IV

In the case of Epicurus, what emerges is a very different picture of the philosopher's relation to the goal he proposes and to the philosophical life.

It is hardly necessary to describe Epicurus' school or his ideal of retired life. All this has been studied and is well known.^[62] I would rather draw attention to the following facts. First, the lack of a biography by Antigonus of Carystus.^[63] As for a biography written by members of the Epicurean school, Wilamowitz explained this by saying it was "as little necessary to them as a Goethe biography would be today";^[64] thanks to Epicurus' letters, the school had a lot of material on the teacher and did not need a special collection of it.^[65] "But the outsiders had execrated the person distasteful to them along with his doctrine."

I do not believe that a disagreement over theory is the main reason why Antigonus did not write a Life of Epicurus. Rather, we should look

[61] This has been remarked, for Diogenes, by H. Niehues-Pröbsting, Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus (Munich, 1979), 82-83.

[62] See now D. Clay, "Individual and Community in the First Generation of the Epicurean School," in S YZHTHS IS : Studi sull'Epicureismo greco e romano offerti a Marcello Gigante (Naples, 1983) l:225-279.

[63] On Usener's attempt to read Antigonus instead of Ariston in DL 10.14, see G. Arrighetti, Epicuro: Opere , 2d ed. (Turin, 1973), 488.

[64] Wilamowitz, Antigonus , 128 n. 1.

[65] Diogenes Laertius quotes Apollodorus' Life of Epicurus and many other late sources, favorable or hostile; they show that after Epicurus' death the debate on his personality became increasingly sharp.

to the deliberate silence of Epicurus himself and of the school members, manifested in their living apart from people in a strict sense. This was a choice very different from other philosophers' ways of teaching and living, especially that of the Stoics, which can perhaps be compared to the Academic tradition.^[66] No living image of Epicurus as a person was presented day by day to the Athenians' eyes, and what came out of the school was just one word, "pleasure" : something apparently very easy for everybody to understand and attack, and very different from the remote "good" of the Stoics.

There is a kind of inverted symmetry between Stoics and Epicureans on the philosopher and the ethical goal: the Stoic was living in public and proposing a far-off ideal; the Epicurean was living in seclusion and proposed an attainable ideal, not only in a trivial sense, but, as we shall see, in a sense central to the philosophy itself.

To return for a moment to Antigonus—perhaps he did not write Epicurus' Life simply because the philosopher lacked a public image, a lack increased by a high feeling of protection toward the master which restrained his pupils from talking about him outside the school. The exceptions to this, collected by Diogenes Laertius at the beginning of his biography, show that the only possibility of getting news about Epicurus' behavior depended on somebody's leaving the school and slandering him.

Moreover, it is noteworthy that we have no comic passage concerning Epicurus' deportment, his way of dressing, hairstyle, and beard.^[67] This proves he did nothing deliberately to make a vivid impression, and indirectly it shows that comedy deserves credit and attention as a source: it is likely that comic poets did not create a personage out of Epicurus because there was no living model under their eyes.^[68] Instead, we may note that, in spite of its superficiality, the comic evidence of Epicurean ethical philosophy reflects at least in part its genuine character, as confirmed by Epicurean texts themselves. In the comic fragment already quoted a clear antithesis is drawn between Epicurus, who knows the nature of "good," and the Stoics, who look for it "in their strolls" ).^[69] There is a rather striking parallel in a fragment by Epicurus (F 423 Usener):

[67] Cf. A. Weiher, "Philosophen und Philosophenspott in der attischen Komölie" (Diss. Munich, 1913), 74-75; it is likely that the biographers would have quoted the evidence if there was any.

[68] See, for instance, the hedonic Epicurean described by Alciphron.

The highest joy is w escape a big evil; this is the nature of "good," if one understands it rightly, and then stops, not walking about chattering emptily about the "good."

