II
 
EPICURUS AND HIS AGE

THE founders of the Stoic and Epicurean sects were contemporaries. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was a native of the town of Citium, in Cyprus, and was born about the year 359 B.C. He died in 267, at the ripe age of ninety-two. Epicurus was born in 341 B.C., seven years after the death of Plato, and almost twenty years before the death of Aristotle. He died in 270 B.C., at the age of seventy-one. For more than thirty years Zeno and Epicurus were fellow-citizens of Athens, during the period of their manhood and old age. And yet their paths never met, they moved in different orbits. The founder of the Stoic school was a public and popular character. The King of Macedon looked up to him as to a master and a conscience, and the people of Athens not merely evidenced their faith in him by putting the keys of their city into his veteran hands, but publicly decreed him the honours of a golden crown and a national entombment, in consideration of the character of his life and teaching. Very different was the lot of Epicurus. He and his friends lived in quiet, unostentatious privacy. They were barely heard of by the mass of their contemporaries. Kings and commonwealths belonged to another order of things, removed from their interests and sympathies.

Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Epicurus was the son of Neocles and Chærestrata. The name of his father, being the same as that of the father of the great statesman Themistocles, suggested a couplet of the poet Menander where he contrasts the son of Neocles who freed his country from slavery, with him who freed it from foolishness. The precise spot where Epicurus was born — it is impossible with complete certainty to determine. He was an Athenian, and belonged in particular to the little village or Dêmos of Gargettos, about seven miles northeast of Athens. But it is most probable that he first saw the light in the island of Samos. In the year 365, twenty-four years before the birth of Epicurus, the Athenian general Timotheus had attacked Samos, which was then hostile to Athens and acting in the interests of the Persians. After the conquest of the island, several of the natives who belonged to the hostile party were expelled by the general, and their lands were assigned to Athenian colonists,¹ who, it appears, gradually encroached upon their neighbours, till there was scarcely one of the original landholders left. Among the Athenians who sought to better their fortune in Samos were the parents of Epicurus. For Athens had lost the commercial and maritime supremacy in the Levant, for which she had struggled a century before in the Peloponnesian war, and still more recently in the year 378. By the middle of the fourth century, B.C. 355, she was forced to surrender her claims to the mastery of the seas. The island of Rhodes on the southeast, and the town of Byzantium to the northeast of the Ægean Sea, became the main seats of commercial activity.

There was great depression both in the public and private finances of Athens, and the opportunity of finding relief in a colony was too tempting to be resisted. Neocles, the father of Epicurus, was one of two thousand Athenians who hoped to find an allotment of land in the island of Samos — a beautiful and fertile region of about thirty miles in length and of an average breadth of eight miles. By profession, Neocles is said to have been a schoolmaster: at any rate, he kept an elementary school — a business which then, as now, seems to have been one of the last shifts of impecuniosity in a new settlement. The family evidently was not in a brilliant position. According to the gossip of a later day, the youthful Epicurus was his father's assistant in the school, and helped to prepare the ink for the use of the pupils. But if the function of elementary teacher was attributed to the father, even less creditable was the vocation assigned by rumour to the mother of Epicurus. She was a minister in the service of foreign superstitions, of a church or chapel unauthorized by public or national establishment. Regarded half as a witch or sorceress, and half as a deaconess in a dubious conventicle of low and probably superstitious worshippers, she was no doubt scarcely a creditable parent in the eyes of the world. And at these rites, too, Epicurus was present as a boy helping his mother.²

It is very likely that these stories — reminding the classical student of the picture drawn of the youth of an Athenian orator by a rival contemporary who sought to blast his fame — are complete fabrications. The friends of Epicurus on the other hand, laid some stress on his descent from the Philaidæ, the family from which Pericles too had sprung. Both statements may have some truth in them. If one stops at the right place in genealogy, a creditable ancestry is always obtainable. And, on the other hand, it is not inconceivable that even in boyhood Epicurus was placed in antagonism to the dominant aristocracy of his time, no less in his religious associations than in his social circumstances. We know enough of Greek history in this period to be aware that the national gods had formidable rivals in a number of foreign deities, mainly of Oriental origin. In the port of Athens, in Rhodes, and other commercial centres, the existence of religious societies is revealed to us by the monumental stones which preserve the record of their constitution, the duties of their members, and scattered incidents in their history.³ Very probably these were haunts of superstition; but they were also guilds and brotherhoods of religion, with a domestic and social, no less than an ecclesiastical character, and by their means the stranger, the outcast, and the poor found compensation for their exclusion from civic ceremonial and festivity in these small chapels and more limited congregations, where they had a temple-worship and a litany of their own. Epicurus from his birth was outside the pale within which national idiosyncrasy and political pride confined their religious and their moral standards.

In his eighteenth year he went to Athens to take his place amongst his countrymen. At that period of his life every young Athenian presented himself before the members of his Dêmos or parish, and after an examination, which in older days had been intended to test the qualifications of the candidate to sustain his post in the national army, but was probably now little more than a form, he was "confirmed" as an aspirant citizen. On that occasion he took what was called the oath of the Ephêbi to be true to the service and interests of his fatherland.⁴ When Epicurus in this way was enrolled as a member of the Athenian State-and-Church — confirmed, as it were, as a citizen — one of his comrades in the rite of initiation, and one almost to be styled his college friend, was the great poet of the New Comedy, Menander. In later days the period of novitiate between the eighteenth and the twentieth year was a time when the young Ephêbi enjoyed the privileges and submitted to the restraints of a sort of student and college life. But it was probably not as yet customary to give to the period of opening manhood a training so predominantly intellectual as it came to be in the early centuries of our era.⁵  And, at any rate, the times were evil. In 323 B.C., when the news of Alexander the Great's death was wafted to Greece, the Athenians, in the restless spirit which often had led them to glory, took up arms to recover their own independence and to liberate Greece from Macedonian rule. The troops which Alexander had disbanded on the completion of the conquest of Persia had gathered in great numbers at Taenarum, in the south of the Peloponnesus; and the money which Harpalus, a runaway viceroy of Alexander's, had brought to Athens, easily enabled the Athenians to equip from these warriors, impatient for employment, a force sufficient for the moment to paralyze Antipater, who held Macedonia in the interest of the "kings," the sons of Alexander the Great. But in no long time Antipater, whom the vigorous outburst of the war had shut up in the town of Lamia, in the south of Thessaly, was able to resume the offensive with his reinforcements; and in the year 322: B.C., the seaport-heights of Munychia and the Piræus, the harbour-forts of Athens, were garrisoned by Macedonian troops.

