Introductory Remarks

Fifty years ago, when the recent resurgence of Epicurean scholarship was in its infancy, it was fairly typical for scholars to begin with a few plangent observations about the neglect of Epicurus along, perhaps, with a dark glance at the baleful influence on histories of ancient philosophy exerted by Hegel, who had been brutally dismissive of Epicureanism (Chapter 30). A few would give the occasional brave nod in the direction of Epicurean arguments that seemed to speak to current developments in philosophy at the time, but overall it was hard to miss an underlying subtext of occasional defensiveness mixed with some slightly sheepish boosterism. Today, the situation is markedly different both within and outside the Academy. Introductory ancient philosophy courses, which invariably used to conclude with Aristotle, now regularly make plenty of room for Hellenistic philosophers, and graduate programs are awash in seminars devoted not only to Epicureans, but also to their rivals, the Stoics and Sceptics. Meanwhile, contemporary philosophers continue to churn out article after article of increasing sophistication defending or (mostly) attempting to refute Epicurus’s arguments about the harmlessness of death (Chapter 7). Indeed, it is hard to think of another set of ancient philosophical arguments that has created such an argumentative frenzy.¹

Apart from the sheer bulk of scholarly production, however, the number of clubs, blogs, and self-help groups devoted to Epicureanism continues to explode. Indeed, I imagine many professional scholars may sometimes feel that their contributions somehow lack the immediate visceral appeal of those flashier productions of true believers touting Epicureanism as a cure for everything from one’s romantic troubles to climate change. Yet, though it is doubtful that many of the scholars in this volume write as believers, nonetheless they have come together with a strong conviction, no longer needing much defense, about the intrinsic interest of Epicurus’s philosophy and the historical significance of its subsequent widespread influence. In short, it has been a very good half-century for Epicurus and Epicureanism.

This recognition of Epicurus’s importance is not so distant, however, that the volume has not been able to include many of the scholars who were among the first solitary pioneers to publish important work on Epicureanism, and it is a special pleasure to note that not only have they retained their interest over the decades, but they also are now in the position to reflect first hand on the various trajectories of scholarship that many of them helped to inaugurate. At the same time, however, the volume has attempted to give voice to approaches and issues that are newly coming to the fore, especially in the reception of Epicureanism. It is here that scholarship has most recently taken flight in so many areas and disciplines that the volume has at best been able to try to outline only some of the major developments and connections that a new generation of scholars is exploring in greater depth. Even as this volume goes to press, new studies are appearing about Epicurus’s influence on figures as diverse as Omar Khayyam, Shakespeare, Shelley, Foucault, etc., and this appears to be just the tip of the iceberg.

In many ways, Epicureanism presents a distinct case among the ancient philosophical schools. One reason is because our knowledge of it is continually being enriched by new evidence in a way that distinguishes it from the rest of its ancient competitors. Whereas most ancient philosophical texts have come down to us from medieval manuscripts that have been copied from generation to generation, with all the problems attendant on that process, in the 1750s a treasure-trove of some eight hundred papyrus rolls was excavated in Herculaneum, many of which offer direct and often unprecedented kinds of evidence about ancient Epicureanism and its practices and arguments. These had been buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 ce and were the first full papyrus books to come to light in Europe. Unfortunately they also had been carbonized and, accordingly, nearly impossible to unroll initially without inflicting grave damage upon them. One recent source of considerable excitement in the world of ancient philosophy, however, has been the development of new techniques that are giving us much better glimpses into a large number of these works by Philodemus, an Epicurean of the first century bce. Philodemus (Chapter 15) cannot claim to be an especially original philosopher, but his works show us a later Epicurean, no doubt partially under the influence of his own teachers, trying to work out and adapt the doctrines of Epicurus and the earlier founders of the school to the demands of his own intellectual and cultural milieu hundreds of years later. By the same token, his approach to the liberal arts generally and especially to rhetoric (Chapter 13) and to poetry (Chapter 14) appears to develop lines of argument that were either missing among earlier Epicureans or perhaps treated by them in more deflationary ways. In any case, the variety and amount of this new material coming to light from Herculaneum gives Epicureanism a special kind of purchase on our scholarly attention.