These words show dearly that the good can be grasped by the mind and that the man who has done so will really possess it. Unlike Zeno, Epicurus can state in simple words the "nature of the good." This is a leitmotiv not only of Epicurean ethics, but also of Epicurus' image. Even if, as previously stated, we have for Epicurus nothing similar to Antigonus' biographies, a passage like the famous last letter to Idomeneus is in itself very significant (DL 10.22):

On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life (), I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could augment them; but over against them all I set gladness of mind ( ) at the remembrance of our past conversations.

Epicurus deliberately speaks of himself as of somebody "living happily," and the remark is of course reinforced by the mention of such terrible physical pain.^[70] In the surviving Epicurean texts the terms and are typically used to indicate the state of happiness, instead of the much more common . Of course, the latter are not missing, but they occur with remarkably less frequency.^[71] From Ep. Men . 127 we would infer, at first sight, that Epicurus made a technical distinction between and :

We must also reflect that of desires some are natural, others are groundless; and that of the natural some are necessary as well as natural, and some natural only. And of the necessary desires some are necessary if we are to be happy , some if the body is to be rid of uneasiness , some if we are even to live.

Here seems to refer to mental tranquillity, which, when added to bodily freedom from pain, has as its result . From this point of view, is viewed as higher than , as

[71] Cf. H. Usener, Glossarium Epicureum , ed. M. Gigante and W. Schmid (Rome, 1977), s.v.

unifying the soul and the body's state.^[72] It is true that in general and are synonyms, and Epicurus uses them so (for instance at the beginning of the Letter to Menoeceus ). Still, a difference may be detected if we look at , the standard word for divine happiness since Homer.^[73] Epicurus' preference for words of the same root may reveal, even in the language itself, the connection between divine and human happiness, which he emphasizes in so many passages of his ethics.

Ep. Men . 135 (end):

Practice these things and all that belongs to them, in relation to yourself by day, and by night in relation to your likeness, and you will never be disquieted, awake or in your dreams, but will live like a god among men. For quite unlike a mortal animal is a man who lives among immortal goods. ().

The only divine quality man cannot have is indestructibility.^[74] In the Letter to Herodotus (76-77, 78, 81; cf. Ep. Men . 123) is the property of the gods, while the former without the latter is regularly used for man (Ep. Hdt . 78, 79, 80). Nonetheless (F 141 Usener) Epicurus writes to Colotes, who had paid his teacher a sign of honor typically reserved for the gods:

You made us worship and honor you in our turn; go and be immortal and think of us as immortal. ().

The well-known similarity between the divine and the human condition is felt so strongly that even the epithet typically reserved for gods can be applied to the Epicurean. From this arose the famous comparison of Epicurus to a god, familiar from Lucretius.^[75]

[73] Cf. C. De Heer, MAKAP—EYD AIMW N—OL BIOS —EYTYXHS : A Study of the Semantic Field Denoting Happiness in Ancient Greek to the End of the Fifth Century BC (Amsterdam, 1969).

[74] VS 31: "In dealing with death all of us humans inhabit a town without walls."

[75] 5.8 ff.; cf. Cicero Tusc . 1.48 and Fin . 5.3 for his images on rings and household objects. A recent study by B. Frischer, The Sculpted Word: Epicureanism and Philosophical Recruitment in Ancient Greece (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982) is devoted to the iconography of Epicurus. The main thesis of the book, that Epicurus' original statue at Athens was intended to recruit pupils, seems to me rather unconvincing, though Frischer's analysis of the typology of Epicurean sculptures is interesting in itself.