Nor was this all. The regent of the Empire and administrator of the young princes, acting on the advice of Antipater, determined to break the insurrectionary spirit of the Athenian democracy. The civic franchise was restricted to those who had property to the amount of at least two thousand drachmæ: and it was openly suggested to the poor disfranchised Athenians that it might be well for them to seek their fortune in the towns lately founded by Macedonian kings on the coast of Thrace. More than half of the existing citizens seem to have been thus exiled. And Athens, restored to only a communal or municipal independence, was left in the control of the propertied and aristocratic classes, who loved peace and so were well content with the supremacy of Macedon. But Perdiccas, the administrator of the young princes, and Antipater went further. They restored Samos from the possession of Athens to its old proprietors, who had been banished from their native island more than forty years: and the Athenian settlers were forced to quit the ground they had usurped, and seek a refuge on other shores.⁶

Neocles and his family—for Epicurus had at least three brothers—went from Samos to the neighbouring coast of Asia Minor. They seem to have found some difficulty in fixing on a home. Colophon and Teos are two places mentioned as their abodes:⁷ the former is said to have been the spot where Epicurus found his father on his return from Athens. Colophon not long before was the home of a lyric poet of some note, Hermesianax, who gave to three books of his odes the name of Leontion, his lady-love: a name which will afterwards recur in the history of Epicurus. Whether the lady of Hermesianax was also the lady of Epicurus is one of those questions which are apparently unanswerable, and probably for that reason excite the curiosity of a leisured fancy and afford ample ground for the grave disquisitions of philologists. Nor do we know how long Epicurus stayed in Colophon or Teos. At any rate, we know that about his thirtieth year he was temporarily settled at Mitylene, in the island of Lesbos. And it was at Mitylene that he first came forward as a recognised philosopher.

Of his apprenticeship to philosophy we have but scanty hints. It was told by his friends that the future philosopher had betrayed himself even in his schoolboy days. As he read the "Theogony" of Hesiod with his tutor, he stumbled at the line which told how the origin of all things was from chaos. "But what," asked the young Epicurus, "was the origin of chaos?" The teacher, who did not profess anything beyond grammar, naturally declined to solve the difficulty, and recommended Epicurus, it is said, to consult the professors of philosophy.⁸  His chief teachers in that department are said to have been Nausiphanes, a Democritean of Teos, and Pamphilus, a Platonist of Samos.⁹

Of Nausiphanes, fortunately, we have some slight record. He seems to have taught at Teos, a place which on the collapse of the Ionic revolt (about 494 B.C.) had been brought into very intimate relations with Abdêra, the native city of the philosopher Democritus, the founder of the Atomic School. But Nausiphanes, though styled a Democritean, had had for his immediate master a man rather different from Democritus.¹⁰  This was Pyrrho of Elis, the noted Sceptic of antiquity. But it is somewhat misleading to term him a sceptic, in the modern sense of that term. He had seen the revolutions of Greek philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to their followers; he had accompanied the army of Alexander the Great to India, and had learned the falsity of much in dogmatic philosophy, and the uncertainty of much that seems fixed in morals. The lesson taught by Pyrrho intellectually was suspension of judgment; morally, it was imperturbability. "Whoever desires to attain true happiness, must," said Pyrrho, "find an answer to the three following questions.¹¹  What is the constitution of things? What ought to be our attitude towards them? And, lastly, What will be the consequence to those who adopt this right attitude?"  The first question we cannot answer, and therefore in the second place we must simply reserve our judgment and refuse to fix anything absolutely. We can only say: 'Probably,' and 'It seems so.' In this way we attain an undisturbed repose of mind. Such a scepticism, if it checks curious questioning, does not disturb our practical life: we can continue to act, though we act only according to probabilities.

Pyrrho himself wrote nothing, and those who were curious to know something of the doctrines of one whose fame was widely spread had to seek their information from his pupils. Such were Timon and Nausiphanes: and the latter used to relate in later years how Epicurus had again and again questioned him about the habits and tenets of the great sceptic.¹²  But Epicurus could hardly have been in the ordinary sense a pupil of Nausiphanes; he must indeed have been rather older than his alleged master. Nausiphanes, however, it seems, claimed him as a disciple, much to the annoyance of Epicurus, who acknowledges that he did occasionally drop into the lectureroom of the "Mollusc" as he calls him, and found him expounding his doctrines to a few bibulous lads. And from all that one can learn about Epicurus, it is plain that he could not have been much of any man's pupil. He claims that he was self-taught; and that was in the largest sense true. That the contemporary philosophy did not influence him, it would be absurd to maintain; but his acquaintance with it was evidently confined to the main doctrines, in which it was popularly recognised. Where he did read was in the now perished writings of the philosophers anterior to Plato and Aristotle; for these last, in the main, he simply ignored. From Democritus he directly or in directly gained his physical theories; and a good authority informs us that his favourite philosophers were two of these pre-Socratic speculators, Anaxagoras, and Archelaus, the so-called teacher of Socrates.¹³  What he found in them to admire we can only guess: probably the physical and mechanical explanation of the universe and of man, in which Anaxagoras seems. to have abounded. At Mitylene disciples gathered round him; and at Lampsacus, a ferry-town on the Dardanelles opposite to the modern town Gallipoli (the city of Callias), where he spent another year or two, he gradually became a recognised head of a philosophic school. He came, says an ancient writer, to look upon Lampsacus almost as his country.¹⁴  The best of its inhabitants became his friends: particularly Idomeneus, and Leonteus with his wife Themista, Polyænus and Metrodôrus; and the friendships then formed lasted through life. In later days he kept up a correspondence with them, as with the philosophers at Mitylene; and twice or thrice crossed the sea to visit the scenes where disciples first believed in him. If Athens was the Mecca of this prophet, Lampsacus was his Medina.