A second distinctive source of evidence is perhaps among the strangest and most impressive productions of the ancient philosophical world (Chapter 21). In the city of Oenoanda in ancient Lycia, a Greek Epicurean in the second century ce had a summary of Epicureanism of approximately 25,000 words carved onto the limestone walls of a public portico. This is the most massive inscription surviving from Greco-Roman antiquity and thus far hardly a third of it has been uncovered. Diogenes of Oenoanda, as he has come to be called, set up this philosophical porch in order to make available the saving message of Epicurus for “people from the entire earth,” regardless of country. Many of these texts have no exact parallel elsewhere and again, as they slowly come to be published and studied, they offer refinements, developments, and intriguing philosophical divergences from our other sources of textual evidence. They also help to illuminate the public face of Epicureanism in this period and to begin clarifying the nature of Diogenes’s audacious and enterprising attempt to present Epicurus’s message to a cosmopolitan audience as a kind of monumental public performance. Readers will quickly notice how many of the volume’s chapters show the growing influence of Philodemus’s and Diogenes’s texts on the overall interpretation and understanding both of Epicurus’s thought and of the kinds of tensions and possibilities for development that later thinkers were able to divine in his original doctrines.

It is perhaps worth briefly mentioning here a related feature of Epicureanism that may not be immediately obvious as one turns to individual chapters, but is often lurking somewhere in the background. Epicureanism was alone among the ancient philosophical schools in being able to maintain, along with a coherent philosophical identity, a stable, continuing physical presence in Athens during its first few centuries of existence. In the past, this has sometimes led to extreme views in the scholarship about the doctrinal conservatism of Epicureans in this initial period and also about the clubby tone of both their thought and communal life in Athens and elsewhere. The volume begins with a detailed exploration of not only the evidence for Epicurus’s life, but also for the relations of leading figures in the school down to the first century bce. It has become fairly clear that scattered among periods of intellectual harmony and cohesion were individual outbreaks of apostasy and dissidence that sometimes prefigure later divergent manifestations of Epicureanism. This is an important corrective to some outmoded views about the doctrinal rigidity of Epicureans² and it seems that Epicureanism quickly was able to take on forms with sufficient plasticity to put one in mind, for example, of the many varieties that Christianity has taken through the ages. Indeed, one of these later manifestations arising from their intersection—“Christian Epicureanism”—would seem to illustrate well the surprising flexibility of both (Chapters 25, 26, 28). Such a view of the malleability of Epicureanism also helps prepare us to see how it was possible not just for generations of philosophers, but also for great poets like Lucretius (Chapter 16), Vergil and Horace (Chapter 17), and even a statesman like Thomas Jefferson (Chapter 28) to find in their own diverse times, places, and intellectual contexts helpful models in Epicureanism for addressing their own and their publics’ most pressing questions. The notion of the blinkered doctrinal fundamentalism of Epicureans had been entrenched for so long in the scholarship, however, that it is worth bearing in mind that, while many scholars have moved on, others have still felt the need, given the nature of the volume, to spend some time acknowledging and then exorcising its phantoms.

Turning to questions of Epicurus’s philosophy itself, one of the most striking features of Hellenistic philosophy, which is shared by Epicureanism, is a drive for a systematic understanding of all aspects of the world and a confidence that not only can one come to understand its basic principles, but that such understanding will lead one to individual happiness (Chapter 16). Unlike much of contemporary philosophy which has been carved up into various specialisms and whose practitioners are increasingly reluctant to wander into the domains of their departmental neighbors down the hall, Epicurus, with a kind of enviably insouciant innocence, claims to be able show how his views of theology, the physical world, epistemology, psychology, ethics, and so on form a coherent, intelligible whole. Not all scholars have agreed that the joins he sees between his various arguments in these disciplines are as tightly fitted as he hopes, but nonetheless one of the abiding interests of his philosophy is his attempt to see the forest for the trees—which apart from its own intrinsic interest, serves, perhaps, as a potent reminder of some of the original larger goals of philosophy over and above an aloof pride in its own professional dexterity.

