Epicureanism

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A garden stood outside the Dipylon gate at Athens, between the city wall and the road to the Academy, and on its plot a man who held that the universe was made of falling atoms taught that the highest good was a quiet stomach and an untroubled mind. He admitted women through the gate, and slaves. Over the entrance, a later writer reported, hung a promise to the stranger: here the highest good is pleasure, and the keeper of the place will set barley-cakes and water before the newcomer. The arrangement was deliberate. Epicurus had decided that almost everything human beings wanted was unnecessary, that almost everything they feared was imaginary, and that a school could be built on the difference.

Roman marble portrait of Epicurus, copied from a Hellenistic Greek original. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Garden and its texts

Epicurus was born on Samos in 341 BCE, the son of an Athenian colonist, and died at Athens in 270. He had studied the atomism of Democritus through a teacher named Nausiphanes, taught for a time at Mytilene and Lampsacus, and around 306 bought the property at Athens that gave the school its name: the Kepos, the Garden. The community that gathered there lived in a deliberate seclusion from civic ambition, on the principle later compressed into a slogan, lathe biosas — live unnoticed. Friends pooled resources without surrendering them to a common fund, on the reasoning that a true friend gives freely and a forced commune breeds the suspicion that erodes friendship. The Garden survived its founder by centuries, with a recognized succession of scholarchs, and it remained one of the four great philosophical institutions of Athens alongside the Academy of Plato, the Lyceum of Aristotle, and the Stoa that would house its great rival, Stoicism.

What the Garden produced has mostly vanished. Diogenes Laertius, writing in the third century CE, reports that Epicurus left about three hundred rolls, “and these contain not a single citation from other authors.” Of that vast output almost nothing continuous survives. The transmission rests on a narrow set of channels, and the architecture of the whole school must be reconstructed from them. The indispensable channel is the tenth and final book of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, which is devoted entirely to Epicurus and embeds, complete, three letters and a set of maxims: the Letter to Herodotus on physics, the Letter to Pythocles on celestial phenomena (a text some modern scholars suspect is a pupil’s epitome rather than the master’s own hand), the Letter to Menoeceus on ethics, and the forty Principal Doctrines, the Kyriai Doxai (all preserved in Diogenes Laertius Book X). To these a Vatican manuscript adds the eighty-odd Vatican Sayings, identified in 1888. Beyond the doxographers, the only physical scraps of Epicurus’s own pen are charred fragments of his treatise On Nature, recovered from the carbonized library of a villa at Herculaneum that Vesuvius buried in 79 CE.

The fullest exposition of the system to survive antiquity belongs not to Epicurus but to a Roman who came two centuries later. Titus Lucretius Carus, who lived from roughly 99 to about 55 BCE, set the whole physics into Latin hexameters in De Rerum Natura, “On the Nature of Things,” six books of verse that present themselves as a cure offered to a friend named Memmius. The poem’s text rests on two ninth-century Carolingian manuscripts now at Leiden, the Codex Oblongus and the Codex Quadratus, from which the lost archetype was reconstructed by Karl Lachmann in 1850 — a reconstruction that became a founding monument of modern textual criticism. The other rich vein is the Herculaneum library, hundreds of rolls belonging to Philodemus of Gadara, an Epicurean of the first century BCE whose treatises survive only because the eruption happened to freeze them in carbon. Against all this stands Cicero, who reports Epicurean doctrine at length in De Finibus and De Natura Deorum precisely in order to refute it, and whose hostility colored the school’s reputation for fifteen hundred years.

Atoms, void, and the swerve

The physics begins from two principles offered as self-evident. Nothing comes into being from what is not, and nothing passes away into nothing. From these Epicurus draws the conclusion that the sum of things is eternal and consists of two ultimate realities: bodies and void. The bodies that cannot be divided further are the atoms, atomoi, the uncuttable; the void is the empty space through which they move. There is no third kind of thing. Everything else — color, warmth, the bitterness of wormwood, the mind itself — arises from atoms of various shapes and sizes meeting, locking, and dispersing in the emptiness. The universe is unbounded, the number of atoms infinite, and the worlds many, coming to be and perishing across an endless field.