In 307 B.C. Epicurus settled in Athens. Since he had left it, in 322, its fortunes had not been brilliant, but they had given it tranquillity. In the year after the death of Antipater, in 319, it had been for a while drawn into the whirlpool of Macedonian politics.

Enticed by the promises of Polysperchon, who hoped to enlist the democratic passions of the Greek cities on his side, Athens rushed from one political extreme to another. The violent reaction was not accomplished without bloodshed. Old Phocion and his conservative associates in the Macedonian interest fell a victim to fanatical and patriotic republicans, who doubted the honesty of his cautious policy. He and his friends were executed as traitors. But the hopes then encouraged of a renewal of Athenian sovereignty in Greece were soon disappointed. In 318, Athens was at the mercy of Cassander: and that prince, who not long afterwards made himself undisputed master of Macedon by the assassination of all the seed-royal of Alexander, continued to hold the city tight in his hands by means of the Macedonian garrison in the ports. From 318 to 307, the practical ruler of Athens under the Macedonian king was Demetrius of Phalerum. Under his government the city enjoyed considerable material prosperity: commerce flourished, and the three hundred and sixty statues which are reported to have been erected throughout Attica in honour of Demetrius himself are a proof that art was not neglected. Demetrius was at once a scholar and a man of the world.¹⁵  In early life it is said he had exhibited the simplicity of a hermit in his fare of island cheese and pickled olives. But prosperity apparently changed him: he became a beau, devoting art and time to elaborating his personal appearance, and did not scruple to give free play to his sensual proclivities. Under such a Régime public morality and spirit necessarily deteriorated. The fashionable philosopher of the period was a pupil of Aristotle, Theophrastus, the friend of Cassander and of Ptolemy. Two thousand disciples, it is said, flocked to hear his lectures.¹⁶  Even more vehement was the attraction exercised by Stilpon, of Megara, when he visited Athens: the very workmen flocked from their workshops and ran to look at him.

Probably, however, with all these disadvantages, Athens may have seemed to some a more desirable residence than most of the Greek towns. Its old glories still won for it occasional reverence from the potentates of Asia and Egypt. In most of the other communities of Greece revolution was in permanence. Each party, as it gained the supremacy, in its turn massacred the prominent members of the opposition. Tyrants in name or in reality; foreign adventurers in search of power or pleasure; mercenary troops with no national ties and no respect for law, morality, or religion; exiles saturated with the gathered hatred of years: these and such like inflammable materials throughout Greece made the life of a peaceful inhabitant impossible. With no security for life and property, poverty and lawlessness spread apace; and the young not unfrequently grew up indifferent to their country, sceptical of their religion, bent upon enjoyment, and seasoning sensuality with a dash of literary and philosophic cultivation. Such, in its worst aspects, was Greece in the beginning of the 3rd century B.C. One fact alone may tell of the misery of the time. In the year 308, a Cyrenean adventurer advertised his intention of leading a horde across the deserts against Carthage, which was then staggering under the blows of another adventurer of great ability and greater unscrupulousness, Agathocles, the despot of Syracuse. Numbers of Athenians and other Greeks joined the enterprise. For, says the historian, the ceaseless wars and rivalry of princes had brought all Greece low and made it feeble, so that men not merely looked to an expected good fortune, but were influenced by the prospect of release from their present ills.¹⁷

The arrival of Epicurus in Athens in 307 was almost simultaneous with a change in the situation of Athens, by which the city was more openly involved in the wars between the successors of Alexander. Each of them hoped to win Athens to his side. The material support which she could render was indeed small, but the intellectual prestige of her name was a tower of strength for her friends. Macedonia had hitherto held her in tutelage by means of Demetrius of Phalerum. In 307, he was forced to abandon the city and flee to Egypt, before the attack of another Demetrius, the Besieger (Poliorcêtes), the son of Antigonus. Antigonus had made himself one of the most potent of the generals, who, after Alexander's death, gradually dared, in name as in fact, to divide his empire among themselves. From his seat of government in Phrygia he kept-up an incessant and generally successful system of encroachment upon his neighbours, Ptolemy in Egypt, Seleucus in Babylon, and Lysimachus in Thrace. His son, Demetrius, is one of the most remarkable characters in the age of Epicurus. In him was combined the intellectual ingenuity of the Greek with the despotic sensuality of an Oriental sultan. He seems to have been possessed by a genuine enthusiasm for Athens.

Athens, restored to nominal liberty by the young Demetrius, fell into an intoxication of flattery. Demetrius and his father were proclaimed kings: they were worshipped as the "gods and saviours" of the state; a priest for their godheads' service was yearly appointed; their images were woven on the great veil of the Parthenon amongst the pictures of the other gods; two new tribes were formed and named after the liberating kings; one of the months (Munychion) had its name changed to Demetrion; and the last day of the month was styled Demetrias.¹⁸  But perhaps the best evidence of the worship and fetes which attended Demetrius in Athens is an ode or hymn sung, on one occasion, in his honour. "For other gods," it says, "are either far away, or have no ears to hear, or are not at all, or have no mind or care of us whatever: but thee we see before us, no god of wood or stone, but a real god and true."¹⁹  This burst of devotion to their saviour, whilst it shows the degradation of religious feeling and the lapse of the national faith, and whilst it is a bitter accusation against the rule of the Macedonian, proves also how completely the old spirit of Athens had sunk, and how hopeless was its political regeneration.