The volume is divided into roughly three sections. After an introduction to Epicurus’s life and the history of the school in antiquity, it turns to Epicurus’s philosophy per se and offers a comprehensive analysis of all of its major areas. The next nine chapters, beginning with Philodemus, look at the expanding role of Epicureanism in the Roman era and has chapters devoted not only to more straightforward advocates and critics, but also shows various transformations of Epicureanism in poetry and cultural life generally. The story picks up again with the Renaissance, and the last third of the volume sketches more broadly the many forms of Epicurean influence on European thought ever since. Contributors have carefully balanced, it is hoped, strongly held individual views with a wider survey of the overall scholarly terrain. Occasionally some topics that might have formed unified contributions have been shared across different sections of the volume, though this has been signposted in the notes. Mostly this had to be done to avoid repetition, but also a decision was made that aspects of some topics might be more judiciously handled in different argumentative contexts. So, for instance, Epicurus’s notion of justice as being a contract not to harm or be harmed became one of his most lasting and influential contributions to Western legal and philosophy. At the same time, though, Epicureans have important discussions of justice in relation to friendship, as an individual virtue of character instrumental to personal happiness and tranquility, and also as an initial step grounding the origins of social and political life. To treat all of these different aspects of Epicurus’s account together in a single contribution devoted to Epicurean justice would have meant going through a lot of the same material in a volume that is not particularly distinguished by its slenderness. Thus, justice as a contract is treated in detail in Chapter 26 in the context of Gassendi’s and Hobbes’s detailed discussions of contractual justice and the nature of law. There one can arguably see Epicurus’s original theory to better effect alongside its subsequent transformations by two of its key early modern philosophical proponents. The relation of justice and friendship and the conception of justice as an individual virtue of character is treated in Chapter 10, which takes up questions of the nature and scope of relations of friendship and, thus, the extent to which Epicurus’s conceptions of friendship and justice overlap. Finally, justice in the context of the Epicurean psychological and anthropological account of the origins of social groups finds a natural place in a fuller account of Epicurean social and political theory in Chapter 11. It is hoped that these kinds of division of labor do not prove too unwieldy, but at the same time, they in some sense reflect the systematic nature and range of Epicurean discussions and the extent to which they often spill over what Epicurus would take to be artificial boundaries. At the same time, in this particular case for instance, one might be left wondering, say, how justice as a contract is compatible with justice being a personal virtue. In general, contributors have been urged to note such questions in their individual contributions where relevant, but also to point readers to more detailed and unified discussions of such individual problems in the scholarly literature.

In turning to the presentation of Epicurus’s philosophy, he is reported to have said that the best entry into his system of thought was through his theology (Chapter 5), though Epicureans were not particularly dogmatic about a best starting point. In retrospect, this claim seems slightly incongruous, given how many misunderstandings, many of them willful, his theological views have been subject to through the ages, especially by Judaism (Chapter 22) and Christianity (Chapter 23). Given the Epicureans’ flexibility on the question of starting points, the volume has followed a different order, however, and begins the discussion of Epicurus’s philosophy proper with his epistemological arguments (Chapter 2). This is not entirely arbitrary since as he was writing, philosophers were becoming more and more self-conscious about providing an epistemological grounding or criterion of truth for their claims about natural philosophy and the rest of their systems, and there is some evidence that Epicurus was sympathetic to such a methodological procedure or, perhaps, even responsible for inaugurating it. This attempt to establish how it is that philosophers or natural scientists can demonstrate the truth of their theories arose partly in response to sceptical arguments about the unreliability of the senses that had been part and parcel of earlier Greek atomism. Epicurus argued that the senses provide the basis for truth by passively receiving information without altering it and thus providing us with reliable content. We can fall into error, however, by making false judgments about this content. My senses may be reliably reporting, for instance, that the oar looks bent in water and it does. But I make a mistake by inferring from this that the oar itself is bent, since by collecting more evidence from my senses I would be able to come to the correct judgment that the oar is not bent, but only appears so in the water because of the way it is refracting light. Without relying on my senses, however, I could never accumulate the evidence needed to make the correct judgment. Our mental preconceptions (prolepseis), which arise empirically through experience, give us a basis for making such correct judgments. Epicureans further bolstered this claim with an extensionalist theory of language (Chapter 12) grounded in its empirical acquisition. Epicureans’ strongly empirical claims about the acquisition and justification of knowledge were to strongly resonate with later empiricist philosophers, especially those who linked their claims to a particular scientific materialist view of the world (Chapters 25, 30). By the same token, the Epicureans developed a scientific methodology based on inferences from preconceptions and “what underlies words” to justify their theories about entities that are not directly open to observation, such as atoms and certain cosmological phenomena.

