David Konstan A Life Worthy of The Gods The Materialist Psychology of Epicurus 2008

A IIFE WORTHY OF THE GODS
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The Materialist Psychology
of Epicurus
A IIFE WORTHY OF THE GODS
IAVID KONSTAN
Las Vegas | Zurich | Athens
PARMENIDES PUBLISHING
Las Vegas | Zurich | Athens
2008 Parmenides Publishing
All rights reserved.
In part originally published in 1973 as
Some Aspects of Epicurean Psychology by E.J. Brill, Leiden
This revised and expanded edition
published in 2008 by Parmenides Publishing
in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-930972-28-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Konstan, David.
A life worthy of the gods : the materialist psychology of epicurus / by David
Konstan. New ed.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: Some aspects of Epicurean psychology. 1973
ISBN 978-1-930972-28-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Epicurus. 2. Lucretius Carus, Titus. De rerum natura. 3. Emotions. 4. Human
behavior. I. Konstan, David. Some aspects of Epicurean psychology. II. Title.
B573.K66 2008
187dc22
008029131
Excerpts from On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and translated by
Martin Ferguson Smith (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2001)
appear by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Typeset in Book Antiqua and OdysseaUBSU (Greek) by 1106 Design
Printed by United Graphics in the United States of America
1-888-PARMENIDES
www.parmenides.com
Contents
Preface to the Revised Edition vii
Introduction to the First Edition xvii
Acknowledgments xix
CHAPTER 1: Epicurean Passions 1
CHAPTER 2: Psychology 27
CHAPTER 3: Social Theory 79
CHAPTER 4: Epistemology 127
Bibliography 153
Index 169
This book is a new edition of Some Aspects of Epicurean Psychology,
originally published by E.J. Brill in 1973. Besides being brought up to
date in a great many details, it includes much wholly new material, for
example this preface, the entire first chapter, and more. This revised
edition was first published in Italian (Konstan 2007a), thanks to the kind
encouragement of my dear friend, Ilaria Ramelli, who also translated it,
and of Professors Roberto Radice and Giovanni Reale, the editors of the
series, Vita e Pensiero, published under the auspices of the Universit
Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Milan.
A word of justification is needed for republishing a book on
Epicureanism that is now more than thirty-five years old. The field has
changed greatly over the past few decades. New editions of papyri from
the Epicurean library in Herculaneum, accompanied by fine commen-
taries, have greatly augmented our knowledge both of the later tradi-
tion of Epicurean theory and of the original form it took at the hands
of Epicurus himself, for example in his magnum opus, On Nature. In
addition, Epicureanism has come in for intensive investigation, stimu-
lated both by the work of Marcello Gigante and his associates in Naples
and other scholars in Italy, as well as by the meetings and publications
sponsored by the Symposium Hellenisticum, where specialists from
various countries focussed critical attention on Epicureanism, Stoicism,
skepticism, and other relatively obscure philosophical traditions. We
understand a great deal better today Epicurean epistemology, physics,
Preface to the Revised Edition
vii
A Life Worthy of the Gods: The Materialist Psychology of Epicurus
and moral theory than we did in the early 1970s (for recent surveys of
Epicurean doctrine in general, see Konstan 2002, 2005).
There would have been little point in republishing an essay on
Epicurean psychology that took no account of these developments, and
I have endeavored to bring the present volume up to date, in the sense
that I have taken notice, where it seemed relevant, of the principal contri-
butions to the subjects that are covered in it, indicating where they seem
to confirm or to challenge the conclusions that I had drawn. Naturally, in
reflecting on the themes treated here in light both of new research and
my own wider experience of ancient philosophy, I have modified my
views, and this too had to be reflected in a new edition (note especially
the new Chapter 1). All of this required a good deal more than the mere
addition of references to new books and articles, with the body of the
book left unaltered.
And yet, this is not simply a new study of Epicurean psychology (in
the sense to be specified below). It is a new edition of an old book, how-
ever much it may have been amended and, I hope, improved. The basic
argument and armature of the original study have been left intact. This
gives the book a certain hybrid or palimpsestic quality: it preserves the
original plan and idea, and yet is in many respects quite new, incorpo-
rating numerous supplementary passages and arguments that materi-
ally affect the exposition. This new edition is meant to replace the old
(which is now in any case out of print), not to complement it (my thanks
to E.J. Brill for releasing me from the copyright of the original version,
and encouraging the publication of the new one).
Inevitably, there is a certain tension in the structure of a work of
this sort. The arguments I presented thirty-some years ago were cast in
reponse to the predominant scholarship of the time, and this determined
to some extent their order and emphasis. It did not seem appropriate
to eliminate the citations of earlier research, even though I might add
discussions of more recent studies, in which the focus had changed and
some of the older problems were either settled or have come to seem
marginal to an understanding of Epicureanism. I have sought, in this
new edition, to preserve the basic dialectic of the original version, even
as I adapted it, where necessary (which was often), to reflect new texts
and currents of thought. I believe that, in spite of this double focus, the
viii
book continues to exhibit a line of argument that is both coherent and
contemporary. My readers will have to be the judge of how well I have
succeeded in this attempt.
The reader may wish to see in advance an outline of the arguments
that follow, in which the major theses are stated and the most controversial
conclusions are clearly marked as such. With the benefit of much new
scholarship, some of which has engaged directly with the hypotheses
and analyses presented in the first edition of this book, I can myself
perceive more plainly where my contributions are more or less solid,
given the state of the evidence. In what follows, then, I present a sum-
mary of the central claims, and an indication of how they hang together.
For the details, the reader will have to consult the chapters that follow,
which, despite considerable expansion over the original version, retain
the relative brevity suitable to a monograph.
In Chapter 1, which, as I have said, is wholly new, I make a radical
claim concerning the nature of the path in Epicurus own writings. In
brief, I argue that the path for Epicurus are precisely pleasure and pain,
and that they, like sensations or aisthseis, reside in the non-rational or
alogon part of the soul (the very division of the soul into a rational and
non-rational part in Epicureanism is controversial). It follows from this
that a positive or negative sentiment or reaction experienced in, or requir-
ing the participation of, the rational part of the soul (the logikon) is not,
strictly speaking, a pathos, that is, either pleasure or pain, but something
else. In fact, Epicurus refers to such responses as either joy (khara) or fear
(phobos), terms which stand in, as it were, for pleasure and pain at the
level of the rational soul. Although later Epicureans, and Philodemus
in particular, do not always observe the distinction between path in
the narrow sense and what we may call emotions (Epicurus seems
not to have employed a special term to cover both positive and negative
feelings in the rational soul), it represents, I argue, a crucial distinction
in Epicurean psychology.
In Chapter 1, then, I examine an aspect of Epicurean psychology in
the ancient sense of the term, that is, the science of the soul or psyche.
For the Epicureans, as A.A. Long and David Sedley observe, the souls
primary functions are consciousness in all its aspectsespecially sen-
sation, thought, and emotionand the transmission of impulses to the
ix
body (1987: 1.70). In modern terms, much of this material would come
under epistemology at one extreme and physiology at the other. In the
balance of this book (that part which represents the revision of the
original monograph: here, Chapters 2 to 4), I investigate, or attempt to
reconstruct, certain views of the Epicureans concerning what we may
call psychology in the modern sense, that is, the mental states, emotions,
and activities that contribute to or disrupt the healthy operation of the
psyche. Today, psychological therapies look to treat pathologies such as
depression, obsessive and compulsive syndromes, and delusions. Such
disorders, or behaviors that are comparable to these clinical conditions,
were of concern to Epicurean thinkers as well: even more than the other
philosophical schools of classical antiquity, the Epicureans conceived of
their insights as providing a cure for tribulations afflicting the mind,
and it is this aspect of their program that I consider in the sequel (cf.
Nussbaum 1994).
It is well known that the Epicureans believedand were often ridi-
culed for believingthat the principal cause of human unhappiness
is the fear of death and the punishments that were imagined to attend
upon it. But death, they held, is in fact nothing, so far as human beings
are concerned, and hence it is not a proper object of fear. As Epicurus
writes in the Letter to Menoeceus (124): Accustom yourself to believing
that death is nothing to us, since all good and evil reside in sensation
[aisthsis], and death is the privation of sensation.
1
The doctrine is sum-
marized more pithily in the second of the so-called Principal Doctrines
of Epicurus, and also by Lucretius (3.830: nil igitur mors est ad nos), and is
a cornerstone of Epicurean philosophy.
The fear of death is disturbing in itself, whether the Epicureans
thought of it as an unconscious or repressed dread, as some modern
scholars maintain, or simply one that is denied, perhaps even to oneself
(see Gladman and Mitsis 1997). But the harm it does to human happi-
ness extends beyond the malaise it generates in the soul, according to
Epicurus. For the Epicureans held that this fear is also responsible for the
excessive and irrational desires that cause people to disregard their well-
being and put their lives in danger, and that lead to wars, wrongdoing,
1 All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
x
and a general deterioration of social life. Thus, Lucretius writes: Greed
and the blind passion for positions of power, which drive wretched men
to exceed the limits of the law and, as partners and abetters in crime,
to struggle day and night with all their might to reach the heights of
wealththese blights on life are nourished in no small part by the fear of
death (3.5964). Why should the fear of death have such consequences?
The answer, I argue, is indicated in part in the same passage of the Letter
to Menoeceus cited above (124): And so a correct understanding of the
fact that death is nothing to us makes this mortal life enjoyable, not by
adding to it an infinity of time, but rather by ridding us of the longing for
immortality. Even today, when Freudian psychology has accustomed us
to the idea of unconscious fears and desires, and to the mechanisms by
which they are disguised, the Epicurean theory is striking. All the more
so was this the case in antiquity. It was radical simply to maintain that
an empty fear could be a pervasive cause of human desire and action.
In Chapter 2, I look further into the mechanism by which irrational
fear is converted into irrational desire, taking as my point of departure
several passages in Lucretius De rerum natura. In a moment I shall indi-
cate something more about the nature of the argument I develop in this
regard. But I also make an additional claim, and this one is less commonly
acknowledged in the modern scholarship on Epicurean psychology. I
argue that not only does the irrational fear of death induce limitless
desires, but that, in turn, such desires are at least in part responsible for
the anxieties that human beings have in regard to death. Once again, a
good part of the evidence for this claim is derived from the exegesis of
passages in Lucretius poem. The consequence of this double process
or direction of causation is that irrational fears and desires mutually
reinforce each other, and the closed cycle that results is a major rea-
son why both fears and desires are so difficult to eliminate or control.
When the first edition of this book was published, this constituted a
new explanation of the relative tenacity of irrational fears and desires,
in spite of Epicurus revelations concerning the physical universe and
human nature; nor is it now a commonly accepted view. But it was also
novel in respect to method. Let me indicate how.
In the so-called tetrapharmakos or four-fold remedy, Epicurus indi-
cates the need to reduce both fears and desires if true contentment is to
xi
be attained. I quote from the formulation in Philodemus Ad contubernales
or To His Companions (PHerc 1005, col. 4.914), as translated by Michael
Erler and Malcolm Schofield (1999: 645): God presents no fears, death
no cause for alarm; it is easy to procure what is good; it is also easy to
endure what is evil. Erler and Schofield remark that the first two axioms
can be established only by physics, not by ethical inquiry narrowly
conceived. The next assertion, concerning the ready availability of good
things, rests on the Epicurean ideal of moderation, which is achieved,
according to Erler and Schofield, when we comprehend the nature and
species of desire; thus, this too will in the end depend on understand-
ing naturehuman, not now cosmic, nature.
Now, it is perfectly true that Epicurus offers an analysis of three kinds
of desirenatural and necessary, natural but not necessary, and both
unnatural and unnecessaryand, on the basis of an accurate apprecia-
tion of human needs and their satisfaction, demonstrates how and why
we irrationally pursue, at great effort, goods beyond what our nature
requires. In Chapter 2 of this book, however, I seek to demonstrate a dif-
ferent kind of connection between irrational fears and desires. It is not
merely that both depend on a failure to understand something about the
constitution of the world, whether the fact that there is no punishment in
the afterlife or that human needs are by nature limited. Rather, I examine
the interrelationship between fears and desires on what we may call the
phenomenological level, by arguing that the fear of death and of punish-
ment after death inspires the urge to limitless acquisition of wealth and
power, and that these very desires in turn contribute to and augment the
fear of death. What is more, the mechanism by which the fear of death
is converted into acquisitiveness, and acquisitiveness into fear of the
afterlife, is basically symbolic in nature: on the one hand, people imagine
that poverty is similar to death; on the other hand, the torments of the
next world are projections of the restless life of desire that people lead in
this one. Both of these errors depend on our making symbolic or quasi-
allegorical substitutionswe genuinely believe that in avoiding poverty
we are escaping death, and that images of frustration derived from this life
represent the reality of the next. Mistakes due to false metaphors are, on
this interpretation, central to Epicurean psychology, which in this respect
bears an important resemblance to modern psychoanalytic theories.
xii
As I have said, I base a good part of my case for this account on a
reading of certain passages in Lucretius, which I believe offer impor-
tant evidence of Epicurus own approach (for my views on the extent of
Lucretius own contribution to Epicurean philosophy, see Konstan 2006).
For example, when Lucretius insists that our anxieties do not fear the
sound of arms nor do they respect the gleam of gold (2.4951), but
can be assuaged only by the power of reason, I take him to mean that
people really do imagine that wealth and power put fears of death to
flight, and that this is why they seek them so relentlessly. Once more,
when Lucretius asserts in the proem to Book 3 that greed and the blind
desire for power are nourished in no small part by the fear of death
because [enim]as he explainsfoul humiliation and bitter poverty
seem to linger, as it were, before the portals of death, and this is why
[unde] men wish to escape them, driven by illusory terror (3.6468), I
understand this to be not a poetic flourish but rather a genuine piece of
Epicurean doctrine, and a necessary element in his overall argument.
The irrational and limitless desire for wealth is motivated not just by
a failure to perceive that in truth what nature requires is limited and
easily obtained, as Epicurus says in Principal Doctrine 15, but also by
a false inference deriving from the figurative resemblance between a
humble station and death.
If the fear of death generates unlimited desire by a kind of metaphori-
cal confusion, it is by a similar mechanism, I argue, that irrational desire
in turn produces and augments anxieties over death. The clue to how
it works is once more to be found in Lucretius, this time, as I indicated
above, in his famous explication of the punishments in the underworld
as projections of the lives of human beings in this one: Undoubtedly
it is in our life that all those things exist which are fabled to be in the
depths of hell. What there is in real life is the fear of punishment for
crimes. Here on earth the life of the foolish becomes hell (3.9781023,
trans. Long and Sedley 1987: 1.15253). Here again, I take this elaborate
allegory to represent an authentic part of Epicurus explanation of the
fear of punishment in the afterlife. For Epicurus would have needed to
provide some account of why people entertain precisely this vision of
hells torments, that is, as an assortment of forever frustrated cravings
that leave their victims in a continual state of pain, just as he required an
xiii
explanation of why greed and ambition are consequences of the fear of
death: the images of infernal tortures derive, I suggest, from simulacra of
our behavior in this world which, by an unwarranted addition of belief,
are imagined as torments actually existing in the next. Such, then, are
Lucretius explanations of how fear drives people to endless accumula-
tion, and why in turn such insatiable desires should compound the fear
of punishment after death. What is more, Lucretius accounts, not despite
but just because of the imagery in which they are cast, provide the only
analysis that survives of how these psychological processes operate.
Difficult as irrational fears and desires are to eradicate in people today,
thanks in part to their reciprocally reinforcing character, there neverthe-
less was a time, according to the Epicurean conception of human social
evolution, when neither the dread of punishment in the afterlife nor the
unappeasable passion for wealth and power had yet come to dominate
the minds of human beings. Lucretius account of the history of the race
in Book 5 makes it clear that primitive people were not subject to the
superstitious terrors that afflict people in the modern world. Besides, in
the early days of human society, when resources were too scarce to permit
individual accumulation, and the threat of harm from savage creatures
and other dangers demanded general cooperation, there would not have
existed the behaviors that in a later age served as the basis for the popular
image of Hades torments. Nor does it follow automatically that the mere
existence or possibility of wealth generates an unassuageable desire for
it, which is then imagined as a form of punishment in the hereafterfor
why should anyone believe that the gods would seek to punish evildoers,
and in just this fashion? In Chapter 3 I argue that the emergence of such
fears and desires depended on, among other things, two further major
transformations in the course of human history: the development, first,
of language, which was the precondition for the kinds of mental error
or symbolic construal that we have seen to be an important ingredient
in irrational fears and desires, and, second, of a social system based on
the rule of law and the generalized fear of punishment that law entails,
which gave rise in turn to a religious terror of a like castigation inflicted
by the gods in the afterlife.
In the third chapter, accordingly, I discuss in some detail the Epicurean
theory of language and of the place of law and punishment in society,
xiv
as well as the attitude toward early society and whether Epicurean
anthropology can properly be labeled either primitivist or progressivist.
I propose that the rule of law has a double character in Epicureanism. On
the one hand, it emerges naturally and necessarily in the course of human
history, as new resources, including both the development of language
and other technical and political advances, give rise to widespread vio-
lence within human communities. On the other hand, I argue that law
and punishment also have a negative side, for they are an essential source
of the pervasive fear of punishment by the gods, and hence contribute
to the very crimes, resulting from limitless desire for wealth and power,
that necessitate legal contraints in the first place. Lucretius again gives
the best evidence of this paradoxical status of law in Epicurean theory,
but it reflects, as I try to show, orthodox Epicurean doctrine.
Beyond the aspiration to wealth and power in the misguided hope
of allaying the fear of death, human beings suffer, as Epicurus observes
in the Letter to Menoeceus (124), from a longing for immortality that
Epicurean philosophy is intended to abolish, thereby permitting the full
enjoyment of this mortal life. In Chapter 4, I argue that the cause of this
irrational desire for eternal life resides in another symbolic confusion, this
time not between death and weakness or poverty, which is the motive
force of greed and ambition, but of a quite different sort. Epicurus held
that the life of the sage was equal to that of a god, and that the pleasure
experienced by the wise is in no way inferior to that enjoyed by divine
beings. I take this analogy to divinity to be seriously meant: the full-
ness of joy and pleasure available to mankind is not augmented by time,
and in a certain sense stands outside of temporality. The mistake is to
imagine that such a timeless experience of pleasure and ataraxy can be
achieved by the indefinite prolongation of life, an immortality like that
which the Epicureans ascribed to the gods. Yet another instance of such
epistemological confusion or kenodoxia, to be dispelled by Epicurean
science, is the human passion of erotic love. All animals experience the
impulse to procreation, which Lucretius labels Venus in the proem to
the first book of his poem. But Venus stands also for a higher-order kind
of satisfaction that human beings share with the gods. The experience of
being in love generates an image of fulfillment that misleads people into
believing that the deep desire for tranquillity can be satisfied by sexual
xv
communion. Relying once again chiefly on the analysis of erotic desire
in Lucretius, I attempt to indicate in the fourth chapter (and also toward
the end of the second) the nature of this error and its consequences.
This, then, is the structure of the book before you. It begins with an
investigation of where fear, joy and desire are lodged in the soul (the ratio-
nal part) and how they relate to the non-rational sensations of pleasure
and pain and to the higher-order happiness of ataraxy. I then discuss the
dynamic interaction between irrational fears and desires as a consequence
of erroneous symbolic associations, and indicate, in the following chapter,
what it is in the evolution of human capacities and social life that gave
rise to such misunderstandings. Finally, I suggest yet another kind of
confusion that haunts human life, namely the belief that one can realize
physically, through an infinitely extended life or the complete union of
selves in the act of love, the kind of consummate happiness that only a
proper understanding of cosmic and human naturethat is, Epicurean
philosophycan confer. The red thread running through the study as
a whole is the idea that a kind of linguistic confusion or unconscious
allegorical substitution contributes significantly to the empty beliefs
or kenai doxai that perturb the life of mankind. While interrelated, the
arguments in support of the several claims are independent. The reader
must be the judge of whether they stand up to scrutiny in the light of the
latest disoveries concerning Epicurean philosophy.
xvi
In this book, I examine certain aspects of the thinking of Epicurus and
Lucretius on problems connected with human emotions and behavior.
Specifically, I inquire into the Epicurean analysis of irrational fears and
desires, insofar as the fragmentary or incidental treatments that we have
may shed light on this matter. I then review the Epicurean account of
the origin of society, in order to determine whether and how irrational
fears and desires arose in the course of the development of civilization.
Finally, I look very selectively at certain questions in Epicurean physics
and epistemology, to discover what, if anything, in the natural theory
provides the ground for error and irrational passions.
Although this study enters upon a number of different problems
in Epicureanism, it is not intended to be an investigation of Epicurus
philosophy as a whole. Epicureanism is today a highly controversial sub-
ject. In several places I defend a position that has not won the universal
consent of scholars. I do not imagine that I have said the last word on
these matters, but to get a general view of the topic of irrational fears and
desires it is necessary and timely to take some steps toward a synthesis
of the results of some recent studies.
It may be that, because I am looking at Epicurean psychology, social
theory, and physics in order to see their connection with fear and desire, I
shall be guilty of a certain misplaced emphasis, treating as explanations
for irrational emotions various theoretical positions that were developed
with quite other issues in mind. That is, perhaps, a natural consequence
Introduction to the First Edition
xvii
of the focus of my argument. However, I believe that the irrational fears
and desires played a more central and controlling role in the Epicurean
system than has sometimes been supposed. I hope, nevertheless, not to
give the impression that fears and desires were the sole preoccupation
of the Epicureans.
A word on method may conclude this preface. In interpreting the
poem of Lucretius, I have frequently used techniques of literary analysis,
such as stressing the significance of images, metaphors, puns and the like,
in order to uncover philosophical positions and arguments. To put it in
Otto Regenbogens terms (1932: 2 and n. 1), I examine Lucretius the poet
in order to find out more about Lucretius the Epicurean. This method
involves serious risks, of which I hope I have been sufficiently aware.
The logic of poetry is not the logic of philosophy. But Lucretius was so
profoundly imbued with the doctrines of Epicurus that his sometimes
elliptical and allusive verse may nonetheless contain the clue, as I believe,
to important ideas for which scant other evidence survives. Nevertheless,
the results of such analysis must remain tentative. The justification for
the procedure is that no other route exists to the Epicureans thinking on
these problems. Perhaps, too, I may add something to the understanding
of certain passages, especially in Lucretius, which come in for detailed
discussion.
xviii
In the preface to the original edition, I wrote: It is my pleasure to
acknowledge the encouragement and assistance of friends and colleagues
who helped me to clarify many of the arguments and ideas in this essay,
although they are not, of course, to be held responsible for the various
points of interpretation where I have defended an unusual or controversial
view. Today, I can add many more names to the list of those who have
generously provided me with guidance as I worked through difficult
questions in Epicureanism. Let me begin by recalling those whom I was
pleased to thank more than thirty years ago. There was my close friend,
the late Richard Ross, to whom I owed the inspiration to pursue problems
of Epicurean psychology. I was also deeply indebted to Thomas Cole, the
late Stephen Crites, and David Furley for their acute criticisms and kind
moral support. My colleagues at Wesleyan University, and in particular
Stephen Dyson and Kevin Whitfield, made many helpful suggestions.
I also owed much to conversations with my then wife, Loretta, who
patiently endured my ponderings. I should note too that the publication
of the first edition was supported by a subvention from the Stanwood
Cockey Lodge fund, administered by the Department of Greek and Latin
(now the Department of Classical Studies) of Columbia University.
Today, I must add, first and foremost, an expression of thanks to Ilaria
Ramelli, who not only translated my revised manuscript into Italian,
which in turn is the basis of this new edition, but has been a constant
source of stimulation and support. I wish to express my gratitude also
Acknowledgments
xix
to Regina Hschele, who read the chapters with her unfailingly critical
eye, and was generous with her encouragement. I am grateful to Brad
Inwood and Phillip Mitsis for critical commentary on many points, as
well as for their friendship. My wife, Pura Nieto, has been my companion
in all my work. I wish also to thank the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences, located in Stanford, California, for a grant that
enabled me to undertake the revision of the book in a most splendidly
tranquil and collegial environment, and also the National Endowment
for the Humanities, which provided additional funding for my leave.
I may note that Chapter 1 was originally presented as a lecture in
the Department of Philosophy at the University of Utrecht; I am deeply
grateful to colleagues there for penetrating questions and comments.
An abbreviated version was published in a Festschrift for Dorothea
Frede (Konstan 2006a), and I happily dedicate it to her once again in
the somewhat fuller form in which it appears here (my thanks also to
Burkhard Reis and Stella Haffmans, the editors of that volume). Some
material deriving from that argument has also appeared in an essay on
the soul in Epicurus, published in French (Konstan 2007).
The original edition of this book bore the dedication, To My
Parents. Now, thirty-five years later, I dedicate the revised edition to
their memory.
xx
1
In what follows, I investigate the status of the path (plural of pathos)
in Epicurean psychology. It will emerge that Epicurus had a very nar-
row view of the significance of this term, in comparison with its use
among his contemporaries, and indeed among some of his own follow-
ers (see Konstan 2006b). What is more, this restriction has important
consequences for Epicurus understanding both of the emotions and of
the goal of life in general.
In popular as well as philosophical literature of the late fifth century
onward, pathos is the normal Greek word for emotion. The term nev-
ertheless retained a wide range of connotations, and if it came to refer
specifically to emotion only in the 420s and probably later (Harris 2001:
84), it was not limited to this meaning either in everyday or scientific
usage. For example, the word often bears the sense of an accident or
misfortune, as well as the neutral significance of a condition or state of
affairs. In philosophical language, pathos may signify a secondary quality
as opposed to the essence of a thing (cf. Aristotle Metaphysics 1022b1521;
Urmson 1990: 12627). Even in the domain of psychology, pathos might
well include sensations such as pleasure and pain, and also desires or
appetites, which we do not necessarily classify as emotions in the strict
sense of the termnor did Aristotle. Thus, in the Rhetoric to Alexander (7.5
= 1428a36b5), formerly thought to be by Aristotle but now commonly
ascribed to Anaximenes and dated slightly earlier than Aristotles own
Rhetoric, we find path illustrated by contempt, fear, taking pleasure
CHAPTER 1
Epicurean Passions
2
(hsthentes), feeling pain (lupthentes), and desiring (epithumountes); else-
where (7.14), the list of characteristic path is given as passionate love,
anger, drunkenness, and ambition (ers, org, meth, and philotimia). In the
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle himself adopts a somewhat wider usage,
in which he includes desire in the broad sense among the path, e.g. at
1105b2123: I call path desire [epithumia], anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy
[khara], love, hatred, longing, competitiveness, pity, and in general those
things upon which attend pleasure and pain (cf. 1147a1415; for pathos
complemented by epithumia, 1151b89; also Eudemian Ethics 1220b1213;
further discussion in Konstan 2006b).
Aristotle is more precise, however, in the Rhetoric, where he offers
his most detailed analysis of the several path. Here, Aristotle makes it
clear that pleasure and pain (hdon and lup) are elements or compo-
nents of path, properly speaking: Let the emotions be all those things
on account of which people change their minds and differ in regard to
their judgments, and upon which attend pain and pleasure, for example
anger, pity, fear, and all other such things and their opposites (Rhetoric
2.1, 1378a2023). This account is confirmed in the Nicomachean Ethics as
well, where Aristotle describes the virtues as being about actions and
path, and adds that pleasure and pain attend on every pathos and every
action (1104b1415). The path that Aristotle discusses in the Rhetoric
include anger, the satisfaction that assuages anger, love and hate, fear
and confidence, shame, gratitude, pity, envy, and competitiveness, among
others. Some of these are characterized by a desire, for example anger
(a desire or orexis for revenge) and love (a wish that the loved one may
prosper); but simple desires in the sense of appetiteshunger, thirst,
and the likeare not treated as path.
1
1 Solmsen 1986: 151 notes that in Platos Timaeus (42A5, 69D4) aisthsis is twice treated as
an ingredient of the irrational soul part, which must report to the rational soul if it is
to be conscious of it (although the aisthsis is not said to occur only when the conscious
soul is aware of the sensation, 152). For Plato, pleasure and pain accompany sensations
(64A265B3; note use of pathmata for sensations here), although sensation (e.g., sight)
can of course occur without pleasure or pain: what produces pleasure and pain is the
intensity of the movement by which particles leave their natural condition or return to
it (153). Solmsen continues (154): and are not strictly speaking
but potential concomitants of ; they are a word of even wider
range than (citing 64A2ff). Solmsen remarks (15455) that Plato sometimes
3
More particularly, Aristotle in the Rhetoric treats pleasure and pain,
that is, hdon and lup, as sensations or aisthseis: since feeling pleasure
is in the perception of some experience [pathos], and phantasia is a weak
kind of perception [aisthsis], some phantasia of what one remembers
or expects always occurs in a person when he remembers or expects
something. Thus, it is necessary that all pleasures are either present
in perception or arise in remembering things that have happened or in
expecting things that will happen (1.11, 1370a2734).
2
In respect to pathos, as with a number of other technical terms, Epicurus
went his own way, and indeed seems almost deliberately to have turned
Aristotles account on its head.
3
Pathos appears principally as one of three
(or perhaps four) basic epistemological capacities that Epicurus calls
criteria. Thus, Diogenes Laertius, in his summary of Epicurus teach-
ing, reports (10.31) that in the Canon, Epicurus says that the criteria of
truth are sensations [aisthseis] and preconceptions [prolpseis] and the
path, and some Epicureans add the imaginative projections of thought
[tas phantastikas epibolas ts dianoias].
4
Epicurus associates sensations and
path in several passages in the Letter to Herodotus (3738, 55, 63, 82; cf.
Principal Doctrines 24). For example, he writes (38): For it is necessary
to look to the primary concept behind each sound. Then we must
observe everything in accord with the aisthseis, and, simply, the attendant
speaks of pleasure and pain as aisthtika (cf. Theaetetus 156B), but he typically follows
Greek usage in distinguishing the categories of perception and feeling, and this was to
be decisive for later schools (cf. Hippocrates On Ancient Medicine 9), even though aisthsis
continued to be used for perceptions as well as feelings (157). For a full discussion of
Aristotles conception of the emotions, see Konstan 2006c.
2 On the relationship between phantasia and aisthsis in Aristotle, see On the Soul 3.3
and On Dreams 2, 459a1519, where phantasia is said to be a motion that arises from (or
as a result of) the activity of perception. Solmsen 1986: 157 afrms that Aristotle makes
aisthsis a cognitive power inferior only to the activities of . It is conceivable that
Aristotles account, in De anima 3.7, 430a2631a8, of aisthseis as determining what is or is
not the case, whereas the pleasant and unpleasant condition what one seeks and avoids,
had an inuence on Epicurus; for discussion of Aristotles view, see Solmsen 1986: 160;
Modrak 2001; 95191, 221; Struck 2004: 6062.
3 Cf. Solmsen 1986: 162: Epicurus goes entirely his own way.
4 Solmsen 1986: 157 oddly asserts that for Epicurus aisthsis is the capacity of feeling
pleasure and pain. On the status of prolpseis as criteria, see Laks 1976: 10405; Morel
2007; Konstan 2007b.
Epicurean Passions
4
projections whether of thought or of some other of the criteria, and so too
the occurrent path (cf. Letter to Pythocles 116, where it would seem that
there are projections [epibolai] not just of dianoia but also of aistheseis and
path). However this may be, it is clear that the path operate alongside
aisthseis and certain processes of thought, and together provide us with
all the information we have concerning the world.
The aisthseis have received considerable attention by scholars, espe-
cially in connection with Epicurus doctrine that all sensations are true
(see e.g. Taylor 1980; Everson 1990; Striker 1996). Leaving this puzzle aside,
what we know about aisthseis is that they do not involve reason (aisthsis
is alogos, D.L. 10.31) or memory (mnm), and that they are associated with
the five senses (Letter to Herodotus 68). The path are evidently distinct from
the aisthseis, but what precisely are they? According to Diogenes Laertius
(10.34), the Epicureans say that there are two path, pleasure [hdon] and
pain [algdn], which exist in every animal, the one pertaining to what
is ones own [oikeion], the other pertaining to what is foreign [allotrion],
by which choices and avoidances are distinguished. For Epicurus,
then, the path are what inform us about the affective value of things in
the worldwhether they are to be pursued or shunnedwhereas the
aisthseis inform us about how things appear physically.
5
Epicurus also uses the term pathos in connection with the senses, for
example in his explanation of hearing: Hearing too derives from a kind
of stream that is borne along from the object that sounds or echoes or
knocks or in some way or other provides the acoustic pathos (Letter to
Herodotus 52; cf. 53). It is conceivable that this usage reflects a distinction
between the impact of the acoustic stimuli, which consist of material films
or eidla (in Latin simulacra), and sensation proper, which is something
more than the mere physical collision of the image-bearing atoms and
the auditory apparatussomething more akin to perception, perhaps,
and occurring in the psyche, not just in the ear. If this is so, and if the
path of pleasure and pain are in this respect analogous to the akoustikon
5 Cf. Prost 2004: 117: de mme que dans lordre de la physique la sensation nous
renseigne sur ce que les choses sont, de mme dans lordre de lthique laffection nous
renseigne sur ce que les choses sont pour nous. Obbink 1996 notes that Philodemus, in
De pietate, attributes aesthsis and hdon to the gods (5.2123 = 13739, pp. 11415); they
lack, however, the pathos of pain (algdn), cf. 7.2224 = 19496.
5
pathos, then they would consist of the immediate response, at the level
of the skin, so to speak, to incoming stimuli, before they are registered
in the soul. But I suspect rather that Epicurus is simply using pathos in a
way that is equivalent to aisthsis here.
6
In a recent survey of Epicurean Epistemology in the The Cambridge
History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Elizabeth Asmis (1999: 27576) offers a
subtle and detailed analysis of the role of the path in Epicurus psychol-
ogy. I cite it in extenso, both because of its clarity and because I find
myself in disagreement with certain elements of her interpretation.
She writes:
Epicurus joins feelings (path) to perceptions as a basis of
inference. In his survey of Epicurean canonic, Diogenes Laertius
(x.35) states that there are two feelings, pleasure and pain, by
which choice and avoidance are judged. But this does not imply
that pleasure and pain are not also a criterion of truth. For they
determine action by serving as a measure of what truly is good
and bad. The basic difference between these two measures of
truth is that feelings are acts of awareness of inner states, whereas
perceptions are directed at what is external to us. As a type of
canon, the feelings are not simply altered conditions of the sense
organ; they include an awareness of the condition. Epicurus
agreed with others that every act of perception depends on an
6 Cf. Koenen 1997: 169 on Letter to Herodotus 53: it appears that, according to Epicurus,
smell causes a . Rejecting the claim by Bailey 1947: 1257, 1261 that pathos here sug-
gests a subjective element (based, Koenen notes, on a highly polemical statement on
the Epicurean explanation of taste in Plutarch Adv. Col. 1121C = fr. 324 Usener), Koenen
invokes rather the use of in the explanation of hearing in the Letter to Herodotus
52 along with Aetius 4.13.1 = fr. 318 Usener, and concludes: one gets the impression
that Epicurus uses to refer in a general and neutral way to the effect, caused by
particles which are emitted from the sense object, on the sense organ. Contrast Lautner
1989: 2526: die Atomen in die Ohren strmen und dort eine entsprechende Reaktion
zur Folge haben, die der pathe der wahrnehmender Person entspricht; das pathos
durch die Strmungen der Atomen verursacht wird, und andererseits ist das pathos das
Zeichen fr diese Strmungen. Das ist nach Lust und Schmerz messbar und berichtet
nicht darber, was man eigentlich wahrnimmt (26). But one does perceive the pleasur-
ability or painfulness of the object, even if these are not physical characteristics in the
same sense as color or sound.
Epicurean Passions
6
alteration of the sense organ; and this may be called a feeling.
In addition to being moved, the sense organ may have a feeling
of being moved; and this constitutes a criterion of truth. At the
most general level, this criterion is a feeling of pleasure or pain.
Subsumed under these feelings is the whole range of bodily
sensations, such as feeling sated or hungry or having a pain in
the stomach, and the entire range of emotions, such as anger,
sadness, or joy. One highly controversial claim supported by
reference to feelings is the claim that the mind is situated in the
heart. Like the Stoics (though with a different logical apparatus),
the Epicureans sought to determine the location of the mind by
the evident fact that the heart is where we feel fear, joy, and
other emotions. Since the mind is the seat of the emotions, this
feeling shows that the mind is located in the heart.
Let me isolate four of Asmis claims for closer attention: (1) feelings
are acts of awareness of inner states, whereas perceptions are directed
at what is external to us; (2) feelings are not simply altered conditions
of the sense organ; they include an awareness of the condition; (3)
Subsumed under these feelings is the whole range of bodily sensations,
such as feeling sated or hungry or having a pain in the stomach, and
the entire range of emotions, such as anger, sadness, or joy; (4) feeling
shows that the mind is located in the heart.
First, then, let us consider the pleasure we derive from agreeable
musicone of Epicurus own examples of kinetic pleasure (On the Goal,
quoted in Cicero Tusculan Disputations 3.41), and clearly quite differ-
ent from pleasures of replenishment, such as those which derive from
satisfying hunger or thirst. Why is the pathos associated with listening
to music more internal than, say, the auditory sensation, which also,
as we have seen, involves a pathos? We perceive the pleasing quality of
the music, just as we hear the pitch and rhythm of the music, not of the
locus where the sensory organ is affected. Second, is there a distinction
between a pathos as a condition of an organ, and as the awareness of that
condition? I am inclined to think that Epicurus would not have recog-
nized such a division; certainly, there is no direct evidence that he did.
Rather, the alteration in the sense organ (in which, as we shall see, the
7
psyche is implicated) just is the awareness of pleasure. Stephen Everson
(1999: 551) writes in the same Cambridge volume that there is good
reason to believe that Epicurus accepts that atomic change determines
mental change; we may add that atomic change in the complex of body
and psyche just is mental change.
7
Asmis third point involves the inclusion of the emotions among
the path, so that a pain in the stomach associated with the feeling
of hunger is subsumed under the same category as anger and joy.
We may consider this item together with the last, that the feelings
testify that the mind is located in the chest or heart. The evidence
for this last proposition is a scholium incorporated into the text of
Diogenes Laertius 10.66 = fr. 311 Usener, which reads as follows:
He says elsewhere that it [the soul] is made up of very smooth and
round atoms, which differ greatly from those of fire; and one part
of it is non-rational [alogon], and dispersed throughout the rest of
the body; but the rational part [to logikon] is in the chest [thrax], as is
evident from fears [phoboi] and from joy [khara]. Now, to say, with
Asmis, that feeling shows that the mind is located in the heart is to
beg the question of whether emotions may be classified under path,
since the feelings in question are not pleasure and pain, which we
know to be path, but rather fears and joy. These latter pertain to the
rational part of the soul; that is why our awareness of them in the
chest proves that the rational part of the soul is located there. I pre-
sume that Epicurus appeals to fears and joy because they are more
palpable than thoughts, and are more commonly felt to inhabit the
region of the heart. But his argument goes also to show that these
two emotions, if we may call them that, are specifically situated in
to logikon (the term to logikon does not seem to occur elsewhere in
7 See Glidden 1980: 184 on the material identity of these path with atomic motions in
our bodies; but note the criticisms of Mitsis 1988: 4546. Lautner 1989: 24 argues that
Die pathe, die letzten Endes Schmerzen und Lste sind, werden nach Epikur in einem
gegebenen Sinnesorgan durch die Strmung der Atomen zustande gebracht. Wie diese
Strmungen die Schmerz- und Lustempndungen konstituiren, so das, dass man sich
dieser Empndungen bewusst ist, ist auch nichts anderes, als dass er sich der im Krper
zustandegekommenen physiologischen Wandlungen bewusst ist. But why should one
be aware of change in the body, rather than of the property of the thing itself? See also
Prost 2004: 116: notre rapport au monde se fait par lintermdiaire des atomes.
Epicurean Passions
8
Epicurean writings, at least according to the Glossarium Epicureum =
Usener 1977). As I shall indicate in a moment, that is not the locus of
what Epicurus calls path.
First, however, I cite the evidence of Lucretius to show that he con-
firms Epicurus on this matter quite precisely.
8
The passage is toward the
beginning of Book 3 (13651); I quote the translation of Long and Sedley
(1987 vol. 1: 6667), inserting the Latin words where relevant:
My next point is that the mind [animus] and the spirit [anima]
are firmly interlinked and constitute a single nature, but that the
deliberative element [consilium] which we call the mind [animum
mentemque] is, as it were, the chief, and holds sway throughout the
body. It is firmly located in the central part of the chest. For that
is where fear and dread [pavor ac metus] leap up, and where joys
[laetitiae] caress us: therefore it is where the mind [mens animusque]
is. The remaining part of the spirit [anima], which is distributed
throughout the body, obeys the mind [mens] and moves at its
beck and call. The mind by itself possesses its own understand-
ing and its own joys [sibi gaudet] while nothing is affecting either
the spirit [anima] or the body. And just as, when our head or eye is
hurt [laeditur] by an attack of pain [dolor], the agony is not shared
[non concruciamur] by our whole body, so too the mind [animus]
sometimes itself suffers pain [laeditur] or waxes with joy [laetitia]
while the rest of the spirit [anima] throughout the limbs and frame
is receiving no new stimulus.
8 Mehl 1999: 27287 argues that because Lucretius wished, like Epicurus, to use only
common rather than technical terms, and had available only animus and anima to cover
the three categories of the soul, its rational part, and its non-rational part in Epicurus
(274), he makes rather a mess of things. Thus, For psukh, the union of to logikon and to
alogon, he uses animus alone, anima alone, animus and anima joined by a connective, and
mens and anima joined by connective; for to logikon, he uses animus alone, mens alone,
or animus and mens joined by a connective; and for to alogon, he uses without exception
the word anima (27475). The only ambiguity, however, resides in the occasional use of
anima for the entire soul as well as for its non-rational part. But in this, Lucretius follows
Epicurus own practice in respect to psukh.
9
Lucretius goes on to explain that when the mind (mens) is affected
by a very great fear (metus), the spirit (anima) as a whole shares the sen-
sation (15253), while physical impacts such as a wound from a spear
affect the mind (animus), for example by producing mental confusion
(mentis aestus) (16876).
I note first that the familiar contrast in Lucretius between ani-
mus and anima, while it produces an agreeable jingle,
9
may serve to
obscure Epicurus precise characterization of these parts, of which
Lucretius himself is perfectly well aware. He chooses the term con-
silium as the proper equivalent to Epicurus to logikon; he explicitly
says that he will call this animus or mens, which are more natural in
Latin.
10
The word nous does not seem to occur in Diogenes Laertius
tenth book, and I suspect that Epicurus avoided it as a technical term
9 Boyanc 1958: 135 notes that the Latin jingle reproduces that between logikon and