But the relief from Macedonian occupation was not lasting. Demetrius was called away by the other engagements of his father's policy, and Athens had to sustain, unaided, a combat with the King of Macedon. It was, probably, at this time that a curious incident in the history of philosophical teaching took place. The democracy, which was now in power, looked with suspicion on the philosophers, who were mostly conservative in their sympathies, and who, at least the Peripatetics, were attached to the Macedonian rule. Accordingly, a law was passed forbidding any one, under pain of death, from opening a philosophic school without the consent of the supreme council and people. Theophrastus, and, probably, other philosophers, rather than comply with the order, left the city: but Athens was too dependent on her schools, or the Macedonian party soon raised its head; at any rate, the law was repealed next year, and the offended philosophers returned to their schools.²⁰

At Athens Epicurus purchased a house and garden. The former, at least, was in the quarter of the city known as Melité, the elevated southwestern district between the Acropolis and the Piæus. This garden was the head-quarters of the friends of Epicurus when they visited Athens, and became the hearth and home of the school which gathered round him. If we could believe one account of the matter derived from an author²¹ who depended too much on compilations from books, one might fancy Epicurus and his company settled in a town-house with a garden around it, introducing into ancient life a sweet odour of the country, and anticipating the coming of a time when cities would no longer be fortresses, but blossom out. into a variegated scene of roofs embowered in leaves. That such a custom came in as the peace of the Roman Empire encompassed a larger sphere is well known; and if Epicurus did surround his home with a garden, he did what seems to have been done before his time. But one does not feel certain that the house and the garden were contiguous: on the contrary, the reverse, as we shall see, is probably, the truth. We are told that the garden cost eighty minæ, i.e. about £320; but the information scarcely enables us to fix the size of the property.

For a period of about thirty-six years Athens was the home of Epicurus. He never during that time took part in public life, never solicited those municipal posts which were open to the ambitious. A calm, unostentatious life devoted to study of the nature of the world and morality, and enlivened by the companionship of like-minded men and women, and by correspondence with those who, in other places, were aiming at the same ends, was the life of Epicurus. In thus standing aside from the business of the commonwealth he ran counter to the teaching of some earlier philosophers, though not, perhaps, to the practice either of Plato or Aristotle. But the altered situation ought to be taken into account. The Athens of his time was no longer a sovereign state, ruling imperially over the islands of the Archipelago, nor was it the mere municipality which it afterwards became under the Roman Empire. Public life in such ambiguous circumstances was unreal and deceptive. The real springs of political force were to be found in the diplomatic intrigues of royal courts. Accordingly Epicurus, like Socrates before him, preferred to stand away out of the giddy whirl of politics, and devoted his best efforts to give a simpler and more natural tone to the aims and aspirations of individual life. It scarcely needs any argument to show that in such a season he chose the better part. In this time of instability, to act beneficially through the medium of politics, was only possible for a king or potentate possessing the rare desire to ameliorate and humanize his people. But men out of power could still show:

How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

In religious matters Epicurus was not a dissenter from the national faith. He worshipped the gods of his community and his age, and took part in the observance of religious services and of festival pageantry. So, too, he instituted services to commemorate the names of some of his beloved dead. From neither the dead nor the gods did he expect any reward. But to both he felt an overflowing of a full heart, gladly showing forth in act its sense of fellowship and kindred with the august and distant gods and the near and dear departed. We are told with pride, too, by Philodêmus, the contemporary of Cicero, that Epicurus was never molested by the comic poets—never banished or put to death as an atheist and infidel.²²  Philodêmus was, no doubt, thinking of Socrates; but he hardly realized how different Athens was in the two periods, and how very great was the contrast between Socrates, freely discussing on the streets and squares, with all comers, on all topics, and Epicurus conversing quietly with his friends in his garden.

Thus tranquilly passed these thirty-six years in Athens. The position of Epicurus was very unlike that of his contemporaries in philosophy. Some of them like Zeno, the Stoic, and the heads of the Peripatetic school, Theophrastus, Strato, Lyco, and Demetrius were on terms of friendship and familiarity with the princes and great men of the time. It was not a rare or surprising event to see philosophers acting as the ambassadors of their native state, in its transactions with foreign powers. Thus Menedêmus, of Eretria, was entrusted by his fellow-citizens with the plenipotentiary disposition of their town; he was sent on embassies to foreign kings, such as Lysimachus, Ptolemy, and Demetrius; and the young king of Macedonia was proud to subscribe himself as his pupil. Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt had been a scholar of Strato of Lampsacus. And Arcesilaus, the Platonist, though he declined the efforts made to get him to meet the King of Macedon, was an intimate friend of the captains or governors who held garrison in the Piræus, and stood well with Eumenes, the son of Philetærus.²³

Another class of philosophers established themselves in the favour of the successors of Alexander on less equal terms than those claimed by the chiefs of Platonism and Aristotelianism. Men like Theodôrus, the witty Cyrenaic, and Crates the Cynic, with his Cynic wife, Hipparchia, made themselves regarded as an acquisition at the kingly courts by their powers of repartee, and the reputation of their bons mots. Their jests at the orthodox beliefs and their unblushing disregard of conventional standards, perhaps increased the piquancy of their company. Thus, when Stilpo was asked by Crates if the worship and offerings of the faithful gave the gods any satisfaction, he only replied by saying that the question was one not to be asked on the highway, but when they were alone. Another of these scoffers, Bion of Borysthenes, acquired quite a reputation by his religious indifference, though when sickness visited him he sought relief in the use of amulets, and abjured all the errors of his tongue. The court of Lysimachus, prince of Thrace, seems to have been a favourite resort of emancipated free-thinkers, both male and female. Hipparchia, the Cynic, and Theodôrus, the Cyrenaic and professed atheist, sometimes met there. Theodorus was the typical representative of the advanced thinkers of the time. He professed open contempt for the popular theology; he was a thorough cosmopolitan; and morality he regarded as one of those conventions which the elect spirits of society might treat as past and obsolete, for all but the narrow-minded Philistines and bourgeoisie. Before kings and people he was equally careless of his language. Athens was shocked at his open irreligion, and Mithras, the chamberlain of King Lysimachus, had to call him to account for his want of respect.²⁴

