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What did Epicurus Learn from Plato?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2017
Abstract
Epicurus and Epicureans were famously antagonistic toward Platonic metaphysics and the dialectical style and technique pioneered in the Academy. However, there are Platonic methodological and doctrinal themes in Epicurus's epistemology, theology, and politics.
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References
1 Cicero, De Natura Deorum (DND) 1.72; cf. De Finibus 1.20, 26, 71.
2 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (D.L.), 10.26.
3 D.L. 10.13.
4 Rohde and Brieger were among those who took Epicurus’ rhetoric seriously. See Bailey, Cyril, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), 226Google Scholar.
5 See D. L. 10.8; Sextus, Adv. Math. 1.3–4. ‘Lerocritus’ (Nonsense) was Epicurus's pet name for Democritus. But what can we make of his calling Aristotle a ‘profligate’?
6 The Vatican Collection of Epicurean Sayings (V.F.), in Arrighetti, Graziano, Epicuro: Opere (Turn: Einaudi, 1960; 2nd ed., 1973), 23Google Scholar. For Epicurus’ knowledge of the dialogues of the ‘exoteric Aristotle’, see Bignone, Ettore, L'Aristotele perduto e la formazione filosofica di Epicuro 2 vols. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973; first ed. 1936)Google Scholar. Aristotle's philosophical works were, of course, not yet available in the form we know. So Aristotle does not loom as large as Plato in the thoughts of Epicurus, who saw him mainly as a follower of Plato.
7 D.L. 10.14.
8 DND 1.72–73.
9 It seems worth asking whether Cicero has in mind the Skeptical Academy of his own day, the school of his main allegiance apart from ethics.
10 Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus (Ad Men.), 124. Among the Platonic ‘Apocrypha’, the dialogue called Axiochus, written in ‘a vulgar κοινή’, as A. E. Taylor puts it, deploys, as a ‘consolation’ the argument that ‘death is nothing to us, for while we are death is not, and when death is, we are not’. In the dialogue, Axiochus, an uncle of Alcibiades, dismisses the argument as childish ‘twaddle’. Immisch reads the dialogue as a Platonic riposte to the Epicurean denial of mortality. Taylor calls it ‘a mere revival of the ideas of a second-rate sophist’ and speculates that it may reflect early, faddish responses to incipient Epicureanism. Taylor, A. E., Plato: The Man and his Work (London: Methuen, 1969), 551Google Scholar, citing Immisch, O., Philologische Studien zu Plato (Leipzig: Teuber, 1896)Google Scholar vol. 1, Axiochus. For Epicurean parallels, see Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (DRN), 3.830 and Epicurus, ad Men., 125.
11 Philodemus, Against the Sophists, 4.9–14.
12 386a-b.
13 64a.
14 ‘Plato, Lucretius, and Epicurus’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 12 (1901), 201–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Whatever exposure Lucretius had to Plato, Shorey reasons, likely reached him via Epicurus.
15 356; cf. D. L. 10.141.
16 Op. cit. note 14, 201.
17 D.L. 10.31.
18 Reale, Giovanni, The Systems of the Hellenistic Age, vol. 3 of Reale's History of Ancient Philosophy, tr. Catan, John R. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), 113Google Scholar.
19 Thus his biting satire of Pericles's Funeral Oration in the Menexenus. Thucydides too understood the devastation of that war. With the benefit of hindsight, he too reconstructs Pericles's oration as an epitome of hubris. See the discussion in Goodman, ‘Ibn Khaldun and Thucydides’, in Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 224–25Google Scholar.
20 See Timaeus 53c–55c and W. Schmid, Epicurs Kritik der Platonischen Elementenlehre (Leipzig, 1936). For the Timaeus as a special target of the Epicurean rejection of Plato's geometrical derivation of the elements, see Cicero's gloss at DND 1.18–19. For Plato the discovery (perhaps by Theaetetus) that the regular solids of geometry are limited to five was not less exciting than the Pythagorean discovery of the octave. Both findings seemed to show the rootedness of nature and its laws in the rational patterns of mathematics – and thus to reveal the ontic primacy of the ideal.
21 Epicurus is clear on this commitment in his Letter to Herodotus (ad Herod.), 38. Lucretius reasons similarly in DRN 1.150 ff. The doctrine was, of course, Democritean (D.L. 9.44), giving concrete application to the anti-creationism of Parmenides and Melissus.
22 See ad Herodot. 64; DRN 3.350–69 ff., where touch becomes the paradigm of perception. Note what follows: rejection of Democritus’s account of the soul's placement.