alogon, the two parts of the psukh indicated by scholion to the Letter of Herodotus 67 and
by Aetius 4.4.6: , ,
,
(= fr. 312 Usener, fr. 68A105 Diels-Kranz, fr. 160 Arrighetti
2
: Democritus and Epicurus
hold that the soul is bipartite, containing the rational part xed in the chest, and the
non-rational dispersed throughout the entire constitution of the body).
10 Boyanc 1958: 133 misinterprets the connection: Lanimus, auquel il accole le mot
mens, comme peu prs quivalent, exerce sa domination sur tout le corps et ce titre
peut tre considr comme consilium, cest--dire volont rchie. Boyanc says of the
reason why the animus is located in the chest: cest que l rside le sige de la peur et
de la joie, cest--dire des motions, ce que nous conduit remarquer que la sensibilit,
comme on peut sy attendre chez un picurien pour qui le plaisir est le souverain bien,
appartient au mme principe minent que la volont et que les facults intellectuelles.
This is to confuse voluptas (pleasure) with laetitia (joy); Boyanc does, however, recognize
that on the intellectual level, fear takes the place of pain (cest moin encore la douleur
que la crainte). Servius, on Virgil Eclogue 2.58 (p. 27 Thilo), ascribes to the Epicureans
the view that there are two distinct senses to the term voluptas, one physical, the other
intellectual: Epicurei enim dicunt, quod etiam Cicero tractat, geminam esse voluptatem,
unam quae percipitur, et alteram imaginariam, scilicet eam quae nascitur ex cogitatione.
Unde ita debemus accipere, hunc [i.e., Corydon] usum per cogitationem illa imaginaria
voluptate, qua et cernere et adloqui videbatur absentem (The Epicureans sayas Cicero
too discussesthat pleasure is double: there is one that is perceived, and another that is
imagined, that is, the kind that arises from thought. And so we ought to understand that
Corydon has experienced that imagined pleasure by way of thought, by virtue of which
he seemed to behold and converse with one who is absent). Servius derives this view
from Cicero, however, and it may be doubted that it goes back to Epicurus himself.
Epicurean Passions
10
(cf. Glossarium Epicureum s.v.).
11
Lucretius anima, in turn, renders Epicurus
psukh. The psukh is the locus of aisthsis, which, as we have seen, is
specifically said to be alogos, and lacking in memory or mnm. Like
Epicurus, Lucretius calls in witness two emotions, fear (pavor ac metus
= phoboi) and joy (laetitiae = khara) to show that the consilium is located in
the chest. Just as khara is distinct from the pathos hdon, so too Lucretius
employs the term laetitia rather than voluptas for the emotion that resides
in the consilium.
12
The body is affected by pain: dolor renders Epicurus
term algdn, which, unlike lup, the term favored by Aristotle, connotes
a specifically physical or corporeal sensation. Epicurus, again, seems
to have avoided the term lup, though he employs the participial form
of the verb lupeisthai to designate mental distress.
13
The body, however,
11 Bailey 1947: 2.1005ff. states that Lucretius animus corresponds to nous in Epicurus,
and anima to psukh; according to Bailey, then, the anima is the seat of sensation and the
animus the seat of thought and emotion. Contra Boyanc 1958: 13334, who insists that
some pleasures, pains and emotions are peculiar to the animus. Bailey is, in my view,
more likely to be right concerning the narrow sense of psukh in Epicurus, even if it may
sometimes, like anima, have referred to the combined rational and non-rational parts of
the soul. Boyanc asserts further that the animus and anima are separate in location, but
identical in substance (135), and that pain and pleasure are not restricted to the anima,
that is, to the parts outside the chest (although Bailey includes them among the sensa-
tions), since pain and pleasure are in the chest too (13738); but this is not what either
Epicurus or Lucretius afrms. Boyanc concludes that the anima too contains the fourth
element (138), a matter on which I suspend judgment.
12 Solmsen 1986: 163 is mistaken in saying that in Lucretius 3.10616 the mind may
experience pleasure and pain independently of the body; pain pertains to the body
and well-being to the mind. Again, Solmsen wrongly afrms that the body alone is
said to have aisthsis in Lucretius 3.35058 (165); Lucretius in fact states the opposite.
Solmsen is committed to the view that perception involves reason, and this leads him
to misconstrue its function in Epicurus system.
13 Cf. Principal Doctrines 3 and 10, where to algoun and to lupoumenon are evidently
distinct, and neither is compatible with the presence of hdon (cf. Diano 1974: 168);
for lupeisthai = grief, see D.L. 10.119; at 10.125 the three mentions of lupein presum-
ably reect an opponents words. Metrodorus fr. 5 has
(for there is a certain kind of pleasure that is pursued through pain),
which suggests that here lup = algdn; but note Seneca, Epist. 99.25: est aliqua volup-
tas cognata tristitiae, where grief or sadness seems the sense, as opposed to dolor;
Cic. Tusc. disp. 3.25.61 translates lup as aegritudo, and this seems right. Cf. also Epic.
fr. 154, ] [ ] [] [ ][] (Is it not a
perfect cure for distress that the pain due to lack is eliminated?), and VH
2
11.29:
11
cannot feel pain, or anything, on its own; it is only in combination with
psukh that it experiences the path, whether pleasure or pain.
14
Thus, in
the Letter to Herodotus (6364) Epicurus writes: one must hold firmly that
the soul [psukh] is most responsible for sense-perception [aisthsis]. But
[the soul] would not have aquired this [power] if it were not somehow
enclosed by the rest of the aggregate. But the rest of the aggregate, though
it provides for the soul this cause [of sense-perception], itself has a share
in this property because of the soul; for it does not share in all the features
which the soul has (trans. Inwood and Gerson 1997: 13, modified).
Like the psukh, the rational element can also suffer: Lucretius applies
the verb laeditur to both; but its distress resides in fear itself, which seems
to serve as the contrasting term to khara or laetitia. Thus, in the proem to
Book 2, Lucretius famously declares that nature demands nothing for
itself but that pain [dolor] be absent from the body, and that the mind [mens]
enjoy a pleasing sensation [iucundo sensu] with the removal of anxiety and
fear [cura metuque] (1719). Lucretius contrasts the pain of the body with
that of the mind, and this is a natural enough way to speak, but in a sense it
is not wholly accurate. Both pain in the sense of algdn, and the distress of
fears or phoboi, are perceived by the soul in the larger sense in which psukh
includes both the non-rational and the rational parts; likewise, both plea-
sure as hdon and joy, or khara, are psychological affects. The difference
between them is better expressed as that between non-rational vs. rational
affects: the former are the path; the latter do not seem to have a special
name in Epicurean theory, but it is reasonable to dub them emotions.
15
[] [ ] [] (the distress that resides in us on account
of death). Contra Diano 1974: 178, who describes the pleasures and pains of the soul
as gioie e tristezze, e .
14 The formulations of Diano 1974: 174 are thus only approximate, taking the body for
the combination of body and non-rational soul: La sensazione in loco e lanima non ha
nulla che fare coi del corpo; lanima dell e dell del corpo non pu
saper nulla. It is true, however, that Epicurus and especially Lucretius sometimes speak
in a shorthand way as though aisthsis and the path pertained to the body alone. That
the awareness of pain resides in the soul is a doctrine that goes back to Plato Philebus
33D-34A, 43A-C; cf. Knuuttila 2004: 18.
15 Diano 1974: 252 asserts that nel senso specico di passioni sincontra negli
scritti epicurei di frequente, citing frr. 221 and 548 Usener; his other evidence does not
derive from Epicurus himself, however, and I suspect that a change occurred in usage
Epicurean Passions
12
The path, then, are a function of the psukh or anima, and are not
rational in the sense that they do not involve the logical element or
mind. The path of pleasure and pain function automatically, and do
not depend on logos; according to Diogenes Laertius (10.137 = fr. 66
Usener), Epicurus cited as proof that pleasure (hdon) is the goal (telos)
the fact that animals, as soon as they are born are satisfied with it but
are in conflict with suffering [ponos] by nature and apart from reason
[logos]. So it is by our experience all on its own [autopaths] that we
avoid pain [algdn] (trans. Inwood and Gerson 1997: 44). The twin
emotions of fear and joy, on the other hand, belong specifically to the
consilium or logikon, and they are distinct in category from the path.
16
in the later school, for example in Philodemus (see below). Diano also insists (254) on a
distinction between the path of soul and of body, but it is more correct to speak of path
as pertaining to the anima, not the body or to logikon. Cicero De n. 1.55 says animi
voluptates et dolores nasci fatemur e corporis voluptatibus et doloribus (cited 256); but this is
Cicero. Epicurus himself states (Us. 429, from Plutarch Contra Ep. beat. 1088E):
etc., but here the preposition is
crucial. Again, Diano (266) speaks of path as perturbationes arising from empty opinion,
citing fr. 485 Usener; this passage does indeed mention empty fearsbut not path. It is
an interesting puzzle whether the memory or anticipation of pleasure is itself an instance
of pleasure; I suggest that it is not, for Epicurus; among other things, our memories may
play tricks on us, and we may be mistaken about future pleasures (or pains). Prost 2004:
140 rightly observes that La joie, la peine, la colre, etc., associent laffection un acte
de pense rationelle sur un tat de choses donn; si laffection seule relve de la partie
irrationelle de lme, lmotion est, elle, produite par la partie rationelle. It is a question,
however, whether there is a necessary element of physical pain or pleasure that serves
as the substrate of emotional fear or joy, as is the case for Aristotle, for example. The
positive and negative qualities of the emotions do not seem to be directly connected,
by Epicurus, to affects of the anima. To speak, then, of les douleurs de lme (142) may
be something of a misnomer.
16 In this, I agree essentially with Diano 1974: 168, save that I speak of the rational and
non-rational parts of the soul, where as Diano speaks of the soul vs. the body. Citing
Diogenes Laertius 10.34, Diano remarks of the path: Essi sono dellanima e del corpo;
per lanima sono detti rispettivamente e , per il corpo, e ; e come
il piacere , oltre che moto dei sensi provocato da un agente esterno, anche assenza di
dolore, si ha, quanto a questa seconda specie, e per lanima, e pel corpo
e . Queste denominazioni sono per Epicuro termini tecnici. resta
sempre il termine generico, ma, quando si tratta di specicare, non accade mai chegli li
scambi, come avviene sempre in Platone e nelle scuole in cui la tradizione si mantiene.
The two types of affect are distinct, as of different atomic motions, which
is why Epicurus can conclude that the animus is a distinct part of the soul (16869).
13
What, then, is the status of khara or laetitia in Epicurus system? To
begin with, we may say that khara ought not to be confused with the
goal or telos, which is variously described either as hdon (e.g., D.L. 10.11;
cf. 10.131, where hdon is defined as neither feeling pain [algein] in the
body nor being disturbed [tarattesthai] in the soul [psukh]; 10.137), or
as ataraxia, freedom from perturbation (cf. Letter to Pythocles 85; D.L.
10.128, where ataraxy is defined similarly to hdon as neither suffering
pain [algein] nor anxious fear [tarbein]), but never as khara or joy.
17
Diogenes Laertius reports (10.136 = fr. 2 Usener) that, in his book On
Choices (Peri hairesen), Epicurus affirmed that ataraxy and freedom
from trouble [aponia] are katastematic pleasures [hdonai]; but khara and
good cheer [euphrosun] are regarded as kinetic activities (reading
[nom. pl.] with Long and Sedley 1987 vol. 2: 12425;
the mss. give [dative sing.], kinetic by virtue of
activity).
18
Erler and Schofield, again in the Cambridge History (1999),
Cf. ps.-Alexander of Aphrodisias thika Problmata 126.732: That lup, not ponos, is
the opposite of pleasure: for ponos implies a kind of corporeal pressure, whereas lup
implies a psychic contraction. For lup is both in the pressures of the body and of the
soul in its own right, just as pleasure is, but ponos is in the body only (
. ,
.
, , ). On ponos = dolor
and labor, cf. Cicero Tusc. disp. 2.15.35.
17 On the distinction between joy and pleasure, cf. Purinton 1993: 28788; I disagree,
however, with Purintons denition of khara as the intentional state which has pleasure
as its object (292).
18 Purinton 1993: 28890 defends the dative (the passage is cited more extensively, with
further discussion, in Chapter 4, pp. 13132). Giannantoni 1984: 28 cites this passage
to show that Epicurus teneva distinte khara e euphrosun in quanto in moto, da quella
condizione catastematica dellanima (ataraxia) e del corpo (aponia) in cui consiste la vera
hdon; I agree, save that hdon in the strict sense pertains, I believe, to the non-rational
part of the soul. Giannantonis interpretation is facilitated by taking as dative.
Stokes 1996: 160 rightly notes that it is difcult to resist the supposition that
and offer within the katastematic category a contrast of bodily and mental; hence
both body and soul have both kinds of pleasures. Despite Stokes doubts, this surely
reects Epicurus own view. But the contrast between khara and euphrosun is, Stokes says
(161), obscure: the latter should, in the context, refer to kinetic bodily pleasure or hdon,
and I do not doubt that it does, even though the term is not clearly so restricted in the
Epicurean texts we have. Since hdon includes both static and kinetic bodily pleasure,
Epicurus presumably chose euphrosun here in order to indicate the specically kinetic
Epicurean Passions
14
offer an interpretation of this passage which has the great merit of
making clear the distinction between khara and hdon, but with which
I find myself in disagreement over the fundamental character of these
affects. Erler and Schofield first explain the difference between static
or katastematic pleasures, and those that are kinetic or dynamic. The
essence of katastematic pleasure, they write (1999: 656), is simply that
it is a stable condition. When the body is in such a katastma, it is
entirely free of pain; hence the designation of aponia as a katastematic
pleasure. We must suppose that ataraxia, the katastematic pleasure of
the soul, is achieved when it attains an analogous condition of stable
psychic harmony.
19
Erler and Schofield then continue: What mat-
ters most for Epicurean ethics in the end is not katastematic pleasure
itself, but the joy and delight it gives us. For joy and delight are forms
of awareness, or path, as katastematic pleasure is not (here they
cite the passage from Diogenes Laertius quoted above).
20
And they
conclude: From one point of view, therefore, Epicurus disagreement
with Aristippus is much less than he makes it appear, since the great-
est pleasure remains strictly speaking a kinetic pleasure, namely our
delight in aponia and ataraxia.
variety. Stokes (162) seems to interpret as a third category of pleasure those which
Epicurus describes at Principal Doctrine 10 as the pleasures concerning the proigates,
i.e., merely sensual pleasures which do not fulll a lack. But these are surely kinetic, as
Lucretius rightly indicates (4.62223).
19 Cf. Diano 1974: 170: Quanto al piacere catastematico, esso negativamente denito
come assenza di dolore , , pi precisamente: ;
positivamente come equilibrio, e sanit della carne. Katastasis is the state of
the atoms having returned to their original position (remigare). Contrast Giannantoni
1984: 44, who concludes that il piacere cinetico non poikilma bens soddisfazione di
desideri naturali ma non necessari, whereas il piacere catastematico quello che
soddisfa i desideri naturali e necessari (those that are neither necessary nor natural
cannot be satised at all). But surely kinetic pleasures are those associated with fulll-
ing any kind of need, and above all a natural one like eating. For a survey of modern
views on kinetic vs. katastematic pleasure, with particular reference to the relevance
of Ciceros testimony in De nibus 2, see Mitsis 1988: 4551; Stokes 1995: 15152; Prost
2004: 11924.
20 Striker 1993: 16 inclines to the view that aponia and ataraxia are states of pleasure, but
the joy and delight (sc. that come with them) manifest themselves in motion, that is, in
particular episodes of pleasure and enjoyment.
15
Now, it will be clear from what I have said that I disagree about
applying the label pathos to joy and delight. Beyond the question of labels,
however, there is a substantive issue here. The path are very elementary
forms of awareness, operating at the level of the non-rational psukh.
They constitute the physiological basis of approach and avoidance, and
are instinctive, pertaining as much to animals as to human beings. In
themselves, they admit of no deliberation, no reasoning.
21
The sense in
which the pathos of pleasure or hdon constitutes the goal or telos for
Epicureanism is, as I understand it, just by virtue of the fact that it is the
thing to which all living creatures are naturally attracted, just as they are
repelled by its opposite, algdn.
22
Of course, one is aware of such pleasure,
just as one is aware of sensations or aisthseis without the mediation of
higher-order reasoning in the logikon part of the soul. This awareness
is as much a feature of katastematic pleasure as it is of kinetic pleasure:
21 Mitsis 1988: 43 argues that For Epicurus, the path provide a standard of truth and a
criterion by which to judge actions. They therefore have the same kind of foundational
role to play in our moral life that sensation does in grounding the pursuit of knowledge.
Both serve to give us infallible, causal contact with the world. Yet both are alogon. They
must be sorted out and tted together by further judgments, or prolpseis, if they are to
guide our epistemological or moral judgments reliably. With all this I am in agreement.
However, it does not follow that a pathos can serve only as a sign or as a basis of inference
that must be conrmed or disconrmed by subsequent affective evidence, by prolpseis,
and by our knowledge in general (44); there is no conrming or disconrming of the
pleasure or pain we experience, though of course we can judge whether in the given
circumstances it is worth pursuing or not, given an overall calculus of pleasures. Mitsis
afrms (13839) that Epicurus wants the path to serve as a preconceptual given, but
he goes beyond Epicurus view in adding: At the same time, however, Epicurus thinks
that beliefs have an active, causal role to play in our path. Thus, the Epicureans use of
pathos is extremely elastic inasmuch as it includes both relatively simple sensations
and more complex emotions.
22 Alberti 1994 argues, rightly in my view, that Epicurus located the highest good
in pleasure, not in virtue (contra Mitsis 1988, Annas 1987, 1993); the virtues are not
pleasurable in themselves. Cf. Cicero De nibus 1, where Torquatus (2931) makes it
clearagainst later Epicureans who think that reason plays some part on our knowledge
of the highest goodthat pleasure is the criterion for choice for every animal; animals
do not choose rationally. All that reason or logismos does, apart from getting rid of false
opinions (19899), is to choose among immediate pleasures with a view to the long-term
pleasurable state (19497): sempre dunque la ragione, e non la virt, a determinare
qual la condotta richiesta per conseguire il ne del piacere (201). Hence, la teoria
etica epicurea si pone al di fuori della cosiddetta etica della virt (202).
Epicurean Passions
16
one simply is conscious of the pathos constituted in and by stability and
the absence of pain or perturbation in the body or soul.
23
Joy or khara, however, is not the same as pleasure at all, any more than
fear, the negative condition of the logikon or rational part of the soul, is
the same as pain. The important thing is to recognize that phobos and
khara are both kinetic activities of the rational soul.
24
Fear is the sign of a
disturbance or tarakh, of course; what then is joy a sign of? There is no
evident reason for supposing that it constitutes awareness of the kataste-
matic or stable condition of the body or soul. Let us pursue the analogy
with fear. We understand fear as involving not simply the awareness of
an unpleasant sensation, but rather as a complex emotion involving a
23 For an example of the kind of confusion that results from not distinguishing the parts
of the soul in which pleasure and higher-order mental operations such as beliefs operate,
cf. Strozier 1985: 8687: experience involves not simply the consciousness of feelings
but a consciousness of the causes of the feelings. Every feeling is, as I have said, the
necessary consequence of a cognition. The cognition is the recognition of the cause of
the feeling and consequently the knowledge of the means to achieve the feeling, once
it has been experienced. Cooper 1999: 497 offers a more nuanced account of the goal of
life as a certain state of consciousness caused or occasioned by the complete absence
of pain and distress.
24 Stokes 1996: 167 quotes Vatican Saying 27 as indicating a kinetic pleasure of the mind,
namely that of learning:
,
,
.
In other pursuits the reward comes at the end and is hard won. But in philosophy
enjoyment keeps pace with knowledge. It is not learning followed by entertainment,
but learning and entertainment at the same time (trans. Long and Sedley 1987: 1.156)
Whereas Stokes sees a collapse of kinetic and katastematic pleasures here (167; cf.
16869), I should say rather that the pleasure is clearly kinetic: as fears are dispelled,
joy (here called to terpnon) enters. This is different from the absence of perturbation,
although on 169 Stokes allows that there is a temporal distinction between acquiring
wisdom (a kinetic pleasure) and achieving it (henceforward, a katastematic pleasure).
Prost 2004: 125 agrees with Stokes that kinetic pleasures of the mind have to do with
learning (apprentissage), and more particularly with the philosophical knowledge
that brings tranquillity of soul: Le plaisir est donc le privilge du savoir vrai. Prost
aptly cites (126) Sextus Empiricus Against the Mathematicians 11.169 = fr. 219 Us. = LS
25K that philosophy is an energeia that produces a happy life by way of reasoning and
discussion. It is not clear whether energeia necessarily implies a kinetic joy, unless it
serves to dispel fears: even the sage can have this experience by recalling and repeat-
ing the lessons learned (126). Prost argues further (127) that there is kinetic pleasure in
friendship, insofar as it contributes to a state of ataraxy.
17
judgment concerning the nature of the object to which it corresponds, or
which evokes it. In this sense, fear is very much like an Aristotelian emo-
tion. Aristotles definition of fear runs as follows: let fear be a kind of pain
[lup] or disturbance [tarakh] deriving from an impression [phantasia] of
a future evil that is destructive or painful; for not all evils are feared, for
example whether one will be unjust or slow, but as many as are productive
of great pain or destruction, and these if they are not distant but rather
seem near so as to impend. For things that are remote are not greatly
feared (Rhetoric 2.5, 1382a2125; cf. Konstan 2006c: 12934). Fear involves
the sensation of pain, but not just that: it also depends on evaluation or
calculationwhat Epicurus would call epilogismos (D.L. 10.73)of the
nature of an impending evil: that it is indeed harmful or productive of
pain. The sensation of pain is incorrigible: that is in the nature of a pathos.
Fear, however, is subject to reasoning and argument. It may indeed have
a valid cause, in which case it is justified, or it may notas in the case
of the fear of death, according to Epicurus. It is esssential to fear that it
pertain to the rational part of the soul, for if it did not, there would be no
possibility of eliminating it by the therapy of philosophy.
I take it that khara or joy is also a rational emotion, which responds to
an impression of something deemed to be pleasant. As such, it too should
be corrigible, and hence able to be mistaken. One may, for example, imag-
ine oneself acquiring a large fortune, and think oneself perfectly secure
as a result. If one is thinking of security against death, this will be a false
kind of joy, dependent on what Epicurus calls empty belief or kenodoxia
and motivated in large part by a fear that is itself irrational. It will also
prompt desires that are insatiable in nature, leading to a reciprocally
reinforcing cycle of empty fears and desires (see Chapter 2). If, however,
one anticipates rather the kind of tranquillity that is possible for human
beings, and which resides in the absence of pain and the freedom from
mental perturbation, then it is a proper and rational joy.
25
25 Cf.
(every pleasant movent in the body is referred to some pleasure and joy of the soul;
fr. 433 Usener = Plut. Non posse sauviter vivere 2, 1087B; partially quoted also in fr. 552
Usener); I expect this is a somewhat garbled reference to the distinction between hdon
and khara, the latter specic to the rational part of the psukh. So too Cicero De nibus
3.10.35: quamquam Stoici communi nomine corporis et animae hedonn appellant, ego malo
laetitiam appellare quasi gestientis animi elationem voluptariam (although the Stoics call the
Epicurean Passions
18
Erler and Schofields claim that What matters most for Epicurean
ethics in the end is not katastematic pleasure itself, but the joy and delight
it gives us, is thus misleading. The telos or goal of Epicurean philosophy
is not khara, but ataraxy (combined with the absence of physical pain).
To the extent that the condition of non-perturbation is pleasurable, the
awareness of it takes the form of a pathos, and is experienced in the irra-
tional part of the psukh.
26
If, as I have argued, fear and joy are experienced in the rational part
of the soul, the question arises: do animals (other than human beings)
have these emotions? The answer depends on whether animals are
considered rational. Aristotle, like the Stoics, held that they are not. As
William Fortenbaugh writes (2002: 94):
Humans have the capacity to think. Animals lack this cogni-
tive capacity and therefore cannot experience emotions as analyzed
by Aristotle. Of course, animals can be said to experience path,
for this word has multiple meanings and can be used inclusively
to cover both the emotional responses of human beings and the
reactions of animals. In addition, emotion words like org and
pleasure of the body and that of the soul by a common name, I prefer to call laetitia
the pleasurable elation of the, so to speak, exulting mind); this passage seems decisive
for the technical distinction recognized by the Epicureans. Lucretius employs voluptas
somewhat more freely, sometimes in connection with tranquillity of mind (3.40, 6.94);
cf. divina voluptas atque horror (3.2829), which may indicate the frisson Lucretius feels
upon contemplating the boundless universe, and not an intellectual pleasure as such.
Venus, understood as sexual pleasure, is hominum divomque voluptas (1.1; cf. 2.17273, and
4.1057, 1075, 1081, 1085, 1114, 1201, 1207, 1263), and Lucretius speaks too of the voluptas
that derives from sweet [suavis] friendship (1.14041; for an implicit contrast between
voluptas on the one hand and suave and dulce on the other, cf. 2.113). At 2.258, voluptas,
like hdon, is the cause of attraction. On voluptas as the sensation associated with the
return of matter in the body to its proper place, see 2.96368, and cf. 3.251, 4.62729
on pleasures of the senses; on the impossibility of new pleasures, 3.1081, and on their
natural limit, 5.1433.
26 This is an important point, and deserves emphasis. If freedom from fear and other
perturbations is to be understood as pleasurable, that is, as a kind of hdon (of the
katastematic variety, to be sure), then qua pleasure it is a pathos, and hence pertains to
19
phobos, anger and fear, can be used to describe the behavior
of animals, but this is analogical usage.
27
Epicurus own position on the rationality of animals is not entirely
clear, due, I expect, to the lacunose condition of our sources.
28
Hermarchus,
the alogon or non-rational part of the soul. When Cooper (1999: 497) writes that plea-
sure, for Epicurus, is a certain state of consciousness or perception, I agree, provided
we understand perception as pathos rather than aisthsis (both are operations of the
non-rational soul). I agree with Cooper (51113) too that there are not, for Epicurus, two
kinds or genera of pleasure, but rather a single kind of pleasure that has two causes,
both of whichthe katastematic as well as the kineticinvolve processes or activi-
ties, not mere inert states; Cooper effectively resolves the ostensible contradiction in
Epicurus view of pleasure on which Bonelli (1979: 1944), drawing largely on Ciceros
critique, insists.
27 Aristotle allowed that animals possess similarities to intelligent understanding (
, Hist an. 8.588a2324); cf. Politics 1332b56 for
human beings alone possessing reason (logos); also Politics 1254b2324, where Aristotle
contrasts human beings, who possess reason or logos, with animals and slaves, who
obey their pathmata; at Politics 1253a915, Aristotle species that among animals, only
humanity possesses reason, and the voicing of what is painful and pleasant is a sign of
this: for this pertains also to other animals (their nature reaches the level of having the
perception [aisthsis] of what is painful and pleasurable and signaling it to one another),
but reason resides in manifesting what is advantageous and harmful, and so too what is
just and unjust (see too EN 1098a34, EE 1224a2627, Metaphysics 980b2628; History of
Animals 641b89; Sorabji 1993: 13). Hence only man can feel happiness (Parts of Animals
656a5). For the position of the Stoics, see Diogenes Laertius 7.129; cf. Cicero De ofciis
1.50. Contrast Plutarch On the Cleverness of Animals, e.g. 96062, where the claim is made
that animals do have both a share in reason and path (966B).
28 Boyanc 1958: 141 suggests animals too likely have to logikon in Epicurus, though we
have no texts on the matter; but this seems highly doubtful to me. According to Dierauer
1977: 197, the Epicureans held that die verschiedenen Emotionen, Lust und Schmerz,
Begierde und Angst, bei Menschen und Tieren weitgehend vergleichbar seien, although
at the same time they believed that den Tieren Vernunft und berlegungskraft versagt
seien. The latter condition, however, denies them emotions (that is, desire and fear) in
the strict sense. Dierauer 196 n. 8 cites several passages in Philodemus Peri then (ed.
Diels 1916) for the view that die Tiere unter hnliche ngsten und Schrecken litten wie
die Menschen, e.g. XI.18ff., 32ff.; XIII.29ff.; XV.21ff., but the crucial point is that such
fear is (XI.19, cf. 31, XIII.2931, XV.23), not identical to the human emotion; cf.
Diels 1916: 6265. Obbink 1996: 123 translates Philodemus De pietate 9.311 = 232242 as
follows: Again, because not even the other animals [zia] had been deprived of the analogy
of disturbance [taragma], and because about this humans have the fear of death Obbink
parses the underlined phrase (n.5) as deprived by early humans in their thinking; but
I wonder whether the point is rather that animals are not subject to tarakh in the strict
Epicurean Passions
20
as quoted by Porphyry in De abstinentia (1.12), notes that there can be
no justice between human beings and animals because the latter lack
reason or logos (cf. Epicurus Principal Doctrine 32; Warren 2002: 13840).
Polystratus, who, according to Diogenes Laertius (10.25), succeeded
Hermarchus as the third head of the Garden, clearly denies to animals
the possibility of either recalling or anticipating events, including their
own prior or future states of pleasure and pain (coll. IVII = Indelli 1978:
10911; cf. Warren 2002: 13738). Moreover, Lucretius provides, I believe,
indirect evidence that animals do not experience emotions, and more
particularly fear. Lucretius is attempting to explain the odd fact that lions
cannot endure the sight of roosters, but instantly take to flight (4.71013).
He writes (4.71421):
ni mirum quia sunt gallorum in corpore quaedam
semina, quae cum sunt oculis inmissa leonum,
pupillas interfodiunt acremque dolorem
praebent, ut nequeant contra durare feroces,
cum tamen haec nostras acies nil laedere possint,
aut quia non penetrant aut quod penetrantibus illis
exitus ex oculis liber datur, in remorando
laedere ne possint ex ulla lumina parte.
Nor is it any wonder, since in the body of roosters there are
certain constituents, which when they are introduced into the
sense, any more than the gods are. Atherton 2005: 127 (citing On Nature 25, 1056 5.1.11
and Laursen 1995: 16) remarks: There is some evidence that Epicurus recognised a
distinction between animals that are, and animals that are not, subject to something like
moral assessment. Given the criterion by which it is dened, such animals must be
able not merely to learn, and to modify their behaviourincluding, presumably, their
signaling and vocalising behaviour, but to do so in response to experiences based
on reward and punishment directed toward the acquisition of very particular disposi-
tions: otherwise it is hard to see why we should think of them as liable to the mode of
admonition and correction (25, 1191 7.2.5.24, Laursen 1995: 31). But the origin of such
modications remains notoriously mysterious. Other evidence about the Epicurean
school points to disagreement about the status of animals, and gives little or no guid-
ance on the issue of intentionality.
21
eyes of lions, dig into their pupils and produce a sharp pain, so
that, fierce as they are, they cannot withstand it, although these
[constituents] cannot harm our eyes, either because they do not
penetrate them or because, though they do penetrate, they are
given free passage out of our eyes, so that they cannot harm our
eyes in any direction by remaining trapped inside.
The lions avoidance of roosters is instinctive; it results from an imme-
diate physical pain (dolor), produced by simulacra that are so shaped
as to cause pain in the visual apparatus of these animals in particular.
The rooster does not pose an actual threat to the lion; nevertheless, the
lions reaction is not an instance of empty or vain opinion (kenodoxia),
since it does not involve a judgment (doxa) at all. The entire process
occurs at the level of the non-rational soul: it does not involve memory
or learning from experience, for if it did, the lion would soon overcome
its dismay and make a meal of the creature.
29
Properly speaking, then,
the lion does not fear the rooster. This same analysis will explain the
instinctive impulse to flee that deer, for example, experience at the sight
of a predator, where the danger of harm is perfectly real. In neither case
is reason involved: deer no more learn to avoid lions than lions learn
to avoid roosters. What passes for fear is simply the natural tendency
of all creatures to shun pain.
There may be a special term for the fear-like evasion of painful
stimuli that is characteristic of animals. Lucretius seems to employ metus
chiefly of human fear; it is often associated with cura or anxiety (an
exception is 5.1061, where metus is paired with dolor in the phrase metus
aut dolor). So too timor is reserved for the human emotion, and most
frequently occurs in connection with the fear of death. Pavor, however,
may be used of animals (e.g., 3.305, 3.743), though it is also applied to
29 Aristotle is not entirely consistent on whether animals have memory or other
rational capacities; in History of Animals 8, 589a12, for example, he allows that the
more intelligent [sunettera] ones, which have a share in memory, do tend their off-
spring longer and more sociably [politikteron]; cf. Generation of Animals 753a717, on
the more clever (phronimtera) animals having an attachment (suntheia) and affection
(philia) for their young.
Epicurean Passions
22
humans in connection with a childs instinctive fear of the dark (for the
verb paveo, cf. 2.376).
30
Whether or not it is the case, as I have suggested, that Epicurus
deliberately restricted the use of the term pathos to the non-rational
sensations of pleasure and pain, as opposed to emotions such as fear
that entail rational judgments, Philodemus, in his treatise On Anger,
clearly does refer to anger (org) as a pathos, although the term most
often seems to carry a negative connotation.
31
Philodemus in this
essay draws a sharp distinction between org, which he, like Aristotle,
considers a legitimate response to harm or insult, and what he calls
thumos, which is excessively intense. Thus, Giovanni Indelli (2004:
104) explains:
With org, Philodemus designates the true and proper feeling
of anger, without further specifications. When it is caused (as
happens in the greater part of the cases) by particular actions or
behaviors, when, that is, it is not ken org (empty org), it need
not, for the Epicureans, be repressed, because it is considered
something natural and rationally controllable, in contrast to thymos,
30 In those passages in which Lucretius does ascribe apparently human emotions to
animals, I suggest that this is, strictly speaking, an analogical usage (as Fortenbaugh
says of Aristotle); cf. the analysis of the origin of human language at 5.105690, where
Lucretius says that animals too are capable of vocally expressing metus (1061) as well
as dolor and gaudia (surely = voluptas), and note too rabies (1065). Lucretius is accurate
in describing these animal states as sensus (1087), feelings; only human beings can
use language to identify things (res, 1058, 1090) in the world outside. Cf. Atherton
2005: 128: horses are said by Lucretius to have a mind [mens, animus] (2.265, 268,
270; cf. Annas 1993: 67), and animals are said to dream, as we do, about the important
events in their lives (4.9841010; cf. Sorabji 1993: 289). But (pace Annas 1993: 67) at 3.299
there is nothing necessarily rational about the stags mind, for this, being governed
by cold air currents, is more like its natural temperament (intellect [animus], 288,
and nature [natura], 302, are clearly synonyms for mens here). Similarly, the horses
mens may be (the physiological basis of) its consciousness or subjectivity, not (that
of) its rationality.
31 E.g., III 23: [] (the angry path) VI 13,
(the path in our soul that accompany
us on account of our false opinions), where pathos refers to passion resulting from
false opinion; XV 17, ,
(a pathos carries one away to such an
23
characterized by a fundamental irrationality, since the latter is the
product of instinct and not of logismos (calculation).
32
Now, it is unlikely that excessive or uncontrolled anger is a prod-
uct of instinct. Jeffrey Fish (2004: 121) argues that there is reason to
believe that only in Philodemus school, even among the Epicureans,
was any theory of anger like this taught.
33
Even if this is so, and despite
the damage to the text, Philodemus would not have described an instinc-
tive or non-rational response as empty. A pathos in this sense is, as we
have seen, always correct and incorrigible. If anger is empty or vain,
extent as to make an angry person give up those things for which he has the ercest
desires), where again pathos seems used of excessive or irrational anger; XXVI 11,
; XL 36, ,
; (having been deliberately harmed by someone or
having the impression that one will be harmed, will one experience the same pathos?);
XLIII 8, , (nor should one
the difference that the pathos has in respect to the event); passages cited from Indelli
1988. Mitsis 1988: 13940 refers to this treatise for conrmation of the role of belief in
the path, but Philodemus use of pathos in this connection is, I think, a novelty, and very
likely inuenced by Stoicism.
32 Cf. Indelli 1988: 24: Filodemo distingue lira dallirascibilit, cio il pathos vero e proprio
dallinclinazione a caderne preda; Indelli 2004: 10506: Even for the Epicureans, then,
the difference was quite clearunderscored by Philodemus in col. xlv.3337between
org, natural anger, springing from motives that are justied, moderate in its duration
and its intensity, and thymos (which Philodemus seems also to call ken org), blind and
uncontrolled rage, to which the wise man certainly is unable to fall prey; Fish 2004:
114, citing XLIV 535; Armstrong 2008; Sanders forthcoming.
33 Fish notes further (133n46): Much of Philodemus treatise is taken up by polemic
against Epicureans who did not share his views concerning the nature of anger and
its proper treatment. It is possible that Philodemus inherited these views from his
teacher Zeno. Cf. Procop 1993: 37886. Julia Annas (1989) argues that Philodemus also
adapted Epicurus distinction between natural and necessary desires to his own dis-
tinction between natural and empty anger. She afrms that in Epicurus natural desires
are for generic things, like food or drink, whereas natural but unnecessary desires are
for particular foods, e.g. lobster (15152); the empty belief is that this particular food is
necessary. Anger, while not a desire (153), has desire for revenge as a component part,
as Aristotle and the Stoics (Arius Didymus ap. Stobaeus Ecl. 2.91.1011) maintained. To
take pleasure in punishing others is perverse, according to Philodemus (col. 42.2234);
retaliation may correct or be taken to excess as a result of empty belief, although here
False beliefs do not attach the desire to retaliate to a specic object, as false beliefs
attach the desire to eat to lobster in particular (160).
Epicurean Passions
24
it must mean that it is based on, or involves, the addition of opinion: it
is the doxa that is false, and this pertains to to logikon, not to the alogon
meros or non-rational part of the psukh.
More than any other philosophical school in antiquity, and in pro-
nounced contrast to Aristotle in particular, the Epicureans were concerned
with emotions that appear to have no reasonable object in the world:
emotions, that is, and above all fear, that are elicited by false beliefs about
the nature of an ostensibly threatening or harmful event. Epicurus des-
ignated these emotions as empty (kenos), in the sense that they depend
on vain opinion. Aristotle noted in passing that people may experience
fear even when there exists no immediate cause in the environment (De
anima 1.1, 403a2324: -
). But he did not suggest that such fear was
a pervasive cause of human malaise; as William Harris (2001: 16) states
in respect to anger, Aristotle and all the other classical authors who
defined anger agreed, in effect, that it was an emotion with a specific
object, which is precisely what a mood is not. But for the Epicureans,
emotions elicited by events that do not justify them were a primary
object of attention. Thus, analogously to the distinction between two
kinds of anger drawn by Philodemus, Diogenes of Oenoanda discrimi-
nates two types of fear (frag. 35.II Smith): As a matter of fact this fear is
sometimes clear, sometimes not clearclear when we avoid something
manifestly harmful like fire through fear that we shall meet death by it,
not clear when, while the mind is occupied with something else, it (fear)
has insinuated itself into our nature and [lurks]. (trans. Smith 1993:
385; the last word represents one possible restoration of the Greek text,
which breaks off at this point).
The Epicurean emphasis on the vanity of the object of fear, in par-
ticular in the case of the fear of death, made it essential to locate fear
and other emotions in the rational part of the soul, where the direct
and incontrovertible evidence provided by sensation and the path was
embellished by the addition of belief. Nancy Sherman (2000: 155) has
observed that on Aristotles appraisal-based view of the emotions,
emotional shifts are the result of cognitive shifts. But, she adds, this
intellectualist approach constitutes a limitation to his theory: What
Aristotle doesnt explore is why some emotions dont reform at the
25
beck and call of reason (156). Sherman extends her critique to ancient
Greek and Roman thought as a whole: The question Ancient moral
psychology leaves us with (though the Ancients never ask it) is, why
doesnt persuasion work? That is, why doesnt rational discourse undo
irrational emotions? These are the very questions, as Sherman notes,
that underlie Freuds project (157). Thus, although Freud allies himself
with the Aristotelian view that emotions have cognitive or ideational
content, he departs from this view in a radical way by stipulating that
ideational content may be unconscious. Rage at you may really be
about rage at myself (ibid.).
In the Hellenistic period, however, some philosophical schools did
pose the question of why certain emotional responses seem to be resis-
tant to amelioration (for the Stoic account, see Graver 2007: 14963). The
Epicureans in particular held that people are commonly mistaken about
the causes of their emotions, and more particularly are universally con-
sumed by the fear of death, a fear they either conceal or misrecognize.
To help rid human beings of this anxiety, they elaborated a complex
doctrine involving two levels of the soul, the one irrational and the
seat of sensations and feelings or path, the other rational and the locus
of those emotions that depend essentially on belief. In addition, they
examined how such false beliefs arose in the course of human history,
and why they persist in the face of argument, thanks to the vicious circle
of mutually reinforcing fears and desires. The roots of Epicurus theory
in many ways lie in the tradition represented by Plato and Aristotle, but
he gave their insights a radically new twist. His doctrine of the path is
a crucial element in this development.
Epicurean Passions
27
It is important, in understanding Epicureanism, to observe that the
Epicureans play down talk of praise and blame.
1
Although Philodemus
composed a work in ten books entitled On Vices and the Opposing Virtues,
which includes one book On Household Management (PHerc. 1424), one
On Arrogance (the tenth = PHerc. 1008), and probably three books On
Flattery (PHerc. 222, 223, 1082, 1089, 1457, and 1675), the Epicureans have
little to say about virtue, in the sense of promoting standards or ideals
that prescribe what is right or fitting to do.
2
Lucretius rarely uses the
1 Philodemus On Frank Speech (Konstan et al. 1998) advocates a nuanced use of frank
criticism () in the instruction of novices, which may involve the judicious applica-
tion of blame (, 13.23, 87.89, XIXa.12; , 35.7, , IXb.3, IXb.4,
IXb.5, IXb.12; cf. 77N.45) and praise (, VIIIa.10, 49.12, XIIIb.12,
XVIIIa.8, 68.45, IIa.12 [conjectured], T4.I.3). But the emphasis in pedagogy was
on a correct understanding of the doctrine, not on virtuous or vicious actions as such.
Contrast Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1.12, 1101b3132,
(praise is for virtue; for people perform ne deeds
as a result of virtue); 1.13, 1103910: (we
call praiseworthy dispositions virtues).
2 Cf. Letter to Menoeceus 132: .
,
, ,
.
(The beginning of all these things,
and the greatest good, is prudence. Therefore prudence, from which all the remaining
virtues arise, is a more valuable thing than philosophy, since prudence teaches that it
is impossible to live pleasantly without living prudently, nobly, and justly, <nor to live
CHAPTER 2
Psychology
28
word ofcium, duty or responsibilityonly five times does the word
occur in De rerum natura, and in three of these it just means natural
function.
3
In fact, Cicero attacked Epicureanism on just this point,
and because it afforded no ofcii praecepta, counsel in respect to duty,
he denied that it was a philosophy at all.
4
The reason is not, of course,
that the Epicureans were indifferent to what people do or feel, but they
prudently, nobly, and justly> without living pleasantly. For the virtues are naturally
combined with living pleasantly and living pleasantly is inseparable from the virtues);
and cf. KD 5. The emphasis here is on pleasure as the condition for virtue, not the reverse;
cf. Cicero De nibus 1.2930, and Alberti 1994; also Athenaeus 12.546 (cf. 7.280b):
,
(In On the Goal, again: one must
value nobility and the virtues and things of this kind, if they provide pleasure; but if
they do not, then farewell to them); and fr. 72a = Plutarch Against Colotes 1117a1:
[]
,
(In his letter to Anaxarchus [Epicurus] wrote as follows: I summon people to
continuous pleasures and not to virtues, which are empty and vain and bring with them
perturbing expectations of rewards). Philodemus did of course mention and analyze
virtues and vices in various treatises, e.g. On Frank Criticism 57.3 (). Note especially
Philodemus [if he is indeed the author] treatment of the interaction of pleasure and the
virtues (an extended list) in On Choices and Avoidances (Indelli and Tsouna-McKirahan
1995) XIV; Indelli and Tsouna-McKirahan comment (175): The author claims that there
is a one-way entailment between a pleasant life and a virtuous life, i.e. that the former
entails a life in which all the virtues are present at once, and they add: The passage is
a paraphrase of Epicurus thesis that virtue and pleasure are intrinsically connected.
Indelli and Tsouna-McKirahan argue further that Epicurus viewed virtue as a unitary
state of the mind in which the virtues are distinguishable but not separable from one
another, though they acknowledge that Epicurus did not explicitly argue for the
doctrine of the unity of the virtues (176; cf. 33n30, 4446). He did not necessarily need
to, since his point, I take it, is that someone who understands in the proper sense that
pleasure is the telos will behave in the ways that people generally understand to be
virtuous (it is a one-way entailment); there are no virtuous dispositions (or a single
virtuous disposition) as such, in the way that Aristotle and the Stoics maintained.
3 Function at 1.336, 362, and 4.857; at 1.336 there is a pun of the verb ofcio, which
accounts for the use of ofcium there and at 362; cf. Friedlnder 1941: 19. At 2.605 the
term apparently signies kindness rather than duties; at 4.1124 it has its common
signicance in a passing reference to everyday obligations. For Lucretius treatment of
such fundamental Roman ethical concepts as ius and virtus, see Minyard 1985: 5152;
Minyard concludes (52): Like civitas and ius, virtus proves uninteresting and unuseful
to Lucretius the Epicurean.
4 Cicero De ofciis 1.2.56. Epicurus does speak of offering instructions ()
on how to live properly (Letter to Menoeceus 123, 126), but by this he refers to the
29
Psychology
believed that if they do what is necessary for pleasure, they will natu-
rally be just.
5
The problem remained that while human nature clamors
for its simple pleasures, easy to provide, human beings are tormented
by vain fears and are engaged in irrational pursuits. Part of the task of
Epicurean psychology was to explain why this is so. The explanation
that Epicurus developed rested largely upon an analysis, original and
profound, of irrational fears and desires.
The proem to Book 2 of Lucretius De rerum natura is subtle and con-
densed, but it accurately reflects (I believe) Epicurus thinking concern-
ing the connection between irrational fears and desires, and provides a
good point of entry into the question.
6
It begins with a vivid sequence of
images that describe, with considerable economy, how irrational desires
threaten the tranquillity and even the lives of those they hold in thrall.
7