In turning to Epicurus’s atomism (Chapter 3) we are confronted with an interesting historical irony. On the one hand, the importance of his theory for the development of early modern atomism seems beyond question and he is often, rightly, taken to be an influential figure in the formation of classical atomic theory (Chapter 25). Yet, at the same time many of his views, such as the indeterminate swerve of atoms, were thought to be aberrations, even by such early advocates of his atomism as Gassendi. Thus, although often seen as a champion of modern atomism, Epicurus in some sense can also be viewed as a champion of what might be characterized as post-modern atomism (and logic) to the extent that he grapples with philosophical issues that parallel contemporary worries in quantum theory (Chapter 31).

Epicurus argues that both space and time are quantized and that the universe consists of material atoms that travel at a uniform velocity of one minimum of space per minimum of time. He bolstered his theory with a series of sophisticated and remarkably prescient claims about the quantity of different kinds of atoms and underlying mathematics of their movements. Moreover, his views about the systematic nature of philosophy led him directly to worry about the relation of indeterminate atomic events to voluntary human action and responsibility (Chapter 9), in a way different from the majority of contemporary philosophers who attempt to analyze the nature of free will while bracketing questions about the causal connections between atomic events and human action. One intriguing issue hanging over contemporary accounts of free will is Epicurus’s question of how free, seemingly rational human decisions can arise out of a material world structured by random quantum events.

Atoms, of course, are not directly perceptible, so Epicureans needed to develop a series of methodological procedures for justifying their claims about them. They faced a series of corresponding problems explaining cosmological, astronomical, and meteorological phenomena that were likewise beyond immediate perception (Chapter 4). Again, with respect to their cosmological views the Epicureans were outliers, since unlike most of their philosophical rivals, they denied that the cosmos was both finite and spherical and they also held that there were multiple worlds. They sometimes used the latter claim to bolster their argument for the existence of multiple explanations for certain phenomena for which there is inadequate empirical confirmation. Even if we can eliminate a competing explanation in our world, there may be equi-probable explanations in other worlds, thus multiple explanations may exist across multiple possible worlds. Interestingly, the Epicureans linked this notion of multiple explanations, which has sometimes been used by modern scientists as a working method for aiding in the formulation of strong inference, for ethical purposes and to eliminate the fear of certain phenomena. The verdict seems to be out at the moment about the potential benefits of multiple workable hypotheses in scientific discovery, so opinions differ about whether Epicurus’s move to such instrumental ethical benefits may have been too quick and hence a lost opportunity. But again, he reminds us of the potential ethical dimensions of our scientific methodologies and their ethical and social costs.

Clearly, one place where someone might push the Epicureans’ theory is on the question of why they are so confident that some of their views, for instance in atomism and in theology, are not similarly susceptible of multiple explanations. The threat to their atomist theology seems especially strong, as Seneca (Chapter 19) was to insist in defending the providential and teleological views of Stoicism. But Epicureans were adamant in maintaining their view of anthropomorphic gods that are physically incorruptible, live in a state of psychic blessedness, and have absolutely no concern for human beings. This latter claim opened them to the charge of atheism from early on, and along with their denial of the immortality of the soul (Chapter 6), was a key reason why, unlike Aristotle and Plato, Epicureanism seems to have completely disappeared from the Islamic and Byzantine philosophical traditions. Interestingly, Epicurus held up the life of the gods as an ethical model in many areas of his philosophy (e.g. friendship, Chapter 10) and insisted that mortals can aspire to similar states of untroubled blessedness (Chapter 8), all the while emphasizing our mortality and the fact that after our deaths we will be nothing. Chapter 7 takes up Epicurus’s central ethical claim that “death is nothing to us” and examines both the importance of this argument for his overall ethical theory, but also its intrinsic philosophical power, however counterintuitive at first glance. Unlike Aristotle, who thinks his views take on plausibility the more they align with the best available beliefs, the Epicureans are keen to revise and purify what they take to be the mass of our mistaken ordinary beliefs. None is as harmful to us and to society at large as the belief that death is something terrible and to be feared. Interestingly, at various times, even philosophers greatly influenced by Epicureans in other areas of philosophy took this particular claim to be untenable, either because they were convinced of their own immortality or because they thought that such a claim was impossible for a hedonist to maintain coherently; but it is noteworthy how Epicurus’s claims here have again sprung to the center of philosophical attention.

