Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  The matter remains controversial, and Pyrrho’s real thoughts are likely to remain elusive. What little is known about him is compatible with different readings, and the same seems to have been true of his pronouncements, such as they were. Pyrrho’s truest legacy to the school that bore his name may well have been the image of a life of supreme tranquillity, detached from any positive assertions about the good conduct of life. The most distinctive characteristic of later Pyrrhonism, which set it apart from Academic Skepticism, was its goal—a “suspension of judgment,” as Diogenes memorably writes, “attended by tranquillity as if by its shadow” (9.107). Sextus, who goes into the matter more fully, represents this as a chance discovery. Seeking to resolve the anomalies presented by conflicting appearances and opinions, Pyrrho’s followers were compelled to suspend judgment by the opposing considerations of equal strength on each side of every question; the peace of mind they had long sought, though in vain, came as the unexpected result (Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.25–30). Later Pyrrhonism, then, uniquely combines the tranquillity exemplified by Pyrrho with practices of argument leading to suspension of judgment for which the Skeptical Academy was the most important, though not the only, source.

  1 John Dillon, The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (347–274 BC) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).

  2 Diodorus Cronus, whom Diogenes places in the succession of the Socratic Euclides of Megara (see 2.111–12), was among other things a virtuoso in argument and a master of logical puzzles, and it is this side of his philosophical character that Ariston has in view.

  3 Plutarch (first and second century AD) wrote a book about the question, which has not survived. Gellius (second century AD) says it was much discussed by Greek authors (XI v 6).

  4 See Gisela Striker, “Sceptical Strategies,” in Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology, ed. Malcolm Schofield, Myles Burnyeat, and Jonathan Barnes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 54–83.

  5 See Julia Annas, “Plato the Sceptic,” in Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues, ed. James C. Klaage and Nicholas D. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 43–72.

  6 To be sure, “eristic” is usually a pejorative term, used by Plato among others to distinguish the formally similar method of question and answer, practiced by the sophists in order to display their cleverness and achieve apparent victory in argument, from Socrates’ arguments, which he undertakes in pursuit of truth and understanding. Diogenes’ reference to “eristic” simply reflects the difficulty outsiders to the practice had distinguishing the two, which often struck them as similar displays of competitive logic-chopping. The rhetorician Isocrates, a younger contemporary of Socrates and older contemporary of Plato, who set up a school to rival the schools of Plato and Aristotle, notoriously lumped together as practitioners of eristical argument those whom we view as philosophers and the sophists.

  7 See A. A. Long, “Diogenes Laertius, Life of Arcesilaus,” Elenchos 7 (1986): 429–49; and John M. Cooper, “Arcesilaus: Socratic and Sceptic,” in Knowledge, Nature and the Good (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 81–103.

  8 A translation with an illuminating introduction and commentary can be found in Charles Brittain, Cicero on Academic Skepticism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006).

  9 An examination of this section with comparisons to Sextus Empiricus can be found in Jonathan Barnes, “Diogenes Laertius IX 61–116: The Philosophy of Pyrrhonism,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, II.36.6, ed. Wolfgang Haase and Hildegard Temporini (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), 4241–301.

  10 Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica 14.18.1–5; A. A. Long and David N. Sedley, eds., The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1:14–15.

  11 See Richard Bett, Pyrrho: His Antecedents and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); T. Corey Brennan, “Pyrrho on the Criterion,” Ancient Philosophy 18 (1998): 417–34; and Jacques Brunschwig, “Pyrrho,” in The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. K. Algra et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 241–50.

  Epicurus in Diogenes Laertius

  James Allen

  Epicurus is the subject of the tenth and last book of Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (cf. 1.15) and the last of the “Italian line” of philosophers, according to the fanciful successions Diogenes used as an organizing principle. Other members of that line were discussed in Book 9, including Democritus, the ancient Greek world’s most prominent atomist before Epicurus and a critically important influence on him in physics and ethics, despite his protestations of independence.

  While the plan of the Lives therefore dictated where the treatment of Epicurus would fall, his appearance at the end of the work had a further significance.

  In one of the handful of passages that seem to afford a glimpse of the author, Diogenes tells us that the Chief Maxims—forty statements by Epicurus—that will conclude Book 10 will also be the crown (colophon, or “summit”) of his book as a whole. By closing his work in this way, he says he will have made its end the starting point of the happy life (10.138). This expression of sympathy for Epicurus, together with other signs of approval, has led some scholars to suspect that Diogenes was himself an Epicurean.

  Book 10 is unique in presenting the views of its subject at length in his own words. Apart from the biographical and doxographical material of the kind familiar to us from the other nine books and the forty doctrines, it contains three letters from Epicurus to his followers, summarizing and expounding his teachings for their benefit. These letters are a primary source for what we know about the teachings of Epicurus, but they are also notoriously hard to understand.

  The result is a book with the following plan, the bulk of which is made up of primary source material (*).

  1–29: Epicurus’ life.

  30–33: Canonic (epistemology).