Pyrrho, another philosopher of the early Hellenistic age, is similarly praised by his follower Timon (T 61 Decleva Caizzi = F 67 Diels), but I would like to point out an important difference between the image of Epicurus and that of Pyrrho. Here are Timon's verses:

This, Pyrrho, my heart yearns to know, how on earth you, though a man, live easily in peace, never taking thought, and consistently undisturbed, heedless of the whirling motions and sweet voice of wisdom? You alone lead the way for mankind, like the god who drives around the whole earth as he revolves, showing the blazing disk of his well-rounded sphere.^[76]

Timoh's picture of Pyrrho emphasizes the philosopher's unique achievement and contrasts it with the miserable crowd of "mortals." Timon's verses on Pyrrho, and Antigonus' anecdotes about his way of life, tally well.^[77] Pyrrho himself is said to have described his ethical goal as "difficult" (, T 15 Decleva Caizzi). In contrast with Epicurus, Pyrrho left no disciples whose lives resembled his at any deep level. The philosophers who revived his name much later made no attempt, so far as we can tell, to imitate Pyrrho's lifestyle.

Although the Epicureans venerated the founder of their philosophy, they did not conceive of the Epicurean life as one that was outside their own reach. On the contrary, once one has discovered, thanks to Epicurus, that pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life (Ep. Men . 127: ), the end is taken to be easy to attain . Epicurean texts are strikingly full of eu - compounds: pleasure and good are easy to get, evil and pain are easy to avoid.^[78] Nothing similar is offered by Zeno's biography or fragments, and this is surely not accidental.

[76] Trans. Long and Sedley. For some points in Pyrrho's ethical attitude which may have attracted Epicurus, see my commentary to T 28-31 (Pirrone: Testimonianze , 182 ff.) and my article, "Pirroniani e accademici nel III secolo a.C.," in Aspects de la philosophic hellénistique , ed. H. Flashar and O. Gigon, Fondation Hardt, Entretiens 32 (Vandoeuvres and Geneva, 1986), 147 ff.

[77] See my commentary, passim.

Epicurus speaks of becoming godlike, but this is very different from what Plato intended by "likeness to god." In the Platonic tradition the goal is something one approaches but never attains in ordinary life, just as one cannot attain perfect knowledge and truth in an embodied state; the dichotomy between intelligible and sensible, divine and human, is influential at every level. In Epicurus, divine does not signify a different order of reality from human. Long and Sedley have argued that the gods, according to Epicurean theory, are paradigms of everybody's ethical goal, idealized models of what man wants to achieve, "paragons of the Epicurean good life."^[79] If it is correct to maintain—as they convincingly do—that in the original theory the gods are thought-contents, with no independent reality outside human minds, we can understand the meaning of Epicurus' ethical goal even better.

A remark about Epicurus' emphasis on "self-sufficiency" will serve as an appropriate conclusion.^[80] Self-sufficiency can have two meanings: to need nothing because one is content with what one has, and to need nothing because one has everything. Epicurean texts use it in the first sense, while Stoic ones use it mainly in the second. In fact, contrary to what one could expect, autarkeia is not a pervading theme of early Stoic texts, and as far as I know it is attributed to Zeno only in an epigram by Zenodotus, a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon (cf. DL 7.30).^[81] Apart from the well-known doxographical formula about the self-sufficiency of virtue, only one early occurrence of the term, as cited in the index to von Arnim's collection, is significant, SVF 2.604, from Chrysippus' On Providence: "Only the cosmos is said to be self-sufficient, since it alone has in itself everything it needs" (). This statement agrees with the traditional meaning of autarkeia as a divine qual-

[79] Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers 1: 144 ff.

it).^[82] So, according to the Stoics, it belongs strictly only to the cosmos (and, we may easily infer, to the ideal sage who possesses virtue, not to the man who is not yet virtuous). According to Epicurus, on the other hand, self-sufficiency is a condition every individual can and should achieve in his lifetime, in order to adapt his needs to what he has and be happy, just as every man can make himself godlike (Letter to Mother , ap. Diog. Oen. F 62 Grilli = 53 W.):

Neither small, nor of no importance are the things which now happen to us, such as to make our soul's disposition equal to the divine one, and to show that, not even because of mortality are we inferior to the immortal and blessed nature.