
But we will grasp this better from his own doctrines and sayings.
Among the ancients, says Diocles, Epicurus especially admired Anaxagoras (though he disagreed with him on various points) and Archelaus,45 the teacher of Socrates. Diocles adds that he trained his disciples to commit his treatises to memory.
13 Apollodorus, in his Chronology, says that Epicurus also studied with Nausiphanes
14 He used his own words when speaking of things, on which account Aristophanes the grammarian faults him for an idiosyncratic style. But his prose was so lucid that in his work On Rhetoric49 he says that nothing is required but clarity. And in his letters, instead of the salutation “Greetings,” he would write, “Do well” or “Live well.”
But Ariston says in his Life of Epicurus that the philosopher’s Canon was inspired by The Tripod of Nausiphanes; he adds that Epicurus had been Nausiphanes’ student and had also studied with Pamphilus the Platonist in Samos. He says that Epicurus began to study philosophy at the age of twelve, and founded his school at the age of thirty-two.
15 He was born, according to Apollodorus in his Chronicles, in the third year of the 109th Olympiad, during the archonship of Sosigenes, on the seventh day of the month of Gamelion,50 seven years after the death of Plato. At the age of thirty-two he founded a school, at first in Mytilene and Lampsacus, where he taught for five years. He then returned to Athens, where he died in the second year of the 127th Olympiad,51 during the archonship of Pytharetus, at the age of seventy-two. His school passed to Hermarchus, son of Agemortus, of Mytilene.
16 Epicurus died of a kidney stone after an illness of fourteen days, as Hermarchus says in his letters. Hermippus reports that Epicurus got into a bronze bathtub filled with warm water, asked for unmixed wine,52 and drained the cup. After he had urged his friends to remember his doctrines, he died.
My own verses about him run as follows:
“Farewell, and remember my doctrines.”
Such were Epicurus’ dying words to his friends.
He sat in a warm bath, downed unmixed wine,
And forthwith quaffed chill Hades.
Such was the man’s life and such his death.
He disposed of his property as follows:
17 I hereby give all my goods to Amynomachus, son of Philocrates, of Bate, and to Timocrates,53 son of Demetrius, of Potamus, in accordance with the terms of the gift inscribed in the Metröon,54 on condition that they make the garden and its appurtenances available to Hermarchus,55 son of Agemortus, of Mitylene, and his associates, and to those whom Hermarchus may leave as his successors, so that they may live and study there. I charge my school in perpetuity with the task of helping Amynomachus and Timocrates and their heirs preserve to the best of their ability <…> the communal life in the garden in whatever way is most secure, and I direct the trustees’ heirs, and likewise those to whom our successors in the school may bequeath it, to maintain the garden. Let Amynomachus and Timocrates allow Hermarchus and his associates to inhabit the house in Melite56 during Hermarchus’ lifetime.
18 From the revenues of the property given by me to Amynomachus and Timocrates, let them, to the best of their ability, in consultation with Hermarchus, provide funds for the funeral offerings to my father, mother, and brothers, and for the customary celebration of my birthday each year on the tenth of Gamelion, and for the assembly of my school on the twentieth of each month to commemorate Metrodorus and myself in the traditional manner. Let them also celebrate the day in Poseideon57 that commemorates my brothers, and likewise the day in Metageitnion that commemorates Polyaenus,58 as I have done myself.
19 Let Amynomachus and Timocrates take care of Epicurus,59 son of Metrodorus, and Polyaenus’ son, provided that they live and study philosophy with Hermarchus. In like manner, let them also take care of Metrodorus’ daughter, and when she has come of age let them give her in marriage to whomever Hermarchus selects from those who philosophize with him, provided that she is well behaved a
nd obedient to Hermarchus. From the revenues of my property, let Amynomachus and Timocrates, in consultation with Hermarchus, provide them with as large an annual allowance as seems adequate for their needs.
Let them make Hermarchus their fellow trustee of the revenues, so that everything may be done with the approval of him who grew old with me in philosophy and was left as head of my school. And whenever Metrodorus’ daughter comes of age, let Amynomachus and Timocrates provide her with as large a dowry as can be spared from the revenues, with Hermarchus’ approval.
20 Let them also take care of Nicanor,60 as I have always done, so that no members of the school who have been helpful to me in private life and shown me every kindness and chosen to grow old with me in philosophy may lack the necessities, so far as my means allow.
21 Give all the books I own to Hermarchus.
And if anything happens to Hermarchus before Metrodorus’ children come of age, let Amynomachus and Timocrates give each of them an allowance for their necessities (provided they are well behaved), drawing on my remaining revenues as far as possible. And let them manage all other matters in accordance with my arrangements so that everything may be carried out to the best of their ability. As for my slaves, I hereby free Mys, Nicias, and Lycon; I also grant Phaedrium her liberty.
22 As he was dying, he wrote Idomeneus the following letter:
Passing a delightful day, which will also be the last of my life, I write you this note. Dysentery and an inability to urinate have occasioned the worst possible sufferings. But a counterweight to all this is the joy in my heart when I remember our conversations. I beseech you, in light of how admirably, from childhood, you have stood by me and by philosophy, to keep watch over Metrodorus’ children.
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Page 59