This much Epicurus took, with modifications, from Democritus. His one decisive departure is the most famous idea in the whole system, and the surviving evidence for it is curious: it is set out plainly only in Lucretius, and does not appear explicitly in any text of Epicurus that has come down. In Democritus’s universe the atoms fall and collide by strict necessity, and from such a universe nothing genuinely new can issue and no choice is free. Lucretius describes the remedy. As the atoms fall through the void, “at quite uncertain times and uncertain places,” they swerve a little from the straight path — nec plus quam minimum, no more than the least amount. This minimal deviation, the clinamen, the swerve, is what allows atoms to collide in the first place and what breaks the chain of causes. Without it, Lucretius writes, nature would never have made anything; and from it derives “that free will torn from the fates” by which living things move where pleasure leads. The swerve is physics enlisted in defense of free will: a refusal to let the atomist universe become a prison of determinism.

A Renaissance manuscript of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The soul follows the same logic. It is not a separate substance breathed in from elsewhere but a body, a fabric of especially fine, smooth, swift atoms distributed through the frame, bound up with the breath and warmth of the living thing. Such a fabric holds together only while the body that contains it holds together. At death the atoms of the soul disperse like smoke, and with them go sensation and the self. There is no judgment, no transmigration, no shade lingering by the rivers of the underworld. The consequence is the school’s central therapeutic claim, and it follows from the physics with the force of a theorem. Lucretius works through it across the third book of the poem, marshalling argument after argument that the mind is mortal — that what cannot be present to suffer cannot be harmed.

The canon and the criteria of truth

Before ethics and even before physics, Epicurus laid down a method for telling true from false, the part of the system called the canonic, from kanon, the measuring-rod. He named three criteria. The first is sensation. Every perception, taken in itself, is true — the senses report exactly what strikes them, and error enters only with the judgment the mind adds. The oar in water genuinely looks bent; the mistake lies in inferring that it is bent. The second criterion is the prolepsis, the preconception: a general notion built up in the memory out of repeated perceptions, the standing pattern of “horse” or “human” against which a fresh impression is matched. Without such anticipations no inquiry could even be framed, for one could not ask after a thing without some prior grasp of what is being sought. The third criterion is feeling, pathos, pleasure and pain, which serve as the rule for choice and avoidance as the senses serve for fact.

What cannot be perceived directly must be judged by its agreement or conflict with what can. The atoms and the void are not seen; they are inferred as the only account that does not contradict the evidence of the senses, “for if you fight against all sensations,” Epicurus warns in the Principal Doctrines, “you will have nothing to refer to in judging even those of them which you say are false.” This is an empiricism with teeth. Astronomy, where multiple explanations may all be consistent with appearances, is handled with a striking restraint: where several accounts square with what is seen, the school declines to force a single answer, holding that the demand for one is itself a relic of the anxiety the philosophy exists to dissolve.

Pleasure, gods, and the four-part cure

The ethics that all this serves is the most misunderstood part of Epicureanism, because its key word is the one most easily misread. The goal of life is pleasure, hedone — but pleasure as Epicurus defines it, not as his enemies imagined it. Pleasure is the absence of pain. There is no positive state above the removal of disturbance; once hunger and thirst and cold are answered and the mind is freed of fear, the resulting condition cannot be made more pleasant, only varied. The body’s pleasure is aponia, freedom from pain; the mind’s is ataraxia, freedom from disturbance, and the second is the higher because the mind ranges over past and future while the body feels only the present. The figure who has reached ataraxia lives, the Letter to Menoeceus says, “like a god among men.”

This is why the school is austere rather than indulgent. Desires are sorted by a calculus. Some are natural and necessary — for food, for shelter, for the relief of pain, for understanding — and these are easily met. Some are natural but unnecessary, like the desire for rich food rather than plain. And some are empty, kenai, neither natural nor necessary — the desire for wealth, fame, power, the crown of office — and these are the engines of human misery, because they have no natural limit and can never be filled. “Nothing is enough,” Epicurus writes in the Vatican Sayings, “to one for whom enough is little.” Bread and water, taken when one is truly hungry, yield the keenest of pleasures; he would feast on luxuries, he said, only to keep luxury from mastering him. Of all the means to a happy life, the Principal Doctrines hold, “by far the greatest is the possession of friendship.”