Because it has been seen, however, as a mere expression of selfish egoism,
it is necessary to pause a moment to examine it in some detail. First, the
accusation, as represented by Cyril Bailey, in his massive commentary
on the poem (1947: 2.797):
There remain the introductory lines (113) which to almost all
readers have an unpleasant taste of egoism and even of cruelty.
The Epicurean philosopher, secure in his own independence, gaz-
ing on the troubles and struggles of his fellow-men is an almost
cynical picture; Bacon referred to it ironically as Lucretian plea-
sure. Nor can it be wholly defended, for it is true that Epicurus
hedonism was essentially individualistic; the Epicurean must
elements () of his philosophical system, not to moral advice as such. Cf. Indelli
and Tsouna-McKirahan 1995: 18081.
5 See further pp. 5458 below.
6 It will be clear that I do not accept the distinction that Bonelli (1979: 89) draws between
Lucretius atteggiamento sentimentale che ha in s e solo in s le proprie motivazioni,
di ordine intuitivo e fantastico, and which non ha sicuramente nessun rapporto con
Epicuro, and Lucretius the Epicurean, understood as quei momenti dellopera in cui
lesposizione non si accende di particolare luce poetica; Bonelli insists that la questione
lologica contiene un errore di metodo in quanto non distingue lelemento documentario
dallelemento poetico.
7 For the gure of the priamel, and its place in the tradition of the philosophical pro-
treptic, see the rich collection of parallels in Fowler 2002: 1828.
30
be freed from the pains of body and mind, and it would no doubt
enhance his sense of pleasure to observe the contrast in the lives of others.
Perhaps the only pleas which could be made in extenuation are
that in practice the Epicurean, like the founder himself, showed
a large degree of kindness to others (), and that it
was the aim of Lucr. to make converts, so that as many men as
possible might share Epicurean tranquillity. We may remember
too the strong Epicurean injunction against taking part in public
affairs: was to be carried out literally.
8
Here is the text:
Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis,
e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem;
non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas,
sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est.
5 suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri
per campos instructa tua sine parte pericli,
sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere
edita doctrina sapientum templa serena,
despicere unde queas alios passimque videre
10 errare atque viam palantis quaerere vitae,
certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate,
noctes atque dies niti praestante labore
ad summas emergere opes rerumque potiri.
9
8 Italics mine. Baileys extenuation of Epicurus is the same as Ciceros (above, n. 4).
Boyanc (1963: 43) rescues Lucretius by means of a subtle distinction: Disonsce
nest pas vaine subtilitque cest la vue des misres des insenss qui rjouit le sage,
non celle des insenss misrables. Fowler 2002: 39 notes that Lucretius makes the
consciousness of ones own lack of pain the main element, rather than pleasure in
anothers discomfort; Nevertheless, he adds (40), Lucretian comfort is apt to seem
selsh and anything but humanitarian (citing Nichols 1976: 62), though he defends the
passivity of the sage in these situations on the grounds that they are ones in which we
are helpless to do anything (41) to relieve the persons in distress. For an interpretation
similar to mine, see Holtsmark 1967.
9 Text according to Bailey 1949 unless otherwise indicated.
31
Psychology
I provide the English prose version by Martin Ferguson Smith
(2001: 35):
It is comforting, when winds are whipping up the waters of the
vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person:
not that anyones distress is a cause of agreeable pleasure; but it is
comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt. It is
comforting also to witness mighty clashes of warriors embattled
on the plains, when you have no share in the danger. But nothing
is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified
by the teaching of the wise, tranquil sanctuaries from which you
can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere
in their random search for the way of life, competing for intel-
lectual eminence, disputing about rank, and striving night and
day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to
secure power.
10
Two questions, which Bailey however does not raise, suggest them-
selves with respect to the first four verses: from what kinds of evils
(malis, 4) is the Epicurean sage exempt, and what is the cause and nature
of the sentiment that he derives when he observes them? Lucretius
has adapted, in the initial image, a commonplace or proverbial figure,
and similar expressions elsewhere may help to indicate the nature of
the sentiment. In 59 B.C., Cicero described to Atticus (ad Att. 2.7.4) his
feelings about the state of Roman politics: I desire to gaze upon those
shipwrecks from the land, I desire, as your friend Sophocles says, to hear
the thick hail from beneath my roof, with my heart in slumber (cupio
istorum naufragia ex terra intueri, cupio, ut ait tuus amicus Sophocles,
10 Smith 2001: 35 n. 1 cites Baileys criticism and observes: In reply, two points may be
made. One is that Lucr. is careful to stress that pleasure is derived not from the suffering
of other people, but from the thought that one is not sharing it, and surely what he says
is true. The other point is that, although the Epicureans experienced enhanced pleasure
when they compared their own tranquillity and happiness with the discontent and
unhappiness of the unenlightened, they made it their business to bring the message of
truth and salvation to those in ignorance of it. My own defense of Lucretius thought
is of a different nature, as will become clear.
32
).
11
A still closer parallel is
a fragment of the Athenian comic poet, Archippus: How sweet it is to
gaze upon the sea from the land, Mother, when one is not oneself sail-
ing anywhere ( , ,
).
12
The two Greek dramatists are clearly expressing the
same sentiment, the sweet pleasure that attaches to a sense of security.
This is surely also the thought that is uppermost in the lines of Lucretius,
inasmuch as security (), as DeWitt (1954: 184) has put it, was a
catchword of Epicureanism.
13
Ciceros remark seems to be in the same
spirit; however, since Cicero, like Lucretius, alludes not only to his own
safety but to the misfortunes of others as well, there is the impression
of another, less worthy sentiment: the selfish delight that resides in
estimating ones own good fortune by the afflictions of others.
14
Is this
idea also present, as Bailey supposes, in Lucretius?
Apparently anticipating such misunderstanding, Lucretius rejects
the notion at once: not because there is an enjoyable pleasure in the fact
that anyone else is suffering distress (non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda
voluptas, 3). Ernout and Bailey, however, dismiss this emphatic disclaimer
as an effort to corriger ce que cette exclamation goste peut avoir de cho-
quant, or to tone down its harshness.
15
But consistency is on the side
of Lucretius, for a sense of securityif that is the idea hereis unlikely
to emerge from the contemplation of bad fortune as such, which would
rather prompt an awareness of ones own vulnerability. It remains, then,
11 Sophocles Tympanistae fr. 579 Nauck = fr. 636 Radt (with slightly different text: ,

). For related passages, see Fowler 2002: 2833.
12 Archippus fr. 43 Kock = fr. 45 Kassel-Austin.
13 Cf. Principal Doctrines 7, 13, 14, 28; Vatican Sayings 17, 31; On Nature fr. 26.42
Arrighetti
2
.
14 I think we can safely exclude the idea that Lucretius is referring to the malicious
pleasure that derives simply from the spectacle of another persons suffering, what in
German is called Schadenfreude and in Greek epikhairekia (see Aristotle Rhetoric 1386b34;
Nicomachean Ethics 1107a10). This was perceived as a wholly ignoble sentiment, akin to
phthonos or envy, and would certainly be alien to the Epicurean sage. The delight arising
from the mere comparison of ones own well-being with the lesser comfort of another
is more respectable; cf. Democritus fr. D55 Taylor = B 191 Diels-Kranz, quoted below
pp. 3738.
15 Bailey 1947: 2.797; Ernout and Robin 1962: 203 ad v. 1.
33
Psychology
to determine the cause of the sentiment that Lucretius onlooker enjoys.
Lucretius gives the reason in the fourth verse, but because the lan-
guage is condensed, it requires close analysis to bring out its significance:
sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est. Bailey renders the line
as follows: but because it is sweet to perceive from what misfortunes
you yourself are free. This translation, however, leaves several points
unclear. First of all, we may note that the phrase, cernere quibus malis careas
(to put it in ordinary prose word order), is ambiguous. Grammatically, it
is in the form of an indirect question (to perceive from what you are
free), which requires that careas be in the subjunctive; it may have been
so in the direct statement as well, or else have been in the indicative. In
the latter case, it will mean from what particular misfortunes you are
free (i.e., the storm at sea that Lucretius imagines); in the former, it will
mean to perceive from what kind of misfortunes you are free.
16
Bailey
evidently adopts the first alternative, but there is good reason not to
reject the second.
In the second place, although perceive as the translation of cernere is
satisfactory in one respect, in that the Latin term may denote intellectual
discrimination as well as optical vision,
17
it fails to capture another sense
of cernere that is particularly frequent in De rerum natura, that of discern-
ing or making out something small, remote, or otherwise difficult to
see or understand. It is the word used of descrying things just become
visible, or, with a negative modifier, of not quite seeing things below the
threshold of discrimination or not naturally perceptible. There are some
40 occurrences of cernere (in the infinitive) in Lucretius, and more than
half of them bear this special connotation of detect or discern.
18
If
cernere may mean discern in the passage under consideration, then the
way is open to an interpretation different from Baileys, one that will not
leave Lucretius or the Epicureans exposed to the charge of cruelty. For on
16 Cf. Munro 1886: 2.118; Holtsmark 1967: 199n15; Paratore and Pizzani 1960: 194 translate
da quali mali tu sia libero.
17 For the intellectual sense, see 1.347, 4.915; the visual meaning is far the
most common.
18 For the special connotation, cf. 1.134, 301, 327, 600, 751; 2.140, 248, 250, 314, 315, 827,
837; 3.359; 4.105, 596, 610, 760, 767, 803, 809, 1231; 5.63; 6.407. The proportion is similar for
other forms of the verb.
34
this interpretation, cernere will not simply repeat the meaning of spectare
in v. 2, and will not refer to the pleasure that derives from beholding a
person struggling on a foundering ship.
Finally, the word careo, in this context, perhaps means something more
than is indicated by the phrase, to be free of. For careo may sometimes
denote an essential, rather than a temporary or accidental privation: thus
carere morte (Horace Odes 2.18.12), for example, means to be immortal or
not to be susceptible to death.
19
In line with the preceding arguments,
then, the entire verse might be accurately, if not wholly elegantly, ren-
dered: but because it is sweet to discern the kind of evils to which you
yourself are not susceptible. On this reading, the cause of the sense of
security is revealed as the awareness that one is safe from certain mis-
fortunes. The question remains: what kinds of evils are these?
No one is free from what is arbitrary or fortuitous, so the evils can-
not be of this kind. Rather, they must be avoidable evils, easily and
naturally avoidable, of the kind one must pursue if one is to encounter
them. Now, to the Romans, even more than to the Greeks, a storm at sea
was just this type of misfortune. It is a commonplace of Roman poetry,
which Kirby Flower Smith, among others, has amply illustrated, that
seafaring violates the law of nature and of the gods, and is therefore
impious. That is, seafaring is not regarded as a natural occupation.
More important, the motive of seafaring is greed of gain.
20
In turn, the
perils of the sea are regarded as the punishment for human cupidity:
natura insidians pontum substravit avaris (Propertius 3.7.37). Lucretius own
attitude toward seafaring accords well with the typical Roman literary
conception (cf. 5.1000ff., 2.552ff.); it is the association with greed that no
doubt prompted the expression, improba navigii ratio (5.1006).
21
In the light
of this literary topos, Lucretius image of the storm-tossed ship acquires
particular significance: the poet imagines, not the helpless victim of
19 Cf. Lucr. 3.356: dimissa anima corpus caret undique sensu (once the soul is lost, the body
lacks any sensation at all). Ciceros denitiondesiderat, requirit, indiget (Tusc. 1.87, cit.
TLL s.v. ad init.)puts the emphasis on the subjective side of missing something.
20 Smith 1913: 24647; cf. Heydenreich 1970: 1362.
21 Bailey 1947: 1482 suspects that 5.1006 is an interpolation, on the grounds that it inter-
rupts the sequence; but if seafaring is associated with the pursuit of wealth, then the
logic of the passage is clear enough.
35
Psychology
natural disaster, but the audacious trader whose unnatural greed lures
him to incur the perils of the sea.
22
The evils, then, from which one enjoys
sweet security are the misfortunes which attend the lust for wealth; or,
perhaps, it is greed itself which is the evil, and it is the achievement of
Epicureanism that it can free people from such desires. On this reading,
moreover, the opening lines become consistent with the import of the
poem as a whole.
To recapitulate: Lucretius has evoked the sweetness of the sense of
security, but he has intimated as well that this security derives from the
awareness that unnatural desires do not infect the soul. Perhaps, indeed,
the picture of a ship beset by stormy winds suggests a soul laboring
under the blasts of passion. The ship as soul too is a conventional literary
metaphor in antiquity.
23
Lucretius language seems to support the image:
the calm, even waters (aequora) are aroused (turbare) as though by passion
(turbare is the natural Latin equivalent of ).
24
The storm, then,
would be both the symbol and the penalty for immoderate desire.
There were, above all, two unnecessary desires which Lucretius
exposed as the enemies of tranquillity in the soul and in the community:
avarice and ambition. Bailey (1947: 1000 ad 3.59) observes that avarice
and ambition, as Heinze notes, were characteristic Roman vices at the
end of the Republic.
25
The twin desires for wealth and for power are
specifically the focus of Lucretius proem to Book 2: ad summas emergere
opes rerumque potiri (13), or in the translation of Smith: to scale the
summit of wealth and to secure power. The desire for wealth, I have
suggested, is the underlying subject of Lucretius first image, the ship
22 It was a commonplace that merited or earned misfortune does not deserve pity (see
Konstan 2001: 3448); hence the sage would not react with this emotion.
23 Cf. Holtsmark 1967: 195 and n. 7; also Lucretius 6.34 volvere curarum tristis in pectore
uctus, which is a development of the motif (there is a parallel in Catullus 64.62: magnis
curarum uctuat undis).
24 Strong emotions were perturbationes; cf. Cicero Tusculan Disputations 4.10: quae Graeci
vocant, nobis perturbationes magis placet quam morbos (what the Greeks call path,
we prefer to call perturbations rather than diseases).
25 Cf. Cicero De ofciis 1.7.24, 1.8.2526; the reference is to Heinze 1897 ad loc. Minyard
1985: 35 desribes Lucretius poem as an attempt to apply a philosophical system to
the realm of Roman social behavior. But the condemnation of greed () as
a chief instance of irrational desire is not merely Lucretian or Roman, but goes back to
Epicurus himself; see Spinelli 1996.
36
at sea (emergere is a sea metaphor, as Ernout points out, and it perhaps
picks up the motif of the opening lines).
26
The desire for power, in turn,
is alluded to in the second image, taken from warfare (56). The specta-
tor whom Lucretius has in mind is surely not the common soldier but
a powerful officer such as Memmius, for whom military tenure was
a necessary stage in the cursus honorum and in the service of political
ambition. Even if tua parte (6) = your share does not refer to Memmius
27

himself but is the generalizing second person formula, it must refer to
a high-ranking military officer, as is clear from Lucretius summary of
his argument at vv. 3741:
quapropter quoniam nil nostro in corpore gazae
proficiunt neque nobilitas nec gloria regni,
quod superest, animo quoque nil prodesse putandum;
si non forte tuas legiones per loca campi
fervere cum videas belli simulacra cientis, etc.
Again, in Smiths version (2001: 36):
Therefore, since neither riches nor rank nor the pomp of power
have any beneficial effect upon our bodies, we must assume that
they are equally useless to our minds. Or when you watch your
legions swarming over the spacious Plain in vigorous imitation
of war, etc.
Your legions (tuas legiones) can only refer to a person of consular or
near-consular status (Smith 2001: 36 n. 6 suggests that the Plain is the
Campus Martius, and that Lucretius may have witnessed the exercises
of Julius Caesars army there in 58 B.C.). Here again, then, the pleasure
in beholding the contests of war (certamina; cf. certare, 11) derives from a
feeling of complete security from this kind of danger: the Epicurean sage
is free not to participate in such pursuits, and was encouraged to lead a
life unencumbered by political aspirationsto live inconspicuously
26 Ernout and Robin 1962: 20506 ad 2.13; cf. Fowler 2002: 6465.
27 For the question of reference to Memmius in the poem, see Farrington 1965: 24ff.
37
Psychology
( ), in the formula adopted by Plutarch as the title of one of his
essays (Moralia 1128A; for Plutarchs polemical purpose in this essay, see
Gallo 1996). The model for such a disengaged style of life in Lucretius own
time was Ciceros intimate friend Atticus, who avoided all public office
and succeeded in remaining on amicable terms with all parties, whether
partisans of Caesar or of Pompey. Struggle and danger (laborem, 2 and
pericli, 6) are the conditions of life for the uninstructed (cf. labore, 12 and
periclis, 15). The thrice-repeated adjective magnus (1, 2, 5) underscores, I
think, the excess in such desires; for the natural needs of human beings,
pauca videmus esse opus omnino (2021: And so we see that the nature of
the body is such that it needs few things, trans. Smith 2001: 36).
With the third and culminating image of a fortified citadel, the meta-
phor becomes transparent (713). The true fortress of security is the
teaching of the wise (doctrina sapientum, 8), that is, the philosophy of
Epicurus. From this vantage point alone may one look down in safety
upon the restless and futile activity of people who stray and wander,
strive and contend, reduce talent, station and industry (ingenio, nobilitate,
labore, 1112) to the service of empty and limitless desire.
28
Amid the
frantic, compulsive motion at sea, on the battlefield, everywhere, only
the Epicurean is stationary and secure.
There is a fragment of the ethical writings of Democritus, preserved
in Stobaeus, that bears a striking similarity to the passage under discus-
sion in Lucretius, and it is illuminating to compare the two.
29
Democritus
writes (frg. 191 Diels-Kranz):

.

.

28 Ingenia is the usual word for natural ability, in contrast to labor, effort or diligent
practice. The idea of restlessness is conveyed in the words errare, palantis, certare,
contendere.
29 Morel 2000: 54 observes that this passage of Democritus annonce ainsi le clbre
prologue du Chant II de Lucrce; for interpretation, cf. Morel pp. 6061.
38
,
,
,
,
.

.
, ,

,
.
,
.
In the translation of Taylor (1999: 25 = frg. D55), the passage runs:
For men achieve cheerfulness by moderation in pleasure and
by proportion in their life; excess and deficiency are apt to fluctu-
ate and cause great changes in the soul. And souls which change
over great intervals are neither stable nor cheerful. So one should
set ones mind on what is possible and be content with what one
has, taking little account of those who are admired and envied,
and not dwelling on them in thought, but one should consider
the lives of those who are in distress, thinking of their grievous
sufferings, so that what one has and possesses will seem great
and enviable, and one will cease to suffer in ones soul through
the desire for more. For he who admires those who have and who
are congratulated by others and is always dwelling on them in
his memory is continually obliged to get up to new tricks and
in his desire to achieve something to attempt some wicked deed
which is forbidden by the laws. Therefore one should not seek
those things, but should be cheerful at the thought of the oth-
ers, comparing ones own life with that of those who are faring
worse, and should congratulate oneself when one thinks of what
they are suffering, and how much better one is doing and living
39
Psychology
than they are. For by maintaining that frame of mind one will
live more cheerfully and will avert not a few evils in ones life,
jealousy and envy and malice.
Cheerfulness (), according to Democritus, is acquired through
moderation (), which is interpreted as a certain stability of the
soul (); moderation, in turn, is understood as the freedom from
envy () or desire (), and to realize this disposition, it is help-
ful to contemplate the lives of those less fortunate than we. Desire under-
mines the cheerfulness and tranquillity of the soul by stirring up restless
and illicit aspirations (,
).
30
For Lucretius, too, there is a joy in the freedom from restless desire, and
a sense of liberty and security may be stimulated by reflection upon the
compulsive pursuits of others (cf. Smith 2001: 35 n. 1, cited in n. 10: the
Epicureans experienced enhanced pleasure when they compared their own
tranquillity and happiness with the discontent and unhappiness of the
unenlightened). Nevertheless, there is an important difference between
the two, and it points, I think, to a fundamental distinction between
Epicurean doctrine and Democritus more practical ethic, at least so far
as the fragments permit us to infer. Democritus wisdom does not seem to
go beyond gnomic exhortation and advice.
31
In the passage just cited, the
suggestion is: count your blessings. Such precepts may be useful, but they
do not seem to constitute the kind of psychological theory or approach
that the Epicureans developed, doubtless thanks to the inspiration of
Democritus.
32
Lucretius does not suggest that a comparison of fortunes
30 The passage is discussed by Bailey 1928: 199; for a detailed analysis, see Warren
2002: 4464. Warren notes (46) that Democritus is no full-blooded hedonist since he
does not characterise the best life as one in which the maximum amount of pleasure
is enjoyed.
31 See, for example, fragments 198203, and, among the gnmai, fragments 37, 3941,
5657, etc.; on Democritus ethical theory, see Vlastos 1945, 1946; also Kahn 1985;
Konstan 1987.
32 Nausiphanes substituted the term akataplxia (undauntability) for Democritus ath-
ambi, fearlessness, as crucial to the good life, which invites comparison with Epicurus
ataraxia or imperturbability; on Nausiphanes role in transmitting Democritus teach-
ings to Epicurus, see Warren 2002: 16092.
40
can, in and of itself, bring about moderation in desire or cheerfulness. For
the Epicureans, envy and competitiveness were not the causes of excessive
desire; at most, they were manifestations of it. The cause of immoderate
desire was, according to the Epicureans, irrational fear:
denique avarities et honorum caeca cupido
60 quae miseros homines cogunt transcendere finis
iuris et interdum socios scelerum atque ministros
noctes atque dies niti praestante labore
ad summas emergere opes, haec vulnera vitae
non minimam partem mortis formidine aluntur (3.5964).
In the translation of Smith (2001: 69):
Furthermore, avarice and blind lust for status, which drive
wretched people to encroach beyond the boundaries of right and
sometimes, as accomplices and abettors of crime, to strive night and
day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealththese
sores of life are nourished in no small degree by dread of death.
The phrasing in this proem to the third book clearly echoes that of
the proem to the second (noctes atque dies niti praestante labore ad summas
emergere opes, 2.1213), and underscores the connection between the two
passages. Irrational desire (caeca cupido), in the form of avarice and ambi-
tion (avarities, honorum), is nourished by the fear of death. In this relation
between desire and fear, I argue, lies the profound insight of Epicurus
and the advance represented by his psychological theory.
33
The question
remains, however, just how the fear of death is translated into desire.
33 Kenney 1971: 83 ad 5986 writes: The idea that avarice and ambition, with all their
attendant crimes, are motivated by the fear of death seems to be L.s own extension of
the Epicurean thesis that it was a desire for security ( = stabilis vita 66) that
drove men to seek fame and status (.. 7, 73 Us.; cf. Cic. De Fin. 1.5961). What lends
L.s exposition of the idea its peculiarly urgent avour is of course its contemporary
relevance. But, as we have seen, Epicurus too speaks of the drive to accumulate wealth
and power.
41
Psychology
This question takes us to the heart of Epicurus doctrine.
34
To resume the discussion of the argument of the proem to Book 2: in
the introductory lines 113, Lucretius explains that desire undermines
the security of the soul, and further observes that desire is the result of
ignorance. Lucretius makes it clear in the following verses that human
beings are ignorant of the elementary requirements of their natures:
o miseras hominum mentis, o pectora caeca!
15 qualibus in tenebris vitae quantisque periclis
34 Smith 2001: xviii notes that the Epicureans regarded fear of death not only as a very
bad thing in itself, but also as the root cause of that feeling of insecurity that leads people
to compete for wealth and power and often to commit crimes or go to war in pursuit of
these objectives. Smith relates Lucretius view to the contemporary turmoil in Rome,
for example the Catilinarian conspiracy. On the association of desires and fears, see
Porphyry To Marcella 29 = Epicurus frr. 203 and 485 Usener. Especially illuminating in
this connection is Porphyry De abstinentia 1.54, cited in Diano 1946: 14546 and in Heinze
1897: 58; the latter observes: Die khne Behauptung, dass die Hauptwurzel auch dieser
bel die Todesfurcht sei, ist echt Epikureisch. Perelli 1969 argues at length and with
considerable ingenuity that anxiety over death plays a role in Lucretius which is entirely
out of proportion to, even if it is not inconsistent with, its signicance in the writings of
Epicurus himself and his successors, like Philodemus. Perelli accounts for this emphasis
by a psychoanalytic diagnosis of Lucretius as a morbidly neurotic personality, a victim,
as Saint Jerome reports (Chronicle, Olympiad 171.3), of periodic depression or insanity.
Perellis book represents an advance over previous efforts along these lines (e.g., Logre
1946, Lortie 1954, Cavendish 1963; cf. also Rozelaar 1943, Beye 1963). But it is unlikely
that Lucretius introduced any major innovations into Epicurus treatment of the fear
of death (Perelli 1969: 80, 89101); see the review of Perelli by Wormell 1971, and more
recently, Sedley 1998, who makes a very strong case for Lucretius fundamentalism in
respect to orthodox Epicurean doctrine; also Konstan 2006 for a discussion of the limits
of Lucretius philosophical originality (Clay 1983 illustrates Lucretius originality in
making his own poem the visible model for the nature of things [35]; cf. also 16991
on Lucretius method). For Philodemus views on the fear of death, see Armstrongs
(2003) brilliant discussion of the treatise On Death; Armstrong remarks (28) on the essays
alternation of sarcasm (harsh frank criticism) with the gentler medicine of genuine
human sympathy for the worst aspects of the fear of death, and its recommendation of
deep, continuous and serious religious meditation on reality and the stark facts as the
only escape from these difcult aspects. Armstrong provides an extensive bibliogra-
phy of discussions of the fear of death in Epicurean and modern philosophy in n. 28 on
pp. 2829, and concludes that most of these articles would need radical revision if the
On Death of Philodemus had been part of modern scholarships apparatus of Epicurean
texts. Indeed, Armstrong remarks (31) that there are some kinds of fear of, and pain
at the thought of, death which even a philosopher will sympathize with.
42
degitur hoc aevi quodcumquest! nonne videre
nil aliud sibi naturam latrare nisi utqui
corpore seiunctus dolor absit, mente fruatur
iucundo sensu cura semota metuque? (2.1419)
O minds of mortals, blighted by your blindness! Amid what
deep darkness and daunting dangers lifes little day is passed!
To think that you should fail to see that nature importunately
demands only that the body may be rid of pain, and that the mind,
divorced from anxiety and fear, may enjoy a feeling of content-
ment! (trans. Smith 2001: 3536)
Natures needs are not difficult to discern or comprehend; she barks
or howls out (latrare, 17)
35
her simple, basic requirements: avoid bodily
pains and mental fears (for the distinction between pains as pertain-
ing to the non-rational part of the soul and fears as disturbances in the
rational part, see Chapter 1, pp. 1016). Lucretius then sets forth in verses
now pleading, now ironic, how neither riches nor power can banish pain
(2036) or ease anxiety (3753).
36
On the contrary, the pursuit of wealth
and power is marked by toil for the body (cf. laborem, 2) and terror for the
mind (pericli, 6). The demands of nature are not mysterious, but people
mysteriously sacrifice natural satisfactions for the sake of wealth without
value and power without safety. If desire is sustained by fear, as Lucretius
affirms, then it is a kind of fear that no natural precautions can allay.
37
Later in the proem, where Lucretius satirizes the motives of greed and
ambition, he explores further the relationship between fear and desire:
35 On the word, see Fowler 2002: 7374.
36 The two segments are equal in length (17 verses each), suggesting that Lucretius has
consciously balanced them; on the careful structure of the proem to Book 2, see Fowler
2002: 1618.
37 I should note here that I am referring primarily to irrational fears and desires, or what
Epicurus referred to as empty passions. The Epicureans did not reprove natural or
limited desires and fears. In a general way, it was a commonplace that fear or concern
over threats to life might lie behind a desire for money sufcient to ensure a relative
security (cf. Anonymus Iamblichi 4, in Diels-Kranz pp. 40102; I am indebted to Tom
Cole for pointing out the similarity between this passage and the Epicurean view).
43
Psychology
quapropter quoniam nil nostro in corpore gazae
proficiunt neque nobilitas nec gloria regni,
quod superest, animo quoque nil prodesse putandum;
40 si non forte tuas legiones per loca campi
fervere cum videas belli simulacra cientis,
subsidiis magnis et ecum vi constabilitas,
ornatas<que> armis itastuas pariterque animatas,
43a fervere cum videas classem lateque vagari,
his tibi tum rebus timefactae religiones
45 effugiunt animo pavidae; mortisque timores
tum vacuum pectus linquunt curaque solutum.
quod si ridicula haec ludibriaque esse videmus,
re veraque metus hominum curaeque sequaces
nec metuunt sonitus armorum nec fera tela
50 audacterque inter reges rerumque potentis
versantur neque fulgorem reverentur ab auro
nec clarum vestis splendorem purpureai,
quid dubitas quin omni sit haec rationi potestas?
(2.3753)
38
In Smiths version (2001: 36):
Therefore, since neither riches nor rank nor the pomp of
power have any beneficial effect upon our bodies, we must
assume that they are equally useless to our minds. Or when
you watch your legions swarming over the spacious Plain in
vigorous imitation of war, reinforced with numerous reserves
and powerful cavalry, uniform in their armor, uniform in their
spirit, and see your fleet swarming and widely fanning out,
39

