Epicurus

(b. Samos, 341 B.C; d. Athens, 270 B.C)

moral and natural philosophy.

Epicurus’ father, Neocles, a schoolmaster, was an Athenian of the deme Gargettus who emigrated to the Athenian colony in Samos. At eighteen Epicurus was required to go to Athens to do his military service, after which he rejoined his family, who had by then moved to the Ionian mainland town of Colophon. When he was thirty-two he moved to Mytilene, on Lesbos, and then to Lampsacus on the Hellespont; in both places he set up a school. He returned to Athens about 307/306 B.C. and bought a house, with a garden that became the eponymous headquarters of his school of philosophy. His extant writings, apart from fragments of lost works, consist of Letter to Herodotus, which is a summary of his philosophy of nature; Letter to Pythocles, on celestial phenomena (possibly the work of a pupil); Letter to Menoeceus, on morality; and two collections of aphorisms, one called Kyriai doxai (Principal Doctrines), the other now known as The Vatican Collection.

Epicurus’ main concern was to teach an attitude toward life that would lead to personal happiness. He rejected the philosophical ideals of the good life propounded by the Platonists and Aristotelians and substituted a moderate hedonism. Pleasure is the good. Pain is the obstacle to be removed or avoided. Unsatisfied desires are painful, so the wise man learns to limit his desires to things that can easily be obtained. The good Epicurean seeks a quiet life with a few like-minded friends and avoids becoming deeply involved in the affairs of the world.

The moral message was reinforced by a cosmology, and it was this that gave Epicurus whatever importance he has for the history of science. Peace of mind, he thought, was threatened by ignorance about the natural world, by certain widespread beliefs in the intervention by supernatural powers in man’s environment, and by belief in rewards and punishments in a life after death: “If we were not troubled by doubts about the heavens, and about the possible meaning of death, and by failure to understand the limits of pain and desire, then we should have no need of natural philosophy [ø?????????]” (Kyriai doxai, 11).

Epicurus found a world view that suited his moral purpose in the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, which he first learned from his teacher Nausiphanes. The historian is in no position to make an accurate assessment of Epicurus’ originality, since information about Democritus is scanty and biased. It is certain that the main framework of the atomist system was completed by Democritus. All phenomena were explained on the assumption that the whole natural world consists of imperceptibly small, indestructible, and changeless atoms, made of a single common substance, differing only in shape and size, moving in the infinite void. Democritus explained how perceptible qualities were generated in compounds according to the shapes and sizes of the component atoms and the quantity of void between them. He gave some account of the origin and destruction of worlds in the infinite universe, brought about by random collisions of atoms moving through the void. He wrote about the natural origin of living forms and the natural development of human society and culture.

All of this was taken over by Epicurus. Several modifications in the system can be observed, however, and no doubt more would be revealed if the evidence were more complete. Some of the modifications can be seen to be attempts to meet criticisms brought against Democritus by Aristotle. For example, Aristotle’s criticism of “indivisible magnitudes” (especially in Physics, Z) appears to be the reason for Epicurus’ contradicting Democritus about the indivisibility of the atoms; the Epicurean atom has “minimal parts” that can be distinguished theoretically but not split off physically (Letter to Herodotus, 56–59). Aristotle’s analysis of “the voluntary” (Nicomachean Ethics, III, 1–5) was one of the factors that led to the notorious “swerve” of atoms in Epicurean theory. Democritus’ theory of motion was thought not to allow human beings to initiate motion, since all the motions of the atoms that constitute a mind could be explained by their own previous motions and their interaction with the environment. Epicurus said that atoms deviated unpredictably from time to time, and thus he provided for breaks in the chains of causation. He also modified Democritus’ theory of motion in another way: instead of taking basic atomic motion as an unexplained assumption of the theory, he said that all atoms have a natural motion “downwards,” because of weight. The swerve was therefore needed for another purpose, since without it the theory could not explain why atoms do not all drop in parallel straight lines through the infinite void, without colliding.

Some of Epicurus’ views about the natural world were extremely naive and reactionary. His avowed purpose was to pursue the inquiry only as far as was necessary to remove anxiety. His “canonic,” or rules of procedure, held that any view not in conflict with the evidence of the senses could be regarded as true. Thus the hypothesis that the cosmos was created by an intelligent deity was ruled out as being in conflict with the observed facts of the world’s imperfections and with the true conception of what it is to be a god (Letter to Herodotus, 76–77; see also Lucretius, De rerum natura, V, 55–234). But the sun’s motion in the ecliptic may be due to the tilting of the heavens, or to winds, or to some other cause (Letter to Pythocles, 93). De rerum natura, book VI, and Letter to Pythocles contain many cases in which multiple explanations, ranging from the more or less correct to the ridiculous, are offered for natural phenomena.

The main importance of Epicurus for the history of science is that he reasserted the principles of Democritus’ atomic theory in opposition to the teleological natural philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. His own major work, On Nature, did not survive long enough to be very influential; but the essentials of his theory were preserved in the letters that Diogenes Laeritius included in book X of his Lives and Opinions of the Philosophers, in some of the philosophical works of Cicero, and especially in the poem De rerum natura of the devoted Roman Epicurean, Lucretius. These were the main sources from which post-Renaissance philosophers drew their knowledge of ancient atomism, when Aristotelianism began at last to lose its dominant position.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Text with English translation and commentary is in Cyril Bailey, Epicurus (Oxford, 1926; repr. New York, 1970). The most recent critical edition is G. Arrighetti, Epicure (Turin, 1960), with Italian trans. and commentary; this also includes the papyrus fragments of On Nature. English translation is in Russel M. Geer, Epicurus: Letters, Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings (New York, 1964). Text with ancient testimonia is in H. Usener, Epicurea (Leipzig, 1887; repr. Stuttgart, 1966).

Studies of Epicureanism include Cyril Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (Oxford, 1928; repr. New York, 1964); Benjamin Farrington, The Faith of Epicurus (New York, 1967); David J. Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists (Princeton, 1967); Jürgen Mau, Zum Problem des Infinitesimalen bei den antiken Atomisten (Berlin, 1954); W. Schmid, Epikurs Kritik der platonischen Elementenlehre (Leipzig, 1936); “Epikur.” in Realexikon für Antike und Christentum (Stuttgart, 1961); and Gregory Vlastos, “Minimal Parts in Epicurean Atomism,” Isis, 56 (1965), 121–147.

A conference on Epicureanism is recorded by Association Guillaume Budé, Actes du VIII^e congrés, Paris, 5–10 avril 1968 (Paris, 1969).

Later history of Epicureanism is discussed in Marie Boas, “The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy,” in Osiris, 10 (1952), 412–541; Robert H. Kargon, Atomism in England From Harlot to Newton (Oxford, 1966); and Kurd Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter his Newton (Hamburg, 1890; repr. Hildesheim, 1963).

For fuller bibliography, see Bursian’s Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, no. 281 (1943), pp. 1–194; and P. DeLacy, “Some Recent Publications on Epicurus and Epicureanism, 1937–1954,” in Classical Weekly, 48 (1955), 169 ff.

David J. Furley