While it continued to be the chosen home of Epicurus and his followers, Athens passed through a series of vicissitudes. Demetrius Poliorcêtes, its liberator from the Macedonian yoke, had been forced to withdraw his help, and as soon as he had gone, Cassander, the king of Macedon, renewed his efforts to impose his supremacy upon Athens. But in the hour of their peril the Athenians cried aloud for help to their former saviour, and in 303 B.C. Demetrius re-appeared in the Athenian territory, and succeeded in driving the Macedonian armies to the north of the pass of Thermopylae. In consequence of this relief, the Athenians were reckless with delight, and their gratitude found vent in a shameful servility. The Parthenon, the temple of the maiden goddess, was in part assigned to the prince as a lodging, and there for a short time he kept up a succession of imperial revelries with his mistresses and the artistes of his court. But these hours of intoxication were soon followed by a terrible awakening. In 301. B.C. Demetrius and his father succumbed under the combined attack of the other "kings," as the successors of Alexander had lately come to style themselves. After the battle of Ipsus, in which Antigonus lost his life, Lysimachus became master of both sides of the sea of Marmora, and Demetrius found that the Athenians were not disposed to afford him any shelter or aid in his misfortunes. Athens, with the general selfishness of the age, declared itself neutral, and proceeded to rearrange its own affairs. But this was now in reality impossible. Where the aims of those who dreamed of maintaining for Athens an independent existence and policy clashed with the interests of the adherents of the Macedonian power and of those who supported the plans of other princes, faction was inevitable; and about 297 B.C. Athens fell into the hands of a popular chief, called Lachares. This man is described by an ancient writer as of all tyrants known the most savage towards men and the most unscrupulous towards God.²⁵ Demetrius Poliorcætes, now that Cassander was dead, determined again to try to get a footing in Athens. He invested the city by sea and land, and cut off all provisions from the inhabitants. A dreadful famine in the city was the consequence; the necessaries of life began to fail. A bushel of salt sold for twenty shillings, and for a peck of wheat people were willing to pay more than ten pounds. In one house a father and son were sitting in moody despair: suddenly a dead mouse fell from the roof, and the two wretched creatures sprang up and fought over the tiny prey. Epicurus and his companions managed to subsist on beans, counted out in equal numbers to each member of the household.²⁶  Even the tyrant suffered in the general distress. At length he fled — not, it is said, without plundering the temple — and the city fell into the power of Demetrius. The trembling citizens expected vengeance for their falling-off from his side some years ago; but Demetrius, who had always a softness for Athens, was content to ignore their insincerity, and to secure himself against any repetition of it by fortifying and garrisoning the Museum rock in the city, as well as the maritime forts of Piræus and Munychia ( 295 B.C.)

For the next seven years, during which, by one of those strange vicissitudes so common in that period, Demetrius held the throne of Macedonia, Athens remained tranquil under the Macedonian garrisons at her gates. But in 288 B.C., when Demetrius was forced to abandon his Macedonian kingdom, the old Athenian love of independence revived, and young and old alike, under the leadership of Olympiodôrus, rose in rebellion and defeated the Macedonian garrison when it attacked them, and captured the fort on Museum hill, though the garrisons in the forts still remained. Athens, thus liberated by the help of Pyrrhus of Epirus, showed its changed circumstances by setting up honorary decrees as a tribute to the great orators who had urged the state a generation before to resist the power of Macedon. But the spirit of ancient independence was gone. It was to foreign kings that Athens was indebted both for its nominal independence and for its very subsistence. The princes of the Crimea made it frequent gifts of wheat. Foreign patronage is the evidence given by the honorary decrees to the kings of the Bosphorus and of Pæonia, to Lysimachus of Thrace, Pyrrhus of Epirus, and Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt.

In the last years of Epicurus, Athens lived at peace, with Macedonian garrisons at her gates; in the Piræus, in Munychia, and in Salamis. In Macedonia, Antigonus Gonatas, the son of Demetrius, had succeeded to his father's kingdom in 279, and kept up with Zeno and some others of the philosophers a friendly intercourse. With Epicurus, who lived out of the sphere of politics, and with Arcesilaus, who banished politics from the Academy, he had no dealings. Greece, under Macedonia, like Judea under the Romans, was not exactly the place where the king and the philosopher could meet on fair terms.

Epicurus had been from infancy of rather feeble health. In his boyhood, it is said, he was so weak that he had to be lifted down from his chair, and so blear-eyed that he could not bear to look upon the sun or fire. His skin, too, was so tender that any dress beyond a mere tunic was unbearable. Such is the account quoted by a lexicographer of the Byzantine period:²⁷ and the maladies of Epicurus are treated as an anticipatory judgment of heaven upon him for his alleged impieties. Curiously enough, the biographer of Jeremy Bentham tells us how Bentham was so weak at seven years of age that he could not support himself on tiptoe, and he spoke of himself as the feeblest of feeble boys:²⁸ but the greatest bigot would hardly go so far out of his way as to suggest that Bentham's views richly deserved such an organization as his portion. It was also suggested that Epicurus's ill-health was due to his loose and luxurious life. One of his pupils apparently wrote in refutation of these charges.

In the year 270 B.C. Epicurus died at Athens. For a fortnight before his end he had suffered much from obstruction by stone in the bladder.²⁹  But up to the last moment his intellect was unimpaired: he dwelt both in conversation and his letters, on the memories of philosophic fellowship

When each by turns was guide to each,
And fancy light from fancy caught,
And thought leapt out to wed with thought
Ere thought could wed itself with speech.