23 See Aristotle, Physics I 3, 187a.
24 Democritus, fragment 68B9, from Diels, H. and Kranz, W., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (DK) 6th ed. (Berlin, 1951)Google Scholar. See also DK.68B6 and 68B8, Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos (Adv. Math.) 7.135–38, and D.L. 9.72.
25 Epicurus, ad Herod. 38bc, 39b.
26 See Sextus, Adv. Math. 8.9.
27 DND 1.70. His motive: avoidance of the Megarian elenchus that would treat the ultimate outcome as a matter of necessity.
28 D.L. 10.31; cf. Cicero, DND 1.31.89, De Finibus 1.22.
29 Epicurus, ad Herod. 39b.
30 Democritus fragment DK.68B156.
31 Epicurus, The Principal Doctrines (K.D.), 23–24. See also D.L. 10.31.
32 Republic 509–10.
33 Theaetetus 160b.
34 Epicurus, ad Herod. DL 10.31.
35 Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math. 8.63.
36 Phaedo 103e–107b.
37 See Lucretius’ ‘outburst’, as Bailey calls it, at DRN 2.434–45: tactus enim tactus pro divum numina sancta corporis est sensus. Bailey translates: ‘For touch, yea touch, by the holy powers of the gods, is the sense of body…’ But note the concessions to mechanism at Timaeus 80c: ‘as to the flowing of water, the fall of the thunderbolt, and the marvels that are observed about the attraction of amber and the Heraclean stones – in none of these cases is there any attraction, but he who investigates rightly will find that such wonderful phenomena are attributable to the combination of certain conditions – the nonexistence of a vacuum, the fact that objects push one another around, and that they change places, passing severally into their proper positions as they are divided or combined.’ (tr. Jowett). The denial of a vacuum, which is critical here, is clearly inconsistent with atomism. But the rejection of action at a distance is a hallmark of mechanism.
38 Gerson, Lloyd, ‘Plotinus and Epicurean Epistemology’, in Gordon, Dane R. and Suits, David B., Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance (Rochester, NY: RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press, 2003), 69–79 Google Scholar.
39 Sextus, Adv. Math. 7.203.
40 Enneads 5.5.1. Cf. Morel, Pierre-Marie, ‘Plotinus, Epicurus, and the Problem of Intellectual Evidence: Tr.32 (Enn. V5)’, in Longo, A. and Taormina, D.P., (eds) Plotinus and Epicurus: Matter, Perception, and Pleasure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 114–23Google Scholar.
41 Enneads 5.5.1 17–19.
42 Sextus, Adv. Math. 8.9.
43 Theaetetus 184b–186e; see also Sextus, Adv. Math. 7.210.
44 Epicurus, ad Herod. 37.
45 DRN 2.112–24: ‘I call to mind an illustration of this fact, an image that has passed before our eyes but is ever present to our view: Only study how the sunlight pours into the house when its rays are let into the darkened rooms, and you will see the myriad tiny bodies tumbling every which way in the empty space, caught in the sunbeams’ light, as though embroiled in some unending battle, squadron against squadron, ceaselessly, advancing and retreating, joining and disjoining. Whence you can infer (conicere) how the ultimate particles are tossed about in the greater void.’ The illustration comes from Leucippus and Democritus; see Aristotle, De Anima I 2, 404; cf. Lactantius, De Ira Dei 10.9. Einstein showed in 1905 that molecular momenta suffice to cause the Brownian movement of particles suspended in a fluid, thus causing the Tyndall effect, the scintillation of motes dancing in the light.
46 See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (PH), 1.147. Democritus, Sextus charges, ‘in some places abolishes the things that appear to the senses and asserts that none of them appears in truth but only in opinion,’ the reality being the atoms, which must be known by reason (Adv. Math. 1.135–40), the atoms being ‘void of every sensible quality’ (2.6). Cf. Sextus’ critique of the Epicurean inference to atomism by Demetrius of Laconia, Adv. Math. 2.348–50. The later Epicurean, Philodemus, whose work survived in fragmentary form at Herculaneum, was keen to address this point at the opening of On Methods of Inference, arguing that any method that infers non-existence from lack of perception is ‘not cogent’. See On Methods of Inference, III. Col 1a. 1 trans. DeLacey, P.H. and DeLacey, E.A. (Philadelphia: American Philological Association, 1941)Google Scholar.
47 Epicurus, ad Herod. 39a, 56b; cf. DRN 1.584–98.
48 D.L. 10.32. See, further, Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, 427.
49 Epicurus, ad Herod. 62.
50 Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, 430.