Chapter 8 focuses on the central and difficult question of Epicurus’s hedonism, which forms the backbone of his ethical theory. At the same time, trying to fashion the great variety of remaining evidence into a coherent theory is not only a formidable conceptual task, but also a Herculean doxographical one as well, especially since in addition to what remains from Epicurus himself and later Epicureans such as Philodemus, Diogenes of Oenoanda, and Lucretius, one must contend with the detailed and typically unfriendly criticism of Cicero (Chapter 18) and Plutarch (Chapter 20). The theory itself is complex and Epicurus developed it within a rich context of hedonist theorizing that included the Cyrenaics from whose views he was especially concerned to differentiate his own. The Cyrenaics held a radically presentist view of pleasure in which pleasure can be experienced only in the moment. Epicureans were keen to show that our pleasures, especially the kinds of mental pleasure discounted by the Cyrenaics—such as pleasures of memory and anticipation—were more valuable than the bodily pleasures recommended by Cyrenaics. These mental pleasures extend beyond the present, but somehow, for Epicureans, still retain their immunity to being diminished by death. Many have argued that various details of Epicurus’s overall project are untenable, but the influence of a more generalized notion of Epicurean hedonism has been palpable from the Renaissance (Chapter 24), and then on through to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French (Chapter 27) and British thought (Chapter 29).

Many of Epicurus’s central doctrines have provoked intense reactions from the very beginning. His materialism, hedonism, denial of divine providence and the immortality of the soul, his mechanistic views of the origins of our mental faculties and social behavior, his claims about the harmlessness of death—all historically have engendered bitter opposition as well as advocates who have adopted individual facets of his philosophy. The contributors in this volume offer a representative cross-section of both sides of these debates from antiquity to the present. It seems clear that not only are these debates continuing, but often in ways that uncover ever new aspects of their ultimate Epicurean origins. What often makes Epicureanism so compelling to (post-)modern readers is that Epicurus’s problems seem to be closer to our problems in a way that distinguishes him from his ancient rivals—at least for those who no longer believe in a teleological universe governed by divine providence, the immortality of our souls, that we are naturally inclined to pursue virtue and happiness in a polis together, etc. Interestingly, although most contemporary philosophers who have engaged with Epicureanism, because of the nature of the discipline these days, have engaged only with some parts of Epicurus’s thought in isolation (Chapter 7), one important and perhaps even crucial challenge that Epicureanism raises is the demand for more systematic examinations of, say, how our views of politics are connected to our views of the nature of death, or how our conceptions of free will stand up in the light of our most up-to-date knowledge of physics—and then, even more philosophically taxing—how all four of these elements in our thinking are mutually related. Epicureanism thus offers a systematic challenge to philosophers to rise above their specialisms. By the same token, as professional philosophy continues its drift into increasing isolation and public irrelevance, Epicureanism perhaps offers models here as well, since it has found voices, including those of great poets, writers, and statesmen, to address pressing problems in a public discourse that allows for mutual intelligibility and, hence, criticism.

I am grateful to David Konstan and Tony Long for first suggesting that I edit the volume and I would like to thank the contributors, all of whom have made this a much more pleasant task than I could have reasonably expected. Phoebe Garrett did the lion’s share of putting the volume together, correcting it, and seeing it through to the end, all the while writing her own important study of Suetonius. I wish to especially thank the following for their translations: David Konstan (Chapter 5); Leonardo Karrer and Carlo Da Via (Chapter 15); Matthias Hanses ( Chapter 20); and David Armstrong (Chapter 26).

My heartfelt gratitude goes to Stefan Vranka for being a wise and patient editor and I have continually relied on and benefited from his advice. Tim Beck is to be thanked for corrections that were always to the point and that made for a much cleaner final manuscript.

Finally, at least to the extent that one porcus de grege Epicuri is allowed to piggyback on the labor of others, I would like to dedicate this volume to two eminent Epicurean scholars, David Konstan and David Sider, both long-time friends and colleagues. The two of them met more than sixty years ago and seem to have taken to heart Epicurus’s strictures about laughing while doing philosophy. I thank them both for including the new kid on the block into their waggish company. No doubt Epicurus would have recommended a higher proportion of philosophy to laughter, but nonetheless I would have experienced much less of both without them.