His last intellectual care was for his doctrines — he bade his friends remember what he had taught. His last personal care was for the children of a disciple who had died before him, and for whom he asked his benevolent friends to continue the attentions and support which they had hitherto given to himself.

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III
 
THE EPICUREAN BROTHERHOOD

"WHEN the stranger," says Seneca, "comes to the gardens on which the words are inscribed: 'Friend, here it will be well for thee to abide: here pleasure is the highest good,' he will find the keeper of that garden a kindly, hospitable man, who will set before him a dish of barley porridge and water in plenty, and say, 'Hast thou not been well entertained? These gardens do not whet hunger, but quench it: they do not cause a greater thirst by the very drinks they afford, but soothe it by a remedy which is natural and costs nothing. In pleasure like this I have grown old.'"¹  "Epicurus, the Gargettian," says another writer,² "cried aloud, and said: 'To whom a little is not enough, nothing is enough. Give me a barley-cake and water, and I am ready to vie even with Zeus in happiness.'" In words like these we have a picture of the garden of Epicurus. At first sight it presents the idea of a society of ascetics rather than of voluptuaries, and of dietetic reformers rather than philosophers. "We ought," says Epicurus, "to be on our guard against any dishes which, though we are eagerly desirous of them beforehand, yet leave no sense of gratitude behind after we have enjoyed them."³  Instead of the revelry and dainty dishes which we should probably associate with the name of epicure, we find a meal of plain bread and water, with half a pint of light wine occasionally added. "Send me," says Epicurus, in one of his letters, "some cheese of Cythnos, so that when I will, I may fare sumptuously."⁴  The life of the Epicurean circle attempted to inculcate plain living, not as a duty, but as a pleasure. Probably, if we believe the stories of the ill-health of Epicurus and his friends, there may have been something of a dietetic experiment in this behaviour. The society was not, indeed, in principle vegetarian; on the contrary, they justified the use of animal flesh for food, much on the same metaphysical ground as Spinoza afterwards employed; i.e., the immense generic difference which they believed to separate man from the brute. But in practice, their diet, like that of so many other philosophers, was mainly vegetarian. Their temperate habits seem to have drawn down upon them the jokes of the comic poets. "Your water drinking," says a character in one of their plays,⁵ makes you useless to the state: whilst by my potations I increase the revenue." Philemon puts the following words into the mouth of one of his characters: "This fellow is bringing in a new philosophy: he preaches hunger, and disciples follow him. They get but a single roll, a dried fig to relish it, and water to wash it down."⁶  So, too, when Juvenal draws his sketch of the real wants of human nature, he identifies what is required to free us from cold and thirst and hunger, with the conveniences which Epicurus in his little garden found sufficient.⁷

To place this aspect of Epicureanism in the foreground seems justified by the whole tenor of the system. To them the life of man was a life at once of the body and the soul. Epicurus declared himself unable to understand what was meant by a pleasure where the body and its various senses were utterly and entirely ignored. The common doctrine of so many ancient philosophers, that the senses and the instincts must be checked, repressed or ignored — that apathy, or the absence of sense and feeling, is the ideal perfection of the sage — was a doctrine against which he always contended. It was easy for opponents to say that such a protest opened the door to sensuality, and to hint that she was even asked to come in. But it is easy to see that the point with Epicurus was that philosophy must keep constantly in view the fact, that humanity is embodied in flesh and blood, and that the body, if ignored in theory, will somehow manage to avenge itself in practice. He had come to know the experimental truth of the proposition, that what we are depends so much on what we eat. And the words of Metrodôrus, his disciple, which gave so much offence to delicate ears, when he says, that "the doctrine which follows nature has for its main object the stomach,"⁸ were probably not so heinous in their meaning as some critics supposed. A good digestion is the basis of a happy life: and dyspepsia is the root of all evils. This aphorism, paradoxical and one-sided as it may be, is not necessarily vicious. Plato had already partly recognised the truth of the observation; and one may pardon the emphasis laid on the doctrine, if we assume the speaker to have been somewhat of a valetudinarian. It is one of the tendencies of our day to lay stress, probably an exaggerated stress, on the personal care of health, and to attach enormous importance to a reasonable diet. The moral doctrines of Plato and Aristotle had been a trifle too exacting for humanity: they elevated virtue, as Descartes says, to a great height, but they scarcely showed how the height could be scaled.⁹  Epicurus comes and begins at the beginning: a simple and natural life with simple enjoyments is his ideal. If we remember, too, that according to the Epicurean theory pleasure is defined as the complete removal of the painful state, and that, once achieved, the pleasure can never be intensified, but only varied by any subsequent additions, we can understand how Epicurus bids his friends to rest content with simple fare. Costly fare only gives a character of variety and multiplicity to the enjoyment which it cannot increase.

Who were the members of this society? the guests who sought the hospitality of the sage? the friends who permanently remained with him? The brotherhood was not a fixed and stationary band. Freely, they went and came to hear and see their teacher. Foremost of them all in the affections of the master was Metrodôrus. It was at Lampsacus that Metrodôrus, who must have then been about twenty years only, first came into contact with Epicurus. It seems to have been a case of love at first sight, as it were, and the union between them became so close that the two clung to each other like an elder and a younger brother, and Metrodôrus never was absent from the circle save for six months, while he paid a visit to his native town. Epicurus was never tired of praising his friend for his goodness and unwearied spirit. He married Leontion, another disciple of the garden, and died at the age of fifty-three, seven years before Epicurus, leaving behind him a son and a daughter to the care of the survivor. His brother Timocrates was for awhile another of the band, but he ultimately became a renegade and an opponent. His sister Batis was married to Idomeneus, another disciple, also belonging to Lampsacus, and of some note as an historian; another brother is also mentioned. A fourth disciple from the same place was Polyænus, who is said to have been before his conversion a notable mathematician. From Mitylene came the successor of Epicurus in the headship, Hermarchus. He was the son of poor parents, and had begun life by the study of rhetoric, but afterwards distinguished himself as a philosopher. To Lampsacus, too, belonged Leonteus and his wife Themista. Their son was named after their teacher. From Lampsacus also came Colôtes, of whom it is told that when first he heard Epicurus expounding the natural system, he fell at his feet and did him reverence; whereupon Epicurus, not to be outdone, worshipped and complimented him in return. It would have made, says Plutarch in a scoffing mood, an excellent subject for a picture.¹⁰

