Epicurus and the Stoics

Two schools, one city #

Epicurus settled in Athens about 306 BCE and taught in a house with a garden, where friends lived and studied with him.¹ A few years later, about 300 BCE, Zeno of Citium, a Cypriot who had come to Athens, began to teach in the Painted Porch (the Stoa Poikile), a public colonnade beside the marketplace. His followers were called Stoics after the porch.²

The two settings suit the two temperaments. One school kept to a private circle of friends, and the other taught in the busiest public place in the city. It is easy to push this too far. The Garden had followers and correspondents across the Mediterranean, and not every Stoic was a public man. Still, the contrast sets the mood for what follows.

The schools also treated their founders differently. Seneca observes that the Epicureans credited whatever any of them said to Epicurus himself, while Stoics disagreed freely with Zeno and with one another.³ Stoicism was reshaped so thoroughly by Chrysippus, the third head of the school, that an old saying held that without him there would have been no Stoa.⁴ The Stoics we read most, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, lived three to four centuries after Zeno, so ‘the Stoic view’ is always a shorthand.

A caution about evidence runs through this whole essay. Epicurus’ three letters and his sayings survive because Diogenes Laertius copied them out. The early Stoics’ own books are lost, and we rebuild them from later summaries and from opponents, above all Cicero.⁵ Each school is partly seen through the other’s eyes, and where this essay says ‘the Stoics held’, read it as a reconstruction. For a quick side-by-side, see Epicurean and Stoic. This is the long version.

A shared project #

Both schools inherited from Socrates the idea that philosophy is about how to live, and both treated it as a craft that needs training, not only a body of doctrine.⁶⁷ They agreed that most distress comes from false beliefs about what matters: that wealth, reputation or a long life are needed, or that death and the gods are to be feared. They agreed that desire can be trained, that the wise person is largely self-sufficient, and that the right life follows nature.⁸

Both also asked their students to study how the world works, and for the same reason. Epicurus said that fear about the greatest matters cannot be removed without knowing the nature of the universe (Principal Doctrine 12).⁹ The Stoics counted physics with logic and ethics as the three parts of philosophy.¹⁰

The hinge is the word ‘nature’. Both schools say that we should live in accordance with it, and they mean different things. For the Epicurean, nature is atoms and void, and what nature shows us about ourselves is a plain fact about animals: we want to feel well and not to suffer. For the Stoic, nature is a rational order of which human reason is a part, and to follow nature is to live in agreement with that reason. Most of the other disagreements grow from this one.

What the world is like #

Epicurus held that the universe is made of bodies and void, that it is unlimited, and that there are countless worlds, ours among them.¹¹ The world was not made for us. Lucretius says that if he knew nothing about atoms, he would still doubt that a divine power made the world, because it has so many faults.¹² The Epicurean universe is not hostile. It is indifferent, and neither gods nor fate are running it.

The Stoics pictured one finite world, a living and rational whole, shaped by a fiery breath (pneuma) that runs through matter and holds it together. That world is governed by reason, which they called logos, providence, nature or fate, and in the Stoic account it passes through cycles of burning and renewal.¹³¹⁴ To live ‘in agreement with nature’ is, for a Stoic, to bring one’s own reason into line with that order.¹⁵

This is more than a quarrel about physics, because it decides what a bad event means. In a rational world, suffering can be understood as part of a larger good, even when we cannot see how, and the Stoic task is to accept it with understanding. In a world of atoms, there is nothing to understand beyond the causes, and the Epicurean task is to stop adding fear and resentment to what nature has already dealt. Each school pointed out that the other’s world makes its own consolation impossible.

Pleasure, virtue and the cradle #

The two schools gave opposite readings of the same observation. Watch a newborn animal, said the Epicureans, and you will see it seek what feels good and avoid what hurts before it has been taught anything, so nature itself shows what is good.¹⁶¹⁷ The Stoics answered that an animal’s first impulse is to keep itself in being and to be attached to its own constitution, with pleasure only a by-product. As the child matures, the thing that suits its nature becomes acting in line with reason, which the Stoics identified with virtue.¹⁸¹⁹

What Epicurus meant by pleasure is narrower than most people suppose. It is the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul, and he says plainly that he does not mean the pleasures of the spendthrift.²⁰ He valued the virtues, but as the means to a calm and pleasant life. He says it is impossible to live pleasantly without living wisely, honourably and justly, and the reverse is true too (Principal Doctrine 5).²¹ The Stoics held that virtue alone is good, and that it is enough for happiness. Health, wealth and reputation are ‘indifferents’ to be preferred or avoided but never counted as goods.²²

In daily life the two schools often recommend similar acts: simple living, honesty, justice, loyalty. The difference lies in why, and it shows at the margins. A Stoic could say that a person who keeps faith with a friend on the rack is no worse off in the ways that count. An Epicurean would hold that bodily pain and the loss of friends matter, and would work to protect against them. Cicero sets out the Epicurean case in the first book of On Ends and presses the objection that pleasure cannot support the virtues in the second.²³ That debate has not ended.

