Epicurus and Lucretius

Epicurus

Epicurus was born in 341 BCE on the island of Samos, into an Athenian family. He studied philosophy as a young man, including with a follower of the atomist Democritus, and began teaching around 311 BCE in Mytilene on Lesbos and then in Lampsacus on the mainland coast. About 306 BCE he bought a house with a garden in Athens and set up his school there. It took its name from the garden.

The school was unusual for its time. Ancient sources report that it admitted women and enslaved people, and that Epicurus asked his students to live simply and to talk together as friends. He taught that we can be happy by understanding nature, so that we stop fearing the gods and death, and by limiting our desires to what is easy to satisfy.

His will left the house to the school and provided for a yearly remembrance of his birthday and monthly gatherings of his friends, which is the origin of the Twentieth. He died in Athens in 270 BCE, aged about seventy-two. According to Diogenes Laertius, he suffered a painful kidney illness for two weeks. In a letter written on his last day, Epicurus is said to have written that the pain was matched by the joy of remembering his conversations with friends.

Timeline

341 BCE

Born on Samos.

c. 311 BCE

Begins teaching in Mytilene, then Lampsacus.

c. 306 BCE

Buys the house and garden in Athens and founds the school.

270 BCE

Dies in Athens.

c. 55 BCE

Lucretius dies, leaving his poem unfinished.

1417

Poggio Bracciolini finds a manuscript of Lucretius.

1750s

Excavators at Herculaneum find carbonised scrolls, many of them Epicurean.

1888

The Vatican Sayings are identified in a manuscript in the Vatican Library.

What survives

Epicurus is said to have written about three hundred scrolls, including a 37-book work On Nature. Almost all of it is lost. What we have is a small, precious set:

• Three letters, to Herodotus (on physics), Pythocles (on the heavens) and Menoeceus (on how to live), preserved by Diogenes Laertius.
• Principal Doctrines, forty short sayings, also preserved by Diogenes Laertius.
• Vatican Sayings, around eighty more, found in a manuscript in 1888.
• Fragments of On Nature and other works, recovered from the burnt scrolls at Herculaneum.

Much of what we know of his thinking comes second hand, from Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch and from critics. Read the critics with that in mind. Many of them wanted to discredit him.

Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet who died around 55 BCE. Almost nothing reliable is known about his life. His one surviving work, De Rerum Natura ('On the Nature of Things'), is a long poem in six books of Latin hexameter. It sets out Epicurean physics and ethics for a Roman reader, and it was left unfinished at his death.

He wrote it to persuade as well as to explain. In one famous image from Book I, he says the poem is like honey smeared on the rim of a cup of bitter medicine, so that a reluctant reader will drink the cure.

What each book covers

Book I

Nothing comes from nothing. Everything is made of atoms moving in void.

Book II

How atoms move and combine, including the swerve that lets them break from strict determinism.

Book III

The mind and soul are made of atoms and die with the body. Death is nothing to us, and Lucretius argues the time after death is no different from the time before birth.

Book IV

Sensation, thought, dreams, and desire, including a sharp, unromantic account of love.

Book V

The origin of the world, of living things, and of human society and culture.

Book VI

Weather, volcanoes and disease, ending with the plague of Athens.

The poem nearly disappeared. A copy was found in 1417 by the book hunter Poggio Bracciolini in a monastery, and it spread widely through Renaissance Europe. Its atomic picture of the world, and its calm view of death, were debated for centuries afterward.