Vitae philosophorum

Epicurus, son of Neocles and Chaerestrate, was as citizen of Athens of the deme Gargettus, and, as Metrodorus says in his book On Noble Birth, of the family of the Philaidae. He is said by Heraclides[*](i.e. Heraclides Lembos (F.H.G. iii. p. 70).) in his Epitome of Sotion, as well as by other authorities, to have been brought up at Samos after the Athenians had sent settlers there and to have come to Athens at the age of eighteen, at the time when Xenocrates was lecturing at the Academy and Aristotle in Chalcis. Upon the death of Alexander of Macedon and the expulsion of the Athenian settlers from Samos by Perdiccas,[*](Diod. Sic. xviii. 18. 9.) Epicurus left Athens to join his father in Colophon.

For some time he stayed there and gathered disciples, but returned to Athens in the archonship of Anaxicrates.[*](307-306 b.c.) And for a while, it is said, he prosecuted his studies in common with the other philosophers, but afterwards put forward independent views by the foundation of the school called after him. He says himself that he first came into contact with philosophy at the age of fourteen. Apollodorus the Epicurean, in the first book of his Life of Epicurus, says

Hence the point of Timon’s allusion[*](Fr. 51 D.) in the lines:

Again there is the latest and most shameless of the physicists, the schoolmaster’s son[*](The meaning is: a schoolmaster like his father before him. Cf. Dem. De cor.§ 258 ἅμα τῷ πατρὶ πρὸς τῷ διδασκαλεί ῳ προσεδρεύων. From Aristophanes, Acharn. 595-7, it seems that patronymics were used of persons engaged in hereditary occupations.) from Samos, himself the most uneducated of mortals.

At his instigation his three brothers, Neocles, Chaeredemus, and Aristobulus, joined in his studies, according to Philodemus the Epicurean in the tenth book of his comprehensive work On Philosophers; furthermore his slave named Mys, as stated by Myronianus in his Historical Parallels. Diotimus[*](One Diotimus who calumniated Epicurus and was answered by the Epicurean Zeno is mentioned by Athenaeus, xiii. 611 b, as having been put to death.) the Stoic, who is hostile to him, has assailed him with bitter slanders, adducing fifty scandalous letters as written by Epicurus; and so too did the author who ascribed to Epicurus the epistles commonly attributed to Chrysippus.

They are followed by Posidonius the Stoic and his school, and Nicolaus and Sotion in the twelfth book of his work entitled Dioclean Refutations, consisting of twenty-four books; also by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. They allege that he used to go round with his mother to cottages and read charms, and assist his father in his school for a pitiful fee[*](Compare again Dem.De cor.§ 258.); further, that one of his brothers was a pander and

Furthermore that he extolled Idomeneus, Herodotus, and Timocrates, who had published his esoteric doctrines, and flattered them for that very reason. Also that in his letters he wrote to Leontion, O Lord Apollo, my dear little Leontion, with what tumultuous applause we were inspired as we read your letter. Then again to Themista, the wife of Leonteus: I am quite ready, if you do not come to see me, to spin thrice on my own axis and be propelled to any place that you, including Themista, agree upon; and to the beautiful Pythocles he writes: I will sit down and await thy divine advent, my heart’s desire. And, as Theodorus says in the fourth book of his work, Against Epicurus, in another letter to Themista he thinks he preaches to her.[*](A perplexing passage. (1) As παραινετική is for the Stoics that branch of ethics which makes personal application of moral principles, the mss. may be right. (2) By changing αὐτῇ to αὐτήν, a little more sting is given to this tame remark: he thinks that she preaches. (3)If this is one of the fifty scandalous letters alluded to in § 3, Froben’s αὐτὴν περαίνειν, which Bignone and Apelt adopt, may be right. (4) If emend we must, a rude remark is quite as probable as a compliment,cf.§ 8. Hence νομίζει αὐτὴν παρακινεῖν, he deems her mad, if she says or thinks so-and-so, would be in the master’s blunt manner, and Themista (to use the language of Phaedrus, 249 d)νουθετεῖται ὡς παρακινοῦσα.)

It is added that he corresponded with many courtesans, and especially with Leontion, of whom Metrodorus also was enamoured. It is observed too that in his treatise On the Ethical End he writes in these

Again there was Timocrates, the brother of Metrodorus, who was his disciple and then left the school. He in the book entitled Merriment asserts that Epicurus vomited twice a day from over-indulgence, and goes on to say that he himself had much ado to escape from those notorious midnight philosophizings and the confraternity with all its secrets;

further, that Epicurus’s acquaintance with philosophy was small and his acquaintance with life even smaller; that his bodily health was pitiful,[*](Cf. Aelian, Fr. 39 (De Epicuro eiusque discipulis). According to him the three brothers of Epicurus were all victims of disease. Plutarch (Non posse suaviter, etc., 1097 e) mentions the dropsy. However much his ailments were exaggerated by his enemies, they do not seem to have hindered him from literary work.) so much so that for many years he was unable to rise from his chair; and that he spent a whole mina daily on his table, as he himself says in his letter to Leontion and in that to the philosophers at Mitylene. Also that among other courtesans who consorted with him and Metrodorus were Mammarion and Hedia and Erotion and Nikidion. He alleges too that in his thirtyseven books On Nature Epicurus uses much repetition and writes largely in sheer opposition to others,

Epicurus used to call this Nausiphanes jelly-fish,[*](Cf. Sext. Emp. Adv. math. i. 3 νῦν πλεύμονα καλῶν τὸν Ναυσιφάνην ὡς ἀναίσθητον; Plato, Phil. 21 c ζῆν δὲ οὐκ ἀνθρώπου βίον ἀλλά τινος πλεύμονος; Hesychius, s.v.; whence it appears that obtuseness and insensibility, not weakness or pliability, were the qualities imputed by this term.) an illiterate, a fraud, and a trollop; Plato’s school he called the toadies of Dionysius, their master himself the golden Plato,[*](An ironical compliment, probably on Plato’s style: cf. χρυσός τομος. It is not likely that Plato was ever regarded as a Midas or a golden simpleton, for which latter meaning Lucian, Pro lapsu in sal. i. ἐγὼ ὁ χρυσοῦς, is cited by Bignone.) and Aristotle a profligate, who after devouring his patrimony took to soldiering and selling drugs; Protagoras a pack-carrier and the scribe of Democritus and village schoolmaster; Heraclitus a muddler[*](In the same ironical sense in which Plato speaks of the Heracliteans who preached flux as τοὺς ῥέοντας (Theaet. 181 a), themselves in flux.); Democritus Lerocritus (the nonsense-monger); and Antidorus Sannidorus (fawning gift-bearer); the Cynics foes of Greece; the Dialecticians despoilers; and Pyrrho an ignorant boor.