Fate and what is up to us #

In the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus says that some things happen by necessity, some by chance, and some are up to us, and that it would be better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a slave to the fate of the natural philosophers.²⁴ Lucretius gives the physical reason: atoms sometimes swerve a little, so the future is not fixed from the start.²⁵ The swerve does not appear in the writings of Epicurus that survive. It is reported by Lucretius and Cicero, and scholars disagree about what Epicurus himself intended by it.²⁶ See the glossary entry on the Swerve.

The Stoics took the opposite view. Every event has a cause, and the whole chain of causes is the same as providence. Their obvious difficulty was how praise, blame and effort can mean anything if everything is fixed. Chrysippus answered with an image of a cylinder and a cone: a push is needed to set them rolling, but how each one rolls depends on its own shape. So too our actions need outside causes, but the way we respond depends on our own character and our assent.²⁷

The practical result is similar in spirit. The Stoic sorts things into what is up to us, such as our judgements and choices, and what is not, such as health, reputation and other people.²⁸ The Epicurean insists that we can shape a good life and refuses to be ruled by a supposed destiny. Each is trying to remove the torment of resenting what cannot be changed, and each gives a different reason for doing so.

The gods and providence #

The Epicurean gods are blessed and immortal and concerned with nothing outside their own calm, so there is nothing to fear from them and nothing to ask of them (Principal Doctrine 1).²⁹ Diogenes says that Epicurus was known for his piety towards the gods, and the idea was that their serenity is something to admire.³⁰ The Stoic divine is the rational order itself, which cares for the world as a whole, and the world is a kind of city shared by gods and human beings.³¹

Cicero staged the argument in On the Nature of the Gods, giving the Epicurean view in Book I and the Stoic view in Book II, with a sceptic answering each, the Stoic in Book III.³² The Stoic’s best card was the order of the heavens and of living things, and the Epicurean’s was the waste and suffering in the world. Each school treated the other’s picture of the gods as a source of unhappiness: for the Epicurean, a watching providence invites fear, and for the Stoic, a universe without one leaves nothing to trust.

Marcus Aurelius comes back several times to the alternative ‘providence or atoms’.³³ He generally concludes that either way he should act well, and readers differ about how open he meant the question to be. That he kept returning to it shows that the Epicurean picture was a live rival to the Stoics, not a historical curiosity.

Public life #

Seneca sets the disagreement out in two short sentences. Epicurus says that the wise person will not take part in politics unless something intervenes, and Zeno says that he will unless something prevents him.³⁴ The conditions are almost the same, but the defaults are opposite. The Epicurean starts from staying out, and the Stoic from taking part.

The Epicurean reasons are in the sayings. The purest security, Epicurus says, comes from a quiet life withdrawn from the many (Principal Doctrine 14).³⁵ The advice is often summed up as Lathe biosas (‘live unnoticed’), and it drew sharp replies from critics.³⁶ The Epicurean idea of justice is a compact: an agreement not to harm and not to be harmed, which holds only while it is useful (Principal Doctrines 31 to 33).³⁷

For the Stoics, human beings are made for one another, and a wise person will wish to help manage the commonwealth. The ideal reaches beyond one’s own city, since the world itself is a community.³⁸ This is the root of the later idea of the citizen of the world. The picture is less tidy in practice. Seneca argued in On Leisure that the early masters of the school had themselves held no public office, and that a person may serve the larger commonwealth of humanity through study even while withdrawn from the smaller one.³⁹ At the edges, the two positions come closer than the two sentences suggest.

Friendship #

Epicurus ranks friendship as the greatest of the things that wisdom provides for a blessed life (Principal Doctrine 27).⁴⁰ The sayings add that every friendship is worth choosing for itself, though it may begin in need.⁴¹ Diogenes reports that the wise person will on occasion die for a friend.⁴² The Garden itself was a community built on this idea.

The Stoics honoured friendship too, and Seneca’s ninth letter is the best place to see how the schools meet on it. Its first target is neither school. It is Stilpo, who held that the sage feels nothing, and Epicurus’ rebuke of Stilpo is one Seneca accepts. Seneca then says that the Stoic sage is self-sufficient for a happy life and yet wants friends, in order to have someone to practise friendship with.⁴³ He goes on to criticise what he takes to be the Epicurean reason, that one makes friends for the help they can give.