Two fears remain, and the philosophy is built to extinguish them. The first is fear of the gods. Epicurus did not deny that gods exist; the universal preconception of them is, by his own canon, evidence that they do. But the gods are blessed and immortal, and a blessed immortal being neither labors nor meddles. They did not make the world, which assembled itself out of atoms, and they do not govern it, reward it, or punish it; to imagine them stooping to human affairs is to insult their blessedness. The first of the Principal Doctrines states it as the foundation of the whole ethics: the blessed and indestructible has no troubles itself and gives none to another, “so that it is never constrained by anger or favor.” The second fear is fear of death, and against it stands the most quoted Epicurean sentence of all, set down both in the Letter to Menoeceus and as the second of the Principal Doctrines: “Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.” Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not. The two never meet, and so nothing is lost.

Raphael, The School of Athens (1509–1511), Apostolic Palace, Vatican. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

These therapies were eventually compressed into a portable formula, the tetrapharmakos, the “four-part cure,” a word borrowed from medicine, where it named a salve compounded of four drugs. The formula is preserved on a Herculaneum papyrus among the writings of Philodemus, who ascribes it to Epicurus: do not fear god; do not worry about death; what is good is easy to get; what is terrible is easy to endure. Four short clauses, each the conclusion of a long argument, designed to be memorized and carried like a remedy in the pocket. The structure of the whole school is visible in them. Physics dissolves the gods and dissolves the soul; the calculus of desire makes the good easy to obtain; the doctrine that pain is either brief or bearable disarms the last terror. Philosophy here is not contemplation but therapy — “empty is the word of that philosopher,” Epicurus says, “by whom no human suffering is healed.”

The afterlife of the Garden

No school of antiquity was more steadily attacked. The Stoics, the great rivals, built a cosmos that was the reverse of the Garden’s at almost every point: a providential world-soul where the Epicureans saw indifferent atoms, a fate to be embraced where the Epicureans inserted the swerve, a virtue sufficient for happiness where the Epicureans made pleasure the measure. The two systems defined themselves against each other for centuries, and much of what survives of each is preserved in the other’s polemic. Plutarch wrote treatises against the Epicureans; the Academy attacked the canonic; Cicero, sympathetic to the skeptics, gave Epicurean physics and ethics a careful hearing in his dialogues chiefly in order to demolish them. Yet the school spread widely. In the second century CE a wealthy Epicurean named Diogenes had the doctrines carved across an enormous stone wall in his town of Oenoanda in Lycia, a public inscription of some twenty-five thousand words — philosophy turned into civic architecture, a remedy offered to passers-by.

With the rise of Christianity the misreading hardened into a slander. A philosophy that denied providence, denied the soul’s survival, and made pleasure the good was, to its Christian critics, a creed of atheism and the belly, and the word “Epicurean” came to mean a glutton. Dante fixed the verdict in stone in the sixth circle of the Inferno, where Epicurus and his followers lie in burning open tombs, condemned as the heretics “who make the soul die with the body” — the punishment chosen to fit the doctrine, the lid to be sealed at the Last Judgment over those who denied any life beyond the grave. For most of the Middle Ages the system survived mainly as this caricature, its actual texts unread, Lucretius’s poem unseen.

The recovery came suddenly. In the winter of 1417 the Florentine humanist and manuscript-hunter Poggio Bracciolini, then out of work after the deposition of his pope, found a copy of De Rerum Natura in a German monastery — almost certainly Fulda — and had it transcribed. The poem reentered European circulation, and with it the whole Epicurean account of an atomic, self-assembling, godless-but-not-atheist nature. Its diffusion through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the early scientific imagination has been argued by modern historians to mark a genuine swerve in the history of thought. In the seventeenth century the French priest and astronomer Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) undertook the deliberate rehabilitation of the system, publishing in 1647 his De vita et moribus Epicuri, “On the Life and Character of Epicurus,” and laboring to reconcile a Christianized atomism with the new physics; his work helped make corpuscular matter-theory respectable to the founders of mechanics. The line runs on. Thomas Jefferson, late in life, wrote to William Short on the last day of October 1819 that he “too” was an Epicurean, holding the genuine doctrines of Epicurus to contain “everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.” And the calculus of pleasure and pain that the Garden made the rule of choice would surface again, secularized and systematized, in the utilitarian arithmetic of the nineteenth century — the old measuring-rod laid against a new age.

What the Garden offered was never a license but a discipline: a short list of true fears, a shorter list of real needs, and the claim that a human life, correctly understood, requires far less than it imagines to be free of disturbance. Barley-cakes and water, and a few friends, against the gods and the grave.

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