  34–83: The Letter to Herodotus,* which tackles natural philosophy, broadly conceived.

  83–116: The Letter to Pythocles,* which concentrates on one department of natural philosophy, heavenly phenomena (“meteorology” in the ancient sense)—such as the size of the sun, the waxing and waning of the moon, and the like.

  117–21: An ethical doxography, chiefly the attributes of the wise person.

  121–35: The Letter to Menoeceus,* about ethics.

  136–38: More ethical doxography, especially about pleasure.

  139–54: Chief Maxims.*

  We have nothing like these letters for the other two main Hellenistic schools, the Stoa and the Academy. Thanks to the letters and the poem De Rerum Natura, the first-century BC masterpiece in Latin verse by Lucretius, a follower of Epicurus, we are better supplied with firsthand information about his philosophy than that of any of his rivals.1

  Diogenes begins with a biography of Epicurus (341–270 BC). Though an Athenian citizen, Epicurus was born on the Ionian island of Samos, coming to Athens only at age eighteen. In his early years, in a pattern familiar from other lives related by Diogenes, he studied with a number of teachers, including the Platonist Pamphilus (10.13–14). One of his mentors was the Democritean philosopher Nausiphanes; to judge by the harsh words allegedly exchanged between the two, their relations were strained (10.8 and 13; cf. 9.69). Epicurus’ polemics in On Nature and ancient charges that he plagiarized Nausiphanes in his work on epistemology suggest that his teacher was more important to Epicurus than his claim to have learned nothing from him would indicate. According to other testimonies preserved by Diogenes, Epicurus was stimulated to pursue philosophy by reading Democritus on his own and was self-taught (10.2–3 and 13). His insistence on his own originality and independence, however accurate, set him apart from other philosophers of his time.

  The life includes an extensive catalogue of abuse and slander directed at Epicurus (10.3–8). According to some reports he returned the favor with interest (10.8), but Diogenes clearly believed that this charge was itself a slander. As a champion of the view that pleasure is the primary and
natural good and that happiness, the supreme goal, consists of a life of pleasure, Epicurus was peculiarly vulnerable to accusations that he led a dissipated life. According to Diogenes, Timocrates, a onetime follower of Epicurus and brother of his lifelong friend and philosophical partner, Metrodorus, made a minor career out of such charges after leaving the school (10.6).2

  Attacks like this were to be expected. What surprises is Diogenes’ impassioned defense of Epicurus: surely his detractors must have been mad (10.8), for he was a man of universal goodwill (philanthrōpia) and a generous friend esteemed by all who knew him. Diogenes cites testimony that Epicurus and his companions, far from living a life of sybaritic indulgence, were remarkably austere in their tastes and habits (10.9–11). The account squares with what we know from other sources, even critics of Epicurus like Cicero, who conceded that Epicurus was indeed, as his followers maintained, a decent, kind, and abstemious man while insisting his admirable life conflicted with his philosophy.

  The school founded by Epicurus on a property he purchased outside Athens’ walls came to be known as the Garden—a true community of friends, says Diogenes, drawn from all walks of life, including Epicurus’ servants, who practiced philosophy together with him (10.10).3 With a few exceptions, the people he attracted remained friends for life. Diogenes is struck by the school’s long continuous history, which he views as a tribute to the bonds fashioned by Epicurus in the early days of the community (10.9), one that he says survived after others perished—though scholars suspect Diogenes is echoing a source from an earlier period rather than referring to an Epicurean school still extant in his own day.

  Epicurus’ will and a letter written shortly before his death, with which the biographical portion of his life concludes, lend support to the admiring portrait already sketched (10.16–22). The will freed his slaves and provided for the maintenance of friends and for the children of Metrodorus, who had died before him. It also secured the continuation of the school by naming Hermarchus as his successor. Other provisions may suggest something like a cult to modern readers—the injunction that his birthday be celebrated each year, for example, and that his memory and that of Metrodorus be honored on one day of each month.

  Following his usual practice, Diogenes appends an account of one of Epicurus’ most prominent students, Metrodorus, who is the subject of a brief life, and others who are merely named. He adds a list of his best books rather than all of them because, according to Diogenes, Epicurus was an exceptionally prolific author, much given to repetition and disinclined to revise (10.26–28).

  Diogenes now turns to Epicurus’ philosophy as expounded in the three letters, prefacing the Letter to Herodotus with a brief but illuminating account of Epicurean epistemology, or “canonic.” The word “canon” means straightedge, and though Epicurus was not the first to use the term in the metaphorical sense of a standard of judgment or measure of truth, he seems to have been most responsible for turning it into a term of art in Hellenistic epistemology.4 Another important innovation is his formulation of the idea of a concept (prolēpsis), to which he assigns a crucial role in thinking and reasoning. The term and the idea were taken over by the Stoics, and the notion of concepts has exerted an immense influence on the whole subsequent history of philosophy. Above all, he set the agenda for Hellenistic epistemology, and thereby much of the philosophy it influenced, with his insistence that human knowledge and understanding are rooted in perceptual experience (10.31–32; cf. 10.38).