There were other members of the society, such as Pythocles, a young man, on whom Epicurus had built high hopes of future excellence. Leontion has been already mentioned. With her and Themista Epicurus kept up a correspondence, as he did with his other friends. Leontion belonged to the class of women whom the Greeks termed female comrades — the same class to which Aspasia, the morganatic wife of Pericles, had belonged. Of her history and character we know almost nothing. That she possessed some literary and philosophic abilities may be inferred from the statement that she wrote an essay in criticism of a work by the philosopher Theophrastus.¹¹  According to the marriage-laws of the old Greek communities, it was impossible for her to form a legitimate union with a citizen. She was excluded from the fashionable and respectable womanhood, and in the demimonde to which she belonged could only win at the best a dubious rank by her wit, her learning, or her beauty. In the constant wars and revolutions which destroyed the male population of many Greek towns of those times, and threw numbers of women destitute upon the world as slaves or as homeless aliens, women of this class must have been numerous. They possessed or acquired qualifications in their intelligence, accomplishments, and knowledge of the world, which made them abler to attract and enchain men than their more respectable and extremely ignorant sisters, who had never left the seclusion of their homes to mingle with the world, and for whom wedlock meant simply an arrangement for housekeeping. To have married an undowered wife would, to an Athenian, have seemed a monstrous impossibility. The readers of Terence (whose originals depict the contemporaries of Epicurus) are aware that a young lady who had been left penniless had no course open except to become an artist, a singer, a player on the flute, or dancer, if she wished to rise above indigence; and thus circumstances forced her into the demimonde of the large towns. But to judge of these hetæræ, or emancipated women, we must look at them in the light of their historical surroundings, and not by abstract principles or by considerations derived from modern European morality.

Leontion had become, as far as she apparently could, the wife, i.e., technically or legally, the concubine of Metrodôrus, whose mother and sister sent congratulations on the occasion of the marriage.¹²  But Leontion was not, according to various chroniclers, the only lady to be found among the disciples of Epicurus. Marmarion (or, as she seems more probably named in the manuscripts of Herculaneum, Mammarion or Mammaron),¹³ Hedia (Sweet), Erotion (Loveling), and Nikidion (Victorine), are the names given by one writer; another adds Boidion; and a third erroneously inserts Philaenis, among the "young and handsome women," who, as it is phrased, "haunted the garden." Scandal fastened with avidity on these circumstances. Partly, it seems, through the agency of a Stoic, called Diotimus, who bore the Epicureans a bitter grudge, there appeared a collection of fifty letters, purporting to be the correspondence between Epicurus and his mistresses. Leontion was the chief victim of these libels, which human nature unfortunately is inclined to believe must have something in them, once they have been published. What Leontion was like we know not. But we do know that there were two portraits of her known to the historian of ancient art, the elder Pliny. The first is not specially described. But the other depicted Leontion in the attitude of thought.¹⁴  With Mammaron and the rest scandal was equally busy, telling how each of them was the favourite of one or another of the chief disciples of Epicurus. To these scandals the school opposed in antiquity a unanimous denial, and we have no grounds for refusing to accept their disclaimer. It is one of the regular consequences attending a departure from the standard of social morality, that failure in one department is presumed to carry with it failure in any of the rules of ethics. Nothing is too bad to be believed of such a one. And so later gossip-mongers fastened with avidity on the theme. They drew fancy pictures of the loose society and depraved manners of the garden, and depicted Leontion as an unblushing daughter of sin, and Epicurus as her special paramour. In one of the writers, who wrote letters purporting to be the composition of well-known persons of the past, and sketched novelettes in correspondence, we find Epicurus represented as a hoary valetudinarian sinner, urging his unwelcome love on the young Leontion, who has given her heart and person to another lover.¹⁵  Some enemies of the system were even inclined to attribute the ill-health of its early chiefs to their licentious lives.

These slanders not unnaturally grew up in the minds of those who combined the fact that women were not excluded from the garden, with the open doctrine of the school, that pleasure was the aim of life, and especially with sayings of Epicurus, in which he claimed for our animal nature its right to free development. But there can hardly be a doubt that they are gross exaggerations, springing from that common failing which accuses an intellectual opponent of all manner of vices and immoralities. These meetings, where, as an old French writer says,¹⁶ "the fair sex, despising all that slander and jealousy could say against them, wished to have a share, and grudged men the good fortune of being the sole disciples and hearers of this philosopher," were probably as harmless as other gatherings of unlicensed religious sects, where the suspicion of foes has been ready to suppose all unholy excesses of sensuality. Had the life of Plotinus been written by an enemy instead of a friend, we should have probably heard a very different story about the lady in whose house he lived, her daughter, and the other women who followed his steps. Yet, at the same time, it would be a mistake to suppose that the ideas which chivalry has made familiar to the modern world were present in the Epicurean fold. Such sentiments, elevating womanhood into a religious power, and a symbol of the best and sweetest humanity, were unknown to the ancient world. The Greek world, in particular, never rose much above the naturalistic and practical aspects of conjugal life. Æsthetic emotions and ethical influences were not conceived as any part of the love of woman. All that we can safely affirm of the Epicurean society is, that licentiousness is unproven. That the purity of womanhood, the dignity of ladyhood, existed in the society otherwise than in the surrounding world is what we must not affirm.