can it be that these experiences strike terror into your irrational
notions, causing them to flee in panic from your mind? Can it
38 I have departed from the text in Bailey 1947, retaining the manuscript order of vv.
4243; in his earlier Oxford Classical Text (2nd edition, 1928), Bailey printed the manu-
script order.
39 I have added this clause to Smiths translation; Smith omits line 43a, on which see
note 41 below.
44
be that the fears of death leave your breast disburdened and
eased of care? But if we recognize that these suppositions are
absurd and ridiculous, because in reality peoples fears and
the cares at their back dread neither the din of arms nor cruel
darts, and strut boldly among kings and potentates, respect-
ing neither the glitter of gold nor the brilliant luster of purple
raiment, how can you doubt that philosophy alone possesses
the power to resist them?
Wealth and power are thought to provide security against the fears
that beset peoples minds (metus hominum curasque sequaces, 48), fears
that are, at least for the most part, ultimately aspects of the fear of death
(mortisque timores, 45).
40
It is for the sake of security that men practice war
and navigation (4043, 43a):
41
haec vulnera vitae
non minimam partem mortis formidine aluntur.
65 turpis enim ferme contemptus et acris egestas
semota ab dulci vita stabilique videtur
et quasi iam leti portas cunctarier ante;
40 Mortis timores explains or species religiones; the plural timores points to the breadth
or complexity of such fear, as Ernout points out (Ernout and Robin 1962; 1.217).
41 Bailey interprets classem (43a) as legion, rejecting, for no very clear reason, the
possibility that it means eet. Martin took it to mean eet, as Bailey notes (1947:
2.807), and Ernout compares Horace Odes 3.1.3840: neque/ decedit aerata triremi <et>
post equitem sedet atra Cura (nor does dark Anxiety withdraw from a bronze-trimmed
warship, and it sits behind the cavalryman). The words late vagari do not suggest a
review of infantry maneuvers (on the possibility here that simulacra suggests empty
images, see below, n. 49). With a reference to a eet, Lucretius would be continuing
the two images of sea-faring and war with which the proem begins. The verse does
not appear in the main manuscripts of Lucretius; Lambinus inserted here on the basis
of a quotation in Nonius 503 p. 808 Lindsay, where it is attributed to Lucretius. Fowler
2002: 11517 rejects it, on the grounds that it seems weak to have just one line on the
naval forces to four on the array, especially with the anaphora (116); perhaps more has
been lost, but I think the reference back to the opening of the proem, where incidentally
seafaring is given four lines in comparison with two on military excercizes, is sufcient
to justify its inclusion here.
45
Psychology
unde homines dum se falso terrore coacti
effugisse volunt (3.6369)
these sores of life are nourished in no small degree by dread
of death. For as a rule the ignominy of humble position and the
sting of penury are considered to be incompatible with a life of
enjoyment and security, and are thought to imply a sort of pre-
mature loitering before the portals of death from which people,
under the impulse of unfounded terror, desire to flee away (transl.
Smith 2001: 69)
Grinding poverty and despised estate seem like deaths anteroom; to
avoid death seems, in turn, to require means and station, and this moves
people to seek them at all cost. The image is a powerful one, but how should
we understand the association between indigence or powerlessness and
death? Heinze (1897) offered a purely empirical explanation: the former
conditions may lead, very generally, to the latter. Lucretius, Heinze argues,
is thinking of progressive impoverishment which seems at last (iam) to
arrive at the gates of death. For Schrijvers (1970), on the other hand, the
connection is psychological: because death is a poor and despised condition,
poverty and contempt may appear proleptically (iam) as death. Schrijvers
suggests, moreover, that the fear of death is here explained along the lines
developed in 3.894ff., that is, based on the mistaken belief that sensation
may somehow persist after life is extinguished. This may be implicit, but
Lucretius nowhere suggests that the image people have of Hades is one
of grinding poverty (for discussion, see below, pp. 5966). Lucretius here
takes it for granted that people have an irrational fear of death; the point
at issue is why they imagine that they can allay the fear through the kind
of exaggerated acquisitiveness that leads to restless discontent and may
well put life and limb at risk. The symbolic association between poverty
and deaths antechamber seems to have a lot of work to do, since it is the
principal link, so far as our sources permit us to judge, between irrational
fears and excessive or empty desires. Poverty is not conceived as a mere
metaphor for death; or rather, it is a metaphor that has so captured the
minds of people as to constitute the major reason why the response to
46
anxiety over death takes the form of the desire for wealth and status. As
Fowler 2002: 80 expresses it, Men desire life because they fear death, and
reify life as wealth and power. If this is so, then symbolic or allegorical
thinking has a deeply significant role in explaining the nature of the kinds
of false beliefs on which limitless desires are predicated.
42
There is, as I
shall indicate further on, reason to suppose that Epicurus himself enter-
tained such a robust view of the deleterious consequences of metaphor
and allegory for human reasoning.
43
The Epicureans recognized that human beings must meet the neces-
sities of life (cf. 2.20ff. and Bailey 1947 ad loc.), but they held that such
needs were by nature limited and easily satisfied.
44
,
.
42 Gigandet 1998: 32 observes that, because Il ny a pas dautre de la nature, paroles
vaines, songes, fantasmes et illusions en participent aussi bien, and hence, exhiber
les raisons du mythe impose de le rinscrire dans lordre des causes.
43 Contrast Kenney 1971: 84 ad 6573: the career of criminal acquisition = ight from
uncertainty to security = revulsion from the idea of death. If this is L.s logic, it is
not above criticism, as turning on a rather strained play of words and ideas, but that is
often true of the logic of preachers and moralists.
44 Cf. Lucretius 5.111724, and Baileys (1947: 2.800) interpretation of 2.2023; also Perret
1940, though I cannot agree with Perret (282 n. 3) that the thought here is Lucretian, but
not Epicurean. Piet Schrijvers (1970: 28690) has challenged the traditional view of the
connection between 3.5964 and verses 6567, which Heinze (1897: 58 ad v. 65) sum-
marizes as follows: contemptus und egestas weilen schon vor den Pforten des Todes; wer
bei ihnen angelangt ist, wird in Krtze dem Tode selbst verfallen. Schrijvers argues
that 6567 contain two different and independent reasons for human avarice and
ambition: according to 6566, people sefforcent dchapper au mpris et la pauvret
parce que, dune part, le mpris et la pauvret leur paraissent incompatibles avec une
existence douce et stabile; the second reason, introduced in 67 by et, which Schrijvers
takes in the strong sense of in addition (citing Leumann, Hofmann, Szantyr 1977: 2.172:
steigerndes et = und ausserdem), is that cet tat de dnuement semble anticiper sur
la mort (290). Schrijvers reasons that since Lucretius asserts that irrational desires are
motivated by the fear of death to no small degree (non minimam partem, 64), Lucretius
must have indicated another cause, namely the practical anxiety mentioned in 6566.
But he does not explain why an Epicurean would believe that the real difference between
indigence and economic security should be the source of unnatural and unnecessary
desires. Irrational or empty desires do not result from true beliefs, according to Epicurus.
I expect that Lucretius meant rather that other irrational fears, perhaps related to the
fear of death, also generate avarice and ambition.
47
Psychology
Wealth based on nature is delimited and easily provided,
whereas that based on empty beliefs plunges out to infinity.
(Principal Doctrines 15)
Lucretius, however, holds the fear of death responsible for unlimited
desires, in the service of which people abandon all thought for security
and may even be driven to embrace death itself:
intereunt partim statuarum et nominis ergo.
et saepe usque adeo, mortis formidine, vitae
80 percipit humanos odium lucisque videndae,
ut sibi consciscant maerenti pectore letum
obliti fontem curarum hunc esse timorem. (3.7882).
45
Some throw away their lives in an effort to gain statues and renown.
And often, in consequence of dread of death, people are affected by such
an intense loathing of life and the sight of the light that with mournful
hearts they sentence themselves to death, forgetting that the source of
their sorrows is this very fear (transl. Smith 2001: 70).
46
What is the nature of this terror of death, from which people seek to
protect themselves through restless and reckless acquisition of wealth
and power, abandoning tranquillity and jeopardizing, even forfeiting
their lives?
The answer to this question is to be found, I believe, in a fragment
from the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda which distinguishes two
45 Cf. Seneca Letters to Lucilius 24.2223 = Epicurus fragments 49698 Usener, and Cicero
De nibus 1.5.49. A similar idea is attributed to Democritus (fragment 203 Diels-Kranz):
(human beings, in eeing death, pursue it;
cf. Warren 2002: 3638). In light of other gnomic statements of Democritus, I am inclined
to take the participle to mean while or although eeing, and not to suggest,
what Lucretius afrms, a causal connection between the fear of death and suicide.
46 Cf. Segal 1990: 15: Epicurus himself seems more concerned with overcoming innite
desires than with the fear of the innite void after death, and in fact most of his warn-
ings against the unlimited are directed at desire; Nussbaum 1994: 19798. On the role
of limit or measure in Epicurus thought, see Annas 1993: 191n17; Morel 2000: 3739;
Erler 2002: 173 (the is ).
48
kinds of fears; unfortunately, the stone is mutilated at a critical juncture,
but the sense seems reasonably clear:
[ ]
[]
[-]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[ ]
[-]
, []
, [ -]
[-]
, [ ]
[]
47
Smith (1993: 385) translates:
As a matter of fact this fear is sometimes clear, sometimes not
clearclear when we avoid something manifestly harmful like fire
through fear that we shall meet death by it, not clear when, while
the mind is occupied with something else, it (fear) has insinuated
itself into our nature and [lurks].
48
According to these definitions, the two kinds of fear are distinguished
in part with respect to their objects: in the case of ordinary fear, the object
is clearly apprehended ( ), represents a real and immediate
threat to safety, and is feared on this account; the natural response to such
fear is avoidance (). But in the case of indistinct or indefinite
47 Text in Smith 1993, fragment 35.II; older editions (cf. fr. 31 Grilli 1960, fr. 29 Chilton
1967, fr. 30 William) are superseded by Smith.
48 The last word represents one possible restoration of the Greek text, which breaks off
at this point; see Chapter 1, p. 24).
49
Psychology
fear ( ), which today we might call anxiety, our attention
is directed elsewhere ( ), and the
object is not clearly perceivedit might be something falsely imagined
as a threatwith the result that the fear lies hidden within us, and we
cannot simply escape the danger.
49
The editors compare Lucretius 2.5561
(= 3.8793, 6.3541):
55 nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis
in tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus
interdum, nilo quae sunt metuenda magis quam
quae pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.
hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
60 non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.
For, just as children tremble and fear everything in blinding
darkness, so we even in daylight sometimes dread things that are
no more terrible than the imaginary dangers that cause children
to quake in the dark. This terrifying darkness that enshrouds the
mind must be dispelled not by the suns rays and the dazzling
darts of day, but by study of the superficial aspect and underlying
principle of nature. (transl. Smith 2001: 37)
Anxiety is the dread of imaginary things (ngunt) which populate
the darkness of peoples ignorance. In order to express precisely his con-
cept of anxiety, Lucretius joins in a sort of hendiadys the Latin word for
cares and the word for fear to produce the phrase, cura metusque (2.19,
48).
50
The state of malaise is associated with, or perhaps interpreted as,
ordinary fear. Again, anxiety is related to the fear of death (2.4446):
49 William 1907, followed by Chilton 1967 and Grilli 1960, supplied the verb ,
we tremble, as the antithesis to , we avoid. Cf. Fowler 2002: 80: These fears
might more properly be called anxieties, since they have no real object but are caused
by vain imaginings.
50 Cf. Commager 1957: 106; Zonneveld 1959: 189: Sterk geladen zijn vooral de verbind-
ingen anxius angor, angore metuque, cura metuque.
50
his tibi tum rebus timefactae religiones
effugiunt animo pavidae; mortisque timores
tum vacuum pectus linquunt, curaque solutum?
can it be that these experiences strike terror into your irrational
notions, causing them to flee in panic from your mind? Can it be
that the fears of death leave your breast disburdened and eased
of care? (transl. Smith 2001: 36)
But it should be clear that the fear of death, which is involved in
anxiety, is not the same kind of affect as the fear of fire, to use Diogenes
example. The expressions are syntactically similar (timor mortis, timor
ignis), but we must recognize an important difference in meaning: our
own death is not a real object of fear in the sense that fire is.
51
51 For the basic argument, see Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus 12425, of which Principal Doctrine
2 is an abbreviated recapitulation. Putting the argument in its logical order (the reverse
of Epicurus own), it begins with the proposition that our own death is never present to
us, because so long as we exist, it is not, and when it is present, we are not (this argument
derives from Aristotle De interpretatione 21a33; cf. Ackrill 1963: 103; Warren 2004: 1719
distinguishes two separate arguments, one, represented by KD 2 and the beginning of ad
Men. 124, based on the premise that what is dead cannot perceive, and hence that death
cannot appear either good or bad, the other, in what follows in ad Men., predicated rather
on the impossibility that we can be co-present with our own death; but we, that is,
humans, are taken to be sentient beings, and so the two arguments are interdependent).
Therefore, death as such causes no real disturbance, but rather an empty anguish (
), and that by way of anticipation (), i.e., in the form of fear. Accordingly,
for anyone who understands the nature of death it holds no terrors. Consequently, there will
be no irrational desire for immortality ( ), and one may enjoy this mortal
life. Compare also ps.-Plato Axiochus 369 B-C:
. {.} ,
{.} , .
, .
, (I
once heard Prodicus say that death concerns neither the living nor the departed. [Axiochus]:
What do you mean, Socrates? [Socrates]: I mean that, concerning the living, there is not
death, whereas the dead are not. Thus, it does not concern you, for you are not dead, nor
will it concern you, should you pass away, for you will not be. Therefore it is a vain distress
for Axiochus to grieve over what neither does nor will concern Axiochus). Several of
Lucretius arguments against the fear of death in 3.830ff. have analogues in the Axiochus
and in other consolatory literature (see Heinze 1897 ad loc. for details; Nussbaum 1994:
199), although Lucretius does not make explicit use of the reasoning indicated above.
51
Psychology
There is a parallel distinction between two kinds of anger in
Philodemus treatise on this passion (see Chapter 1, pp. 2224). Here, as we
have seen, Philodemus differentiates between org, which is a response to
intentional aggression on the part of another, and thumos, which he treats
as an excessively intense version of the emotion. Org proper responds
to specific acts; however, thumos, also called empty anger (ken org), is
based on a false belief about the stimulus, just as anxiety is caused by
false or empty belief about the nature of the threatening object.
In Lucretius ironic satire on the notion that wealth or power can
provide security against death (2.3753), the superstitious man objecti-
fies his fears (religiones, 44), imagining that Fear itself will take fright at
a display of arms and riches. But he can ward off nothing, because his
anxiety has no real and avoidable object. His efforts to hold the threat
at bay are thus futile and absurd (ridicula ludibriaque, 47). As Lucretius
puts it in the proem to Book 6 (919):
nam cum vidit hic ad victum quae flagitat usus
10 omnia iam ferme mortalibus esse parata
et, proquam possent, vitam consistere tutam,
divitiis homines et honore et laude potentis
adfluere atque bona gnatorum excellere fama,
nec minus esse domi cuiquam tamen anxia corda,
15 atque animi ingratis vitam vexare <sine ulla>
pausa atque infestis cogi saevire querelis,
intelligit ibi vitium vas efficere ipsum
omniaque illius vitio corrumpier intus
quae collata foris et commoda cumque venirent.
He saw that almost everything that necessity demands for sub-
sistence had been already provided for mortals, and that their life
was, so far as possible, established in security; he saw too that they
possessed power, with wealth, honor, and glory, and took pride
in the good reputation of their children; and yet he found that,
notwithstanding this prosperity, all of them privately had hearts
racked with anxiety which, contrary to their wish, tormented
their lives without a pause, causing them to chafe and fret. Then
52
he realized that the cause of the flaw was the vessel itself, which
by its own flaw corrupted within it all things, even good things,
that entered it from without. (trans. Smith 2001: 178)
The attempt to achieve security against death and its attendant terrors
through wealth and power is hopeless: against death there is no ultimate
defense, as Epicurus said (Vatican Saying 31):
,
.
Against other things it is possible to provide security, but as
for death, all we human beings live in an unwalled city.
Irrational desires such as avarice and ambition may be regarded as
extrapolations upon the natural and elementary human needs for sus-
tenance and safety (cf. Lucretius 3.65ff. and pp. 4647 above), but they
are infinite and meaningless extrapolations, for the superstitious person
seeks to protect himself, not against pain, which is justifiably avoided, or
against objective threats to life, but against death itself, which is impos-
sible. Thus, it is the source of irrational anxiety, which only reason (rationi
potestas, 53), as Lucretius insists, is able to dispel.
The fear of death, then, is a species of anxiety, the dread not of some-
thing that constitutes a real harm when it is present, but rather of some-
thing that is vaguely imagined to be an evil.
52
Death is nothing to mortals
(nil igitur mors est ad nos, 3.830); it is meaningless, in a certain sense, to
52 Segal 1990: 19 suggests that Epicureanism appealed to Lucretius and his contempo-
raries not because it allayed fears of an afterlife but because it addressed the problem of
anxiety, including the free-oating anxiety about pain and death. But the element of
punishment in Hades is essential to Epicurean doctrine. To fear pain and make efforts
to avoid it is perfectly rational; it is imagining that we will experience pain when we
are dead that is the source of irrational dread for Epicurus, and one of the main reasons
why people entertain this false belief, which runs contrary to plain sense, is the idea
that they will be punished in the afterlife. The mortality of the soul, and the indiffer-
ence of the gods to human behavior, constitute a two-pronged attack on this erroneous
expectation.
53
Psychology
speak of a dead human being.
53
That people, in their ignorance, seek to
reduce the anxiety they feel upon contemplating their condition when
dead as though they were protecting themselves against objective dangers
is the cause of the compulsive pursuit of wealth and power, compulsive
because no amount of riches and authority can provide security or peace
of mind in the presence of this empty belief. Only instruction in the
truth, that is, in the teachings of Epicurus, can free people from dread
and hence from irrational desires. To return to the introductory lines of
the proem to Book 2: the images which, if taken metaphorically, showed
that security is freedom from desire, also announced, when taken lit-
erally, that tranquillity truly dwells within the soul, for no security is
sweeter or surer than the security of an instructed mind. That is, while
the ship at sea was symbolic of commercial greed, and the battle lines
symbolic of political ambition, nevertheless each was at the same time
an image of physical security, and each yielded to the sweetness of that
spiritual or mental security that is attained only through the teachings
of the wise.
The Epicurean doctrine that fear or, better, anxiety is the cause of
unlimited desire marks a significant departure, I believe, from the
views of Plato and Aristotle on immoderate passions such as avarice or
ambition. Both Plato and Aristotle taught that in practice the virtue of
moderation was acquired through habits developed by long and care-
ful training or education, and conversely, a life dominated by excessive
passions was the product of a bad or undisciplined upbringing.
54
A
doctrine concerning the nature of the soulpsychology in the ancient
senseexplained whence immoderate passions arose. Plato, in Book 8
of the Republic, associates the ambition of the timocratic man with the
predominance of the spirited part of the soul (548C5ff.), and avarice with
53 Cf. Heinze 1897: 3637: Beim Menschen also, dem
(this shape with soul fr. 310), gehrt die Empndung zu den [i.e., per-
ception is one of the essential characteristics as opposed to accidental characteristics
or ], denn wenn sie aufgehrt hat, ist das kein Mensch mehr.
Heinzes review, in the Introduction to his commentary, of Epicurus psychology as it
is developed in the Letter to Herodotus is still one of the most judicious accounts (Bailey
seems not to have made use of it in his commentary).
54 See, e.g., Plato Republic 51819; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2.1.
54
the appetitive part (553C4ff.). But by this move desires limitless by
nature are rendered innate in mortal beings: they must be subjected to
rational control, but cannot be finally eliminated (whether the incorporeal
soul has such ambitions and appetites is unclear). Plato in this passage
suggests an allegorical explanation of acquisitiveness: souls without a
spiritual component of gold and silver seek to accumulate the material
metals in their place (547B2ff.). Indeed, no quantity of material wealth can
compensate for a spiritual insufficiency. This kind of analysis, however,
is essentially metaphysical.
55
Aristotle, on the other hand, with brilliant
insight discriminated the objects of specific and therefore limited desires
such as clothing or shelter (what we might, following Marx, call use val-
ues) from exchange valuesthat is, the cash equivalent or commodified
form of goodswhich are the basis of unlimited and unnatural greed
(Politics 1.9). The reason why the desire for money (that is, for things
reduced to the intangible common denominator of exchange value, which
is representable as a bare number) is unlimited is that value in this form
is abstracted from concrete and natural needs (1.8, 1257b331258a14).
But Aristotle does not explain why money should exert so compulsive
an attraction upon the psyches of human beings.
56
Epicurean psychology rejects the premise that certain desires are
by nature unlimited, and must accordingly account in another way for
cupidinous passions in the psyche. The Epicurean analysis, insofar as it
may be extracted from the passages discussed above, rests ultimately on
the supposition that death (or being dead) is nothing to human beings,
but in fact it is universally feared. Against this anxious dread people
55 Plato describes erotic passion as unbounded (Republic 57377), but does not offer a
reason why this should be the case. As Jonathan Lear (1995: 70) observes: It is as though
there are omnivorous appetites that, in themselves, know no limit. Unless there is
some constraintwhether political or intrapsychic (like shame)these desires will
motivate unbounded consumption. The desire for money and power are in this context
pragmatically motivated, since they are the means by which to acquire the objects of
erotic passion.
56 There is perhaps a hint of a reason at 1257b40ff.:
, (the reason for this disposition is a passion
for living, as opposed to living well). For the contrast between Aristotles dialectical
approach to moral improvement and Epicurus therapeutic pyschology, see Nussbaum
1994: 102115.
55
Psychology
seek material security. Such an image of security may perhaps provide
a specious satisfaction, to the extent that it seems to allay fear, but it can-
not offer real, uncontaminated pleasure (voluptas liquida puraque, 3.40) or
tranquillity.
57
Hence people erect ever higher the bastions of wealth and
power, transcending all bounds of justice and nature, seeking vainly to
protect themselves from a threat that does not exist, and from an anxiety
that dwells within.
The dynamic understanding of anxiety as a cause of inordinate desire
is, I think, evident as well in a much-discussed passage in the proem to
Book 3 (4158):
nam quod saepe homines morbos magis esse timendos
infamemque ferunt vitam quam Tartara leti
et se scire animi naturam sanguinis esse
aut etiam venti, si fert ita forte voluntas,
45 nec prorsum quicquam nostrae rationis egere,
hinc licet advertas animum magis omnia laudis
iactari causa quam quod res ipsa probetur.
extorres idem patria longeque fugati
conspectu ex hominum, foedati crimine turpi,
50 omnibus aerumnis adfecti denique vivunt,
et quocumque tamen miseri venere parentant
et nigras mactant pecudes et manibu divis
inferias mittunt multoque in rebus acerbis
acrius advertunt animos ad religionem.
55 quo magis in dubiis hominem spectare periclis
convenit adversisque in rebus noscere qui sit;
nam verae voces tum demum pectore ab imo
eliciuntur <et> eripitur persona, manet res.
In the version of Smith (2001: 69):
To be sure, people often claim that they dread illness or a life
of infamy more than Tartarus and death, and that they know the
57 For a fuller discussion of pleasure, see Chapter 1, pp. 1218, and below, pp. 7477.
56
mind to be composed of blood, or even of wind if that happens
to catch their fancy; they claim too that they have absolutely no
need of our philosophy. But you may see from what follows that
all these claims are a display of bravado to win applause rather
than prompted by true conviction. For the same people, though
banished from their homeland, driven far from the sight of other
human beings, branded with the stigma of some foul crime, and
afflicted, in a word, with every kind of tribulation, continue to
live. Wherever they bring their troubles, they offer sacrifices to
their ancestors, immolate black victims, dispatch oblations to the
infernal deities, and in their bitter plight turn their minds much
more zealously to superstition. The lesson is this: it is advisable
to appraise people in doubt and danger and to discover how
they behave in adversity; for then and only then is the truth
elicited from the bottom of their hearts: the mask is ripped off;
the reality remains.
Benjamin Farrington has questioned the traditional explication of
these verses, according to which boasters who hypocritically proclaim
their freedom from the fear of death nevertheless, when tested against
misfortune such as exile and disgrace, reveal their superstitious anxiety by
sacrificing to the spirits of the underworld. Farrington observes (1955: 10):
One would expect the poet to put the boasters on the deck of a sinking
ship or in the forefront of the battle when the line is about to break. But
nothing of the sort. The boasters are merely sent into banishment.
There is something feeble and inconsequential about the argument.
58

Farringtons solution is to take persona (58) in the sense of rank or sta-
tion rather than mask. The boasters, then, are obviously of the class of
nobiles engaged in the cursus honorum. Their boasts are philosophically
fashionable, but you may perceive their real nature when you knock
them off the fundamentum stabile (V 1121) they provided for themselves by
wealth and power. Strip them of their social position and see what their
58 Farrington seems to overlook the ironic force of vivunt (50), which exposes, as Heinze
(1897: 57 ad v. 48) points out, the hypocrisy with which the boasters afrm that the infamis
vita (42) is to be feared more than death.
57
Psychology
philosophy amounts to. The mask is off and the truth revealed (1011).
59

Farringtons picture of sinking ships and battle lines perhaps involves a
notion of last-minute fear and repentance not altogether relevant to the
pagan world, but his point nevertheless seems sound. Lucretius exiles
had vaunted their freedom from the fear of death and deaths torments.
In exile, their anxiety, and their beliefs, become manifest in their hom-
age to the shades of the departed, partly, of course, because the need for
pretense is removed (conspectu ex hominum, 49).
60
But the fear of death,
formerly largely latent, now strongly asserts itself for two reasons. One
is Farringtons: the props of wealth and power are fallen (cf. 65ff. and
pp. 4546 above). The other is surely the fear of retribution in the afterlife
which, alongside the terror of sheer extinction, is the major component of
anxiety in Lucretius and Epicurus view. The fear of retribution, moreover,
best explains the sacrifices as symptoms of the fear of death.
A weakness in Farringtons interpretation is that it does not take
account of the reason why the nobiles find themselves in exile: they are
foedati crimine turpi, befouled by some vile charge.
61
Here we may
perhaps see an allusion to the political chaos of mid-first-century Rome,
with its crimes motivated by greed and ambition, the law manipulated
as a weapon by political factions, and abrupt reversals and disgrace
(think of Ciceros exile in 58 B.C.). But whether or not Lucretius had
the contemporary turmoil in mind, he has made the case that the self-
described materialists really do fear punishment not only by adducing
their behavior once they find themselves in trouble (and far from the eyes
of their peers), but also by alluding to the behavior that caused them to
59 The fundamentum stabile does not, as Farrington implies, represent real security in the
passage in Lucretius; it is rather the unrealizable object of people driven by irrational
fears and desires.
60 It must be anxiety or fear that is revealed, not just superstition in the modern sense
of commitment to rituals in order to sway the gods. There is no point to the argument
if the exiles sacrice merely to obtain their recall to Rome, for example. Religio has the
connotation of superstitious terror in Lucretius; cf. Bailey 1947 ad 1.63.
61 Ernout (Ernout and Robin 1962) compares 1.85 (the slaughter of Iphianassa): aram
turparunt sanguine foede (they foully besmirch the altar). There is no mention of turpe
crimen in Polystratus otherwise similar refutation of unphilosophical pretensions to
security from the fear of death in (ed. Indelli 1978); cf. also
Seneca Epistle 82.7. These and related passages are cited by Heinze 1897: 5556 ad v. 41.
58
be banished in the first place.
62
These are just the people who have been
driven to encroach beyond the boundaries of right and sometimes been
accomplices and abettors of crime (transcendere nis iuris et interdum
socios scelerum atque ministros)actions nourished in no small degree
by dread of death (non minimam partem mortis formidine aluntur, 3.6061,
64). Lucretius takes it as given that such people are motivated to strive
endlessly for wealth and power just because of anxiety; this is why he
is certain that, once they are reduced to misery, they will reveal their
true colors. The life they have been leading is precisely the kind that is
driven by the fear of death, which is invariably at the root of ambition
and the transgression of all decency. In exile, these boasters reveal the
cause of their lawlessness. The mask is removed; what remains is the
anxiety that had been denied and concealed.
Anxiety over death creates limitless desire. The question naturally
arises, what causes and sustains this anxiety?
63
There is a certain insuf-
ficiency in the usual answer, that superstition is simply the product
of ignorance, and more particularly, ignorance of Epicurean doctrine
concerning the material nature of the universe and the mortality of the
soul, first of all because human beings in primitive times were appar-
ently free, on Lucretius own account, from such anxiety (see below,
pp. 8688), and secondand more importantbecause this answer
does not explain why the fear of death is so persistent in the face of
philosophy and the fashionable skepticism about the afterlife, testified
to by Lucretius in the passage cited above and confirmed by Cicero,
Plutarch, and others who thought to refute Epicureanism by dismissing
stories about the punishments in Hades as childrens fables in which
no intelligent adult believed (Cicero Tusculan Disputations 1.6.10, 1.21.48;
Plutarch Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum 10, 1093A, 26, 1104C,
etc.; cf. Segal 1990: 1419). The Epicurean position is a hard one: all
human beings, except for those proficient in Epicurean philosophy, are
wretched because they harbor deep anxieties, whether dissembled or,
perhaps, unconscious (that the Epicureans had no notion of unconscious
62 Cf. Kenney 1971: 81 ad 4886: It is worth remembering also that Epicurus himself
had endured exile.
63 I am concerned here with the immediate psychological cause of anxietypunitive
retribution in the afterlifeand not with the general nature of irrational fear, which is
discussed below in Chapters 3 and 4.
59
Psychology
motives in the modern sense is argued forcefully by Gladman and
Mitsis 1997).
64
We may recall Nancy Shermans challenge, quoted in
Chapter 1, to the intellectualist approach to emotion characteristic of
Aristotle and of classical philosophy generally, which fails to explain
why some emotions dont reform at the beck and call of reason, that
is, why doesnt rational discourse undo irrational emotions? (2000:
156). We have now seen that irrational desires for wealth or power are
driven by fear of death. But given Epicureanisms unique emphasis on
irrational fear (as opposed, for example, to submission to the senses and
lower appetites, or acquired disposition, or want of discipline) as the
reason for human misery, excessive desire, and injustice, it is crucial to
account for the persistence or reproduction of this fear itself, in spite
of strong arguments and self-professed beliefs to the contrary. I argue
in what follows that the Epicureans did indeed have a response to this
question, and that it is to be found, at least in a rough form, in the so-
called allegorical explanation, at the end of Book 3, of the mythological
torments of the underworld, which was, I suggest, a traditional and
well-known feature of Epicurean doctrine. As the passage extends for
nearly 50 lines (9781023), I quote just the introductory and concluding
verses, which contain the essence of it:
978 atque ea nimirum quaecumque Acherunte profundo
prodita sunt esse, in vita sunt omnia nobis.
1013 qui neque sunt usquam nec possunt esse profecto.
sed metus in vita poenarum pro male factis
1015 est insignibus insignis, scelerisque luella,
carcer et horribilis de saxo iactu deorsum,
verbera carnifices robur pix lammina taedae;
64 Cf. Cicero De nibus 1.18.59: nec vero quisquam stultus non horum morborum aliquo laborat;
nemo igitur est non miser (nor indeed is there any foolish person who does not suffer
from one of these diseases; thus, there is no one who is not wretched). It is perhaps
worth observing that Ciceros frequent remarks to the effect that the Epicureans greatly
exaggerate the signicance of the fear of death (cf. Bailey 1947: 2.994) proves that this
emphasis was not an innovation or quirk of Lucretius; cf. Puliga 1983: 238: La massic-
cia presenza di termini quali , , nellopera superstite di Epicuro
ci testimonia lesigenza essenziale e primaria di scongiurare ogni paura annidata
nellanima umana.
60
quae tamen etsi absunt, at mens sibi conscia factis
praemetuens adhibet stimulos torretque flagellis
1020 nec videt interea qui terminus esse malorum
possit nec quae sit poenarum denique finis
atque eadem metuit magis haec ne in morte gravescant.
hic Acherusia fit stultorum denique vita.
65
Next let me assure you that all the punishments that tradition
locates in the abysm of Acheron actually exist in our life.
These terrors do not exist and cannot exist anywhere at all. But
in life people are tortured by a fear of punishment as cruel as their
crimes, and by the atonement for their offensesthe dungeon,
the terrible precipitation from the Rock, stripes, executioners, the
execution cell, pitch, red-hot plates, torches. Even though these
horrors are absent, the mind, conscious of its guilt and fearfully
anticipating the consequences, pricks itself with goads and sears
itself with scourges. It fails to see how there can be an end to its
affliction, or a limit to punishment; indeed it is afraid that its
sufferings may increase in death. In short, fools make a veritable
hell of their lives on earth. (trans. Smith 2001: 9496)
There are two separate arguments here. Benjamin Farrington (1955: 7)
has a comment that applies specifically to the first. He begins by observing
that Fear of hell was countered by a two-fold argument. First atomic
physics disproved the possibility of Acheron and its victims. Farrington
then turns to the passage under discussion: In the second place there was
a sociological argument which aimed to show that Acheron was an illu-
sion of a corrupt society, being nothing but the projection of an imagined
afterlife of the hell fools had actually made of their life on earth. Lucretius
account here is better described as psychological rather than sociological
(he in fact has an independent sociological or anthropological analysis
65 I follow Baileys 1928 edition in positing a lacuna before 1013; in any case, qui should
be taken to refer to all the mythological torments described in 980ff.
61
Psychology
of the origin of the fear of punishment in the afterlife, which I discuss in
Chapter 3), but the important question that we must first address is: what
is the status of this allegorical explanation in the Epicurean understand-
ing of irrational fears? Richard Heinze (1897: 184) gave it none:
It seems to me that the way Lucretius here treats punishments
in Hades would not suit an Epicurean consolation. It is a step
further to go from combatting fear to an allegorical interpreta-
tion of punishments as self-inflicted sufferings in this life, as
Lucretius presents it.
(wohl aber scheint mir die Art, wie L. hier die Hadesstrafen
behandelt, in eine Epikureische Trostschrift nicht hineinzupas-
sen. Es ist von der Bekmpfung der Furcht ein weiter Schritt zur
allegorischen Deutung der Strafen auf die selbstverschuldeten
Leiden dieses Lebens, wie sie L. gibt.)
Franz Cumont, in a learned paper (1920), placed the source of the
allegory in neo-Pythagorean doctrines developed in Alexandria, and
Pierre Boyanc (1963: 18081) also agreed that Lucretius, rather than
Epicurus, was responsible for its adaptation to Epicureanism, although
he traced the idea rather to the Hellenistic Academy:
In reality, the true parallels with Lucretius are those offered
above all by the texts of Philo the Jew. There, we find the same
formulas as in De rerum natura, and first of all that the true Hell is
the life of the wicked or foolish person. Misfortunes are precisely
the result of the passions. The only difference is that the pas-
sions are those not of Epicurean ethics but of Stoic ethics.
(En ralit, les parallles vritables avec Lucrce sont ceux
quoffrent surtout des textes de Philon le Juif. Car l nous retrou-
vons les formules mmes du De rerum natura et dabord celle-ci
que le vritable Enfer, cest la vie du mchant ou de linsens. Les
malheurs son trs prcisment ceux des passions. La seule dif-
frence serait que les passions apparaissent non celles de lthique
picurienne, mais celles de lthique stocienne, 180.)
62
Bailey (1947: 2.1158), on the other hand, was of the opinion that, in
spite of Heinzes endeavour to show that it is un-Epicurean in thought,
there cannot be much doubt that the allegorical interpretation of the
legends is derived from Epicurus himself.
66
Bailey, seconded by Ernout
and Robin in the second edition of their commentary (1962) and also by
Paratore and Pizzani (1960), has in his favor the fact that Seneca (Letters
24.18: Epicuream cantilenam, that old Epicurean song) and Lactantius
(Div. Inst. 7.7.13) explicitly name Epicurus in connection with this doctrine
(contrary-minded critics discount this evidence).
67
Certainly, allegoriza-
66 Gale 1994: 2638 argues rightly that, for Lucretius, allegorical exegesis as tradi-
tionally practised must be rejected, since it is based on the (false) assumption that
the poets and myth-makers were either philosophers or else were turning the works of
genuine philosophers into poetry (31). But Lucretius explanation of how the idea of
hells torments arose is not allegory in the traditional sense, for no intention is ascribed
to the inventors of the tales, nor are they seen to convey a hidden meaning to be decoded
by the audience. Lucretius is not interpreting the myths; he is accounting for the belief
in them (for the distinction cf. Russell and Konstan 2005: xviixviii, Gale 1994: 40; note
that Lucretius explicitly rejects the Euhemeristic explanation of the gods as deied
benefactors of humanity, 5.154). Gale points out that in Book 5.116193 Lucretius puts
forward the view that myths were in origin misguided attempts to answer questions
about the natural world (32). In each case, the belief is inspired by perceived phenom-
ena; as Gale says (32n.114), It would not in fact be consistent with Epicurean theories of
thought and perception to write off the entire corpus of myth as completely unrelated
to the real world (cf. 91: the poets must have got their ideas from somewhere). While
Gale allows, however, that Lucretius employs allegory in a more positive way (37) in
his interpretation of the mythic torments in Hades (already anticipated in Democritus
fr. B 297 Diels-Kranz = D 162 Taylor; cf. Lactantius Div. Inst. 7.7.13), she nds it unlikely
that Lucretius exegesis goes back to Epicurus (cf. 9394). Although the matter cannot
be decided conclusively, there remains the need for some such explanation to account
for the fear itself, which plays so massive a role in Epicurean psychology; see below.
67 Segal 1990: 22 observes: Such a displacement of anxiety from one area (physical
suffering and the violation or annihilation of bodily integrity) to another (the afterlife)
is in fact consistent with Epicurean psychology, as David Konstan has pointed out, for
the Epicureans recognized the fear of the Underworld as a displaced form of fear in
this life. Smith 2001: 94 n. 68 takes a more cautious position: It is not unlikely, though
not certain, that Lucr. has derived from Epicurus himself the idea that the punishments
alleged to exist in hell actually exist in our life. See too Philodemus On Choices and
Avoidances XX.67 (Indelli and Tsouna-McKirahan 1995: 9798):
(people are tormented too by losses of money). Indelli and
Tsouna-McKirahan comment (210): The verb is a . Its
primary meaning is that one is thrown into Tartarus where one suffers the torments
of the Titans. Cf. and in Philodemus De pietate p. 322.12 and 19.
63
Psychology
tion of this type was current before Epicurus. As Cumont (1920: 235)
remarks: We know from Plato that the Pythagoreans in his time had
already interpreted the myth of the Danaids carrying water in a sieve,
which empties as quickly as it is filled, as an emblem of insatiable souls
which, abandoning themselves to limitless desires, are never sated with
pleasure (Nous savons par Platon que les Pythagoriciens de son temps
interprtaient dj le mythe des Danades portant leau dans un crible,
qui se vide mesure quon le remplit, comme un emblme des mes
insatiables qui, sabandonnant des dsirs sans frein, ne sont jamais
repues de jouissances; cf. Plato Gorgias 493B, ps.-Plato Axiochus 371E).
There is some evidence that Epicurus himself took an interest in
allegory. At all events, Diogenes Laertius (10.2) records this story about
Epicurus youth:

(The Epicurean Apollodorus [head of the school in the
2nd century B.C.], in Book 1 of his On the Life of Epicurus, says that Epicurus
took up philosophy out of contempt for his school teachers, when they
were unable to interpret for him the passage in Hesiod concerning chaos;
cf. Theogony 116, 123). It is possible that Epicurus simply asked: What,
then, preceeded Chaos?, and went off in a huff when they couldnt reply
(cf. Obbink 1995: 18990; also Laks 1976: 3638). But this scenario does
not quite correspond to the use of the term (interpret), and
even if Epicurus already believed that Chaos could not have arisen out of
nothing, he need not have objected to the idea that a random flux of some
sort had always existed (Hesiods term , 116, need not mean was
born). But Epicurus might have sought or expected a different kind of
meaning in Hesiods description of Chaos, prompted, perhaps, by early
allegorical explications of Homer and Hesiod, which had been flourish-
ing since the late sixth century B.C. (see Ramelli 2004: 4978; Struck 2004:
77110; Russell and Konstan 2005: xiiixv). Needless to say, Epicurus
own approach, at least in his mature years, to rationalizing the stories
purveyed by poets will have differed from the Stoic type of allegorizing,
The idea that desires in this life are models for the torments of Hades thus has good
Epicurean credentials.
64
for example, in which names of gods are treated as symbols of natural
elements such as air, earth, fire and water (see Ramelli 2004: 79145, with
full bibliography; in particular, 10622 on the names of the gods); indeed,
Philodemus indicates that Epicurus explicitly rejected the technique of
associating the gods with things in this world by transposing the let-
ters of their names ([] [], On Piety
53436 Obbink), e.g., by understanding the name Hera () to signify
air ().
68
He will have preferred to explain rather how the myths came
into being as a result of false interpretations derived from evidence of
the senses but contaminated by the addition of beliefjust as he did in
respect to popular ideas of the nature of the gods, in the twelfth book of
his On Nature (cited by Philodemus On Piety 22531 Obbink).
69
That he
would have offered some such explanation of beliefs concerning Hades
is, then, in itself no cause for surprise.
A third reason for taking Baileys, and Farringtons, part in this ques-
tion emerges from a closer examination of the function of this allegorizing
interpretation of the underworld in the Epicurean system. In answer to
this question of the role of the argument, Boyanc (1963: 181) observes:
68 For full discussion of Philodemus rejection of the Stoic style of allegorizing in
the second part of De pietate, see Obbink 2002: 20309, with special reference to lines
36062 (text and translation on 20607). Whether Lucretius was responding to the Stoics
remains controversial; for his direct dependency on Epicurus, and hence the absence
of allusions to Stoic doctrine, see Furley 1989; Sedley 1998; contra (e.g.), Gigandet 1998:
6369, 8187, 38692.
69 Cf. Clay 1983: 49, who explains Epicurus view of myths as the constructs the mind
adds to its real experience: what Epicurus would call . Contrast Gale
1994: 129, who argues that the theory of myth is one area in which we can be virtually
certain that the poet is not in complete accord with Epicurus; Ackermann 1979: 103:
Epikur und seine Schler lehnten eine Allegorese des Mythos ab, weil sie auch gegen
die Mythen schlechthin skeptisch waren. Lukrez ihre Meinung nicht ganz teilteer
hat oft zur Allegorisierung des Mythos gegriffen (cf. 216). The point is, however, that
for Lucretius as much as for Epicurus allegory, or beliefs based on symbolic analogies,
was a source of popular error that demanded to be exposed. For a survey of views
concerning Lucretius use of myth, see Gale 1994: 15; for Lucretius own attitude to
allegory, 2650. For the multiple ways in which Lucretius deploys myths in his poem,
see Gigandet 1998: 1420. For the debate on the nature of the gods according to Epicurus,
and whether they are materially existing entities or psychological projections, see
Kany-Turpin 2007; Sedley 2009 (projections); Konstan 2009 (really existing); further
bibliography in Chapter 3 n. 51.
65
Psychology
Sans doute parce quelle lui a paru rendre raison de la naissance des
mythes, expliquer comment les hommes ont pu se laisser garer par eux.
Cela comporte videmment quune certaine vrit leur est reconnue.
This, it seems to me, is on the right track. Greek myths concerning punish-
ment in the underworld have most of them in common some perpetual
activity doomed forever to frustration. How, Lucretius seems to inquire,
might such a picture have arisen in the minds of human beings? I find
it difficult to suppose that Epicurus altogether ignored a question so
central to his philosophy; indeed, we now know that Philodemus too
referred to the punishment of the Danaids in connection with the fear
of punishment in the afterlife, in his treatise On the Gods (fr. A6, in Kleve
1996: 674). The only answer consistent with Epicureanism, moreover,
would seem to be the one Lucretius offers, that the picture of Hades is
an image of life in this world. In particular, it is an image of the life of
limitless or irrational desire, which afflicts all but the wise. It will have
been generated by simulacra of such endless, hopeless, and constantly
thwarted activity, which are misrecognized as pertaining to the under-
world; some belief in a life after death will already have been current
among human beings, presumably deriving, as Lucretius explains in
Book 4.75767, from dreams in which dead people, thanks to residual
simulacra of them in the atmosphere, seem still to exist and move about.
Those dreams by themselves, however, would not necessarily have led to
the idea that people were punished or tormented after their death, nor,
more particularly, that the punishments would assume the specific form
of endlessly repetitive and vain actions, such as those of Tityos, Icarus,
Sisyphus, Tantalus, the Danaids, and the rest who populate Hades. To
account for these myths, there was good reason for Epicurus to adopt
an allegorical, or rather pseudo-allegorical explanation of the sort that
Cumont describes, since, for Epicurus, all mental pictures are derived
from real simulacra.
70
70 Cf. Letter to Herodotus 50. It may be relevant here to compare Lucretius views on
allegory as expressed in connection with his rationalization of the myth of the Magna
Mater (2.600660). In the concluding verses of this passage, Lucretius condones the use
of at least a poetical metonymy: dum vera re tamen ipse/ religione animum turpi con-
tingere parcat (provided that in fact one not stain ones mind with foul superstition,
65960). To be sure, he is interested to represent ancient myths as anticipations of the
66
If, despite the allegorical form of the argument, its Epicurean
credentials are secure, its consequences are important for our under-
standing of Epicureanism. The concrete picture of retribution in the
afterlife is a projection from lives beset by cupidines or excessive desires.
A major component of the fear of death will thus rest upon irrational
desire and its reflection. But irrational desire was itself explained as
resulting from anxiety over death and punishment. I shall return to
this reciprocal or circular relationship between irrational fears and
desires after a brief analyis of the second argument contained in our
passage, this one more specific to the school of the atomists and going
back to Democritus.
The second argument, which comes at the conclusion of the passage
(101423), explains the idea of punishment in the afterlife as anticipated
retribution for misdeeds in this world. Lucretius formulation of the notion
raises a problem, perhaps, that is not present in Democritus description.
Democritus writes (fr. 297 Diels-Kranz, cited by Bailey 1947: 1158):
,
,
,
.
In the translation of Taylor (1999: 51):
true doctrine of Epicurus. But why should the ancient learned poets of Greece have
had intimations of this teaching? The view was a commonplace as early as the Stoics,
who held that only the sage could be a poet (SVF 3.654 = Stobaeus 2.61.13 W.; cf. Strabo
1.2.3). Sometimes, the oldest poets were imagined to be particularly close to the fount
of original wisdom, which later became corrupted; for discussion of the wisdom of the
poets, see especially Ramelli 2004: 12340; Struck 2004: 11841. Epicurus, believing that
one must hew to the primary or rst (prtos) meanings of words, could have enter-
tained such a view. It is clear, in any case, that for the Epicureans myths must in some
way be derived from an image of events occuring in nature. It was not the program of
the Epicureans simply to deny such tales, since everything that is imagined has some
basis in reality. Schrijvers 1970: 5060 suggests that Lucretius here defends his use of
poetic expressions in the exposition of Epicurean doctrines; this may be correct, but it
does not adequately account for the inclusion in the poem of the Magna Mater passage
itself, which is what the concluding lines are intended to explain. See too Gigandet 1997:
213 for Lucretius use of a mthode tout fait trangre celle de lallgorie.
67
Psychology
Some people, ignorant of the dissolution of mortal nature, but
conscious of their evil-doing in life, trouble their time of life with
terrors and fears, inventing false tales about the time after death.
For Democritus, it is only some people, those who have in fact been
guilty of some transgression, who trouble their lives with fear of future
retribution. In Lucretius version, it would seem, the vast majority of
mankind (the stulti of line 1023) have a sense of guilt for deeds done
(mens sibi conscia factis, 1018). Why this should be so it is difficult to say,
except that all who are victims of irrational fear and desire are, for the
Epicureans, at least potential transgressors of right. This is the burden
of Epicurus Principal Doctrine 5, rendered by Cicero, De nibus 1.18.57,
as follows:
Clamat Epicurus, is, quem vos nimis voluptatibus esse deditum
dicitis, non posse iucunde vivi, nisi sapienter, honeste iusteque
vivatur, nec sapienter, honeste, iuste, nisi iucunde.
Epicurus cries outhe whom you pronounce overly devoted
to pleasuresthat it is not possible to live pleasantly, unless one
lives prudently, honestly and justly, nor prudently, honestly, and
justly unless pleasantly.
What seems clear, at least, is that this second argument too locates
the source of anxiety over death and punishment in behavior which,
according to standard Epicurean doctrine, is consequent upon unlimited
and irrational desire, and the image of hell once more is interpreted as
a projection of circumstances in this life.
71
Lucretius argument, or rather closely integrated pair of arguments,
thus furnishes the answer to a crucial question in Epicureanism: how
71 Compare the Freudian idea of how guilt functions, as summarized by Dodds 1951: 47:
The psychologists have taught us how potent a source of guilt-feelings is the pressure
of unacknowledged desires. Dodds distinction between shame cultures and guilt cul-
tures, borrowed from the work of Ruth Benedict, is no longer compelling as a description
of Greek moral values, but Epicurus focus on unacknowledged fears and desires does
anticipate certain aspects of the modern idea of guilt; see Konstan 2006c: 91110.
68
the fear of punishment after death is perpetuated in peoples minds.
The verses contain, on this interpretation, an important fragment of
Epicurean doctrine, according to which anxiety over death is, to a large
degree, a product or projection of the life of irrational and limitless
desires in this world.
72
Human feelings and behavior generate the fear of
Tartarus. In turn, however, it is the terror of death and the afterlife that,
as we have seen, are in great measure responsible for irrational desires.
Between the irrational fears and desires there seems, then, to be a certain
interdependence. This interdependence is, of course, natural enough in
Epicureanism. Irrational fears and desires have in common the fact that
their objects are vain or misperceived (see below, pp. 7377). The terror
at empty images of retribution drives people to pursue limitless wealth
and power as the way to achieve an impossible security against death.
Conversely, this ever-frustrated striving contributes to the creation of the
popular image of Hades as a place of punishment. Irrational fears and
desires thus go hand in hand, both of them species of empty anticipa-
tion. This mutuality of anxiety and inordinate desire raises, however,
certain questions: how do such fears and desires arise historically? how
are they accounted for by the Epicurean theory of knowledge and the
soul? and finally, how can one escape from what seems to be a vicious
circle of passions? These questions will occupy the next two chapters.
I conclude the present chapter with a discussion of one passion in par-
ticular that we have not so far addressed, that is, Lucretius account of
obssessive love or amor. This passion too, for Epicureanism, turns out
to be based on a kind of epistemological error, predicated on vain or
empty beliefs about the nature of the object desired. Lucretius account
of amor (4.10911104), the third great passion which, along with avarice
and ambition, infects the souls of human beings, brings out well the
nature of such irrational passions:
72 Here I disagree with Rumpf 2003: 20207 and passim, who argues that Lucretius
poem introduces a new perspective on problems of life, death, and the self; cf. 241: Die
zweckhaft angelegte Physislehre des Epikureismus tritt in einen neuen Bezugsrahmen,
denn De rerum natura erschliesst gegenber der nur furchtabweisenden und insofern
negativen Naturlehre des Epikur eine ganz andersartige Dimension von Erkenntnis.
I do not doubt, however, that Lucretius the poet has enriched Epicurean doctrine with
subtle pyschological nuances.
69
Psychology
nam cibus atque umor membris assumitur intus;
quae quoniam certas possunt obsidere partis,
hoc facile expletur laticum frugumque cupido.
ex hominis vero facie pulchroque colore
1095 nil datur in corpus praeter simulacra fruendum
tenvia; quae vento spes raptast saepe misella.
ut bibere in somnis sitiens cum quaerit et umor
non datur, ardorem qui membris stinguere possit,
sed laticum simulacra petit frustraque laborat
1100 in medioque sitit torrenti flumine potans,
sic in amore Venus simulacris ludit amantis
nec satiare queunt spectando corpora coram
nec manibus quicquam teneris abradere membris
possunt errantes incerti corpore toto.
In Smiths translation (2001: 12930):
Food and drink are taken into our body and, since they are able
to occupy fixed parts, easily assuage our hunger and thirst. But
from the fair face and complexion of a human being nothing passes
into the body for enjoyment except impalpable images, a sorry hope
often snatched away by the wind. Just like thirsty people who in
dreams desire to drink and, instead of obtaining water to quench
the fire that consumes their limbs, with vain effort pursue images
of water and remain thirsty, though they drink in the midst of a
torrent stream, so, in love, lovers are deluded by Venus with images:
no matter how intently they gaze at the beloved body, they cannot
sate their eyes; nor can they remove anything from the velvety
limbs that they explore with roving, uncertain hands.
There is a passage in Baileys The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (1928:
491) which reads like a commentary on these lines, although Bailey does
not cite them here:
Desire may arise in two ways: it may in the first place have
a purely corporeal origin: the waste caused by bodily effort or
70
merely by the natural processes of life results in a loss of mate-
rial: consequent upon this comes a movement of pain due to
want ( ): this pain calls up the image of
its satisfaction and that in turn produces the painful movement
of desire. Then, if the means of satisfying the desire is within
our attainment, there follows another movement accompanying
the process of satisfaction: this movement () is a kind of
pleasure. As the result of the completion of the process there
ensues a second kind of pleasure ( ), the
static pleasure of the equilibrium () or freedom from
pain () which the body now enjoys. But the image of
desire may also be presented to the mind without the antecedent
process of loss and pain due to want, as in the case of gluttony
or the social desires of ambition and so on; the desire is in this
case also in itself painful and satisfaction is attended with the
pleasure of movement, but, as it was not originally caused by
the pain of want due to loss, it was a gratuitous upsetting of
the pleasure of equilibrium.
I do not know how Bailey arrived at the opinion that pain due to
want first evokes the image of its satisfaction (is this the same as the
image of desire?), which image then produces desire. On the testimony
of Lucretius, at any rate, it is safe to say that the desire for food or water
(laticum frugumque cupido, 1093) may be sated by drinking or eating the
appropriate substances, while obsessive love is an insatiable appetite
since it feeds on insubstantial images (simulacra fruendum tenvia, 109596),
which can no more abate desire than the dream-images of water (laticum
simulacra, 1099) can slake real thirst (sitiens, 1097, is a substantive, as Ernout
points out, and does not of course refer to dreamed-of thirst; cf. Brown
1987: 23637). It is not that certain simulacra arouse limitless desire; rather,
desires are limitless when they feed on simulacra.
73
Shortly before the discussion of amor which concludes Book 4 of
De rerum natura, there is a passage (4.87076) in which Lucretius explains
73 For the connection between simulacra, dreams, and love, see Brown 1987: 7176,
8287.
71
Psychology
thirst as the consequence of excessive heat within the stomach (calor
amplius aridus):
870 umor item discedit in omnia quae loca cumque
poscunt umorem; glomerataque multa vaporis
corpora, quae stomacho praebent incendia nostro,
dissipat adveniens liquor ac restinguit ut ignem,
urere ne possit calor amplius aridus artus.
875 sic igitur tibi anhela sitis de corpore nostro
abluitur, sic expletur ieiuna cupido.
Similarly fluid is channeled into all the parts of the body that require
fluid. The numerous particles of heat, whose accumulation causes
a burning in the stomach, are dispersed and quenched, like a fire,
on the arrival of the moisture, so that the parching heat can no
longer consume the frame. In this way, then, our bodys panting
thirst is swilled away, and the craving of hunger satisfied. (trans.
Smith 2001: 12324)
From the immediately preceding discussion of hunger (85869)
we know the process that ensues: the imbalance in the body gives
rise to pain (dolor, 866) which is accompanied by or experienced as a
desire for food (amorem edendi, 869).
74
The excessive heat in the case of
thirst may be cooled by liquids (quae incendia dissipat adveniens liquor
ac restinguit ut ignem; Lucretius is probably thinking of the dissipation
of heat atoms). This is an example of the satisfaction of a perfectly
natural need, but it bears an interesting resemblance to the language
in which Lucretius describes the immoderate passion of amor which
in Lucretius, and in literature of the Roman republic generally, often
had the sense of a mad and limitless desire or obsessive love.
75
Lovers
74 There is a resemblance here to Plato Philebus 34D-35E, as Robin points out (Ernout
and Robin 1962: 2.264); cf. also Schrijvers 1970: 28182, where the discussion of hunger is
described, in accord with Schrijvers theory of Lucretius poetic technique, as a prepara-
tion for the analysis of amor.
75 On amor in Roman literature of the period, see Allen 1950: 26164; Caston 2006.
Whereas Greek distinguished between philia, that is, the love that obtains between
72
seek, in Lucretius words, to extinguish the fires of passions ardor
(4.108687):
namque in eo [sc. amore] spes est, unde est ardoris origo,
restingui quoque posse ab eodem corpore flammam.
For the hope is that the same body that kindled the burning
passion can also extinguish the flame. (trans. Smith 2001: 129)
But there is no liquid to extinguish this heat. In a subtle and char-
acteristic play on words, Lucretius suggests that the frenzied embraces
prompted by amor cannot, like cooling water (umor), slake the desire
of love.
76
Indeed, these embraces do more to hurt (laedere, 1082) than
to give pleasure. This word-play, and also the collocation of the pas-
sages concerning hunger and thirst on the one hand, and amor on the
other, are significant.
77
Irrational passions, unlike natural needs, have
an unreal or misperceived object, an empty simulacrum, and therefore
cannot be allayed by consuming, as thirst and hunger can.
78
These
vain desires are extrapolations upon or analogous to real needs, but
rest, in some way, upon a false opinion. Thus Epicurus says in Vatican
Saying 59:
, ,
.
friends or members of a family, and the passionate desire of ers, the Latin amor might
represent both (amor fraternus, for example, would render the Greek philia, not ers). In
erotic literature, however, amor regularly corresponds to ers. See Flacelire 1954; full
discussion in Brown 1987: 11118.
76 Friedlnder 1941: 18 notes the pun on amor/umor but in a different connection.
77 Older editions (including Bailey 1928) bracket 85876, and neither Robins defense of
it (Ernout and Robin 1962: 2.26465), criticized by Bailey 1947: 2.1285, nor Baileys excuse
of it are very convincing. I believe the connection to its context is that suggested above;
cf. Brown 1987: 3233, who concludes that the passage is not quite so detached from
the main themes of Book Four as it initially appears.
78 Perhaps simulacra at 2.41 too has an overtone of empty images, which would suit
the context as I have interpreted it above (p. 44 and n. 41); this would make easier the
words late vagari in 43a.
73
Psychology
The stomach is not something unfillable, as the masses think,
but rather it is false opinion concerning the limitless filling of the
stomach.
I conclude this chapter with a brief examination of the idea of false
opinion.
Epicurus seems to have coined a term for empty opinion or imagination
in the word .
79
Thus, Epicurus writes in Principal Doctrine 30:

, ,
,
(for translation, see below).
And again, in 15:
,
.
Wealth deriving from our nature is both limited and easily
provided, but that deriving from empty beliefs tends to infinity.
Another instance is 29:
,
, ,
.
Of desires some are natural and <necessary, some are natural
and> not necessary, and some are neither natural nor necessary,
but arise through empty belief.
79 It occurs in one of the Hippocratic Letters (17), but these are late; nearer to Epicurus
own time is Polybius Histories (three times, plus three related forms); it is also the title
of a work (Hypomnmata peri kenodoxias) by Aristo of Chios (Diogenes Laertius 7.163).
74
The idea of empty belief was philosophically controversial. Plato
was long perplexed by the problem, and, in the Theaetetus (198B12ff.),
suggested as an explanation of error mistaken or crossed belief,
(cf. , 193D2), to which sounds, indeed,
like a polemical or at least deliberate rejoinder. The doctrine of empty
belief () was percieved to have problematic implications
analogous to those accompanying the notion of empty space ( ),
as Plato had argued (Theaetetus 188Cff.; cf. Sophist 240Cff.). The basis
and nature of false belief are epistemological questions, which will
be examined further in Chapter 4. But it is worth inquiring whether
desires due to empty imagination can be satisfied, and their satisfac-
tion attended by real pleasure. According to Bailey, as we have seen in
the passage quoted above (pp. 6970), there is a real kinetic pleasure
in the satisfaction of inordinate desires such as gluttony and ambition.
Now, limitless desires, as we have seen, cannot be fulfilled or satis-
fied. But can the attempt to satisfy them afford some kind of pleasure?
Unfortunately, the sources do not permit certainty on this matter, but
Baileys translation (1926: 103) of Epicurus Principal Doctrine 30 would
certainly suggest an affirmative answer:
Wherever in the case of desires which are physical, but do not
lead to a sense of pain, if they are not fulfilled, the effort is intense,
such pleasures are due to idle imagination, and it is not owing to
their own nature that they fail to be dispelled, but owing to the
empty imaginings of the man.
80
However, the word pleasures does not appear in the Greek text, and
the demonstrative pronoun surely refers, not to pleasures, but to
desires (). I am not sure that I understand Baileys interpretation;
in any case, the following is a more natural reading of the text:
Those natural desires not leading to pain if they are not
fulfilled, and in which there is an intense strain, arise because
80 Cf. Bailey 1926: 368, which anticipates the ideas in Bailey 1928, quoted above.
75
Psychology
of empty belief, and are not dissolved, not because of their own
nature, but because of the empty belief of the person.
81
There is nothing here about fulfillment of or pleasure in empty
desire.
Lucretius evidence on this point is more helpful. He is clear that
obsessive love cannot produce pure pleasure (the pura voluptas of
4.1081; cf. also 1075 and 3.40). The problem is, how are we to under-
stand impure pleasure? Benjamin Farrington (1952: 27) has sug-
gested that impure pleasure is indeed a species of voluptas, but a bad
or violent kind; non pura (1081), on this account, is used pejoratively to
stigmatize such pleasure. It is far more likely, however, that impure
is used in the sense of mixed in this connection. The idea of mixed
pleasures goes back to Platos Philebus (4447) where one of its mean-
ings, later picked up in Aristotles Ethics (7.14), has reference to things
like itches, where the pleasure of relief is bound up the painfulness
of the condition.
82
This sense superficially accords with Lucretius,
who emphasizes the pain and violence of amor (4.107983). In fact,
however, it is another passage in the Philebus (32B-36C) which is more
likely the source for the Epicurean doctrine. Here Plato distinguishes
between actual or present pleasures and pains and the anticipation
of these affects. Ian Hackforth (1945: 61) summarizes the position in
this way:
A second kind of pleasures and pains are those consisting
in anticipation of the first kind. Such pleasures often occur
81 Compare the translation of Arrighetti 1973: 130 Fra quei desideri che se non vengono
soddisfatti non comportano dolore corporeo quelli in cui intensa la passione provengono
da vuote opinioni, e non per la loro natura sono difcili a dissiparsi, ma per le stolte
credenze degli uomini. There is a kind of desire not leading to pain when not fullled,
such as a desire for pleasant odors, which, though natural, is not necessary. These are
not accompanied by an intense strain, which appears here as the distinguishing mark
of the unnatural desires involving empty belief.
82 On the relationship of Epicurus theory to that of Plato and Aristotle, cf. Brochard
1954: 260ff.
76
simultaneously with actual present pain, thereby constituting one
type of what are later called mixed pleasures.
83
This discussion of anticipatory pleasures leads directly to an analysis
of false pleasure in the Philebus. Here again I quote, for convencience,
from Hackforths summary (1945: 69):
Just as we call an opinion not right if it makes a mistake about
the object opined, so we shall call a pleasure (or pain) not right
if it involves a mistake about the object at which it is felt (
, 37E).
84
To return now to Lucretius: one component of the pleasure of amor is
the genuine and present pleasure of sexual release (4.108485):
sed leviter poenas frangit Venus inter amorem
blandaque refrenat morsus admixta voluptas.
But during the act of love Venus mitigates the lovers penalties,
and the admixture of seductive pleasure curbs their bites. (trans.
Smith 2001: 129)
Lucretius also clearly refers, however, to the pleasure of anticipation
(cf. voluptatem praesagit muta cupido, 1057; praesagit gaudia corpus, 1106). The
clearest evidence is in a passage that has been partially quoted above
(4.108488):
83 Frede 1993: xliv explains Platos argument as follows: Further considerations show
that it is not correct to equate even the simple pains and pleasures of hunger and eating
only with emptying and relling the organism. Memory and desire turn out to play an
important role in these processes as well. [H]unger always already contains the desire
for the corresponding replenishment that we remember.
84 Frede 1993: xlivxlv explains that the analysis of the complexity of pleasure and pain
provides the basis for discovering the promised discrimination among different kinds
of pleasures and identifying their different kinds of aws. For if pleasures are always
dened by their content, their intentional object, we can be mistaken about them in
various ways. Therefore pleasures can be false.
77
Psychology
sed leviter poenas frangit Venus inter amorem
1085 blandaque refrenat morsus admixta voluptas.
namque in eo spes est, unde est ardoris origo,
quod fieri contra totum natura repugnat.
But during the act of love Venus mitigates the lovers penalties,
and the admixture of seductive pleasure curbs their bites. For the
hope is that the same body that kindled the burning passion can
also extinguish the flame. However, nature objects that quite the
reverse happens. (trans. Smith 2001: 129)
This hope, however, is specious; it is snatched away by the wind,
because it feeds on simulacra (quae vento spes raptast saepe misella, 1096).
85

Impure pleasure, then, is compounded partly of sexual delight and partly
of anticipated pleasure and the pain (dolorem, 1079) that comes from vio-
lently clutching at anticipated and unrealizable pleasure.
I have attempted to show that, for the Epicureans, irrational fears
are the cause, at least in part, of irrational desires such as greed and
ambition, and that the life of immoderate desire, in turn, is projected
onto an afterlife in the form of a falsely anticipated retribution, thus
reinforcing anxiety. Irrational fears and desires alike are grounded
in false beliefs and the avoidance or pursuit of simulacra. The question
naturally arises, whence come the simulacra in the first place? What is
the origin of the cycle of irrational fears and desires? The answer to
these questions will occupy the third chapter, which treats the social
theory of the Epicureans.
85 I follow here the reading adopted by Bailey in his 1928 edition, and rejected in the 1947
edition in favor of the reading of the mss. O and Q (so too Giussani, Diels, and Martin):
quae vento spes raptat. Bailey admits (3.1307) that on the latter reading the thought is
certainly obscure and the construction of vento difcult (he renders: which vain hope
tosses to the wind), but concerning the reading of A and B (followed by Munro) he
asks: what is the hope? The immediate context suggests nothing and it can hardly be
the spes of 1086. Bailey evidently does not recognize the importance of anticipation in
the explanation of false pleasures. For discussion of the crux, see Brown 1987: 23435.
79
In a famous passage in Book 5 of De rerum natura, Lucretius compares
the hazards faced by primitive men with the dangers that inhere in
modern society (5.9881010):
nec nimio tum plus quam nunc mortalia saecla
dulcia linquebant lamentis lumina vita.
990 unus enim tum quisque magis deprensus eorum
pabula viva feris praebebat, dentibus haustus,
et nemora ac montis gemitu silvasque replebat
viva videns vivo sepeliri viscera busto.
at quos effugium servarat corpore adeso,
995 posterius tremulas super ulcera taetra tenentes
palmas horriferis accibant vocibus Orcum,
donique eos vita privarant vermina saeva
expertis opis, ignaros quid vulnera vellent.
at non multa virum sub signis milia ducta
1000 una dies dabat exitio nec turbida ponti
aequora lidebant navis ad saxa virosque.
1007 tum penuria deinde cibi languentia leto
membra dabat, contra nunc rerum copia mersat.
illi imprudentes ipsi sibi saepe venenum
vergebant, nunc dant <aliis> sollertius ipsi.
CHAPTER 3
Social Theory
80
In Smiths translation (2001: 16364, modified):
Mortal beings did not leave with lamentions the sweet light of
life in greater numbers then than now. Then it more often happened
that individuals were caught by wild beasts and provided them
with living food for their teeth to tear, and filled the woods and
mountains and forests with their shrieks as they saw their living
flesh being buried in a living tomb. Others, who had escaped with
their bodies part devoured, afterward pressed the palms of their
quivering hands over hideous sores and called on Orcus with dread-
ful cries until they were robbed of life by agonizing pains, destitute
of help and ignorant of what treatment their wounds wanted. But
never in those times did a single day consign to destruction many
thousands of men marching beneath military standards; never did
the boisterous billows of the ocean dash ships and sailors upon the
rocks. Moreover, whereas in those times it was lack of food that
consigned peoples languid limbs to death, nowadays it is surfeit
to which they succumb; and whereas in those times they often
served poison to themselves unwittingly, nowadays they give it
to others to make away with them more expertly.
1
Around this passage there has arisen a considerable discussion about
what Lucretius or the Epicurean view was concerning the primitive
state of mankind, whether better or worse than the present condition.
Primitive man plainly suffered from the want of technology, for example,
and some scholars have concluded that Lucretius extensive account of
the development of technical crafts, which includes the higher arts and
culminates in philosophy itself, places the poet squarely in the camp
of the progressivists, despite the fact that he sees and even dwells on
the darker side of the picture (Taylor 1947: 194). But with the advance
of technology, other critics have argued, emerged mankinds violent
and unnatural passions; primitive people were at the mercy of fortune
1 Smith reads, instead of <aliis> with the Justine edition, <contra> nunc dant and ren-
ders: nowadays they make away with themselves more expertly. For discussion, see
Campbell 2003: 252.
81
but were not yet each others victims. La vie des premiers hommes,
comments Robin (1962: 2.128), toute misrable quelle peut tre parfois,
est du moins une vie naturelle et simple, voisine par consquent de la
vraie philosophie (cf. Green 1942). History, then, is the record of the
decline of mankind, although this darker side is no doubt relieved in
part by the intellectual achievements of humanity, and especially by the
philosophical discoveries of Epicurus. It might seem discreet to withhold
judgment, allowing, with Lovejoy and Boas (1935: 239), that elements or
strands of progressivism and of primitivism are to be found in Lucretius
discussion, without assigning primacy to either.
2
This solution, however,
denies Epicureanism a systematic and coherent account of social history.
But such an account was necessary for Epicurus doctrine, and a brief
discussion of some of the reasons why may reveal in turn why primitiv-
ism and progressivism were likely to prove barren categories with
which to clarify the issue.
3
According to Epicureanism, like many other philosophies, human
beings naturally have the capacity to lead fulfilled lives (that is, a
2 See also Merlan 1950, with a good bibliography of work to that time. Merlan attacks
the unity of Book 5, and concludes that Lucretius was not at all concerned with the
problem of progressivism or primitivism, but sought principally to show that technol-
ogy developed without divine intervention. Further discussion in Borle 1962; Sasso 1979:
1822; Bertoli 1980; Grilli 1995. See also Asmis 1996, who argues that Lucretius account
of evolution is essentially a history of ideas, some of which (like Epicureanism itself)
succeed in promoting human welfare while others do not. Gale 1994: 15682 analyzes
Lucretius account of cultural history as an example of latent myth: While Lucretius
Kulturgeschichte is strictly rationalistic, it is possible to detect underlying references to
mythological accounts of human prehistory and the development of culture (156).
She makes it clear that Lucretius does not wish overly to glamorize the primitive age,
since For an Epicurean, paradise lies not in the past but (potentially) in the present
(161). Nevertheless, Many of the features of Lucretius account of early man in 925ff.
can be seen as rationalizations of aspects of the Golden Age myth (164), e.g. men were
tougher, nature was kinder, there was no agriculture, no laws or states, no sailing or
war (16567). Gale compares (167) Lucretius account to Dicaearchus Bios Hellados, as
reported in Porphyry De abstinentia 4.1.2, where Dicaearchus accepts the rough picture
of the reign of Cronus, but removes . But if Dicaearchus idealized the
early age, Lucretius did not (16869); Technological progress, she concludes, is a
deeply ambivalent affair in Lucretius eyes (177).
3 The unity of Lucretius account should not be merely mechanical, as Jelenko 1936
maintains.
Social Theory
82
). For the Epicureans, specifically, this meant lives free of irrational
fears and desires, so that people might securely enjoy the natural plea-
sures and freedom from bodily pain.
4
In fact, however, people every-
where abandon pleasure and safety, driven by empty fears and false,
limitless desires. Furthermore, the Epicureans did not ascribe blame for
this corruption to some part of humanitys natural psychology, such as
the senses or the passions.
5
Human beings in the natural state, indeed,
do not practice the vices that are symptomatic of the irrational passions:
there was no war or seafaring, as Lucretius tells us in the passage quoted
above (cf. Chapter 2, pp. 6465). This view of mankind, which is the
basis for Epicurean optimism, makes it necessary to locate the source
of the corruption of human nature somewhere in the process of cultural
development. This is what gives the theory a certain primitivist aspect.
At the same time, some degree of social organization and technological
progress is needed to provide an essential minimum of security, and
the Epicureans interest in the long and difficult struggle for the means
of material and cultural welfare sets the progressivist tone. In what fol-
lows, I examine the social theory of the Epicureans chiefly to discover
just when and how irrational fears and desires arose and became uni-
versal in the course of history, and shall be concerned with technological
advances only insofar as they contribute to the formation and, perhaps,
the elimination of these passions.
Lucretius exposition of Epicurean social theory reflects an account
originally worked out by Democritus, as Thomas Cole (1967; see especially
the outline on page 26) has argued in a detailed and cogent defense of
a thesis first advanced by Karl Reinhardt (1912). The influence of this
theory may be traced also in Vitruvius, Posidonius, Diodorus Siculus,
and the Byzantine commentator and erudite Tzetzes.
6
All five accounts
4 For other systems, of course, the fullled life consisted in knowledge, virtue, faith, etc.
5 The senses, along with the feelings or path, were, according to Epicurus, the basis of
all judgment (Letter to Herodotus 38, 82; see Chapter 1, p. 4). The Stoics, who also invoked
social evolution to explain the currency of false opinion, seem nevertheless to have held
that some false impressions are naturally persuasive; see Graver 2007: 15458.
6 Sasso 1979: 6369 calls attention to important differences between Lucretius account
and the parallels in Diodorus and Tzetzes. Lucretius may have inuenced, in turn,
Juvenals fteenth satire (13259), as well as Lactantius description of social evolution
in Institutiones Divinae 6 and Epitome 56; see Konstan 2001: 12124.
83
not only reproduce a substantially identical sequence of stages in social
history; they also reveal an identical and rigorous method behind their
speculative reconstruction of that history. As Cole explains (1967: 47):
The most important and most characteristic feature of our five
texts is to be found in the importance which all of them assign
to the individual technological advance, an advance which is
always plausibly accounted for in terms of empiricist psychology
as the result of accident, imitation or suggestion. Such individual
episodes are the basic and essential units in the entire cultural
process. Progress is simply an accumulation of them, multiplied
indefinitely because of the social character of the medium in
which they occur.
Thus, the Epicureans inherited from Democritus model the basic
pattern at least for the progressivist aspect of their doctrine. Lucretius
account contains certain intrusions, apparently, upon the Democritean
blueprint which, as I have suggested and now attempt to demonstrate
more clearly, are not the product of some kind of pessimism native to
the Roman poet that disrupts Democritus cool and logical conception
of human progress. Rather, the theory is developed in such a way as to
include some explanation of the genesis of irrational passions. Thus, what
is isolated as a primitivist side of Lucretius story may indeed have been
due to the Epicureans, but not at all in the spirit of pessimism.
If in the course of history there arose irrational fears and desires,
according to Epicureanism, it is natural to expect that social develop-
ment will be represented in the theory as a process involving two or
more stages, one of them, at least, prior to the widespread emergence of
such passions, and one or more subsequent to it. In any case, this is the
picture Lucretius gives us. Benjamin Farrington, who has approached the
question in four studies relating to the historical theory of the Epicureans
(1953a, 1953b, 1954, 1955), gives us the following outline of Lucretius
account. The Epicureans, he argues (1953a: 62), divided the history of
mankind into two stages, the second of which was the political stage,
which they condemned. The first stage, or vita prior (5.1105), was a simple
pastoral society, united by a pact of friendship (foedus amicitiae) and
Social Theory
84
free of class division and political oppression (1954: 10). But, Farrington
observes, since men had discovered natural justice before they imposed
on themselves the yoke of law, the urgent question arises how men ever
came to abandon the good life and make for themselves a worse (1955: 8).
This is, of course, an essential problem, and Farringtons answer to it is,
the fear of death, by which, he adds, Lucretius means what we call the
struggle for existence (1953b: 337). For the fear of death begat avarice
which destroyed the pact of friendship and started humanity on the com-
petitive struggle which destroys all the pleasure of life (1955: 8). But the
vita prior remained the ideal of the Epicureans. Accordingly, Farrington
concludes, they were in the strictest sense reactionaries. They believed
in going back so far as possible to the form of society that had been
superseded by the State and recognised that in order to do so it would
be necessary to abandon many of the gains of civilization, many of the
achievements of applied science (1953b: 338).
I agree with Farrington in this: it is important to identify the stages
of social development in the theory, and, especially, to discover how the
transition from one stage to the next is motivated in terms of Epicurean
philosophy. Farringtons analysis, however, which is of course a simplified
and schematic picture, raises an essential problem that is not resolved
in a wholly satisfactory way. If human beings in their ignorance have
feared death from the beginning, and if avarice, moreover (like ambi-
tion, one may add), is a symptom of the fear of death, how is it that
humanitys first society was relatively free of socially destructive desires
and achieved stability, for a time at least, on the basis of friendship? In the
latest of his four studies, Farrington suggests an answer (1955: 8): when
in the course of progress property and money came to be invented men
thought they could win security if they could make themselves richer
than their fellows. That is, anxiety over death could manifest itself as
greed only when society had reached the stage of private property. The
evidence in Lucretius for this interpretation is a highly controversial
passage (5.110514):
1105 inque dies magis hi victum vitamque priorem
commutare novis monstrabant rebus et igni
ingenio qui praestabant et corde vigebant.
85
condere coeperunt urbis arcemque locare
praesidium reges ipsi sibi perfugiumque,
1110 et pecudes et agros divisere atque dedere
pro facie cuiusque et viribus ingenioque;
nam facies multum valuit viresque vigebant.
posterius res inventast aurumque repertum,
quod facile et validis et pulchris dempsit honorem.
And more and more every day those endowed with exceptional
talents and mental power showed how to exchange their former
way of life for new practices and, in particular, for the use of fire.
Kings began to build cities, and to choose sites for citadels to be
strongholds and places of refuge for themselves; and they distrib-
uted gifts of flocks and fields to individuals according to their
beauty, strength and intellect; for beauty was highly esteemed,
and strength was held in honor. Later wealth was invented and
gold discovered, and this easily robbed the strong and handsome
of their prestige. (trans. Smith 2001: 167)
The question is whether the discovery of gold (1113) and the atten-
dant evils of greed which are described in the subsequent lines mark a
competitive and violent phase of history distinct from a benevolent or,
in Robert Philippsons words (1910: 314), patriarchal lordship of the
wise, which is supposed to be described in lines 110512. The evidence
is surely against the patriarchal stage, which seems to have been the
specific contribution of Posidonius to the Democritean tradition (Cole
1967: 18 and n. 7; Boyanc 1963: 248). Nowhere else in the Epicurean tra-
dition are individual benefactors of superior wisdom allowed a decisive
role in the development of culture.
7
Furthermore, the kings mentioned
7 Cf. Lucretius polemic against the idea that some one individual may have discovered or
assigned names for things and taught them to others (5.1041ff.), taken up also by Diogenes
of Oenoanda; see below, p. 103 and n. 36. Gale 1994: 17782 notes that Lucretius attacks
the heurematistic tradition of great inventors, although there are latent references
to the mythological tradition; in particular, she sees his representation of Epicurus as
equivalent to a Euhemerist creator: thus, Lucretius has taken on the Euhemerists on
their own ground (160).
Social Theory
86
in v. 1009, who apparently existed before the discovery of property and
money, were such as to require citadels in which to take refuge from the
envy of the people, as Bailey (1947: 3.1501) points out.
8
It is reasonable
to conclude that the Epicureans recognized a single stage of history, fol-
lowing immediately upon the end of the vita prior, in which the irrational
and aggressive desires, of which greed is only one, emerged.
9
A further
weakness in Farringtons argument is that the Epicureans can scarcely
have looked back to the vita prior as a paradigm of the ideal community
if they imagined it as a society of people whose security was corroded
by the fear of death. If early humans did not know vain desire, neither
were they subject to empty anxiety (see below). It is necessary, then, to
examine Epicurean social theory more closely in order to determine the
origin of irrational fears and desires.
Mankind was not at first social, but existed in a state of primitive
individualism, in Baileys phrase (1947: 3.1499). Lucretius says that
people lived like wild animals (5.932, cf. 94547). On the whole, Lucretius
description of this stage is parallel, as Cole makes clear, to the accounts of
Diodorus and Tzetzes, except in two respects. First, Lucretius introduces
the idea of the earths spontaneous bounty in primitive times (cf. Cole
1967: 2728). Second, and more important, Lucretius pauses to explain
the kinds of cares that troubled the minds of early human beings. The
passage deserves quotation in full (5.97387):
nec plangore diem magno solemque per agros
quaerebant pavidi palantes noctis in umbris,
975 sed taciti respectabant somnoque sepulti,
dum rosea face sol inferret lumina caelo.
a parvis quod enim consuerant cernere semper
alterno tenebras et lucem tempore gigni,
non erat ut fieri posset mirarier umquam
8 Cf. Cole 1967: 18 n. 7. One might argue, less convincingly, I think, that the arces are
intended as protection from foreign enemies; cf. Philippson 1910: 304ff., Sasso 1979: 4245,
who traces the interpretation involving popular envy to the humanist commentator
G.B. Pio (4243 n. 40).
9 Boyanc 1963: 249 sees ambition as the hallmark of the third stage.
87
980 nec diffidere, ne terras aeterna teneret
nox in perpetuum detracto lumine solis.
sed magis illud erat curae, quod saecla ferarum
infestam miseris faciebant saepe quietem.
eiectique domo fugiebant saxea tecta
985 spumigeri suis adventu validique leonis
atque intempesta cedebant nocte paventes
hospitibus saevis instrata cubilia fronde.
In Smiths translation (2001: 163):
They did not roam panic-stricken through the countryside
in the shadows of the night, seeking the day and the sunlight
with loud lamentations, but waited silent and buried in sleep for
the suns rose-red torch to spread its radiance over the heavens.
Having always been accustomed from their infancy to see dark-
ness and light born alternately, they could not possibly have ever
wondered at the departure of day, or feared that the sunlight might
withdraw forever, leaving the earth in the possession of perpetual
night. A much greater cause of concern was the way in which the
tribes of wild beasts often made rest perilous and wretched for
them. Driven from their homes by the arrival of a foaming boar
or powerful lion, they would flee panic-stricken from their rocky
shelters and at dead of night surrender their leaf-strewn beds to
their ruthless guests.
Bailey (1947: 3.1479), comparing Manilius 1.6770 and Statius Thebaid
4.282.84, observes that Lucretius is apparently arguing against a theory
that primitive men dreaded that day might not return.
10
It may be so,
but the important point is this: primitive people did not regard celestial
phenomena with superstitious fear.
11
Lucretius is explicit about the
10 The argument may have been originally directed against Aristotle; cf. Blickman 1989:
163 and 16869, where he compares Epicurus Principal Doctrines 3940.
11 This does not mean that primitive people did not believe in or had no knowledge of
the gods: the gods do exist, for Epicureanism (see Blickman 1989: 158; for the nature of
the gods, see below, n. 51). It is worth noting that Lucretius, in his account of the origin
Social Theory
88
reason why: experience had taught them that day and night alternate
with regularity, so that they could not possibly ever have been struck
with wonder or doubt (97781). We are given to understand that primi-
tive people were empirical: the idea of perpetual night did not enter
their heads, because there was no objective basis for such a belief. Their
sleep was not disturbed by fantastic terrors which they had no reason to
expect. They were concerned rather with the concrete danger of preda-
tory beasts, which broke in upon their peace and forced them from their
rude shelters. Primitive people trembled (paventes, 986), but not with
unfounded anxiety like children in darkness (cf. nec pavidi, 5.97374,
and contrast 2.5561); they trembled in the face of real and present
perils to their security. In the language of Diogenes of Oenoanda, their
fear was not unclear (), but rather distinct and clearly perceived
(). Lucretius meaning seems unmistakable, though the
point has not received the attention it merits. For pre-social humanity,
irrational anxiety, to the extent it may have been experienced, was in no
sense a cause of universal wretchedness, as it later became in an advanced
stage of social development.
Upon the state of primitive individualism, which did not yet look to
the common good (commune bonum, 958) or know to regulate conduct
by custom (mores) or law (leges, 959), there followed the first community
of human beings, the society that Farrington identifies as the vita prior.
As in other accounts in the Democritean tradition, the formation of
society is accompanied, in part as a result but also as a cause, by certain
of the worship and fear of the gods (5.1161ff.), interjects an apostrophe to mankind on the
nature of false pietas (11941203). Following upon this interjection, Lucretius discusses
the sources of the new cura or anxiety, namely superstition: then, when their breasts
were oppressed by other evils, that anxietiey too began to raise its newly awakened head
against them (tunc aliis oppressa malis in pectora cura/ illa quoque expergefactum caput erigere
int, 120708). Before this interjection, Lucretius assigns two reasons for belief in the gods,
one of them valid (the evidence of dreams and visions, 116982), according to Epicurean
doctrine, the other invalid (the regularity of celestial phenomena, 118393). Neither of
these reasons for belief in the gods need have produced dread of them. Primitive peoples
condence in the regular cycle of day and night might well have been associated with
a belief in divine order. Boyanc (1963: 252) notes that the evidence of dreams and the
regularity of the cosmos were the original causes of the idea of the divine according to
Aristotles De philosophia; this may be part of the reason why these two factors are not
associated necessarily with irrational anxiety. See further below, pp. 11419.
89
technological discoverieshouses, clothing, fire, the cultivation and
preparation of grainas well as by the beginning of language (cf. Cole
1967: 3036; Lucretius 5.1011, 10921104; on language, 1028ff.).
12
Lucretius
places special emphasis on the development of the family, through the
medium of which Venus, whose character had formerly been rude and
not dissimilar to animal desire (96264), gradually tames and softens
human beings (101718). The consequence of association in the family
is a desire for amicities (5.101423):
tum genus humanum primum mollescere coepit.
1015 ignis enim curavit, ut alsia corpora frigus
non ita iam possent caeli sub tegmine ferre,
et Venus inminuit viris puerique parentum
blanditiis facile ingenium fregere superbum.
tunc et amicitiem coeperunt iungere aventes
1020 finitimi inter se nec laedere nec violari,
et pueros commendarunt muliebreque saeclum,
vocibus et gestu cum balbe significarent
imbecillorum esse aequum misererier omnis.
Then the human race first began to soften. For fire saw to it
that their chilly bodies could not now bear cold so well under the
covering of the sky; sex sapped their strength, and children by
their charm easily broke their parents stern demeanour. Then
too neighbours began to form friendships, eager not to harm one
another and not to be harmed; and they gained protection for
children and for the female sex, when with babyish noises and
gestures they indicated that it is right for everyone to pity the
weak (trans. Long and Sedley 1987: 127).
Robin (Ernout and Robin 1962: 3.139) saw in what he called cet
aspect sentimental in Lucretius account a divergence from Epicurus
12 A propos clothing, Mitsis 1988: 85 notes that, according to Lucretius (5.1420), the
rst man to wear skins was probably killed for them by his fellows, thus conrming
the connection between expensive goods and violence.
Social Theory
90
(as well as from Diodorus), and Bailey (1947: 3.1484), remarking that the
Epicurean foundation of justice is purely utilitarian, was of the same
opinion. For he adds:
But this austere utilitarian doctrine is undoubtedly soft-
ened and humanized by Lucr. He emphasizes family love as the
foundation of union, insists on the sentiment of pity for women
and children, and, most notably of all, maintains (1019) that the
desire for friendship was one of the causes of the formation of the
contract. He does not revolt from the Epicurean idea, but gives it
a more natural and human background.
In fact, it is doubtful that Lucretius is introducing an innovation here
into Epicurean doctrine.
13
The idea denoted by amicities has two aspects.
On the one hand, it is grounded in utility, and serves as the basis for
mutual security among people. Lucretius early people initiate alliances
with their neighbors with a view to abstaining from inflicting harm on
one another. This sense of alliance is picked up in the words foedera (1025)
and communia foedera pacis (1155), both of which correspond exactly to
the or pact of Epicurus, as Philippson (1910: 31415) pointed
out.
14
As Campbell (2003: 275) observes, nec laedere nec violari is clearly
a translation of Epicurus in Principal
Doctrines 31, 32, 33, and 35, which Epicurus ties closely to the idea of a
social pact (cf. Mller 1969: 305ff. and 318):

,

.
13 For Lucretius dependence on Epicurus in his history of mankind, see Furley 1989a:
212; on parents natural love for their children, cf. Demetrius Lacon in Herculanean
papyrus 1012 col. 46 (De Falco 1923: 49).
14 But this is not to say that amicitia in Roman literature regularly refers to political
alliances with little or no sentimental connotations, as I wrote in the rst edition
of this book (p. 43), following Ross 1969: 8284 and others. For full discussion of Greek
and Roman ideas of friendship, see Konstan 1997.
91
For those animals that were unable to form pacts not to harm
one another or be harmed, there existed neither justness nor
injustice, and so too for those nations [of human beings] that were
unable or unwilling to make pacts not to harm or be harmed.
(Principal Doctrine 32)
15
On the other hand, the capacity to form such alliances was evidently
not present in the earliest, pre-social stage of humanity (note Epicurus
unable or unwilling). In this respect, amicities, like pity, is a new capac-
ity, developed in the context of social life, which is necessitated by the
weakness of the species in its modern form (this in turn a consequence
in part of the invention of fire and the evolution of family life).
16
As John
Armstrong (1997: 32627) observes propos Lucretius 5.102023, the ear-
liest compacts among human beings were made on the basis of what is
fair (aequum), with no mention of enforcement by penalties. Armstrong
adds: It is plausible to suppose that this was indeed the reason that
moved them to form their alliance (amicities), for the emotional softening
experienced within early families had likely given these primitive men
considerable capacities for sympathy (101718). Amicities is evidently a
relationship among equals, whereas pity obtains between stronger and
weaker. The ground of pity, Lucretius explains, is an understanding of
fairness: it is right for everyone to pity the weak; correspondingly, a
sense of what is useful or necessary is the basis for amicities. But friend-
ship is not reducible to utility any more than pity is reducible to justice.
Rather, both sensibilities have emerged among beings who had previ-
ously lived in isolation, where there was no scope for either (cf. Sasso
15 Alberti 1995: 166 observes that, unlike laws about animals, which are merely useful,
those that prohibit killing of people are also just (166), since they depend on a pact,
and one cannot make a pact with irrational creatures (16667)although one can of
course make pacts about them (167 n. 12). Cf. Cosenza 1996: 36263, who notes that,
besides animal species, there are certain human groups that either cannot or will not
enter into contracts. The effort of Goldschmidt (1977: 53) to distinguish Lucretius attitude
toward animals from that of Hermarchus seems misguided to me; one may certainly
tend animals, as one would the weak, but this is not the same as forming a compact
with them, which is the basis of justice.
16 Cf. Long 1985: 310 and Nussbaum 1994: 162, 266, and contrast Armstrong 1997: 327
n. 8, who denies any implication of friendship in the use of the term amicities.
Social Theory
92
1979: 1213). Human beings are able to establish pacts of friendship just
because they have now acquired the ability to love, which was lacking
during the primitive stage in which their temper was tyrannical (ingenium
superbum) and all lived for themselves alone.
17
The friendship that marks the new stage of human society is an
altruistic sentiment (see Konstan 1997: 5356; also OConnor 1989:
185).
18
It is Epicurus, as much as Lucretius, who emphasizes its inher-
ent desirability as opposed to its merely utilitarian function (Vatican
Saying 23):

.
All philia is an excellence [aret] in itself, but it has taken its
origin from service [pheleia].
19
Friendship has indeed a practical function in the Epicurean
system, in that it provides for a certain elementary security against
misfortune and shores up our confidence. Thus, Epicurus writes
(Vatican Saying 34):

.
17 For further discussion of the two aspects to in Epicurus own writings, see
Konstan 1996; cf. also OConnor 1989; OKeefe 2001; Brown 2002. Annas 1993: 23644
emphasizes the tension in Epicurus two-level theory of friendship, which has its
origin in utility but is felt as a genuine caring for others (see esp. p. 240). She identi-
es, moreover, a similar duality in the idea of justice, which depends on a utilitarian
social contract but takes the form of a trait of character (293302): what motivates
the adoption of the contract is not what the individually just Epicurean bears in
mind (300); Annas takes a like view of the role of virtue in general in Epicurus
system (34044).
18 Wolff 2000: 17280 discusses, rather impressionistically, the antinomy between the
utilitarian and altruistic sides to Epicurean friendship: Utile ou dsintrese lamiti?
Ni lun ni lautre, au fond, concde picure (177), and explains: Lamiti commence au
moment prcis o lon cesse de chercher cette aide (179).
19 I keep the mss. reading , with Bollack 1975 and Long and Sedley (1987: 2.132).
Usener emended to , choiceworthy.
93
We have use not so much for usefulness from our friends [philoi]
as for trust in their usefulness [khreia].
But friendship can only confer this benefit if it is sincerely believed in.
With the term amicities, Lucretius seems to capture both the utilitarian
function of Epicurean friendship and its sentimental aspect, by which
it is suitably paired with pity.
The important thing, in any case, concerning the first human com-
munity is that, while it was not perfect, nevertheless for the most part
the social compact was piously observed (5.102427):
nec tamen omnimodis poterat concordia gigni,
1025 sed bona magnaque pars servabat foedera caste;
aut genus humanum iam tum foret omne peremptum
nec potuisset adhuc perducere saecla propago.
Although it was not possible for concord to be achieved univer-
sally, the great majority kept their compacts loyally. Otherwise the
human race would have been entirely extinguished at that early
stage and could not have propagated and preserved itself to the
present day. (trans. Smith 2001: 164).
20
The question is, why did the bonds of obligation and friendship dis-
solve into competition and mutual violence? One reason is doubtless con-
tained in verses 102627, quoted above. In the primitive society, survival
itself depended upon cooperation and mutual non-aggression. Once riches
were accumulated, it became easier to forget that civilized life would
be destroyed in the absence of cooperation. This view is in accord with
the account of early human society ascribed to Hermarchus, Epicurus
20 Cf. Armstrong 1997: 327: Not everyone kept the original contract (102425), but
laws, with their accompanying sanctions for noncompliance, did not come until much
later when cities arose and then collapsed on account of strife over wealth and political
power. Mitsis 1988: 83 observes that individuals have no natural need to engage in
troubling competitive pursuits and have no reason for harming others (83). At the rst
stage of civilization, covenants serve more to coordinate common familial interests
than to solve conicts of interest (84).
Social Theory
94
successor as head of the Garden, by Porphyry in his tract, De abstinentia
(1.1011 = Longo Auricchio 1988: 71, with Italian translationsomewhat
different from the presenton p. 97):
21

,
,
, .