  Epicurus intended the letters to serve as summary presentations of his teachings for those who lacked the time or the ability to master their more detailed treatment in his treatises (10.35–37). Despite this they are as formidably difficult as any works of ancient philosophy, especially the Letter to Herodotus. The philologist Hermann Usener, whose 1887 edition of the letters marked a major advance in Epicurean scholarship, said in the preface to the Epicurea, his magnum opus, that he had devoted the better part of his energies to it for years not out of a liking for the man or an interest in his philosophy but because of the exceptional challenge presented by the many difficulties in the letters preserved by Diogenes Laertius.

  The Letter to Herodotus, concerning physics, is the longest of the three, but it would be a mistake to infer that Epicurus regarded the subject as the most important part of philosophy. Rather he believed, as did other Hellenistic philosophers, that its study contributed to happiness, the achievement of which is the concern of ethics.

  Happiness is a life of pleasure, according to Epicurus, which is therefore the goal toward which all our choices and actions should be directed. He regarded the removal of all pain as the highest form of pleasure; once that was achieved, the pleasures of the table or the bedroom were often enough not worth the bother. As other philosophers observed, including antiquity’s other school of hedonists, the Cyrenaics, this did not seem at all like pleasure as it was ordinarily understood.5

  Instead the condition esteemed by Epicurus resembles the tranquillity, peace of mind, and imperturbability valued by other philosophers whom no one regarded as hedonists. Indeed the term ataraxia, already used by Democritus and meaning freedom from mental distress, figures prominently in Epicurus’ account of the condition of the happy human being (10.85 and 128), and his interest in Pyrrho’s manner of life is also noteworthy.6 Pyrrho was known and admired above all for his imperturbable calm.

  Epicurus held that mental pleasure was greater than physical pleasure and mental pain greater than physical pain (10.137). By making tranquillity impossible, then, fears and anxieties were greater threats to happiness than physical pain. Chief among them in his view were anxiety about divine meddling in human life and fear about the fate that awaits us after death, to which superstitious beliefs about both give rise. By providing us with a clear understanding of the nature of reality, the universe, and everything in it, the study of nature demolishes these beliefs and thereby frees us from one of the principal impediments to happiness.

  Among other things, knowledge of nature will permit us to see that the world we inhabit and perceive is but one of an infinite number of worlds in the infinite universe, formed, as is everything, by the chance collision of atoms. The gods had no part in the creation of this or any other world, and no power to interfere, or interest in interfering, with us. When we die, our souls, which are compounds of atoms in our bodies, dissolve, so bringing to a total and irreversible end the existence of the self, for which, therefore, there can be no afterlife to be anxious about. Hence the need for natural philosophy. If we were not troubled by false beliefs and the fears and anxieties attendant upon them, natural philosophy would be of no use (Chief Maxims XI and XII, at 10.142–43; cf. 10.85).

  The letter proceeds systematically. First Epicurus declares that nothing comes to be from nothing, or perishes into nothing (10.38). Then he argues that apart from body there also exists void—empty space (a position rejected by Aristotle and, within the world system, as opposed to the universe as a whole, also by the Stoics: 10.39). This proposition, like the first, is established by means of an appeal to experience; according to Epicurus, motion, whose existence is a fact proved by observation, would be impossible without void space into which bodies can move. There follow arguments that there is a lower limit to the physical division of bodies; at this point one reaches indivisible, absolutely indestructible, perfectly solid atoms (10.41); that space is infinite in extent, and atoms are infinite in number (and of an indefinitely large though not infinite number of shapes) (10.41–42).

  We also learn a good deal about how perception works: bodies emit continuous effluences—films of atoms—which cause perception when they come into contact with organs of sense. The perceptions to which they give rise are, of course, the basis for the reasoning that yields the atomic explanation for the process of perception itself.

  Though these topics are expected in an exposition of natural philosophy, two other distinctive views in the Letter to Herodotus are not. The first is Epicurus’ so-ca
lled doctrine of minimal parts (10.56–59).7 Not only did he hold that the division of bodies into physically distinct parts separated from one another by void space must come to an end, he also maintained that the intellectual or theoretical division of space—whether void or occupied by body—into smaller units of spatial magnitude has an absolute lower limit. So whenever there are two atoms of unequal size, the volume, length, or whatever you like of each must be a whole-number multiple of the least unit, not further divisible, of the corresponding kind; it is impossible for one to exceed the other in size by a fraction of this unit. Epicurus seems to have held the same for time, denying that every finite length of time is divisible into shorter units.

  His position is in striking contrast to that of Aristotle, and it was likely devised in conscious opposition to it. Aristotle believed in a single finite world, every physical part or portion of which was potentially divisible without limit, as was every finite interval of time in the infinite span of its existence. Epicurus held that the universe is eternal, infinitely extended in space and containing an infinite number of worlds, yet he maintained that finite portions of space were divisible into smaller units of spatial magnitude only a finite number of times.