51 DRN 1.615–23.
52 Aetius 1.3.18. From Diels, Doxographi Graeci (1879), 581–2.
53 ‘Epicurus says that the void exists, which is an imperceptible thing, and this is borne out by the obvious fact of motion; for if void does not exist, neither ought motion to exist, as the moving body would have no place to which to shift, because everything would be a solid mass’ Sextus, Adv. Math. 7.213, tr. after Bailey, 260.
54 Philodemus skirts Epicurus’ distaste for formal logic by proposing an Epicurean counterpart to the Stoic theory of signs.
55 DRN 1.219–20.
56 See DRN 1.215–64, quoted here, 217–20, 238–47. The passage is a descant on Epicurus’ thesis in ad Herodot. 38–39.
57 Polystratus, De Contemptu. 23.26.
58 D.L. 10.39.
59 Meno 86b, Phaedo 72e.
60 Republic 10.611b.
61 Republic 10.597a.
62 Epicurus, ad Herod. D.L. X 42.
63 Polystratus, De Contemptu 23.26.
64 See Cicero, DND 1.16.43; further, compare the Stoic view at DND 2.5–6.
65 K.D. 3.
66 Epicurus, Ad Men. 123; DRN 5.1169–90.
67 Republic 2.379.
68 Symposium 196b.
69 Epicurus, ad Herod. D.L. 10.45, ad Pyth. D.L. 10.89; DND 1.50.
70 Phaedo 70–72.
71 K.D. 11.
72 V.F. 14.
73 Republic 889e–900b. Further, restricting ourselves only to the Republic, the Platonic theology arguably has three regulative principles: that the gods are good (377e, 391c), that they are unchanging (380d, 390c), and that they are sources of truth (382a, 389b). To deny any of these is rank impiety (391e).
74 Epicurus, ad Men., 123.
75 A.E. Taylor, in Plato: The Man and His Work, calls it a ‘convenient anachronism’ to term this class of people ‘Epicurean atheists’ (490).
76 Epicurus, ad. Men., 123.
77 Epicurus, ad Pyth. 85b-88a; cf. ad Herod. 38, 51.
78 Theaetetus 184, 186d.
79 Cf. K.D. 24.
80 K.D. 3, 5, 8, 19–21, 35; V.F. 7, 21, 51, 59, 71; Cicero, De Finibus, 1.39.
81 See Cicero, DND 1.43.
82 Philodemus, On Frank Criticism, Fragment 28:10–11, trans. after Konstan, D., Clay, D., Glad, C.E., Thom, J.C., and Ware, J. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 44–45 Google Scholar.
83 De Finibus 1.42; DRN 1.14–20; cf. K.D. 9. This, further, is a reason why Philodemus roots validity for Epicurean logic in the psychological category of inconceivability in On Methods of Inference, 11.31.
84 K.D. 15, 29.
85 K.D. 4, cf. 28.
86 V.F. 7; cf. K.D. 5, 10, 17.
87 For the relations of Plato's and Epicurus’ accounts of pleasure, see Brochard, V., La Théorie du Plaisir d'après Épicure (Paris, 1912), 252Google Scholar ff.
88 Philebus, 21d.
89 Shorey, ‘Plato, Lucretius, and Epicurus’, 202.
90 Plato, Gorgias 493a-d; see also Republic 363d, 585d, Phaedo 82e.
91 DRN 3.936–37. Nature's rebuke of those unliberated souls in thrall to the fear death echoes Plato, Gorgias 493bc Republic 2.363d, 3.386. The rebuke reverts to Plato's image of the leaky vessel since Lucretius shares Plato's view that pleasures cannot last although his remedy, as nature preaches it, is contentment rather than a quest for goods beyond those that pleasure can afford. For the motif, see Ivan Lindforth, Soul and Sieve in Plato's Gorgias (London: Cambridge University Press, 1944).
92 These snatches from DRN 4.1149–70 are drawn from Rolfe Humphries’ translation, The Way Things Are (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 152.
93 Republic 474de. The object of the infatuation in Plato's satire is an eromenos, but Lucretius had allowed for that at IV 1053, a hundred lines ahead of his satiric sequence.
94 Epicurus, ad Men. 129; cf. DRN 4.865–76; cf. Phaedo 60ab; Phaedrus 258e. At Symposium 186d Eryximachus defines medicine as ‘simply the science of the effects of Love on repletion and depletion of the body’.
95 Porphyry, To Marcella, 28. Philodemus echoes the thought that wealth expands one's exposure to harms, On Frank Criticism, Fragment 30, column XIVa.
96 Epicurus ap. Athenagoras Opera ed. J. K. T. von Otto (Jena: Mauke, 1857; reprinted Wiesbaden: Sandig, 1969) 12.546e. Spinoza retains the notion when he speaks of titillatio. Ethics 2.P11.