.
This is why they refrained, up to a certain moment, from
[killing] kinsmen. But as time went on, and reproduction among
themselves had greatly advanced, whereas animals of other spe-
cies and their dragging off [of humans] had been repelled, some
people undertook a calculation of advantage in peoples conduct
toward one another, and not just an irrational recollection [of
former conditions]. From then on they tried more forcefully to
prevent people from killing one another readily and furnishing
help that was too weak because they had forgotten the past.
The passage is highly condensed, perhaps due to some abbreviation of
Hermarchus text, but the central idea seems clear enough.
22
Originally,
Hermarchus (as reported by Porphyry) explains, the better sort bore
21 The text that Porphyry is following is probably Hermarchus Pros Empedoklea; cf.
Gallo 1985; Obbink 1988; Vander Waerdt 1988, esp. 87; Longo Auricchio 1988: 3336,
123ff.; Indelli and Tsouna-McKirahan 1995: 6465.
22 For discussion, see Longo Auricchio 1988: 13745; there are some textual difcul-
ties, especially the expression , which Long and Sedley (1987: 2.138)
mark as a crux. Sasso 1979: 5052 reviews opinions concerning the reliablility of the
passage as a reection of Hermarchus views, and notes, not without justice, that sia
o no riesso fedele delle idee di Ermarco, il passo di Porrio cos disordinato e, nel
punto che pi ci interessa, incoerente, che solo con estrema difcolt potr stabilirsi se,
ed entro quali limiti, la doppia nascita del diritto sia una tesi e non, invece, il frutto di
95
in mind that they refrained from murder because it was useful to their
safety, and they inculcated a reminder among the rest of the fact that
this would contribute to the common good and thereby to that of each
individual, whether in regard to expelling wild beasts or other people
bent on harming them (1.10):
Some of the most accomplished people of that time recalled
that they had refrained from killing since that was useful for
survival, and they inculcated in the rest the memory of what
resulted in those associations with one another, so that by
refraining from [killing] a kinsman they might preserve the
community, which contributed also to the individual survival
of each individual. Not only was it useful to be separated off,
nor to do anything injurious to those who were gathered in the
same place, insofar as driving out animals of other species was
concerned, but against other human beings who might come
for the purpose of doing harm.

,

,
, .

,
.
As communities became numerous and the threat from wild animals
receded, however, people, it seems, again began to commit murder
against their fellow beings. Evidently, a mere reminder of the utility
of abstaining from internecine violence was no longer sufficient to
uninconseguenza concettuale ed espositiva (5253); further discussion on pp. 5362.
See also Gallo 1985: 3941, with bibliography.
Social Theory
96
deter them. In these conditions, some people made a prudent calcula-
tion () concerning advantage in social relations, and no
longer relied on irrational memory.
23
As a consequence, they imposed
harsher measures, based on laws and punishments. The calculation to
which Hermarchus refers has to do not with the ability to recognize
the usefulness of refraining from murder within the community, since
the earlier leaders were well aware of this and did what they could to
remind others. What the new lawgivers figure out, I would argue, is
that legal penalties are needed to enforce the ban on intracommunal
killing. Why is this additional apparatus required at this stage? The
reason would appear to be the size of the population and its success in
eliminating the danger posed by savage animals. People are now free of
fear (cf. in the following sentence), and so more readily violate
the norms of solidarity that had previously kept them in check.
24
This fearlessness, then, is one reason why people began to violate the
bonds of friendship that had obtained in the first stage of social organiza-
tion. Lucretius follows this argument, however, with a long digression
which perhaps suggests another cause of the historic transition away from
the vita prior: the invention of language. Only after society had been in
existence for a time could language develop, according to what seems to
me the most likely interpretation of Lucretius. Until then, people signified
their feelings by gestures and inarticulate sounds: vocibus et gestu cum
balbe signicarent (1022). Bailey (1947: 3.1485) supposed that the subject of
this line and the next was the children, but surely it was not children
23 These lawgivers cannot be the same as the accomplished people (
), as Goldschmidt 1977: 307 maintained (cf. Longo Auricchio 1988: 143),
since they belong to an earlier stage of human society.
24 Armstrong 1997 (330) discusses the double prohibition on killing in Hermarchus,
and concludes: the Hermarchus passage makes explicit the Epicurean chain of justi-
cation: the security of social life is conducive to the security of the individual, which is
conducive to the individuals freedom from fear. See also Alberti 1995: 164, who argues
that according to Hermarchus, people rst abstained from killing one another on the
basis of utility, that is, their own personal safety; this awareness and practice preceded
any legislative intervention (165). The law was established later to stabilize this situa-
tion via threats of punishment, and also served to make people rationally aware of the
need for abstaining from homicide. Laws are required later because of changed social
conditions and historical events (166), which make people forget (or be unmindful of)
the utility that underwrites their practices.
97
who propounded the standard of social justice: imbecillorum esse aequum
miserier omnis (1023; cf. Campbell 2003: 279, who notes: Unless we have a
sudden change of subject it would seem more natural that aventes nitimi
are the subject of signicarent; also Armstrong 1997: 32627 n. 7).
25
Robin
rather explains (Ernout and Robin 1962: 3.139) that the original compact
est signifie par un langage tout motionnel, gestes et balbutiements, et
elle a pour objet la protection des faibles, femmes et enfants, en tant quils
sont eux-mmes les objets dmotions tendres ou compatissantes.
26
This
kind of communication, from which language proper later developed (or
was at this moment in the process of developing), is akin to the speech of
animals, which can express feelings such as pain and pleasure but cannot
name things (cf. Sasso 1979: 1415). Lucretius makes clear, in his account
of the origin of language, the essential distinction between animal noises
and the vocabulary of human beings (5.105661, 108790):
postremo quid in hac mirabile tantoperest re,
si genus humanum, cui vox et lingua vigeret,
pro vario sensu varia res voce notaret?
cum pecudes mutae, cum denique saecla ferarum
1060 dissimilis soleant voces variasque ciere,
cum metus aut dolor est et cum iam gaudia gliscunt.
ergo si varii sensus animalia cogunt,
muta tamen cum sint, varias emittere voces,
quanto mortalis magis aequumst tum potuisse
1090 dissimilis alia atque alia res voce notare!
Lastly, why is it so very remarkable that human beings, with
their power of voice and tongue, should designate things by dif-
ferent sounds according to their different feelings? Even domestic
25 Bailey (1947: 3.149091) accepts, however, the idea of a pre-linguistic stage of man-
kind. Schrijvers 1999a: 57 afrms that primitive people spoke like children (referring
to Lucretius 5.1022).
26 Cf. Philippson 1910: 29697, Cole 1967: 6061, especially n. 3; also Giussani 1896:
1.27475. These verses tell against the argument of Spoerri 1959: 13537, who denies a
pre-linguistic stage; cf. Coles criticism (loc. cit.).
Social Theory
98
animals and the species of wild beasts, despite their dumbness,
regularly utter distinct and different sounds according to whether
they are afraid or in pain or full of joy. So if animals, despite
their dumbness, are impelled to utter various sounds expressive
of various feelings, how much more natural is it that mortals in
those early times should have been able to designate different
things by different sounds! (trans. Smith 2001: 166)
Many animals utter sounds to express their feelings (sensus, 1087; cf.
metus, dolor, gaudia, 1061).
27
Nevertheless, they are dumb (mutae, 1059; muta,
1088), that is, unable to frame words (Bailey 1947: ad 1059), for they are
unable to denote things (res notare, 1090; cf. 1058). Naming things, however,
is a characteristic feature of human language (5.102829):
At varios linguae sonitus natura subegit
mittere et utilitas expressit nomina rerum.
As for the various sounds of speech, it was nature that prompted
human beings to utter them, and it was utility that coined the
names of things. (trans. Smith 2001: 164)
The question naturally presents itself: how did language arise out of
something like animal cries?
28
This question requires an examination of
27 On the apparent ascription to animals of the emotion fear, along with the path or
feelings of pain and pleasure (gaudia = voluptas), see Chapter 1, n. 30. According to
Aristotle (Politics 1253a1214), animals can signify the sensation of pain and pleasure
to one another ( ).
28 Schrijvers 1999a: 5758 recognizes (with Bailey) two early phases, the rst consist-
ing in expressing physical reactions to emotions or sensations, and the second in the
production of nomina rerum (1029), which has to do with communication and mutual
comprehension: le langage est donc pour Lucrce un fait social (58). For a survey of
recent opinions with citation of many of the relevant texts, see Campbell 2003: 28394.
I omit a discussion of the role of utilitas here, save to indicate my view that there can
only have arisen a use for language after human beings began to associate with each
other in communities; in the pre-social stage, nothing would have promoted the devel-
opment of language (for the sense of the utilitas in Lucretius, see note 37 below). For
various views, including comparison with modern ideas on the origins of language,
see Atherton 2005: 11021.
99
a difficult and much-discussed paragraph in Epicurus Letter to Herodotus
(7576), where certainty about details is perhaps impossible to attain. It
is clear, however, that Epicurus distinguished three stages in the growth
of language,
29
in the first of which, the text seems to say, human beings
did not employ names that had been ascribed or modified by convention
( );
30
they naturally, rather than
deliberately () emitted sounds according to their feelings ( =
sensus) and sense impressions (), sounds which varied with
the different tribes or nations ():
,

,
.
Thus names too did not originally come into being by coining,
but mens own natures underwent feelings and received impres-
sions which varied peculiarly from tribe to tribe, and each of the
individual feelings and impressions caused them to exhale breath
peculiarly, according also to the racial differences from place to
place. (trans. Long and Sedley 1987: 1.97)
This stage corresponds more or less to the condition of animals, and
Horace (Satires 1.3.100) indeed refers to early mankind as mutum pecus,
the dumb herd;
31
but since human beings even at this point produce
sounds that correspond not just to inner states () but also to outer
29 Verlinsky 2005: 6465 defends the idea that there are only two stages.
30 Taking with ; in the rst edition (p. 46 with n. 39), I took rather with
, and interpreted the phrase to mean that names as such did not exist in the
beginning; this is not excluded by what Epicurus says herehe is speaking about how
names originally arosebut his attention here is on the contrast between the role of
convention versus nature. Spoerri (1959: 136 n. 5) implausibly understands the phrase to
mean that arose , that is, naturally from the very beginning.
31 Cf. Giussani 1896: 274; Spoerri 1959: 143 n. 38 rejects an Epicurean inuence on Horace
here, despite verbal echoes of Lucretius (e.g. mutum pecus, notaret), mainly because his
own theory does not allow for a mute stage in human history.
Social Theory
100
impressions (), these latter vocalizations perhaps already
have the character of names or designations of things. Lucretius fur-
nishes a hint as to what occurred next: human beings had a natural
advantage over other animals with respect to language, for their voice
and tongue were more developed or adapted to speech (cui vox et lingua
vigeret, 1057). All animals naturally make use of their specific capacities,
Lucretius argues (103040); just as nestling birds attempt to fly before
their wings are mature, so human beings naturally babble before the
faculty of speech is fully developed. This biological difference, one may
surmise, is the basis for the formation of true language, a process that
is best understood, it would seem, as taking place in the latter part of
Epicurus first stage. In the second stage, according to Epicurus, there
enters the element of convention ():

.
Later, particular coinings were made by consensus within
the individual races, so as to make the designations less ambigu-
ous and more concisely expressed. (trans. Long and Sedley
1987: 1.97)
There has been considerable controversy over the meaning and sig-
nificance of this second stage in the growth of language. P. and E. De
Lacy, who hold that originally people uttered merely emotional cries
which did not say anything specifically about external objects, describe
the next stage as follows (1941: 140): From these cries, Epicurus says, there
gradually arose a system of conventional sounds, referring to objects
(my emphasis).
32
Gregory Vlastos (1946: 5354), followed by Cole (1967:
62 with n. 5), dissents from attributing so great an importance to the role
of convention: The second stage, he remarks, elaborates and perfects
at the level of common consent what was already a working system at
32 Cited by Vlastos 1946: 54 n. 16 (the passage is omitted from the revised edition, 1978);
cf. also De Lacy 1939: 8788.
101
the level of nature.
33
A problem for those who stress the conventional
stage in Epicurus account, Vlastos notes (54 n. 17), is the apparent dis-
crepancy with Lucretius, where the second stage of the Epicurean
theory has shrunk to near extinction.
34
Long and Sedley (1987: 1.100)
suggest that inflections may have been added at this point to the bare
nouns, adjectives and verbs of the preceding stage. Verlinsky (2005: 72)
has recently adduced a passage in Claudius Ptolemys On the Criterion
and Ruling Element (3.2.78 Lammert), that seems to be derived from an
Epicurean source:

,
,

.

.
,
,
.
It is plausible that the earliest verbal expressions were uttered
naturally by people with no previous traditional usage: they must
have been the product of the particular features of the experiences
[] that impinged on them and of the individual nature of
the sounds themselves. The next generation of verbal expres-
sions probably was made from the previous ones by the way of
composition and conscious naming, in accordance with features
of named things. But their successors, having worked hard to
enrich linguistic usage, were led by the superfluity of names to lay
down, as it were, laws about the words themselves. The result
was that they would not permit anyone to describe things in any
33 Cf. also Dahlmann 1928: 100; Manuwald 1972: 912.
34 Cf. Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 12.II.11V.14 Smith.
Social Theory
102
other way than the way they prescribed, even if they immediately
understood perfectly the meaning of what was being stated, which
is the only proper purpose of uttered expression. (trans. based
on Verlinsky)
Verlinsky explains the process as follows:
In the first stage, people tried only to indicate things and their
attitudes to them, and it didnt matter whether they designated the
same thing with one word or several. In the second stage, on the
contrary, restrictions concerning word usage were introduced so as
to exclude the naming of things otherwise than was prescribed, i.e.
to avoid the ambiguity of the previously existing usage. The second
stage is represented thus as the creation of new words, on the one
hand, which was presumably necessary to designate new concepts,
and as the establishing, on the other, of a univocal nomenclature in
view of the diversity of natural names used for the same things.
And he concludes: If the theory of Ptolemy can be regarded as evi-
dence for Epicurus theory, it is tempting to understand the words
in the latter as the introduction of the new words coined
from already existing natural ones in accordance with etymological
correctness.
Some development, clearly, occurred in the second phase. To a certain
extent the controversy over the second stage of linguistic formation has
been fostered, I think, by an interpretation of the opposition between
and more relevant to the disputes of certain sophists of the fifth
century B.C. than to Epicurus, who, as Philippson showed in the case of
law and justice, regarded conventions themselves as based upon nature.
35

If Lucretius emphasis seems different from Epicurus, it is perhaps
35 Philippson 1910: 292ff.; cf. 298: Es ist bemerkenswert, dass die Entwicklung des
Rechtes genau mit der der Sprache bereinstimmt. Cf. Armstrong 1997: 330: With the
connection between contract and end rmly in mind, we can perhaps see why Epicurus
says, The justice of nature is a pledge of usefulness regarding not harming one another
or being harmed (KD 31). For well over a century, the sophistic debate over the nature
of law and justicewhether they are purely conventional or whether they have some
103
because he is polemicizing, like Diogenes of Oenoanda after him (fr. 12
Smith), against the notion that a single individual invented names and
taught the multitude to speak (it is possible that Epicurus took this to be
the argument of Platos Cratylus, or it may be that Lucretius was taking
aim rather at Posidonius).
36
What is significant about the -stage,
however, is that the names for things are no longer automatically elicited
like the sounds emitted by animals (ciere, 1060; cogunt, 1087; cf. subegit,
1028),
37
nor are they directly derived (with or without some element of
social agreement) from such automatic responses.
38
Names are now
abbreviated () and, at least relatively, arbitrary. It seems
reasonable to suppose that this is the stage at which the natural or primary
meanings of words are altered, and no longer necessarily correspond to
their proper objects. As Catherine Atherton (2005: 122) puts it: Now the
second stage involved (and, if it is continuing, still involves) the use of
reasoning [], which makes its advances at different rates,
and thus presumably imports some degree of contingency; and of course
communal imposition of names and improvement thereof will require
basis in naturehad drawn a clear division between nature and convention. Yet here
we nd Epicurus claiming that the justice of nature is a pledge or a contract.
36 See Chilton 1962: 160; Bailey 1947: 3.148889, for the inuence of the Cratylus. Boyanc
1963: 24446 suspects that the idea derives from Pythagorean sources.
37 Subegit in 1028 is used of human beings analogously to the use of ciere and cogere
with respect to animals. Schrijvers 1999a: 59 n. 11 notes that the imposition of names is
not associated with verbs of compulsion such as subegit and cogunt, and concludes that
natura and utilitas thus constitute distinct causes. Names, then, arise in determinate
social conditions, and their earliest meanings are not a simple or unmediated conse-
quence of physiological necessity, whatever the case for the more primitive expression
of sensations and feelings. Schrijvers examines (5961) the sense of usus and utilitas in
Lucretius, which he takes to mean use, practice, experience, and takes exprimere to be
equivalent in force to the necessity implicit in subigere (61). Nature and utility work in
concert, not in conict, and together (independently of deliberate actions) shape human
evolution (6263).
38 Schrijvers 1999a argues that Epicurus conception of phusis refers not to a natural con-
nection between sounds and things, but to a natural origin of language (5556); this is
why at an early stage it was necessary to get rid of ambiguities (amphiboliai) in language
(Letter to Herodotus 7576). Thus, there are no original right meanings to words, and
the phusis-stage cannot have been exalte par Epicure et Lucrce pour sa rectitude in
contrast with the later thesis-stage (56). But there are other explanations for the existence
of ambiguities even in the most primitive phase of utterance, as Verlinsky and Atherton
make clear.
Social Theory
104
deliberate choice amongst alternatives. This is apparently the process
that Epicurus describes in a rather opaque fragment of his On Nature (frg.
31.5 Arrighetti; translated by Arrighetti on pp. 29596):
[][ ][] [ ] [][]
[ ] [][], [] []
[] [][] [], [] []
[] [][][]
and a change of all the words: for it is possible for a few of
those that are in accord with sensations, which, because we pre-
viously believed them to be this way in accord with a mode not
based on impressions, we altered when we realized on the basis
of some calculation or other that they were not such.
Perhaps this process of or transformation continues into the
third stage, which Epicurus describes as follows (Letter to Herodotus 76):

,
,
.
Also, the men who had knowledge introduced certain unseen
entities, and brought words for them into usage, some giving utter-
ance under compulsion, and others having chosen words rationally,
and interpreting them in accord with the principal cause. (trans.
based on Long and Sedley 1987: 1.97, with substantial changes)
Here Epicurus seems to be describing the introduction into the vocabu-
lary of words for abstract concepts ( ), which
are perceived, at first in any case, only by some, and then explained in
terms of some kind of prevailing interpretation ( ).
39
39 Cf. Cole 1967: 62 with n. 31. Verlinsky 2005: 7783 shows clearly that the usual mean-
ing of is to notice, to consider or to comprehend, not to look at or to see
105
With the introduction, then, of conventional names, whether concrete
or abstract, as opposed to automatic vocal responses to sensible stimuli
(whether external or reflecting inner feeling states) and words directly
derived from such responses, language is set at one remove from sensa-
tion. After this, it is possible to utter sounds without an appropriate or
meaningful reference. It is such language that Epicurus calls empty
sounds ( ), sounds devoid of meaning.
40
The idea of empty
sounds is a familiar part of the doctrine of Epicurus; it is essential, he
says, not to be deceived by them (Letter to Herodotus 3738). I believe that
Lucretius makes explicit use of this idea in his explanation of aggressive
competition in human society, that third stage of development in which
people ruthlessly pursue wealth and power and so subvert the security
they seek. This is the passage (5.113334):
quandoquidem sapiunt alieno ex ore petuntque
res ex auditis potius quam sensibus ipsis.
since their wisdom is derived from the mouths of others and
their aims are determined by hearsay rather than by their own
sensations. (trans. Smith 2001: 168)
People believe what they hear about, rather than what they them-
selves perceive. Epicurus Principal Doctrine 37 seems to point to the
same idea:
in a literal sense (Verlinsky cites inter alia Plato Phaedrus 254D, Laws 965B, Epicurus
Letter to Herodotus 38, 63, to which add Polystratus On Contempt of Popular Opinions col.
I = Indelli 1978: 109, where what is healthful or unhealthy, and other advantageous or
disadvantageous things, are among the kinds of things that are not comprehended
[ ] by animals). Verlinsky concludes that Epicurus consequently has in
view neither things which were not seen previously, nor things which are in principle
imperceptible, but rather those which could not be comprehended by all members of a
tribe as easily as ordinary physical objects could. Examples are such things as motion,
rest and time on the one hand and liberty and slavery on the other. On the mean-
ing of , I follow Verlinsky p. 78.
40 Barnes 1996: 213 observes that the concepts and preconceptions which lie behind
our beliefs and inquiries are propositional itemsindeed, are themselves beliefs; a
word or phrase is surely empty if it means nothing. More precisely (214), a word is
empty if nothing is collected under it.
Social Theory
106
,
,
,
,

.
But if someone makes a <law> and it does not happen to accord
with the utility of social relationships it no longer has the nature of
justice. And even if what is useful in the sphere of justice changes
but fits the preconception for some time, it was no less just through-
out that time for those who do not confuse themselves with empty
utterances but simply look at the facts. (trans. Long and Sedley
1987: 1.125)
41
Philippson (1910: 299) supposed that referred to the
vain statements of opponents (eitlen Aussprchen von Gegnern).
I think it more likely that Epicurus means that the confusion resulting
from empty sounds afflicts most people, and is the reason why they
cannot accurately judge the conformity of laws to natural justice. The
mechanism for such confusion will, as I understand it, be this: people
take vain sounds ( ) as designating a kind of reality (this
is what is known as empty belief or ).
42
In the abuse of lan-
guage may be found one of the causes of empty and irrational desires. As
Campbell (2003: 17) states: language is closely tied in to the development
of society as a positive cohesive force, but also, in its association with
the rise of religious error, it is a negative force involved in the descent
41 Alberti 1995: 162 notes that there do not survive any texts by Epicurus concerning
law: The very word nomos occurs only once in the texts securely attributed to him
(Principal Doctrines 37, but thanks only to an emendation by Usener).
42 See Cole 1967: 7679. Schrijvers (1970: 124) remarks: Les paragraphes 37 et 38 de la
lettre addresse Hrodote et portant sur la , lexpos de Lucrce (IV 777/817)
et le rsum de Diogne Larce (X 33) impliquent que, selon picure, la pense est
troitement lie au langage; cf. Schrijvers entire discussion, pp. 87ff. On prolpsis, see
Morel 2007; Konstan 2007b; and n. 52 below.
107
into strife and violence that occurs during the rise of civilization.
43
If
the mad struggle for wealth and power was in part the consequence
of increasing human security, and in part, perhaps, stimulated by new
possibilities and new modes of accumulation, it was a function also of
the liberation of language from its instinctive and natural connection
with the feelings and senses.
To return now to Farringtons argument: the vita prior was under-
mined by social and technological advances, as well as by the blind
development of language. It seems to me impossible that the Epicureans
could have desired or approved the literal recreation of the vita prior
(Cf. Blickman 1989: 162). Mankinds instinctive nature points the way
to the resolution of human problems, but human beings are more than
creatures of instinct. Their progress from the early stage was natural
and inevitable. Furthermore, the Epicureans did not seek to reverse
technological progress. Material abundance, on the contrary, must first
have been achieved in order to reveal humanitys inner insufficiency, as
Lucretius makes clear (6.919):
nam cum vidit hic ad victum quae flagitat usus
10 omnia iam ferme mortalibus esse parata
et, pro quam possent, vitam consistere tutam,
divitiis homines et honore et laude potentis
affluere atque bona gnatorum excellere fama,
nec minus esse domi cuiquam tamen anxia cordi,
15 atque animi ingratis vitam vexare <sine ulla>
pausa atque infestis cogi saevire querellis,
intellegit ibi vitium vas efficere ipsum
omniaque illius vitio corrumpier intus,
quae conlata foris et commoda cumque venirent.
43 Cf. Campbell 2003: 16: The connection between the origins of language, religion, and
injustice is based on this ability to form false judgements. Originally words, produced by
direct interaction with nature, would hold only their true fundamental meanings, and
thus God would mean nothing more than what the simulacra of the gods, as perceived
by early people, showed the gods to be: perfectly happy eternal beings.
Social Theory
108
He saw that almost everything that necessity demands for sub-
sistence had been already provided for mortals, and that their life
was, so far as possible, established in security; he saw too that they
possessed power, with wealth, honor, and glory, and took pride
in the good reputation of their children; and yet he found that,
notwithstanding this prosperity, all of them privately had hearts
racked with anxiety which, contrary to their wish, tormented
their lives without a pause, causing them to chafe and fret. Then
he realized that the cause of the flaw was the vessel itself, which
by its own flaw corrupted within it all things, even good things,
that entered it from without. (trans. Smith 2001: 178)
This inner insufficiency cannot be made good by reverting to an
earlier phase of human development, in which mankinds instinctive
nature prevailed, for the people of those times manquaient, vrai
dire, eux aussi, de la science morale qui devait tre rvle un jour
par Epicure. Boyanc adds (1963: 26061), in his perceptive summary
of the Epicurean position: On ne peut donc pas dire que les satisfac-
tions de ces hommes presque engags encore dans lanimalit nous
seraient proposes comme modle. Rather, it is necessary to purge
the language of vain sounds in order to gain a correct appreciation
of the nature of reality and thus realize that human needs are limited.
This point Epicurus makes strenuously at the beginning of the Letter
to Herodotus (37):
, ,
,
,
.
First, then, Herodotus, we must grasp the things which under-
lie words, so that we may have them as a reference point against
which to judge matters of opinion, inquiry and puzzlement, and
not have everything undiscriminated for ourselves as we attempt
infinite chains of proofs, or have words which are empty. (trans.
Long and Sedley 1987: 1.87)
109
Lucretius expresses this same idea, I think, in verses in the proem to
Book 6 which follow shortly upon the lines quoted above (6.2425):
veridicis igitur purgavit pectora dictis
25 et finem statuit cuppedinis atque timoris.
Therefore with words of truth he purged peoples minds
and laid down limits to desire and fear. (trans. Smith 2001: 178,
modified)
Here, veridicis dictis signifies, I suggest, not only the true teaching of
Epicurus but also words that have a true referent, and are not rendered
empty by virtue of vain beliefs.
The above account of the role of language is likely to be original with
Epicurus, though various components of it were, of course, current before
he wrote. The Epicurean doctrine rests on the assumption that words have
ultimately some natural or intuitive connection with external things, and
that their right meanings can be recovered by attending to the orginal
conception associated with each sound (
, Letter to Herodotus 38).
44
This cannot
have been part of the theory of Democritus, from whom Epicurus nev-
ertheless borrowed the general outlines of his cultural history, including
some part of the account of the origin of language, it would seem, and the
social context in which it developed (cf. Vlastos 1946 on the differences
between Democritus and Epicurus views of language). Furthermore,
Epicurus seems to have complemented his doctrine that human needs
are by nature limited with the position that in the state of primitive indi-
vidualism and in the first community of human beings, human desires
did not yet, for cultural reasons, take the irrational form that came later
to predominate in society. It was reasonable for Epicurus to fasten on
the development of language as one of the events in the course of the
44 I take to mean original, rather than rst in the sense of immediate or
unreective, as Bailey seems to take it; Long and Sedley (1987: 1.87) translate primary;
so too Schrijvers 1999a: 5657 n. 7 afrms that prton in Letter to Herodotus 38 means, not
original, but rather has un sens logique.
Social Theory
110
progress of culture that made possible the emergence of irrational and
empty desires.
Out of the disintegration of the first human community emerged
the city-state, in two stages. The first, marked by universal and unre-
strained competition for the summits of wealth and power, a war of all
against all, culminates in the establishment of tyrannical monarchies,
which in turn are overthrown by the oppressed populace (5.113640).
Apparently to abolish the vicious circle of tyranny and revolutionfor
the fall of the tyrants leads at once to the renewed struggle for power
(1142)society submits to the rule of law, wearied by ceaseless violence
(5.114350):
inde magistratum partim docuere creare
iuraque constituere, ut vellent legibus uti.
1143 nam genus humanum, defessum vi colere aevom,
ex inimicitiis languebat; quo magis ipsum
sponte sua cecidit sub leges artaque iura.
acrius ex ira quod enim se quisque parabat
ulcisci quam nunc concessumst legibus aequis,
1150 hanc ob rem est homines pertaesum vi colere aevom.
At length some of them taught the others to create magistra-
cies and established laws, to induce them to obey ordinances. The
human race, utterly weary as it was of leading a life of violence and
worn out with feuds, was the more ready to submit voluntarily
to the restraint of ordinances and stringent laws. The reason why
people were sick and tired of a life of violence was that each indi-
vidual was prompted by anger to exact vengeance more cruelly
than is now allowed by equitable laws. (trans. Smith 2001: 168)
In the developed community, Bailey remarks (1947: 3.1505), the
natural desire to unite which was seen in the earliest stage has disap-
peared; once again natura has given place to utilitas and foedus. Important
to an understanding of Epicureanism is the question whether the lat-
est stage in human developmentthe rule of lawrepresents a very
real gain, as Margaret Taylor (1947: 191) puts it, affording at least
111
comparative security, or whether legal justice was, on the contrary, a
poor substitute for the bond of friendship which had been destroyed,
as Farrington (1953b: 334) has argued. In order to answer this ques-
tion, it is necessary to recognize, in the first place, that the Epicurean
injunction against the political life did not mean that the school was
actively hostile to established political authority. Quite the contrary,
as Philippson (1910: 300ff.) demonstrated and DeWitt (1954: 183ff.) has
argued at length, civic governments provided the secure conditions in
which it might be possible to lead a good life.
45
It does not necessarily
follow, however, that the Epicureans justified and defended legal penal-
ties and the fear of punishment as the way to control unjust or irrational
behavior. Philippson (1910: 299) believed that such a justification was
part of Epicurean political doctrine:
Thus, for the Epicureans deterrence was the goal of punish-
ment. As far as Epicurus is concerned, this is confirmed by Principal
Doctrine 35, which grounds the effectiveness of the threat of pun-
ishment in the fact that a criminal cannot hope to remain hidden,
even if he remains so a thousand times over for the present. For it
is uncertain whether he will also remain hidden until his death.
(Den Epikureern gilt also danach als Strafzweck die
Abschreckung. Dies besttigt fr Epikur der Spruch 35, der die
Wirksamkeit der Strafandrohung damit begrndet, dass der
Verbrecher nicht hoffen darf, verborgen zu bleiben, auch wenn
er es tausendmal im Augenblicke bleibt. Denn es ist unsicher, ob
er es auch bis zum Tode bleiben wird.)
Indeed, Philippson goes on to assert that Epicurus recognition of the
relation between free will and praise and blame implies that punishment
is valid not only as a deterrent but also may be justified as requital or
revenge for the offence (Vergeltungszweck, 300).
45 Epicurus wrote a work Peri basileias, but little is known of its contents from the mea-
ger fragments (Plut. Non posse 1095 C; Adv. Colotem 1127 A). Philodemus own treatise is
dedicated to Piso, and Dorandi 1982: 4547 suggests that it may have concerned relations
between patrons and clients.
Social Theory
112
Before taking up Philippsons arguments, I should like to present some
evidence that Lucretius, at least, did not take so positive a view of the
role of legal punishments. In the verse that follows immediately upon the
passage quoted above concerning the origin of the laws, Lucretius writes:
thence does fear of punishment tarnish the rewards of life (inde metus
maculat poenarum praemia vitae, 1151). A fear of punishment that stains
or pollutes lifes richness can scarcely be altogether a good thing for an
Epicurean: it bears too close a resemblance to the irrational anxieties over
punishment in the afterlife, and is indeed a contributing factor to such
anxieties, as Lucretius says (see above, p. 66). This view would seem to be
confirmed by a passage in the treatise On Choices and Avoidances (this is
probably the title, and it is probably composed by Philodemus) col. XII:
The many are rather led to right conduct by the laws which
threaten with death, and with punishments coming from the
gods, and with pains which are considered intolerable, and with
the privation of things which are supposedly hard to procure.
This is the case partly because these things threaten men who
are foolish and who cannot be persuaded by the true precepts;
and the only thing that is achieved through them [sc. the laws] is
deterrence for a short period of time (trans. Indelli and Tsouna-
McKirahan 1995: 106).
46
46 Philippson 1941 ascribed On Choices and Avoidances to Hermarchus, and believed it
was the text that Porphyry cites in De abstinentia; contra Gigante 1983: 24759, Indelli
and Tsouna-McKirahan 1995: 6566: Hermarchus point in that text is that the ancient
lawgivers, after examining the life and social dealings of their contemporaries, prohib-
ited homicide by law and instituted legal penalties for the perpetrators. The emphasis
of Hermarchus account is on the origin and function of the law in primitive societies,
not in societies the members of which have fully developed by means of
Epicurean philosophy. On the other hand, col. XII of our text refers to the function of
legal justice in societies which have passed the primitive stages of their development
and in which the alternative of Epicureanism is available. It does not deal exclusively
with laws concerning homicide. And, even as a mere concession to other schools, it does
not appeal to the concept of in order to justify the legal prohibition
of homicide. So Hermarchus conception of punitive law as reported by Porphyry is
not implied by the text of PHerc. 1251 and cannot be used in support of the thesis that
Hermarchus is the author of the latter (6566). For arguments that Philodemus is the
author, see Indelli and Tsouna-McKirahan pp. 6670. It is true that, in the text cited by
113
Indelli and Tsouna-McKirahan argue (3031) that the author is very
likely responding to an objector who holds that popular theology and
the law are useful to deter criminal behavior, and he replies that deter-
rence by the threat of legal punishment is at best temporary. The author
maintains, on the contrary, that only an understanding of Epicurean
doctrine is effective in preventing such behavior. What is more, the fears
promoted by legal chastisements, though they may inhibit or repress law-
less behavior in the short run, also have a share in causing the irrational
desires which lead to antisocial behavior. It is from such a vicious circle,
I have been arguing, that the Epicureans wished to free mankind.
47
Philodemus too speaks of philosophers who perceived that evil deeds
were held in check by the tales [of punishment] because foreboding hung
over the more foolish of mankind, and so allowed such myths to circu-
late (On Piety 120217 = Obbink 1996: 189). He also holds that one should
obey the laws and common customs of mankind, provided that they do
not enjoin anything impious, but he makes no mention of punishment
in this context (136983 = Obbink 1996: 201). The danger is rather that
people will suppose that the gods are terrifying tyrants, and most of all
because of their own bad consciences they will expect great misfortunes
from them (2031 = Obbink 1996: 247; trans. Obbink). The reference, as
Obbink says (n. 1), is to People manipulated by philosophers or rulers
by means of the poets false tales about gods.
48
Porphyry, the emphasis is on the origin of law in the need to control homicide, whereas
in PHerc. 1251 it is rather on the effect of the law in instilling a fear of punishment. But
Lucretius text indicates that the two arguments work in tandem, and both may very
well go back to Epicurus Peri phuses.
47 Mitsis 1988: 64 notes that Our being just benets us by allowing us to achieve the
highest state of inner calm, ataraxia, and he adds (6667): Freeing us from the fear
of death is a chief goal of Epicurean ethics. Contractual theorists, however, have no
program for delivering us from the fear of death. On the contrary, many of them would
argue that it is an important, if not primary, motivation for not only forming but also
maintaining contracts. Epicurus would object that the fear of death does not incline
men to inner peace. Cf. Mller 1974: 73 on Lucretius narrative of the evolution of the
state: Gewiss bringt die Strafandrohung neue, fr die Ataraxie bedrohliche Strfaktoren
mit sich. Aber wer sich aller Verstsse gegen das Gesetz enthlt, geniesst nun jedenfalls
eine grsere Sicherheit als frher.
48 For the connection between fear of detection and fear of punishment by the gods,
see Philodemus On Piety 221942 = Obbink 1996: 259.
Social Theory
114
Following upon the discussion of the fear of punishment and its con-
sequences, Lucretius turns to the question of belief in the gods and the
origin of superstition (5.11611240). Boyanc remarks (1963: 250), without
explanation: De la justice la religion il y a une transition naturelle.
49
To
us, perhaps, the connection is that religion is conducive to just behavior,
among other reasons, because of fear of divine retribution. The ancients
too, of course, were familiar with this motive. The clearest expression
of it is in the satyr-play Sisyphus, attributed to Critias, one of the thirty
tyrants in Athens in 404 B.C. (fr. 88B.915 Diels-Kranz):
50