There is another side to the picture, probably equally exaggerated with the last. As that alleged debauchery, so this presents us with a picture of a hospital or infirmary. The chief philosophers in the school are in this account all the victims of some malady, due probably to their own misconduct, and they all die wretchedly, as atheists and infidels ought. An older writer speaks in somewhat milder terms. He tells us what a source of joy and consolation it was to Epicurus to think of three of his friends and disciples, whom he had tended through their sickness, and now fondly recollected when they had departed.¹⁷  His best-loved disciples, Metrodôrus, Polyænus, and Pythocles, died before him. Epicurus having tenderly cared for them, wasted no time in unavailing regrets. A true friendship and a pure love are an imperishable inheritance for the soul who has enjoyed it, and the memory of such concordant lives may be a source of strength and great joy to the survivor. It was one of the sayings of Epicurus, that we are ungrateful to the past in not recalling the blessings we have erewhile experienced, and counting them among our permanent joys. The three brothers of Epicurus, Neocles, Chæredemus, and Aristobulus, also died before him. Perhaps no circumstance connected with his disciples is more noteworthy than the way in which they clung to him and his doctrine. "Great was the reverence of his brothers towards Epicurus," says Plutarch; "their affection and brotherly feeling made them enthusiastic disciples; and even if they were mistaken in the belief, which they had from their very boyhood formed, that there was no one so wise as Epicurus, still, the man who could inspire such a feeling, and those who could feel it, deserve our admiration."¹⁸

But the real picture was a pleasing one. Friendship was the prevailing spirit of the garden, and knit together its members in every part of the world. A common life supplemented the common doctrine. The pupils, if pupils they may be called, were more the associates and companions of the master than auditors of his lectures. It was their fellowship with their leader which made them great men, and not his instruction merely. They took a deep affectionate interest in all the concerns of one another; and their letters to each other in their temporary absences exhibit the tender domestic tie which bound together the members of the inner circle. One instance may be given. We knew that Epicurus during the second half of his life twice or thrice tempted the dangers of the sea (he was nearly drowned, it seems, on one voyage) to visit his friends in Asia Minor.¹⁹  Among the charred manuscripts recovered from Herculaneum there is found a mutilated letter apparently written by Epicurus, and apparently addressed to the daughter of Metrodôrus, the young girl for whose welfare he felt anxious on his deathbed. "We have arrived," says the writer, "safe and sound at Lampsacus, — I and Pythocles and Hermarchus and Ctesippus, and there we found Themista and the rest of our friends safe and sound. I hope that you, too, are well, and mamma, and that in all things you are obedient to her and to Papa and Matro, as you used to be. For remember, my child, that we are all of us very fond of you — so be obedient to them."²⁰ On certain days the community seems to have observed a fast. In a letter to Polyænus, for instance, Epicurus indulges in playful boast that while Metrodôrus has only reduced his expenses to sixpence, he himself has been able to live comfortably on a less sum.²¹  The purpose of such abstinence was not ascetic; but to determine on how little it was possible to be happy. A life led on these maxims can scarcely have produced those "fat sleek swine of Epicurus's herd"²²  to which Horace alludes; and one is more inclined to say with Seneca that the pleasure of Epicurus is very "sober and dry,"²³ and "reduced to small and slender dimensions."

In this brotherhood, where reasoning on the aims of life took the place of a lecture, and simple meals with kindly converse restrained the furies of controversy, each was his brother's keeper. Even in those early days all were not of one opinion. Leontion and Colôtes are alleged to have had their little errors. When the chiefs of the sect saw such divergence, it was not, however, their way to correct the offender directly. Rather they wrote to another member, exposing and correcting these errors as supposed mistakes of their correspondent. In such a way Leontion saw her mistakes pointed out in a letter of the master to Colôtes.²³  But, on the whole, though there was a certain liberty left on secondary points, the main doctrines of the society were stereotyped. The disciples were recommended to get by rote the fundamental articles or catechism, in which the doctrine was summarized. "Which of you," says Cicero to the Epicureans, "has not learned by rote this catechism?"²⁴  And in some points, therefore, blind following of the master's authority was preached in the school: his writings, and those of the two other members of the Epicurean triumvirate, were treated as authoritative, as inspired, as a sort of Bible. Thus, in the close of one of the fragments on Rhetoric written by Philodemus, we find that author saying: "If Epicurus and Metrodôrus and Hermarchus declare that there is such an art (as sophistical rhetoric), as we shall point out in the sequel, then those of our sect who write against their view are not very far from deserving the punishment of a parricide."²⁵  But it was no deterrent from composition that the writer was bound by his creed. "The Epicureans," says Cicero, "do not refrain from writing on the same topics as Epicurus and their old chiefs." On the contrary. When Philodemus is drawing to the close of another treatise, the thought occurs to him, that he may be blamed for undertaking a work on economics. "It is enough for me that Metrodôrus, as well as Epicurus, enjoins and advises and administers more diligently and down to minor points, and even practises what he teaches."²⁶  But there are many points, it should be added, in which the same writer indicates his divergence from the leaders and teachers of his sect.

It may be asked how was this society maintained? It was not a class of pupils like those which gathered round other philosophers. As Seneca says, it was not the school, but the life in common with Epicurus, which made Metrodôrus and his companions men of note.²⁷  Some of his followers had suggested that they should throw all their property into a common fund; but Epicurus rejected the suggestion of communism as savouring of distrust and as laying a restraint on freewill offerings. But though the friends did not surrender their goods into a club-property, a number of them paid a voluntary contribution or rate to the head of the school: and we have a letter in which he requests that one of these contributors will continue this payment after his death for the benefit of the two orphan children of Metrodôrus, in whom he took an interest.²⁸  In another letter to his friend Idomeneus, he says: "Send us first-fruits, therefore, unto the tending of the sacred body, both for myself and the children."²⁹ And, again, he tells some other friends: "Bravely and splendidly you showed care of us in the matter of procuring the corn, and manifested prodigious tokens of your goodwill towards me." But the gifts thus rendered were paralleled by other gifts from Epicurus —