97 See K.D. 3, 18–21, 26.
98 Epicurus, ad. Men. DL 10.131.
99 K.D. 9, DND 1.113.
100 V.F. 33.
101 K.D. 10, 15, 25, 29–30; V.F. 25, 59, 68.
102 V.F. 55; cf. 19; D.L. 10.22.
103 Epicurus, ad. Men. 132.
104 Timaeus 48; and F. M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1937), 161–77.
105 V.F. 21; cf. 69; cf. Republic 8.558d. For an Epicurean/Platonic ethical application of of the metaphor of addiction as a hook, see the tenth century philosopher/physician al-Rāzī (Rhazes), see , Goodman, ‘How Epicurean was Rāzī?’ Studia Graeco-Arabica 5 (2015), 247–80Google Scholar, and Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age (Edinburgh and New Brunswick, NJ, 1999)Google Scholar Chapter 5, ‘Rāzī and Epicurus’, 35–67.
106 K.D. 4; V.F. 4.
107 K.D. 8.
108 K.D. 15, 28.
109 V.F. 16.
110 Laws 10.905.
111 See Euthyphro 7de; Republic 379–81; , Goodman, ‘Ethics and God’, Philosophical Investigations 34 (2011), 135–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
112 DND I.49; cf. 18.46; 31.87, 34.96; Aetius 1.34.
113 Philebus 33b.
114 Laws 10.885b, 888c, 948c.
115 Republic 2.381.
116 Plato embeds an echo of Sophocles’ thoughts of Aphrodite capturing and subduing Ares (Thyestes, fragment 235) at Symposium 196d. For the balance Vergil seeks of Roman prowess with the ways of peace, see Anchises charge to Aeneas: Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento / (hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem, / parcere subiectis et debellare superbos – Roman, ever remember the art that shall be yours: Ruling nations and ordaining the ways of peace, sparing the vanquished but battling down the proud (Aeneid VI 851–53).
117 Epicurus, Oxyrh. Papyrus, in Festugière, A. J., Epicurus and his Gods, tr. Chilton, C. W. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969; first French edition, 1946) 64–65 Google Scholar, from Diels, H., ed. Ein Epicureisches Fragment über Gotterverehrung (Berlin, 1916) 902–04Google Scholar. Lucretius echoes this thought: ‘It is no piety to be seen with head covered bowing again and again to a stone and visiting every altar…’ (DRN 5.1164).
118 DND 1.145.
119 Plato, Euthyphro 14.
120 Republic 330de.
121 See Epicurus, Letter to Pythocles, 120, and Philodemus’, On Piety, 126.
122 Deuteronomy 10:17.
123 Armstrong, A. H., ‘The Gods in Plato, Plotinus, Epicurus’, Classical Quarterly 32 (1938), 193 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, citing Enneads 3.2.8. For his part, Plotinus aims his darts at moral and spiritual weaklings, who do not reach out toward the divine. The answering neglect, then, he argues is deserved. But the implication is that prayer is aspirational: It does not move the impassive gods but rather seeks to reach them.
124 Epicurus apud Philodemus, Peri Kakion, ed. Jensen, C., Book X and Jensen's Ein neuer Brief Epikurs (Berlin: Weidmann, 1933)Google Scholar. See Armstrong, 195.
125 Armstrong, 193, citing Enneads 3.8.3–4.
126 Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, chapter 10.
127 Armstrong, 194–95.
128 Philodemus, Against the Sophists 4.9–14.
129 DRN 1.80–100.
130 Euthyphro 6a.
131 398a.
132 364b–365a.
133 Republic 366.
134 Republic 377–78.
135 613b. And recall that each wrongdoer must suffer ten times (dekakis) the pain he has caused (Rep. 615b).
136 V.F. 58.
137 Cf. DND 1.121–22.
138 Apology 32a.
139 See Plutarch's Life of Dion for a catalogue of Plato's troubles for his revisionary political ambitions (4.3–7; 11.1–17.5, and 19.1–8).
140 K.D. 40.
141 K.D. 14.
142 DRN 2.1–61. Further, Philodemus reports Epicurus’ view that rhetoric is useful but, at best, in conversing with a friend or persuading an acquaintance. He does not see it as fitting a tool for pleading a case, redressing a wrong, or addressing the populace. On Rhetoric, trans. Chaldler, Clive. (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar, Book 2, Column xxiv.
143 Republic 10.620c.
144 DRN 3.59–86, translation is Goodman's.
145 See, as exemplary: V.F. 45, 64.
146 Epicurus, ad Men. 123.
147 V.F. 52.