10 ,
,
[]
,
,
15 .
Next, since laws prevented people from publicly committing
acts of violence and yet they committed them secretly, that is when,
I think, some clever man, wise in judgment, <first> discovered fear
<of the gods> for mortals, so that evil people would have some
fear, even if they did or said or thought of something secretly.
Lucretius, however, does not turn at once to the matter of supersti-
tious anxiety. The first of the reasons he cites for belief in the gods
namely, evidence from dreams and visions (116982)is a valid one by
Epicurean criteria (see above, p. 87 n. 11; also Sextus Empiricus Against
the Mathematicians 9.25 = fr. 356 Usener; Philodemus De pietate lines
22531 with Obbinks comment at 1996: 67; Gigandet 1998: 170, 17380);
49 Contrast Blickman 1989: 15758, who notes that the chronological progression of the
section on religion is ambiguous.
50 The idea is expanded in 16ff. The notion that fear of the gods (whether or not the gods
exist) is useful in order to keep the mass of mankind law-abiding is commonplace, e.g.
Polybius 6.56, Cicero De divinatione 2; cf. Taylor 1949: 76ff. The attribution of the Sisyphus
to Critias is not entirely secure; some scholars have ascribed it to Euripides.
115
presumably, Lucretius (and Epicurus) included this argument in the
account of religio or superstitious fear because one must believe that
gods exist if one is to dread them. Over the nature of the gods, accord-
ing to Epicureanism, there is considerable controversy, into which it is
not necessary to enter here.
51
Philodemus (De pietate 20519 = Obbink
1996: 121) cites Epicurus Peri hosiottos or On Holiness for the idea that
certain things may subsist not only indestructibly but also continually
one and the same in their perfection ( , [
] [] [] [ ] ), which suggests
that they are imperishably self-identical, but in a manner different from
the ordinary durability of objects. Again, in Book 12 of the Peri phuses,
according to Philodemus (22731), Epicurus says: ] [
51 Obbink 2002: 185 afrms that the central proposition for Epicurean theology is that
for Epicurus nothing is so important about the gods as our correct thinking about them.
Obbink then notes that the gods have no interaction with our world, and concludes: It
therefore must be that our ideas about the gods (and not any other extra-cosmic physical
or perceptual processes) facilitate and structure for us the very existence of the divine,
and adds that this is equivalent to saying that according to Epicurus the gods are merely
our ideas of them, noetic entities or thought-constructs of human beingseach god a
projection of an individual persons own ethical ideals (full bibliography of opinions for
and against this view at 214 n. 104). Obbinks conclusion does not seem to me to follow
from the premises he states, and to be implausible in itself, since piety would have negative
consequences for people who have false ideas of the gods, nor would there be any way
of appealing to common prolepseis of the gods as a way of rectifying false conceptions
about them. See also Philodemus 320425 Obbink 1996, with commentary pp. 32123,
for Obbinks view that gods do not have an existence independent of the coalescence
of the images by which we perceive them: their existence consists fundamentally in
that coalescence (322); also 32527, 33031. For a defense of the proposition that our
way of deriving knowledge about the gods demonstrates incontestably unesistenza
reale degli di (contra Long and Sedley 1987: 1.14449) see Giannantoni 1996: 27; also
Herculanean papyrus 1055 col. XV (Santoro 2000: 96), possibly deriving from a treatise
by Demetrius Lacon on the shape of the gods, which afrms that god together with
reason has subsistence (insieme alla facolt razionale ha anche lesistenza reale,
trad. Santoro 2000: 106: ), with Santoro 2000: 151, who
argues that the term molto signicativa, in quanto, indicando esistenza
concreta e sostanziale dellessere divino, dimostra che infondata la teoria degli di-
going back to Scott 1883 and defended by Bollack 1975: 22538 and Long and
Sedley 1987: 1.14449. See also Santoro pp. 3638, and 6065, and, most recently, Sedley
2009, who defends with further arguments the claim that the gods are psychological
projections, and Konstan 2009, who argues for their real atomic existence; Kany-Turpin
2007 is undecided.
Social Theory
116
] [] , which
Obbink renders he says that the first people arrived at conceptions
of imperishable external entities; Obbink explains (n. 6) that these
are the first people in human history. This would tend to confirm
that the primary conception of the gods, according to Epicurus, is also
chronologically first, and precedes the corruption of belief that enters
in with society and with language.
52
Superstitious anxiety is the consequence of a mistaken view of the
nature of the gods, not of belief in their existence per se. When Lucretius
comes then to address the question of religious anxiety, it is with these
words (5.121825):
praeterea cui non animus formidine divum
contrahitur, cui non correpunt membra pavore,
52 Epicurus does not say that the nomata of the original people corresponded to really
existing external objects that are imperishable, but it must be those subsisting ()
entities of the previous sentence. Obbink 2002: 185 states that Epicurus urged his fol-
lowers to rene their culturally received ideas of the gods so as to recover the original,
unacculturated prolepsis of them, and to contemplate and to worship their thought-con-
structed gods. If there is an unacculturated prolepsis of the gods, it would seem to
follow that early mankind had such a prolepsis, or one that was nearer to it than we have,
especially in the pre-social state and before the full development of language. Obbink
argues that despite Ciceros dependence, in De natura deorum 1.2543, on Philodemus De
pietate 184210, at 1.43 Cicero reverses Philodemus point about popular beliefs: Whereas
Philodemus says explicitly that the Epicureans uphold the , adding that they
hold that they exist ( )
[there are all the gods the Greeks name and indeed even more; cf. col. 362.2531], Cicero,
by contrast, makes Velleius at exactly this point deride vulgi opiniones as magna inconstan-
tia (211). Obbink concludes (214) that Philodemus broad class of gods would include
many debased or aberrant concepts of divinities, at least as potential divinities. These
divinities, Obbink afrms (215), can only intervene in our lives via our preconceptions
of them, i.e., culturally and traditionally received opinions of divinity philosophically
rened to an acceptable approximation of what they had been for the rst humans in
civilisation (215). But why only in civilization, as opposed to the pre-social stage? And
at what stage of civilization would the original idea of the gods have become corrupted?
Obbink concludes (220): We are reminded that Epicureanism is in a sense about return-
ing human beings to their natural state by stripping from them the false beliefs that have
corrupted them (quoting Fowler 2000: 217). On prolpseis in general, and of the gods in
particular, see Morel 2007; Konstan 2007b.
117
1220 fulminis horribili cum plaga torrida tellus
contremit et magnum percurrunt murmura caelum?
non populi gentesque tremunt, regesque superbi
corripiunt divum percussi membra timore,
ne quod ob admissum foede dictumve superbe
1225 poenarum grave sit solvendi tempus adactum?
53
Moreover, whose heart does not contract with dread of the gods,
and who does not cower in fear, when the scorched earth shud-
ders beneath the terrible stroke of the thunderbolt, and rumbles
of thunder run across the vast heaven? Do not nations and people
tremble, and do not proud kings shrink in every limb, stricken
with terror of the gods, in case the dreadful moment of reckoning
has come for some heinous deed or arrogant word? (trans. Smith
2001: 170)
Superstitious terror, it appears, presupposes some pre-existing sense
of guilt and fear of punishment.
54
Lucretius next gives the illustrative
53 In 1124, ne quod is the reading of the manuscripts (O, Q); Lachmann conjectured
nequid; in 1225, adauctum is the manuscript reading, whereas adactum is an emendation
of Marullas, adopted in Bailey 1947.
54 Giancotti 1981: 63 n. 15 cites Perelli 196667: 222, who writes: il timore degli di, come
esseri superiori che puniscono i malvagi, non pu essere anteriore alle leggi umane,
ma nasce dopo e in conseguenza di esse, and notes (214): per impedire le violenze
continue fu necessario istituire le leggi e tenere a freno gli uomini col timore della pena.
A questo punto, e non casualmente, si inserisce il sorgere del timore religioso, dei riti e
dei culti; infatti al timore della pena terrena si associa immediatamente il timore della
pena ultraterrena. Sasso 1979: 10207 places the rise of the fear of punishment in the
monarchical era of human development. Giancotti 1981, in subjecting Sassos view to
critical appraisal, provides a detailed and careful examination of the relevant passages
in Lucretius with a view to demonstrating that an awareness of the gods precedes this
stage and may be ascribed to early mankind (la causa in s [of belief in the gods], il
videre i simulacra divini, preesistette a quelle urbis, a quella diffusione, agli altari, ai riti,
317; cf. 351). But the question is whether a superstitious fear of punishment after death
arose simultaneously with belief in the gods; and here, whatever the exact chronol-
ogy might have been (and I agree that there is not a precise dividing line), it seems to
me that Lucretius verse 5.1180 is decisive in showing that it did not: quod mortis timor
haud quemquam vexaret eorum (the fear of death did not at all disturb any of them), in
spite of visions and dreams of the gods; cf. Giancotti 6164. Lucretius program is to
Social Theory
118
example of a military commander with his fleet, praying in the storm
for peace from the gods, and he concludes (5.123335):
usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quaedam
opterit et pulchros fascis saevasque secures
1235 proculcare ac ludibrio sibi habere videtur.
It all goes to show that there is some invisible force that tramples
on human ambitions and seemingly treads underfoot the glorious
rods and grim axes of high office, and treats them as its playthings.
(trans. Smith 2001: 170)
In his treatise On Piety (lines 215882 Obbink 1996: 255, cited also in
Obbink 1995: 199), Philodemus appears to distinguish two moments in
the invention of stories designed to inspire a terror of divine punishment.
First, there was a stage in which thoughtful people promoted such beliefs
in order to repress crime and harm to the state (); this occurred
when early freethinkers, no longer inhibited by fear of the gods, began
to commit crimes in secret. Then came a second stage, in which certain
people introduced truly terrifying tales of retribution by the gods, now no
longer with the more or less legitimate motive of preventing unjust actions
but simply in accord with popular opinion and heedless of mad inconsis-
tencies in their ideas. This would suggest that, according to Philodemus,
demonstrate quibus ille modis divum metus insinuarit/ pectora, terrarum qui in orbi sancta
tuetur/ fana lacus lucos aras simulacraque deum (those ways in which that fear of the gods
insinuated itself into into peoples breasts, the fear that throughout the world protects
as sacred temples, lakes, groves, altars, and statues of the gods, 5.7375): not just belief,
but fear is his subject, and there is not sufcient reason for supposing that the two
insinuated themselves into the minds of human beings in the pre-social phase, even if
some superstitious ideas emerged before the full regime of law and punishment did.
Cf. Giancottis discussion (33237) of mankinds possible belief in Hades at the time of
the vita prior, based on Lucretius assertion that, when they were caught in the jaws of
wild beasts, they summoned Orcus (accibant Orcum, 5.996); but even if Orcus is
more than a mere metaphor for death, as Giancotti argues, it scarcely suggests a deep
anxiety over punishment in the afterlife in this early epoch (nor does the mere notion
that the gods may sometimes be angry). Thus I do not entirely see the motivation for
Giancottis response (341 n. 45) to my own view (p. 41 of the original edition): Mi riesce
difcile accettare lasserto che il belief in the gods derivante da quanto descritto in
11691193 fosse scevro di dread of them.
119
a sober concern over punishment by the gods may have served some
constructive purpose in the earliest human communities, but that later
on it became wildly distorted and harmful. As Obbink (1995: 199) puts
it: Poetic myths about the gods, and their interpretations at the hand of
opportunistic philosophers and politicians, historically have served for
the most part to obscure naturally formed conceptions, while lulling us
into a false sense of security in the hope that potential wrongdoers will
believe the poets myths and so refrain from injustice.
Taken together, the passages mentioned above seem to invite two
conclusions. First, the rule of law, which rests upon the fear of punish-
ment as the deterrent to antisocial behavior, was certainly an inevitable
stage in human history, and undoubtedly useful under the circum-
stances in which it arose, but should not be understood as a prescriptive
Epicurean doctrine for society. As Diogenes of Oenoanda states (fr. 56,
trans. Smith): But if we assume [wisdom] to be possible, then truly the
life of the gods will pass to men. For everything will be full of justice
[] and mutual love [], and there will come to be
no need of fortifications or laws and all the things which we contrive
on account of one another. John Armstrong, who quotes this passage,
comments (1997: 326):
Here laws seem necessary only for protection against aggres-
sion, so they will be absent from the ideal community. In spite
of this absence, however, the community is full of justice. It
would seem, then, that justice is independent of law. Recent
scholarship on Epicureanism frequently misses this. One reason
Epicureans could conceive of justice as independent of law is that,
unlike laws, the contract necessary to establish justice in a com-
munity (KD 32) does not come with institutionalized penalties
for noncompliance.
55
55 But see Alberti 1995, who argues that justice is the realization of utility by means of a
contract (169; cf. Principal Doctrines 32 and 33), and that laws raison dtre lies in utility.
Epicurus thus abandons the traditional idea that law and justice coincide (170); hence the
conventionalist interpretation of Epicurean justice (e.g. Mller 1972: 10410; Goldschmidt
1977: 7183) is inadequate, since it reduces justice to positive law. But utility is, in
Epicureanism, a real state of the world (171); this is why Polystratus classies it among
relative existents (col. 27 Indelli). Law, then, is an expression of the real interests and
Social Theory
120
The rule of law is a fact in the development of society, not an Epicurean
principle. On the contrary, it is too closely associated with the anxieties
that in part at least produce irrational desires and behavior to be regarded
as altogether good.
56
Second, and this point is more tentative than the first, superstitious
fear, which seems not to have existed among human beings in the state
of primitive individualism and perhaps played no significant role in
the vita prior, may first have become, according to the Epicureans, an
important feature in the third and fourth stages of society, those of
unbounded competition and the subsequent rule of law (cf. Gigandet
1998: 17172, 19096). The discussion of this anxiety follows upon the
description of these latter stages; we are told that dread of the gods is
concerned with punishment for foul deeds or tyrannical words, and
the fear of such punishments can only have arisen after the institution
of like punishments in society; finally, the victims of such fears are
emphatically the wealthy and powerful, and these classes clearly arose
in the last two stages of society. If these arguments are right, then, just
as the Epicureans associated the rise of vain desires with the develop-
ment of language, so they associated the spread of empty anxieties with
both the subsequent outbreak of greed and ambition and the laws and
threats of punishment that contained them.
57
It is now necessary, in conclusion, to turn to the argument of Philippson
mentioned above, and to the passages in Epicurus and Lucretius concern-
ing the fear of punishment and detection. The question is this: do these
texts indicate, contrary to what I have argued above, that the Epicureans
wishes of the masses (172), and enjoins what people would do spontaneously if they
could calculate and pursue their own utility (173); in this sense, law does not perform any
coercive function (175). Law, then, is not valid or just by virtue of enactment: validity is
dependent always on relative utility (179). It is the contract that gives rise to a character,
that of justness or unjustness, which becomes a real property of the action (18081).
Justness is thus an accidental property of a relational sort (cf. Letter to Herodotus 7071),
but no less real for that (18185), just as moral values are real (in Polystratus), but always
relative and subject to revision, according to circumstances (188). See also Morel 2007a:
17584, and Mitsis 1988: 6567, 7992 on justice and contracts.
56 Cf. Blickman 1989: 160, who speaks of the time when ambition and fear of the laws
emerged to plague human life.
57 For further discussion with ample bibliography, see Blickman 1989: 17379.
121
in some sense approved of punishment as a deterrent in their own
time? The evidence may be divided under several heads.
First may be cited statements to the effect that only fear of punish-
ment deters people from criminal acts. Plutarch is explicit (Contra Epicuri
beatudinem 25, 1104B = fr. 534 Usener; cf. frr. 53132 Usener):

.
Epicurus does not believe that one should refrain from injustice for
any other reason than fear of punishment.
Such remarks, mostly found in hostile sources, go beyond the evidence
we have from Epicurean texts (cf. Philippson 1910: 300 bottom).
The second group, drawn from Epicurean texts, consists of passages
in which the fear of punishment is acknowledged as a powerful motive,
e.g. Lucretius 3.82527 (cf. also 3.101415 and 5.115457):
825 advenit id quod eam [sc. animam] de rebus saepe futuris
macerat inque metu male habet curisque fatigat
praeteritisque male admissis peccata remordent.
the soul is often visited by feelings that torment it about the
future, fret it with fear, and vex it with anxious cares, while
consciousness of past misdeeds afflicts it with remorse. (trans.
Smith 2001: 89)
Closely connected with the fear of punishment is the role of consci-
entia, as the above passage makes clear. For Seneca, the term appears to
have a meaning like that of our conscience as we see in Seneca Letters
to Lucilius 97.15 (= fr. 531 Usener):
hic consentiamus [sc. cum Epicuro], mala facinora conscientia
flagellari.
In this let us agree with Epicurusthat evil deeds are punished
by conscience.
Social Theory
122
For Lucretius, who employs the adjectival phrase conscius sibi, not the
abstract noun conscientia, the term seems to refer, as it commonly does
in the Republic, not to the torments of conscience in the modern sense of
the word but rather to the guilty knowledge that, combined with a fear of
punishment, may betray the offender, whether through gestures, looks,
careless words, or cries uttered during sleep (cf. Cicero Against Catiline
2.13, 3.11, 27; also Lucretius 3.1018, 4.101819 and 1135, 5.115860).
So far, we have been dealing with motives and reactions that affect
the mass of human beings. The fourth category, however, concerns
the fear of detection, which creates discomfort even when illegal acts
are done covertly. Here we may include Vatican Saying 7 (cf. Principal
Doctrines 34, 35):
,
.
It is hard for someone who commits an injustice to escape notice,
and impossible to acquire confidence about escaping notice.
What these passages tell us is that it is impossible to have confidence
() that one will escape detection, a view that is amply supported
by Philodemus and other writers in the Epicurean tradition (cf. Seneca
Letters to Lucilius 97.13; Atticus in Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 15.5.5 =
fr. 532 Us.; Plutarch It is Impossible to Live Pleasantly according to Epicurus
1090B-C, etc.). Here, then, is a tone that is definitely prescriptive. The
existence of chastisements and chastisers is assumed, and a recom-
mendation based upon this circumstance is made to the effect that
one should avoid contravening the laws. Are legal punishments, then,
approved, in order that justice may prevail?
58
The fifth and last group of testimonies suggests another answer. These
are all concerned with the behavior of the sage or . Two passages
58 Cf. Seel 1996: 360, who remarks that La lettura forte della R.S. XXXIV sbagliata.
Oltre alla paura di essere punito esistono altre ragioni, proprie al saggio, per astenersi
dal violare la legge.
123
are relevant, the first from a fragment of Epicurus or Puzzles
(Plutarch Against Colotes 1127A = fr. 18 Usener = fr. 12 Arrighetti
2
, with
translation on p. 166), in which Epicurus asks
, .
.
whether the wise man will do what the laws prohibit, if he
knows that he will escape notice. And he answers: A simple
statement is not easy.
59
Plutarch comments ungenerously on Epicurus reply: What he means
is: I will do it but I dont want to admit it. The second is a remark by
Clement of Alexandria (Stromata 4.22.143.6 = fr. 582 Usener):

60

.
, .
And Epicurus too, indeed, says that the sage (as he understands
it) wishes to do wrong for the sake of some gain; for he cannot
achieve confidence concerning escaping notice. Thus, if he should
be persuaded that he can escape notice, he will do wrong, accord-
ing to him [i.e., Epicurus].
61
59 See the discussion of this passage in Cosenza 1996: 36869.
60 Text as in Usener. The Akademie-Verlag edition, ed. Sthlin and Frchtel (1960: 312),
follows Bywater in inserting before , yielding they say that the sage does
not wish to do wrong, but it is not required. The (for) in the following clause
explains why, though the sage wishes it, he nevertheless refrains from wrongdoing.
With , the qualication for the sake of some gain seems pointless. Whether Clement
is accurately reecting Epicurus own view here may, of course, be doubted.
61 In the rst edition, I cited also fr. 533 Usener (Herculanean papyrus 1012) as bearing
upon this topic; the fragment, however, as restored by De Falco 1923: 42 (col. 36) and
attributed to Demetrius Lacon, deals rather with the Epicurean conception of the highest
good as self-sufcient, and is irrelevant here.
Social Theory
124
It is this second passage that provides the link between the arguments
concerning the impossibility of confidence that illegal acts will remain
covert and the statements concerning the behavior of the sage. I expect
that all the passages cited under the fourth and fifth heads above may
have formed part of a single argument, whose source may well have
been the book called .
Phillipson explained brilliantly the point involved in Epicurus puzzle
concerning the sage. The laws of any given community might not reflect
the natural purpose of the contract from which justice () arose,
namely, the prevention of mutual harm (cf. Principal Doctrines 37 and 38).
Will the sage then obey such laws, in the case, for example, that social
changes have rendered older legislation obsolete? He will, answered
Epicurus, presumably in most instances, because it is impossible to
feel secure about the consequences if one has transgressed them.
62
The
problem was not new with Epicurus; Plato seems to have raised it in the
Republic (cf. 441C443B).
63
For the sake of a life free from disturbance, the
sage ought indeed to obey the precepts of common morality in what-
ever place and at whatever time he or she may be living. Neither the
threat of punishment nor the laws, however, are required for the sage
to act in accord with what is naturally just, that is, beneficial to social
life.
64
As Paolo Cosenza observes (1996: 36667, 370), the sages desires
are limited to what is easily acquired, and hence there is no motive for
commiting injustice. Thus, the fear of punishment, while it may work
as a deterrent and is appropriate to, or at least inevitable in, a certain
stage of social development, is not an important motive for the sage,
and ought not to be construed as an approved principle for society
among the Epicureans. Indeed, where social life has progressed to the
62 Cosenza 1996: 37576 notes that where unjust laws are in effect, a sage might be
deterred from violating them by the fear of detection; but he concludes with a non liquet
on whether the sage will ever violate such laws.
63 See Philippson 1910: 30203. On the passage in Platos Republic, see Sachs 1963; Vlastos
1968 and 1969.
64 Mitsis 1988: 89 observes that, By entering into contracts, the Epicurean can gain
security from those who are not sagelike (cf. Stobaeus 43.139 = fr. 530 Usener: the laws
exist for the wise, not that they may not do wrong, but that they may not suffer it). One
motive, then, for respecting the law publicly is to discourage others from violating it.
125
point at which sufficient means of life are available to all, and only an
irrational fear of punishment in the afterlife prevents the majority of
people from enjoying a life of pleasurable tranquillity, the time may be
near when the threat of chastisement will cease to be a useful method
of social control at all.
Social Theory
127
Irrational fears and desires, I have been arguing, arise from a false
opinion or belief concerning empty simulacra, and the vain pursuits con-
ditioned by these passions may afford a certain pleasure derived, in part,
from the hope or anticipation of their abatement. Ambition and greed, in
particular, have as their object the provision of a security beyond what
is possible, that is, immunity to death. The desire for such security is
nourished by the fear of death, and is given scope in the course of social
development through changes in the character of language and the rise
of new possibilities of wealth and power unrelated to real or natural
needs. Fears, in turn, are the product in part of excessive desires, and
are reinforced by the institutions of law and punishment designed to
check socially harmful behavior or, at certain stages of society, to serve
the interests of a religiously skeptical and morally irresponsible elite, who
invent or help to disseminate false stories about the gods. One may yet
inquire whence comes an image of a security so complete as to suggest
the possibility of immortality in a universe in which all phenomena are
eventually reduced to atoms. While we cannot achieve certainty in this
matter, I argue that the god-like invulnerability that, according to the
Epicureans, the soul may in fact attain itself holds out the promise of an
immortal and unshakable happiness. The problem is that this security
is misunderstood by the mass of mankind as physical deathlessness.
It is a striking fact that the Epicureans, who hammered home the inevi-
tability of death, nevertheless frequently described the sage or addressed
members of their own circle as divine and even immortal. Illustrations
CHAPTER 4
Epistemology
128
are easy to multiply. Thus, Epicurus concludes an epistle to Colotes (fr.
141 Usener = Plutarch Against Colotes 1117B) with the words:
.
Go thou imperishable and consider us imperishable.
To Pythocles, whom he addresses as blessed one (, Diogenes
Laertius 10.6 = fr. 163 Usener), he writes (Diogenes Laertius 10.5 = fr. 165
Usener = fr. 88 Arrighetti
2
):
.
I shall sit in expectation of the pleasure and your godlike
arrival.
A letter of Epicurus to his mother, preserved by Diogenes of Oenoanda
(fr. 65.2940 Arrighetti = fr. 125 III.9IV.10 Smith; text as in Smith), makes
the point forcefully:
] [ ] []

.
,
For not small [or ineffectual] are these gains for us which make
our disposition godlike and show that not even our mortality makes
us inferior to the imperishable and blessed nature; for when we are
alive, we are as joyful as the gods. (trans. Smith 1993: 414)
Lucretius, in famous lines, avers that nothing prevents human beings
from leading lives worthy of the gods (dignam dis degere vitam, 3.322), and
he passionately affirms the divine stature of Epicurus (5.8ff.).
1
Plutarch
1 Cf. also Epicurus Letter to Pythocles 135, Vatican Saying 36, where Metrodorus describes
the life of the master as a , and DeWitt 1954: 28081. Schmid 1961: 69495,
129
(Moralia 1091B-C, 1117C) remarks scornfully that this language was
characteristic of the school.
2
It would be wrong, I think, to dismiss such language as a conventional
or rhetorical way of magnifying Epicureanism or its conception of the
sage, especially in the light of Epicurus well-known prejudice against
poetic or metaphorical exaggeration.
3
For the Epicureans maintained
doctrines concerning the nature of pleasure and the soul which give
meaning to these descriptions, and should be related to them. First of
all we may mention the idea, derived from Aristotle, that pleasure is
independent of duration (Principal Doctrine 19):
4
,
.
Infinite time and finite time contain equal pleasure, if one
measures the limits of pleasure by reasoning. (trans. Long and
Sedley 1987: 150)
Epicurus gives the reason for this in Principal Doctrine 20, employ-
ing language borrowed from the mystery religions, as Festugire has
pointed out:
5
following Bignone 1936: 1.12124, compares Aristotles Protrepticus fr. 10c Rose; Steckel
1968: 583 states that Epicurus afrmed, in his response to Colotes gesture of worship,
das Gleichgewicht von Rationalismus und Mystik in seiner Lehre.
2 The fullest description of religious language and motifs in Epicurean writings is that
of Schmid 1961, esp. cols. 74155.
3 Cf. De Lacy 1939. According to Vlastos account (1945: 58082) of the divine in
Democritus, the idea was irrelevant to the atomic system, and merely referred to any
natural entity whose moral value is not less than that traditionally attached to super-
natural entities of popular religion (1946: 63). It is not necessary to explain away the
expressions of a fervent religious feeling in Lucretius as the outbursts of un mistico
represso (Perelli 1969: 179).
4 See Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 10, 1174a14ff., Diano 1946: 122; also Vatican Saying
27 on the purity of pleasure that derives from the pursuit of philosophy, and compare
Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1154b2628, 1177a2527. On the idea that pleasure is not
increased by duration, see also Mitsis 1988: 2427.
5 Alternative reading of the last word: . The terms and are
borrowed from the mysteries; cf. Festugire 1955: 47 on and related terms; also
Friedlnder 1958: 24; Obbink 1996: 53137 on how Epicureanism could be consonant
Epistemology
130

,
The intellect, by making a rational calculation of the end and

the limit which govern the flesh, and by dispelling fears about
eternity, brings about the complete life, so that we no longer need
infinite time. (trans. Long and Sedley 1987: 150).
An understanding of the limits or ends ( , perhaps
even the essential nature) of the body makes possible a complete or
perfect life ( ), and what is perfect does not require or admit
of improvement over time.
6
There is an elegant contrast between anxiet-
ies over eternity ( ) and the completeness that
needs nothing of infinite time ( ), suggesting subtly
that the or eternity promised by the mysteries is attainable only
by turning away from cultic preoccupations and attending rationally to
the bodys nature and the real pleasure of which it is capable.
7
with, and (in a sense) account for, basic religious practices and beliefs (537). For Epicurus
tendency to use ain and related terms of a falsely imagined eternal survival after death,
see Ramelli and Konstan 2007: 3435.
6 On the varied uses of and in Epicurean philosophy, including that of
accounting for the essences or denitions of things, see De Lacy 1969: 105ff. On the vexed
question of Aristotles conception of pleasure, see Hardie 1968: 306ff.; also Chapter 1,
and n. 11 below.
7 For , see also Diano 1946: 128.35, and for the general idea, Epicurus Letter to
Menoeceus 128. Ramelli and Konstan 2007: 34 observe that Epicurus uses ainios in
reference to the future life that non-Epicureans expect, with its dreadful punishments,
that is, to an afterlife in which Epicureans do not believe, citing Letter to Herodotus
81 and Principal Doctrine 28; we might have added the present passage as well. Puliga
1983: 24750 cites Epicurus pronouncements on time in the Letter to Herodotus 7273,
and (p. 248) Lucretius 1.45963, Sextus Empiricus Against the Mathematicians 10.219 = fr.
164 Arrighetti = fr. 294 Usener, as well as PHerc 1413 coll. 5 and 9 = fr. 37.17 Arrighetti
2
,
and concludes (252): Il ridimensionamento della morte che Epicuro opera sul concetto
di ci sembra essere il colpo di grazia inferto al della morte, il quale si
genera, in denitiva, dal considerare l come realt dotata di un carat-
tere assoluto, senza circoscriverlo nellambito della . Mitsis 1988: 55 notes that
Epicurus argues against the Cyrenaics that mental pleasures are greater than bodily
131
The Epicurean texts that we possess have nothing of Aristotles ana-
lytic arguments on the nature of pleasure, although Epicurus may have
employed such arguments elsewhere. What we do have is a physical
interpretation of pleasure that accounts for the subjective phenomenon
of pleasures completeness and timelessness. The theory is essentially
this: the body and soul feel pain or perturbations, respectively, when
their healthy constitution, that is, the natural coherence of their atoms, is
disrupted, and pleasure arises from the return of the body to its healthy
state or else consists simply in the experience of well-being.
8
The dis-
tinction between two sorts of pleasure Epicurus derived from Aristotle,
who developed ideas that Plato had presented in the Philebus.
9
Epicurus
called these types of pleasure, respectively, the kinetic and the static
(). Static pleasure, which does not involve a change of
state, is the greater, according to Epicurus. Moreover, Diogenes Laertius
also informs us that Epicurus regarded the joys of the soul as superior
to the pleasures of the body (10.13637):

,
,
.
pleasures (De n. I.55). The chief reason for the priority of mental pleasures is that they
are temporally extended in a way that the pleasures of the body are not. This is true in
the sense that I can derive pleasure now from the memory of prior pleasures, not that
an enduring pleasure is greater than a transient one merely by virtue of its duration (the
expression animi voluptates et dolores in Cicero is, I believe, inexact, and the speaker
continues with what seems a more rigorous formulation: quamquam autem et laetitiam
nobis voluptas animi et molestiam dolor afferat [although pleasure brings us joy of mind
and pain brings us distress of mind]; see Chapter 1). Cf. Pigeaud 1981: 163: Parce que
lexprience du plaisir catastmatique est lexprience dun temps tellement plein, il est
lquivalent de linnit du plaisir de la chair dans un temps inni; Nussbaum 1994:
21213. Although the philosophical idiom is entirely different, there is a certain analogy
between Epicurus view and that of Plotinus (Enneads 1.5.7.2226, trans. Smith 2004: 55):
Well-being must not be counted by time but by eternity (); and this is neither more
nor less nor of any extension, but is a this here, unextended and timeless. For ain used
of timelessness in the Platonic tradition, see Ramelli and Konstan 2007: 1228.
8 On the physical theory of pleasure, see Merlan 1960: 1ff., and on pain, Zonneveld 1959:
187, 192; also Schmid 1961: 71923.
9 Cf. Hardie 1968: 30203.
Epistemology
132

10
.
,
. ,
. (text as in Long and
Sedley 1987: 2.124)
Epicurus disagrees with the Cyrenaics on pleasure: they do
not admit static pleasure but only the kinetic type, whereas he
accepts both types, for soul and for body, as he says in his book On
choice and avoidance and in On the Goal and in Book 1 of On lives.
In On choices he speaks as follows: Freedom from disturbance
and absence of pain are static pleasures; but joy and delight are
regarded as kinetic activities. He has a further disagreeement
with the Cyrenaics: they take bodily pains to be worse than mental
ones but he takes the mental ones to be worse, since the flesh
is storm-tossed only in the present, but the soul in past, present
and future. (trans. Long and Sedley 1987: 1.118)
11
10 For the reading , see Chapter 1, n. 18.
11 Cf. Merlan 1960. Freedom from pain is clear enough as a static pleasure, but in what
sense are joy and delight kinetic activities (note that, on Long and Sedleys reading,
they are not dened, strictly speaking, as pleasures)? By analogy with the replenishment
theory of kinetic pleasures in the body, joy might be understood as the alleviation of fear;
but, as we have seen (Chapter 1, p. 6), Epicurus afrmed in On the End (cited in Cicero
Tusculan Disputations 3.41) that listening to music is a kinetic pleasure, but it is surely
not a function of alleviating a pain associated with need, unless perhaps we suppose
that it is soothing to a mind perturbed by anxiety. I think it more likely that may
refer also to mentally pleasurable excitation in general, for example the sight of a dear
friend. Long and Sedley 1987: 2.12425 remark correctly that The terms and
evidently pick out mental and bodily absence of pain respectively, but go astray
when they add: but and are most naturally interpreted as two terms
for kinetic pleasure each of which can apply to mind or body; these latter apply only
to pleasures of the logikon part of the soul (see Chapter 1, pp. 1618). Stokes 1996: 154
argues that at De nibus 2.9 Ciceros Torquatus distinguishes kinetic and katastematic
as process and state pleasures, rightly, according to Stokes (156), who explains that the
motions that accompany process pleasures such as quenching thirst may be atomic or
at a higher level (157); but Stokes obfuscates the issue by introducing sensual pleasures
that accompany the satisfaction of needs, for example, in the case of eating, a good taste
133
It is reasonable to suppose that the static pleasure of the soul, involv-
ing no change and requiring nothing for its completion, is the major
component of that happiness which, Epicurus said, belongs to the gods
(Diogenes Laertius 10.121a = fr. 407 Usener):
, ,
,
.
Happiness is a twofold notion: the highest, such as god enjoys,
which is incapable of increase; and the happiness which is capable
of addition and subtraction of pleasures (trans. Long and Sedley
1987: 117).
The relative stability of the soul, the atoms of which, like those of
every other physical structure, exhibit a certain resistance under col-
lision and tend to preserve their natural coherence, defines the souls
or disposition. David Furley (1967: 228) has argued persua-
sively that Epicurus notion of the souls disposition may be regarded
as an atomistic adaptation of Aristotles ethical theory, which held that
external objects stimulate characteristic responses in us; what we do as
moral agents depends not only on the nature of the stimulus but also on
our own trained dispositions.
12
The disposition of the sage is in perfect
accord with nature (Plutarch How a Youth should Listen to Poems 37A = fr.
548 Usener = fr. 125 Diano = fr. B 85 Bailey = fr. 144 Arrighetti
2
):
in the mouth (158), and thus blurring the distinction between the two kinds of pleasure.
Some purely sensation-based pleasures that do not depend on need are still kinetic.
12 On , cf. DeWitt 1954: 25255; on the physical causes of the stability of the soul,
Furley 1967: 23031, who explains the resistance of atoms as a consequence of their
weight, and Bailey 1928: 33738, 34549, who suggests that concilia have a kind of organic
cohesion (Furley does not entirely reject this possibility: cf. 229). See also Sambursky 1956:
124ff., and Lucretius 1.22124. Taylor (1999: 18995) argues that Democritus recognized
forces of attraction and repulsion between atoms; this seems most unlikely to me (see
Konstan 2000 for discussion), and in any case, inapplicable to the theory of Epicurus. On
the Epicurean idea of character, see also Diano 1946: 12931; Vlastos 1945: 582ff.; Sedley
1983; Mitsis 1988: 13266; Purinton 1996.
Epistemology
134

,
.
Neither a great amount of money nor piles of possessions nor
political offices nor power contain what is happy and blessed, but
rather freedom from pain and gentleness of passions and a disposi-
tion of the soul that determines what is in accord with nature.
This character is perfectly stable and does not even imagine ()
13

a contrary condition (Diogenes Laertius 10.117 = fr. 222a Usener):

But a person, once become wise, no longer receives the opposite
disposition nor willingly imagines it.
The disposition in accord with nature is the basis of the sages inde-
pendence (, Porphyry to Marcella 27 = fr. 202 Usener = fr. 67
Diano = fr. 216 Arrighetti
2
):
14
[ ]
15

, .

