Death and Memory

A soldier takes ten years to sail home from a war that already took ten. He loses every ship and every man he started with. Meanwhile his wife holds off a hundred and eight suitors who have moved into his house and are eating it empty, and his son goes looking for news of a father he has never met. When he finally lands on his own island he arrives alone, asleep, and disguised as a beggar — and spends the second half of the poem finding out who in his own household can be trusted.

Herodotus goes to Egypt and writes down everything: why the Nile floods, how a body is embalmed and what each grade of embalming costs, what the priests would and would not tell him, and a king-list running back ten thousand years. The founding document of curiosity about other people.

An Athenian jury of five hundred is asked to decide whether a man has been corrupting the young and importing new gods. He answers by cross-examining his accuser, telling them the god at Delphi put him up to it, and warning them that killing him will damage them more than it damages him. Convicted, and invited to propose his own penalty, he proposes free dinners for life at public expense.

In the second summer of the war a disease came to Athens and killed a large part of the population inside the walls. Thucydides caught it, survived, and wrote down the symptoms in order so that it could be recognised if it ever returned. Then he wrote down what it did to the way people behaved, which is the part nobody has been able to improve on.

A biography in two halves that do not agree. The first is a dossier of everything Epicurus's enemies said: that he was an uneducated schoolmaster's son, that he vomited twice a day from over-indulgence, that he wrote to courtesans, that he stole his atoms from Democritus and his pleasure from Aristippus. It is set down at length, with the sources named. Then Diogenes turns in a single sentence — "but these people are stark mad" — and spends the rest defending him, leaning on the will: a document that manumits four people by name, funds a birthday dinner in perpetuity, and provides for a dead friend's children. It closes with the letter Epicurus dictated on the last day of his life, in agony from a blocked bladder, saying he was happy.

Lucian looks at what people do when someone dies — the wailing, the coin for the ferryman, the expensive funeral, the food left at the tomb — and asks what any of them believe they are accomplishing. Then he lets a corpse sit up and answer his own father back. Written around 170 CE and still the sharpest thing anyone wrote about funeral custom.

The shortest and most read thing Epicurus wrote: the ethics in about fifteen hundred words. It contains the four sentences the whole system is usually reduced to — that the gods exist but are not angry, that death is nothing to us because where death is we are not, that desires divide into natural and necessary and neither, and that the pleasant life is produced by sober reasoning rather than by drinking and delicacies. It closes by telling Menoeceus to practise these things day and night with someone like himself, which is the school's actual method. The last three sections, added by Diogenes rather than by Epicurus, set the doctrine of pleasure against the Cyrenaics and are the clearest surviving statement of the distinction between pleasure in motion and pleasure at rest.