Whether that criticism is fair is disputed. The Epicurean sources say that friendship starts in need and then becomes valuable for itself, and they rank it above the other goods of life. What Seneca’s letter shows is how close the two answers sit to each other, and how much weight the schools placed on the question.

Feeling, and how to train it #

The Stoics held that distressing emotions come from false judgements, for example the belief that something bad has happened when it has not. The wise person is free of them, though not of feeling altogether, since the Stoics allowed three good states: joy, caution and rational wishing.⁴⁴ Epicurus thought it natural to feel pain and sorrow, and that beliefs could ease them. His own last letter, to Idomeneus, is the best-known picture of this. He writes of great suffering, and sets against it a ‘gladness of mind’ at the memory of past conversations.⁴⁵

The training differs in style. The Stoic exercises are mostly rehearsals of judgement: preparing in the morning for what the day may bring,⁴⁶ reviewing the day in the evening,⁴⁷ reminding oneself that what one loves is mortal,⁴⁸ and looking at one’s troubles from far above.⁴⁹ The Epicurean practices are mostly ways of shaping a life and an attention: learning short summaries by heart,⁵⁰ keeping to simple pleasures and good company, remembering past pleasures, and sharing a monthly meal in the founder’s memory (see The Twentieth). Lucretius has his own change of vantage point, the pleasure of watching a storm at sea from the shore, which is a very different thing from the Stoic view from above.⁵¹

This contrast is a generalisation and should be held loosely. Stoics also shaped their circumstances, and Epicureans also trained their judgement. Martha Nussbaum’s reading treats both as therapies of the soul that differ mainly in what they think the soul is suffering from.⁵² A short, reliable account of the Stoic side is John Sellars’ introduction.⁵³

A quarrel through the sources #

The schools did not argue politely. Diogenes reports that a Stoic named Diotimus published fifty scandalous letters under Epicurus’ name, to blacken him.⁵⁴ Epictetus devoted two discourses to attacking Epicurean views,⁵⁵ and Plutarch wrote a whole treatise arguing that the Epicurean life is not pleasant at all.⁵⁶ The Roman poet Horace jokes that he is a pig from Epicurus’ herd.⁵⁷ Epicurus was not gentle either: Diogenes preserves his habit of giving opponents rude nicknames.⁵⁸

Part of the quarrel was about method. The Stoics treated logic as a pillar of philosophy. Epicurus thought the study of dialectic was unnecessary.⁵⁹ That alone is enough to make the two schools sound unlike each other, even when they agree on a practical point.

The sensible response is to read both schools in their own voices before reading what their opponents said of them. For the Epicureans, that means the letters and sayings in the library, and Lucretius. For the Stoics, it means Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, with the caution that they speak for a later and more practical Stoicism.

Crossing the line #

Seneca quotes Epicurus often, especially in the first thirty letters to Lucilius. He is open about it: he says he sometimes crosses into the enemy’s camp, not as a deserter but as a scout.⁶⁰ He admires the saying that contented poverty is an honourable thing, and then adds that if it is contented it is not poverty at all.⁶¹ When someone objects that he is using another man’s words, he replies that ‘whatever is true is my own’.⁶² That is both a generous attitude and a quiet claim that the Stoics hold the truth.

Cicero staged the quarrel in a single dialogue, in which the Epicurean Torquatus speaks in Book I and the Stoic Cato in Book III.⁶³ Nobody is converted, but the reader meets both schools at their best, and the same Roman audience that read Lucretius also read Seneca.

In practice the schools shared a great deal that mattered in daily life. Both wanted people to be less afraid, less greedy, and less ruled by the opinion of the crowd. Both asked for a life that could be lived in a small way and still count as complete. They disagreed about the reasons, and the reasons show up when something goes badly wrong.

Choosing, or not choosing #

There is no need to join a side. If your difficulty is worry about things beyond your control, the Stoic habit of sorting what is up to you from what is not may suit you. If your difficulty is tiredness from wanting more, from ambition or from a crowded life, the Epicurean habits of simple pleasures, good company and fewer desires may help. Some people try each for a week and notice which one they keep.

One question does sit underneath the practices: what you think the world is like. The ancient Stoics held that ethics rests on physics and should be approached through the nature of the universe.⁶⁴ Some modern readers keep the exercises and set the physics aside, and others think the two belong together. The Epicureans would have said the same thing about their own picture of a world of atoms.

If you want to go further, the Epicurean side of the argument is in the Letter to Menoeceus, Lucretius, Book III and the Principal Doctrines. The page on death and the gods shows the two schools’ most direct overlap. Take what helps and leave the rest.