,
.
Wealth that pertains to nature [the one who is truly a philoso-
pher] is limited and is easily provided, whereas that of empty beliefs
13 I do not see why Bailey 1926: 165 renders as pretend, which seems irrel-
evant to the context.
14 On cf. also Letter to Menoeceus 130, and the listings under and
in the index to Diano 1946.
15 I bracket these words as a gloss.
135
is unlimited and difficult to provide. One who follows nature, then,
and not empty beliefs is in all things self-sufficient; for in regard to
what suffices for nature, every possession is wealth, but in regard
to unlimited desires even the greatest wealth is nothing.
The sage is independent of chance (cf. Porphyry To Marcella 30 = fr. 489
Usener = B 77 Bailey = fr. 210 Arrighetti
2
; Letter to Menoeceus 134). Like
the gods, in cui tutto necessario e tutto bene, as Carlo Diano (1942:
48) has argued in his extensive survey of Epicurean psychology,
is the sage, who, although he is not a god, but a mortal man,
lives among goods that are those of the immortals, since, with
chance [tukh] eliminated from his every act, he functions invari-
ably in accord with the strict logical necessity of his nature [phu-
sis], that is, of the flesh. The fool, however, who is in the opposite
state, is basically unfree.
( il saggio, che pur non essendo dio, ma uomo e mortale, vive
tra beni che son propri degli immortali, giacch, esclusa da ogni
suo atto la , non opera se non secondo la stretta necessit
logica della , e cio della carne. Nellopposta condizione e
per fondamentalmente non libero lo stolto.)
Diano has shown (17ff.) how this conception of the sages
too derives from considerations raised by Aristotle. In the atomistic
adaptation, the wise persons soul is most stable and least susceptible to
perturbations, which are imagined as physical, that is, atomic in character.
Constituted in accord with nature, its pleasure is static, wants nothing
from time, and is in this sense divine and immortal.
16
16 On time and pleasure, Puliga 1983: 254, citing Principal Doctrine 19 = Vatican Saying 20,
afrms that Epicuro ha voluto dimostrare che il tempo una categoria psicologica che
non ha senso fuori di noi, oltre la nostra vita; this is too strongcolor too is an accident
of atoms and void, but is not for that reason a subjective or psychological category of
experience. Puliga cites (255) Diano 1974: 275 for idea that pleasure is fuori del tempo;
perch non c tempo per lidentico. See also Mitsis 1988: 2427 on the Epicurean idea
that pleasure is not increased by duration.
Epistemology
136
Two further points about the divine nature of the sage perhaps deserve
mention. Epicurus, once more adapting an insight of Aristotles to his
own atomic theory, defined time as an accident of accidents (Sextus
Empiricus Against the Mathematicians 10.219). For time, as Lucretius
explains (1.44963), is not a thing in itself (per se) like matter and space,
nor is it a property of compound bodies.
17
Rather, the sense of time
arises out of motion and rest, that is, the perception of changes in things,
whether external, such as day and night, or internal alterations between
the various affects and the absence of them.
18
The stable and continuous
pleasure of the sage ought not, on this account, to give rise to a sense of
time, and this is perhaps another reason why the sage needs nothing of
infinite time.
19
17 Cf. Epicurus Letter to Herodotus 6873. The nature of properties (, coni-
uncta) and accidents (, eventa) in Epicurean theory is controversial. Bailey
1926: 235ff., following Giussani, defends Epicurus against the charge of inconsistency in
the use of these terms by observing that properties and accidents are relative; thus,
to use his example, slavery is an accident of man but a property of slave. But there
is no evidence, so far as I know, that Lucretius and Epicurus were thinking of attributes
as logical predicates. On the contrary, Lucretius (1.47882) reduces all phenomena, even
historical events, to accidents of body (corpus) and place (locus). Matter (that is, atoms) and
space alone exist per se (1.419), and all phenomena may be regarded as their attributes.
Certain attributes, however, are the immediate consequences of the atomic structure of a
thing, and cannot be altered without destroying the objects atomic coherence (cf. permitiali
discidio, 1.45152). These, I take it, are properties; the hardness of stone is an example.
Other attributes derive, not from relationships of atoms within compound bodies, but
rather from relationships among or between such bodies. These seem to be the accidents,
and Lucretius cites such abstract notions as slavery, wealth, freedom, war and peace as
illustrations. Slavery is a relationship among human beings and is not inherent in the
atomic constitution of an individual person. The question whether slavery is a property
of a slave seems irrelevant to the analysis presented by Epicurus and Lucretius.
18 Cf. Letter to Herodotus 7273. I have used the phrase sense of time where Lucretius
has only the word tempus and Epicurus the word , because I think the Epicureans
were concerned with the subjective recognition of time. Cf. the discussion of becoming
in Grnbaum 1967: 17: What qualies a physical event at a time t as belonging to the
present or as now is not some physical attribute of the event or some relation it sustains
to other purely physical events; instead what so qualies the event is that at least one
human or other mind-possessing organism M experiences the event at the time t such that
at t, M is conceptually aware of the following complex fact: that his having the experience
of the event coincides temporally with an awareness of the fact that he has it at all.
19 Prost 2004: 152, citing Principal Doctrine 20, observes that Lillimit est en effet la
forme de linconscience.
137
The Epicurean sage also seems divine in the ability to comprehend
mentally all the spaces of the universe. Thus, Lucretius writes of Epicurus
(1.7274):
ergo vivida vis animi pervicit et extra
processit longe flammantia moenia mundi
atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.
And so his minds might and vigor prevailed, and on he
marched far beyond the blazing battlements of the world, in
thought and understanding journeying through all the measure-
less universe. (trans. Smith 2001: 5)
And of his own enlightenment through the teachings of Epicurus
Lucretius says (3.1618):
diffugiunt animi terrores, moenia mundi
discedunt, totum video per inane geri res.
apparet divum numen sedesque quietae.
the terrors of the mind are dispelled, the walls of the world
dispart, and I see what happens throughout the whole void. Plainly
visible are the gods in their majesty, and their calm realms.
(trans. Smith 2001: 68)
While a certain poetic license must be admitted here, these verses
nevertheless have their place in a philosophical tradition going back at
least as far as Parmenides,
20
and are especially reminiscent of Platos
description of the philosopher in the Theaetetus (173E), who is oblivious
to political life because,
,
, ,

20 Cf. Guthrie 1965: 1719.
Epistemology
138
, ,
,
.
In reality only his body resides in the city and visits there, but his
mind, believing all these things to be of little or no account, despises
them and flies everywhere, as Pindar puts it, beneath the earth,
and measures out its surface, and above the sky, studying the
stars, and discovering everywhere the entire nature of each thing
as a whole, not lowering itself to any of the things close by.
21
Michael Erler (2002: 162) has examined in detail how the idea of
homoisis thei or similarity to god in Epicurus derives directly from
Plato. He points out as well that Lucretius appears to allude specifically
to Plato in the proem to Book 5, in the phrase deus ille fuit, deus (a god he
was, a god);
22
the specific echo is of Laws 642A, , , ,
(a god, stranger, a god, to state it with most justice), an
exclamation which Erler describes as the only parallel in a philosophical
context known to me. Erler remarks further (168) that in the phrase
in Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus (135), The Greek
corresponds with Lucretius fuit. Erler registers (172) an important
distinction, however, between Platos concept of transcendent fulfillment
and that of Epicurus, which I too have emphasized in Chapter 2, insofar
as the theoria Plato is looking for is not to be achieved by everyone. On
21 Fowler 2002: 5051 cites also Metrodorus Against Menestratos fr. 37 Krte = Vatican
Saying 10 and fr. 38 Krte (Fowler remarks that this example shows the close relation-
ship between this commonplace and the uplifting of the initiate in the mysteries, who
similarly rises above his earthly existence); also Dionysius of Alexandria, cited in
Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica 14.27.8 = fr. 364 Usener.
22 For this kind of expression in Latin poetry, see Wills 1996: 61; imitations or analogues
in Virgil Aeneid 6.4546, Ovid Met. 15.677, Calpurnius Ecl. 4.100, Statius Thebaid 5.75152
and Silvae 4.6.3637, all with deus deus separated, though they occur in sequence in
Horace Epodes 14.6 and Virgil Ecl. 5.64; cf. also Virgil Ecl. 1.67; in Greek, theos theos
occurs in Bacchylides 3.21, and parallels are given in Snell-Maehlers apparatus ad loc.,
cited by Wills 61 n. 31. Wills writes: What these lines describe is a particular revelatory
moment , proclaiming the power of a god or, more often, a hero (Daphnis, Epicurus,
Hercules). Accordingly, the demonstrative ille is a feature of the tradition from Lucretius
to Virgil to Statius.
139
the other hand, Epicurus strongly believes that everyone and every age
should philosophise, because everyone can understand the basic rules
of nature as explained by his doctrine, which frees everyone from fear
and provides eudaimonia.
23
Whatever this image may have meant for Plato, it is reasonably certain
that Lucretius took it figuratively. In the proem to Book 1, for example,
Lucretius plays upon the ambiguity of certain words for sight which also
signify insight or understanding (1.14048, 15154):
24
sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas
suavis amicitiae quemvis efferre laborem
suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas
quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti,
res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis.
hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.
quippe ita formido mortalis continet omnis,
quod multa in terris fieri caeloque tuentur,
23 Erler also compares (176) in this connection the idea of the ight of the mind in
Lucretius 1.6279, 2.1044ff., which taken literally contradicts Epicurean psychology; he
concludes that as a metaphor it stands for a disposition, which enables us to deal with
the phenomena properly in order to gain ataraxia. On the general idea of
(Theaetetus 176B1), see also Roloff 1970; Gale 1994: 191207, who treats the deication of
Epicurus as another instance of latent myth in Lucretius poem. It may be worth noting
that Philo, De virtutibus 8 (p. 377 M.) mentions the idea of very
shortly after referring to empty beliefs ( , 7), which was something of
an Epicurean catchword.
24 Very generally, video and its derivatives, like perspicio and related forms, are used
metaphorically to mean understanding; tueor, on the other hand, is usually restricted
to the vision of the eyes. Note the emphatic contrast, in end-line positions, in vv. 15253,
as well as in the proem to Book 2, e.g. vv. 5, 9. On tueor, see Guiraud 1964: 35ff. For the
metaphor of the eyes of the soul or eyes of the mind, cf. Friedlnder 1958: 1516
and 34041 nn. 1516; also Schrijvers 1970: 123: Il rsulte de ces analyses que, daprs
la thorie picurienne de la connaissance, le mcanisme de la pense est analogue
celui des yeux.
Epistemology
140
quorum operum causas nulla ratione videre
possunt ac fieri divino numine rentur.
But your fine qualities, Memmius, and the hope of gaining the
pleasure of your delightful friendship spur me to make a success
of my task, however laborious, and induce me to forego sleep and
spend the still calm of the night in quest of words and verses that
will enable me to light the way brightly for your mind and thus
help you to see right to the heart of hidden things. This terrify-
ing darkness that enshrouds the mind must be dispelled not by
the suns rays and the dazzling darts of day, but by study of the
superficial aspect and underlying principle of nature. The fact is
that all mortals are in the grip of fear, because they observe many
things on earth and in the sky and, being at a complete loss for the
explanation of their cause, suppose that a supernatural power is
responsible for them. (trans. Smith 2001: 7)
The Epicureans did not, of course, conceive of an intelligible world
such as Platos, to which distance and change could not apply in any
ordinary sense. I have tried to indicate, however, that as descriptions
of purely subjective states of awareness, the Epicureans found and
defended a serious application of some of the language used by Plato
and in the mystery cults with reference to religious or idealist notions
that Epicureanism itself rejected.
It may be useful to indicate how the souls physical stability, which
is the basis for character in general and in particular for the sages
autarky, is grounded in the atomic theory of the Epicureans. The
fundamental premise is that the atoms are capable of only a limited
number of viable combinations. The Epicurean limits of variation,
as Phillip De Lacy observes (1957: 116), are equivalent to definition,
setting forth the differentiae of genera and species; thus they substi-
tute for Platonic or Aristotelian universals, circumscribing the limits
of the possible.
25
Such limits of variation would apply as well to the
25 Cf. De Lacy 1969 and Vlastos 1965: 139ff., who explains how limitation on the variety
of atoms was a necessary consequence of Epicurus own atomic theory (although I
141
human soul and, incidentally, might have been employed to attack a
Democritean legacy of skepticism. Epicurus had insisted, of course,
that the phenomena of the universe were lawful and that their order
was discoverable, especially in order to assure mankind that aveng-
ing gods do not arbitrarily intrude upon human affairs, and that
Hades and other objects of empty fears have no existence.
26
Besides
the requirement that objects have determinate forms, which was met
by the principle that De Lacy called limits of variation, the Epicurean
theory had to satisfy two further conditions which were indicated by
Democritus (Sextus Empiricus Against the Mathematicians 7.136; fr. B9
Diels-Kranz; cf. also frr. B6, 8):
,

.
In fact we know nothing firm, but what changes according to
the condition of the body and of the things that enter it and come
up against it. (trans. Taylor 1999: 11)
Democritus reasoning is apparently that what is perceived varies
(1) with the condition of the observer and (2) with distortions in the
immediate stimulus suffered in the course of transmission. To the sec-
ond difficulty, the Epicureans responded with the practical expedient
of repeated and nearer views, which would afford an increasingly more
accurate representation of the object (cf. Diogenes Laertius 10.3334;
Lucretius 5.353ff.). As for differences in the perceivers, the Epicureans
could regard these as negligible because the human soul was subject to
the same laws and limits as other things. Sensation and other modes of
awareness, moreover, are accidents () of the motions of atoms
must register my disagreement with Vlastos interpretation of the nature of Epicurean
minima; see Konstan 1982); on the function of natural limits in Epicureanism, see also
Gigandet 1998: 14551.
26 The lawfulness of the phenomenal world provides the means of discriminating real
objects of fear from the fancied objects of vain anxiety, at least insofar as these involve
irregular irruptions of divine agencies into the natural universe.
Epistemology
142
in the soul, bearing to the soul the same kind of relationship that color
bears to visible objects.
27
This is the principle, of course, on which the
subjective experience of the sage is related to the stability of his or her
soul, as that of the mass of humankind is to the perturbations that afflict
theirs. We may compare Lucretius demonstration (2.730990) that atoms
have no color, warmth, sound, or taste, an argument that culminates in
ironic ridicule of the notion that atoms, to compose a conscious soul, must
themselves have senses and awareness. Consciousness is only a kind,
albeit a special kind, of secondary quality (Lucretius 2.89196):
illud in his igitur rebus meminisse decebit,
non ex omnibus omnino, quaecumque creant res
sensilia, extemplo me gigni dicere sensus,
sed magni referre ea primum quantula constent,
895 sensile quae faciunt, et qua sint praedita forma,
motibus ordinibus posituris denique quae sint.
So, in this connection, you will do well to remember this: I am
not suggesting that every substance capable of creating sensible
things produces sensations as a matter of course, but that the
27 See Letter to Herodotus 64, and cf. Peters 1967: 186 s.v. symbebkos. See too Aristotles
discussion of qualities in Categories 8, where affects are included. I may note that the
doctrine of the validity of sensation contributes nothing to the refutation of skepticism
per se. Lucretius (4.49599), in a polemic against the skeptics, writes:
ideoque necesse est
non possint alios alii convincere sensus.
nec porro poterunt ipsi reprehendere sese,
aequa des quoniam debebit semper haberi.
proinde quod in quoquest his visum tempore, verumst.
Therefore it is necessary that one sense cannot overcome another. Nor, furthermore,
can they refute themselves, since we must always have an equal condence in them.
Thus, whatever appears to these at a given time, is true.
Bailey (1947: 3.1237ff.) takes this passage as intended to refute the extreme skepticism
of Metrodorus of Chios. To see that this is not likely to be right, it is enough to note that
Metrodorus also afrmed, according to Eusebius, that everything exists which anyone
perceives or thinks ( , , fr. 2 Diels-Kranz). See Warren 2002: 79,
193200, who notes that Epicurus principal move against Democritean skepticism was
to maintain that the senses report real properties of atomic combinations (195).
143
supremely important factors are, first, the size and shape of the
particles that produce the sensible, and, secondly, their motions,
order, and positions. (trans. Smith 2001: 57)
From these premises it is an easy step to the conclusion that, as the
souls of human beings are more or less alike, in accord with atomic lim-
its on variation, so are their perceptions of things, which are ultimately
reflections of the properties of their own component atoms.
The ascription of divinity and immortality to the sage, then, had a
precise meaning for the Epicureans and was grounded in their physics
and psychology. Such terms had only a subjective reference, however,
in the case of human beings, although the phenomena to which they
referred were, according to their theory, a reflection of a stable condi-
tion of the body and, especially, of the soul. Those who have a correct
understanding of these matters ( ) can enjoy
absolutely firm and steadfast joy ( ), as Epicurus
says (Plutarch That it is Not Possible to Live Happily according to Epicurus
1089D = fr. 68 Usener = fr. B11 Bailey = fr. 22.3 Arrighetti
2
):

.
The comfortable state of the flesh, and the confident expectation
of this, contain the highest and most secure joy for those who are
capable of reasoning. (trans. Long and Sedley 1987: 117)
28
28 The exclusive mention of the esh, in this fragment, cannot, if we take the context in
Plutarch into account, be understood as a legitimate expression of Epicurean doctrine
on this matter. For Plutarch continues: ,

,
(Now rst observe their conduct here, how they keep
decanting this pleasure or painlessness or stable condition of theirs back and forth,
from body to mind to body, compelled, since pleasure is not retained in the mind but
leaks and slips away, to attach it to its source (trans. Einarson and De Lacy 1967: 37).
Cf. also Brochard 1954: 254 and frr. 437, 439 Usener.
Epistemology
144
The mass of mankind, according to the Epicureans, seek security
through fame, wealth or power (Principal Doctrine 7; cf. Vatican Saying 81
and Chapter 2 above). Such security would be a good thing, Epicurus
admits, if it could be achieved (Principal Doctrine 7):
,
,
,
,
.
Certain people want to become famous and admired, think-
ing that they would thus acquire security from other men.
Consequently, if such peoples life was secure, they did obtain
natures good; but if it was not secure, they are not in possession
of the objective which they originally sought after on the basis of
natures affinity. (trans. Long and Sedley 1987: 126)
However, it cannot be achieved in that way. Security is the product
of a stable condition of soul and body, not of material acquisition or
social approbation. In this connection may be noted the familiar con-
trast between the enjoyment of present good and the desire for things
distant or in the future. Lucretius puts the idea in the mouth of Nature
personified, reproving a mans lament over mortality (3.95560):
955 aufer abhinc lacrimas, baratre, et compesce querellas.
omnia perfunctus vitai praemia marces.
sed quia semper aves quod abest, praesentia temnis,
inperfecta tibi elapsast ingrataque vita
et nec opinanti mors ad caput adstitit ante
960 quam satur ac plenus possis discedere rerum.
Stop snivelling, you dolt! Away with your whinings! You had
full use of all the precious things of life before you reached this
senile state. But because you continually crave what is not present
and scorn what is, your life has slipped away from you incomplete
and unenjoyed, until suddenly you have found death standing at
145
your head before you are able to depart from the feast of life filled
to repletion. (trans. Smith 2001: 93)
29
Seneca (Letters to Lucilius 15.9 = fr. 491 Usener; cf. also frr. 49394) gives
us the idea in this form: stulta vita ingrata est et trepida: tota in futurum fertur
(the life of fools is unpleasant and fearful: for it is wholly projected into
the future). Secure pleasure is at hand; when it is sought as the object
of empty desires it brings fearful joylessness.
People may enjoy a divine and immortal happiness, if this is prop-
erly understood. It is the natural goal () of their lives (cf. Diogenes
Laertius 10.137). To want something, people must have some idea of it
(Diogenes Laertius 10.33):

.
We would not seek the object that is sought if we did not know
it in advance.
The idea of immortal happiness would seem to derive in part, at
least, from the image, however confused, that people have of the gods.
30

The proper function of prayer, in turn, is to become receptive to the
ideal of blessedness that we perceive obtaining among the gods. Like
Lucretius, Philodemus too insists that the right reason for prayer is not
to avoid the hostility of the gods, but rather in order that, according
to the understanding of beings surpassing in power and excellence,
we may realize our fulfilments and social conformity with the laws
(73751 Obbink; trans. Obbink 1996: 157; Philodemus is here citing
Epicurus Peri bin).
31
29 Smith reads, and translates, barde for baratre in v. 955; the latter would mean hell-
hole. Other emendations have been proposed; see Kenney 1971: 21617.
30 Cf. Festugire 1955: 6263: The Sage would perhaps have been surprised to hear it
said, nevertheless it remains true that the religion of Epicurus is related to Platos;
also Paratore 1947: 145; Frischer 1982 on images in Epicureanism.
31 Cf. 114755 = Obbink 1996: 185: And one who understands that the provisions of
goods and evils that derive from him [sc. the god] are without feeble anger and favor,
afrms that he needs nothing of human things (my trans.). Obbink 2002: 215 asks
how we can have preconceptions of things that do not exist, and suggests that we have
Epistemology
146
But the idea of true pleasure is also confused; people cannot see, as
Lucretius says (2.17), what their natures are barking for. The Epicurean
account of error is a simple one. People add opinion, falsely, to the data
of their senses, making what we should call a false inference from valid
but insufficiently clear information provided by the senses (cf. Furley
1971; Asmis 1984: 14159). There is no evidence, so far as I know, that the
Epicureans applied this theory of error to the all-important confusion over
the nature of complete or perfect pleasure, but it seems as though they
might well have done so. Divine pleasure is possible for human beings:
the datum is there. Its nature, and the means to it, are misunderstood
through the addition of empty opinion.
32
Vain desires are limitless, as I argued in Chapter 2, because they feed on
simulacra. These simulacra, we may now tentatively add, present an image
of godlike, deathless joy which, misunderstood, motivates an empty quest
for absolute security. This analysis applies to immoderate desires such as
greed, ambition and the pursuit of glory. An analogous treatment is pos-
notions of comparably immaterial entities: Knowledge of the gods, like that of virtues,
mathematics, qualities, etc. constitutes a reality that supervenes on corporeal physical
existence. But we do not ascribe to these a material existence; with the gods, on the
contrary, we are to think of them as living outside the cosmos. Human psychological
processes necessitate that such ideas take their formation here, within the human soul.
But where for Epicurus does the abstract concept of virtue, or number, or quality actu-
ally reside? The answer, surely, is nowhere. We do not, moreover, have images of tall or
happy virtues, as we do of gods. It is a more interesting question how one could know
that gods are eternal and indestructible solely from their simulacra: no number of images
reaching people over the history of a single cosmos could demonstrate that the gods
outlive it (but see Santoro 2000: 37, who argues that our idea of the gods immortality
is based on inference). Obbink adds (216) that The existence of such beings would be
inconsistent with the condition for indestructibility in the Epicurean universe; this is a
puzzle, but it does not entitle us to dismiss Philodemus (and Lucretius) claim that the
gods are indestructible (see Obbinks text 11a = col. 364; no hint here that the gods are
merely our ideas of them). Would Epicurus have deliberately foisted such false notions
on his followers without ever making clear what they meant? See also Sedley 2009 and
Konstan 2009 for further arguments on both sides of the issue.
32 Here, I think, is the source of Epicurus hostility to the astral religion associated
with the doctrines of Plato (cf. Festugire 1955: chh. 1, 5): idealistic theories teaching the
immortality of the soul would conrm the fatal confusion that the Epicureans sought to
dispel. Cf. also Santoro 2000: 16367, commenting on col. XX of the treatise on the form
of the gods attributed to Demetrius Lacon, where the astral theology of the Peripatetics
and Stoics is attacked.
147
sible, I believe, for the case of obsessive love. Lucretius describes how lovers,
in their limitless passion, appear to desire that their bodies may dissolve
(liquescunt, 1114) and merge in complete physical union (4.110814):
adfigunt avide corpus iunguntque salivas
oris et inspirant pressantes dentibus ora,
1110 nequiquam, quoniam nihil inde abradere possunt
nec penetrare et abire in corpus corpore toto;
nam facere inter dum velle et certare videntur;
usque adeo cupide in Veneris compagibus haerent,
membra voluptatis dum vi labefacta liquescunt.
they greedily press body to body and intermingle the salivas
of their mouths, drawing deep breaths and crushing lips with
teeth. But it is all in vain, since they cannot take away anything
from their lovers body or wholly penetrate it and merge into it.
At times they do indeed seem to be striving and struggling to do
this: so eagerly do they remain fettered in the bonds of Venus,
while their limbs are slackened and liquefied by the force of the
ecstasy. (trans. Smith 2001: 130)
It is tempting to compare the angel Raphaels account to Adam, in
Miltons Paradise Lost (8.62229, quoted from Hughes 1957), of the embraces
of angels:
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoyst
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
625 Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:
Easier than Air with Air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure
Desiring; nor restraind conveyance need
As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul.
Physical interpenetration, like immortality, is of course impossible,
according to the Epicureans. However, the oneness of like-minded
Epistemology
148
spirits joined in friendship was exalted and revered by Epicurus and
his followers, once again building on the legacy of the Academy and
especially on Aristotles views. Friendship is an immortal good
( , Vatican Saying 78), Epicurus affirmed, because, as
Festugire explains (1955: 46), it bestows a happiness similar to that
enjoyed by the immortal gods. Friendship causes people to be of one
mind (), so that the sage, who alone knows true friendship,
suffers as much for the torment of a friend as for his own (Vatican
Saying 61; cf. 56, 57). A confused desire for the total unity of friendship,
misunderstood as a physical or sexual possibility, was conceived of
as the basis, I suggest, of the irrational passion of love. The analogy
with aggressive social desires is clear. In each case, what is possible
and natural as a state of the soula kind of divinitybecomes a
goad to mad and frustrated passion when grasped for as the object of
desire. A confused anticipation of true pleasure, which resides in the
extinction of such desires, affords a certain false pleasure, as I have
argued, which in turn may reinforce the passion. Thus Lucretius says
that in love, and acting as its cause, is the hope that the passion may
be quenched by what produced it (4.108687):
namque in eo spes est, unde est ardoris origo,
For the hope is that the same body that kindled the burning
passion can also extinguish the flame.
Such is the result of ignorance of the nature of the soul and its
pleasure.
This interpretation of amor can perhaps help to provide another per-
spective on the role of Venus in the proem to Book 1 of De rerum natura, a
passage that has been much clarified by several studies (cf. Friedlnder
1939; Elder 1954; Giancotti 1959; Ackermann 1979: 18188; Asmis 1982;
Clay 1983: 8295; Gale 1994: 20823; Rumpf 2003: 7295). Apart from her
mythological character as the consort of violent Mars, the ancestress of
the Roman people and the muse of Lucretius verse, invoked by tradi-
tion at the beginning of an epic, Venus has several symbolic aspects,
149
of which I should like to single out two: she represents sexual desire
and procreation among animals (120), and she is the sacred spirit of
peace which reigns among the gods (4449) and which Lucretius prays
Rome may enjoy (2943).
33
Venus represents also the pleasure (voluptas,
1) both of sexual fulfilment and of tranquillity or ataraxy, the one a
variety of kinetic pleasure, and physical, as Bignone (1945: 43744; cf.
Bailey 1947: 3.174950) has made clear, the other a pleasure of the soul,
and static. Moreover, both sexual generation and the tranquillity of the
gods may be said to confer on human beings a kind of immortality,
though only, of course, in a special or metaphorical sense. For, on the
one hand, the immortal peace of the gods is the pattern of the sages
spiritual security, which is like immortality; and, on the other hand,
with respect to procreation, it is tempting, in the words of Phillip De
Lacy (1957: 125 n. 53; cf. Schrijvers 1970: 27376), to see here the influ-
ence of Plato, Symp. 2078, where it is stated that perpetual generation
is the closest that mortals can come to immortality. Human beings
alone can participate in both the pleasures of Venus, for they share the
joy of procreation with animals, and may share with the gods the bliss
of utter peace within the soul.
34
But if only human beings may know
both pleasures, they alone are capable of confounding them, for both
appear to them as Venus.
It is natural and necessary first to satisfy the needs of the body, for they
are always registered, as Epicurus makes clear, in the soul (Porphyry To
Marcella 30 = fr. 200 Usener = fr. B44 Bailey = fr. 225 Arrighetti
2
; Italian
translation at Arrighetti 1973: 562):

, , .
33 Venus symbolic functions may also include the Empedoclean or , and
she is appropriate as well to the proem as Memmius family deity. Clay 1983: 8295
shows that Lucretius Venus also stands for the generative power of nature or , a
transformation of Epicurus more mechanistic conception of nature.
34 For two kinds of Venus, cf. also Lucretius 5.962 and 1017. From the fact that, in
Lucretius description, Mars and Venus enjoy each others embraces (1.3140), I do not
believe that it is legitimate to conclude that, according to Epicurean theology, the gods
know sexual pleasure.
Epistemology
150
,
.
Do not consider it at all unnatural that when the flesh cries
out, the soul cries out as well. The voice of the flesh cries: do not
be hungry, do not be thirsty, to not be cold. It is difficult for the
soul to prevent these things, but dangerous for it to take no heed
when nature bids, because its [the bodys] daily self-sufficiency
is naturally attached to it.
For this reason, I think, Lucretius first presents Venus in her role as
the universal sexual impulse. But when the flesh has been satisfied, and
passion is spent, the soul then aspires to its own peace. Lucretius proem,
which commences with the description of physical desire culminating in
the embraces of Mars and Venus, and then turns to the hope for lasting
peace and a vision of the gods tranquillity, suggests the rhythm of sexual
excitement and release.
35
If the soul, however, loses sight of its proper joy,
and seeks peace and security merely through the satisfaction of the flesh,
it cannot find contentment, and its desire will be frustrated. The physical
Venus, if I may borrow Lucretius imagery, cannot pacify Mars.
The happiness of the sage rested, according to the Epicureans, upon
the stability of his or her disposition. To achieve this disposition, even
to begin to achieve it, it was necessary to understand the nature and
limits of humanity and the universe. Understanding, however, at least
in connection with ethical matters, itself requires a healthy disposition,
as Aristotle had argued (cf. Nicomachean Ethics 1.4). To realize freedom
from the irrational passions, then, one needed the conviction that the
soul was capable of true pleasure, as well as discipline, and the support
of others who were nearer the goal, or at least advancing at the same
pace.
36
Friendly association becomes the way to wisdom, and is perfected
as wisdom matures (see Vatican Sayings 23, 39). For this reason, I believe,
35 I owe this observation to Archibald W. Allen.
36 On the role of faith in Epicureanism, cf. DeWitt (1954: 30305); on Epicurean educa-
tional methods, and the care with which the more advanced helped others to absorb
and accept the major doctrines, see Philodemus On Frank Speech (Konstan et al. 1998).
151
Epicureanism pointed naturally to the development of communities of
converts or disciples dedicated to finding tranquillity, where members
might remove themselves, to some extent, from the environments that
reinforced their passions, and would find spiritual support and delight
in one anothers company (on the communities, see DeWitt 1954: 328ff.;
Clay 1983: 16975; Clay 1983a).
Festugire (1955: 4142) describes the Epicurean community in these
words:
Sheltered from the world and the buffeting of Fortune, this little
group had the feeling that they had reached harbour. Since they
had no care left but to strive to understand better what the Master
had said, friendship became the primary pursuit of the elect.
Each one had to work to build up the atmosphere in which hearts
would open like flowers. It was a question before everything of
being happy, and the mutual affection and the confidence with
which the disciples relied upon each other contributed more than
anything to that happiness. Epicureanism was a spirit much
more than a doctrine, a spirit embodied in the closely-knit circles
whose members scrupulously preserved the words of the Master
and made a cult of friendship.
Festugires beautiful and learned book had the great merit of restor-
ing the appropriate emphasis on the spiritual side of Epicureanismto
some extent, unfortunately, at the expense of the physical doctrine and
also, as we are in a better position to appreciate today than at the time
when Festugire was writing, the practical pedagogical methods that they
developed and employed. But the spiritual teachings of Epicureanism can-
not be divorced from its materialism. Human beings are lonely creatures
in the Epicurean universe, which is independent of our will, our ideas,
and our values (cf. De Lacy 1957: 114ff.). All things change and perish,
and though they must in time be recreated, nevertheless they will not
be the same in any sense that has human meaning.
37
Within the whirl
37 On eternal recurrence and its irrelevance to the question of human immortality, see
Lucretius 3.847ff.
Epistemology
152
and tumble of dark atoms through the infinite void, the souls of human
beings may know, for their brief duration, a perfect peace in which they
are fulfilled. But this peace is theirs only if they see and give assent to
the ever-changingness of the cosmos, and do not seek there a lastingness
that cannot be.
38
People must realize that security lies within themselves,
a subjective image of the atoms in their soulsyet this security is every-
thing that religions and philosophers have promised.
38 Cf. Pesce 1974: 98, who, despite the somewhat owery language, captures something
of the inspirational quality of Epicureanism: Sta qui il profondissimo senso religioso
della dottrina di Epicuro, che colpisce per la singolarit di un ascetismo che non la
pavida ed egoistica fuga dinanzi alla vita del cinico n lelevazione alla pura teoresi del
platonico, ma la scoperta, tanto pi sorprendente perch raggiunta al di fuori di ogni
tradizione religiosa costituita (bench forse qualche sentore dato avvertirne nellantico
paganesimo), che il livello dellelementare coincide con quello dellessenziale, l dove,
tolto il vano e il superuo, si tocca lessere.
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Aetius, 9n9
afterlife, punishment in, xiv; see also
Hades, punishment
ain, 130
aisthsis, ix, 34, 15
[Alexander of Aphrodisias] thika
Problmata, 13n16
algdn, 10
allegory, xii, 5966; and Epicurus,
6263
alogon, 7
ambition, xiii, 3537, 40, 42, 46, 52
amicities, 8993
amor, 6872
Anaximines Rhetoric to Alexander 12
anger, two kinds in Philodemus,
2224, 51
anima, 812
animals
Aristotle on, 19n27
and language, 9798
and rationality, 1822
animus, 812
anxiety, 4953, 5558; as cause of
desire, 5558
Apollodorus, Life of Epicurus, 63
aponia, 14
Archippus, 32
Aristotle
On Dreams 3n2
Metaphysics 1
Nicomachean Ethics 2
1.12, 27n1
7.14 (on mixed pleasure), 75
Politics 1.9 (on greed), 54
Rhetoric (on pathos) 2; (on fear) 17
On the Soul
1.1, 24
3.3, 3n2
on animals and rationality, 19n27
on ethics, 133
Armstrong, John, 91, 119
Asmis, Elizabeth, 57
asphaleia, 32
ataraxia, 1314, 39, 113, 139
Atherton, Catherine, 103
Index
170
atoms, lacking secondary properties,
14243
autarkeia, 13435, 150
Bailey, Cyril, 2930, 62, 6970, 90, 110
bodily needs, 14950
Boyanc, Pierre, 61, 6465, 108
blame, 27
Caesar, Julius, 3637
Campbell, Gordon, 97, 10607
careo, 34
catastematic pleasure, 1417
cerno, 3334
Cicero
To Atticus
2.7.4, 31
De nibus
1.18.59, 59n64
1.18.57, 67
1.2931, 15n22
3.10.35, 17n25
De ofciis 1.2.5, 28
Clement of Alexandria, 123
Cole, Thomas, 83
communities, philosophical, 151
conscientia, 12122
criterion, 3, 56
Critias, Sisyphus, 114
Cumont, Franz, 63
cura, 21, 4950
death
fear of, x, xiii, 4547, 5053, 5859
is nothing to us, x
De Lacy, Phillip, 140, 149
Democritus
fr. 191 D-K, 3739
fr. 279, 6667
on social evolution, 8283
and skepticism, 14042
desire
in Aristotle, 54
as cause of fear of death, xi
easily satisfied, 74
and emotion, 2
and empty belief, 7475
interdependence with fear, 6768
limitless, xxii
natural, necessary, unnecessary,
xii, 3536
nature of, 6973
in Plato, 5354
in primitive communities, 109
Diano, Carlo, 135
diathesis, 13335
Diogenes Laertius
10.2, 63
10.11, 13
10.31, 34
10.33, 145
10.66, 7
10.13637, 131132
10.137, 12
Diogenes of Oenoanda
(on two types of fear) 24, 4749
(on justice) 119
dolor, 10
emotion, ix
empty, anger, 24; opinion, see
kenodoxia; sounds, 10507
epibol ts dianoias, 3
Epicurus
On Choices, 1314, 132
fr. 68 Usener, 143
171
Index
fr. 141, 128
fr. 534, 121
fr. 200, 14950
fr. 202, 13435
fr. 222a, 134
fr. 407, 133
fr. 491, 145
fr. 548, 133134
fr. 582, 123
On the Goal, 6, 28n2, 132
On Holiness, 115
Letter to Anaxarchus, 28n2
Letter to Herodotus
37, 108
3738, 105
38, 109
52, 4
55, 82, 3, 68
6364, 11
67, 9n9
7576, 99101
76, 104
Letter to Menoeceus
23, 28
24, x, xi, xv
24125, 50
26, 28
128, 130
130, 134
132, 27n2
134, 135
135, 138
Letter to his Mother, 128
Letter to Pythocles 116, 4; fr. 165, 128
On Lives, 132, 145
On Nature vii, 12, 64, 11516;
frg. 31.5 Arr., 104
Puzzles (Diaporiai), 123
Principal Doctrines
3, 10n13
5, 67
7, 144
10, 10n13
15, xiii, 4647, 73
19, 129
20, 12930
24, 3
29, 73
30, 7375
32, 9091
37, 10506
Vatican Saying
7, 122
23, 92
27, 16n24
31, 52
34, 9293
59, 7273
61, 148
78, 148
epithumia, 2
Erler, Michael, 1318, 13839
error, as result of symbolic
thinking, xii
escaping notice, in the case of
crimes, 12223
eternity, 130
ethics, Epicurus dependency on
Aristotle, 133
eudaimonia, 133
euphrosun, 13
euthumi, 39
Everson, Stephen, 7
evolution, social
172
in Democritus 8283
Hermarchus on, 9396, 112n46
and origin of desire, 8384
and origin of greed, 8486
and origin of law, 9596
primitive stage, xivxv, 8092
and tryanny, 110
Farrington, Benjamin, 5658, 6061,
75, 8384, 86, 88, 107, 111
fear
irrational, ix
as cause of desire, xxii
caused by desire, 5966
of death, xxii
defined by Aristotle, 17
of gods, 11419
interdependence with desire,
6768
and language, xiv
and law, xiv
lions fear of roosters, 2021
not in primitive society, xiv,
8182, 88
and social evolution, 8384
two kinds of, 24, 4749
widespread, 5859
feelings, 57
Festugire, A.J., 148, 151
Fish, Jeffrey, 23
Fortenbaugh, William, 1819
Freud, xi, 25
friendship, 8993, 15051; an immortal
good, 148
Furley, David, 133
goal of life, 145
god(s)
existence of, 64n69, 11516, 145n31
fear of, 11419
belief in, 11415
happiness of, 133
as model for human happiness,
145
in Plato, 13839
sage likened to, xv, 12728, 13839
greed, xiii
in Aristotle, 54
in Plato, 5354
and seafaring, 3334, 4245, 52
and social evolution, 8486
Hackforth, Ian, 7576
Hades
and allegory, 5966
punishments in, 4546, 5868
happiness
model of deriving from gods, 145
of mortals vs. gods, 133
Harris, William, 24
hdon, as element of pathos in
Aristotle, 2, 812; see also pleasure
Heinze, Richard, 61
Hermarchus
on animals and justice 1920
on the evolution of society 9396,
112n46
Hesiod Theogony 11623, Epicurus
on, 63
Hippocrates On Ancient Medicine, 3n1
homoisis thei, 138
hunger, 7, 6971
immortality
desire for, xv
and human life, 12730, 143
Indelli, Giovanni, 2223
individualism, primitive, 8688
173
Index
insanity, of Lucretius, 41n34
joy, ix
justice, and law, 106; and pleasure, 67
kenodoxia, xv, 17, 7377
kenos
of anger, 24
of opinion, 7277
of sounds, 10507
khara, ix, 7, 1117
knowledge, as condition for seeking
something, 145
laedo, 11
laetitia, 10, 13
language
and animals, 9798
and convention, 99105
and irrational fear and desire, xiv
origin of, 96107
pre-linguistic stage, 97100
law
and irrational fear, xivxv
and justice, 106
origin of, 9596
rule of, 11013, 11920
and punishment, 11213, 12125
sages obedience of, 12325
two aspects of, xv, 11020
lions, afraid of roosters, 2021
logikon, ix, 79, 12
love
obsessive, 7071, 75, 14750
and physical interpenetration, 147
Lucretius
De rerum natura
1.7274, 137
1.14048, 15154, 13940
1.44963, 136
2.113, 2937
2.1419, 4142
2.3741, 3637
2.3753, 4244, 51
2.4951, xiii
2.5561, 49
2.60060, 65n70
2.89196, 14243
3.1618, 137
3.4158, 5558
3.5964, xi
3.6369, 4445
3.6468, xiii, 40
3.7882, 47
3.13651, 811
3.322, 128
3.82527, 121
3.830, x
3.95560, 14445
3.9781023, xiii
3.9781023, 5967
4.71421, 2021
4.87076, 7071
4.108488, 7677
4.108687, 72, 148
4.10911104, 6872, 7677
4.110814, 147
5.7375, 118n54
5.97387, 8688
5.9881010, 7984
5.1006, 34
5.102427, 93
5.102829, 98
5.105697, 9798
5.110514, 8485
174
5.113334, 105
5.113640, 110
5.114350, 110
5.1151, 112
5.121825, 11617
5.123335, 118
6.919, 10708
6.919, 5152
6.2425, 109
lup, as element of pathos in Aristotle,
2, 10
Memmius, 36
mens, 89
metus, 9, 21
Milton, Paradise Lost 8.62229, 147
mind, situated in the chest, 67
mood, 24
music, 6
myth, see allegory
nature, sages life in accord with,
13334
Obbink, Dirk, 119
ofcium, 2728
opinion
addition of, 146
empty, xv, 7277
in Plato, 74
org, 2223, 51
pact, social, 9091
pain, ix; as pathos, 4
pathos, ix, 124
akoustikon, 45
defined by Aristotle, 23
as pleasure and pain, 4
pavor, 2122
phantasia, 3
Philippson, Robert, 111, 124
Philodemus,
On Anger, 2223, 51
On Choices and Avoidances, 28n2,
62n67, 11213
To His Companions xii
On Death, 41n34
On Frank Speech, 27n1
On the Gods, 65
On Piety, 113
20519 Obbink, 115
22531, 64, 11516
22731
23242, 19n28
53436, 64
73751, 145
114755, 145n31
123335, 118
136983, 113
2031, 113
phobos, ix, 7, 1617
pity, 9192
Plato
Axiochus, 50n51
Laws, 138
Philebus (on mixed and
anticipated pleasure), 7476
Republic 8 (on desire), 5354
Theaetetus 3n1, (on false
opinion) 74
on the minds vision, 13738
Timaeus 2n1 pleasure, ix, 2
anticipated, 7577
catastematic, 1417
confused, 14648
Cyrenaics on, 13132
divine, 146
175
Index
independent of time, 12930
and justice, 67
Lucretian, 29
mixed, 7576
as pathos, 4
physical basis of, 13135
pure, 55, 75
of soul superior to that of body,
13132
static, 1417, 13133
Plutarch,
Against Colotes, 123
Impossible to Live Happily according
to Epicurus, 17n25
politics,
avoidance of, 3637, 111
in contemporary Rome, 3637,
41n34, 57
Polystratus, 20
poverty, likened to death, 4546
power, xiii, 3637, 4245
praise, 27
prayer, 145
primitive society, xivxv, 8092
absence of irrational fear in,
8688
individualism, 8688
primitivism, 8082
progressivism, 8082
psukh, ix, 78; as bipartite, 9n9
psychology, ixx
Ptolemy, Claudius, On the Criterion and
Ruling Element (on language), 10102
punishment
in the afterlife, xiiixiv, 4546,
5866
and conscience, 12122
as deterrent, 11113, 12124
and escaping notice, 12223
and the law, xivxv, 11213, 12125
and revenge, 11112
Robin, Louis, 97
sage
independent of chance, 135
likened to a god, xv, 12728,
13543
in accord with nature, 13334
and obedience to law, 12325
and security, 127, 14345
self-sufficiency of, 13435
stability of disposition, 13435,
14043, 150
vision of, 137, 13940
Schofield, Malcolm, 1318
seafaring, 3435
security, 32, 5253
conditions for its being
realized, 108
of the sage, 127, 14345
self-sufficiency of sage, 13435
Seneca, Moral Epistles
15.9, 145
97.15, 121
sensation, ix
Servius on Virgil Eclogue 2.58, 9n10
Sextus Empiricus Against the
Mathematicians 11.169, 16n24
Sherman, Nancy, 2425, 59
skepticism, Democritean, 14142
Smith, Martin Ferguson, 39
society
evolution of, in Democritus 8283
Hermarchus on, 9396, 112n46
and origin of desire, 8384
and origin of greed, 8486
176
and origin of law, 9596
primitive stage, xivxv, 8092
and tryanny, 110
Sophocles Tympanistae 3132
soul, ix; stability of, 14043
sounds, empty, 10507
stability of sages disposition, 13435,
14043, 150
static pleasure, 1417
symbolic thinking, xii
technology, rise of, 8081
telos, 12, 13, 15, 18, 145
tetrapharmakon, xixii
thirst, 6872
thumos, 2223, 51
time
as an accident of accidents, 136
pleasure independent of, 12930
tyranny, as a stage of social
evolution, 110
variation, limits of, 14043; as an
answer to skepticism, 14142
Venus, xvxvi, 18n25, 8991, 14749
Verlinsky, Alexander, 102
virtue, 2729
vision of sage, 137, 13940; in Plato,
13738
vita prior, 8386, 107
Vlastos, Gregory, 10001
voluptas, 18n25
war, 3637
wealth, xiii, 3536, 4246
n
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Parmenides and the History of Dialectic: Three Essays by Scott Austin
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God and Forms in Plato by Richard D. Mohr
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Platos Parmenides: A Translation by Arnold Hermann and Sylvana
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The intellect, by making a rational calculation of the end and

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