The Garden and Its Critics

Lucian's account of how to manufacture a god. Alexander of Abonoteichus planted a goose egg containing a baby snake in the foundations of a temple under construction, dug it up before a crowd, and announced the rebirth of Asclepius; within weeks he had a full-grown tame snake with a painted linen head worked by horsehair, an oracle answering sealed questions, and a stream of money from across the empire. The narrative follows the mechanics — how seals were opened and re-closed, how ambiguous answers were filed, how mysteries with torchlight were instituted, how a Roman governor was cultivated. Two groups saw through it and Alexander named them from the pulpit: Christians and Epicureans. At section 47 he takes a copy of the Principal Doctrines — also on this site — into the marketplace and burns it.

A hostile dialogue, and it is a sequel. Colotes, a member of Epicurus's own circle, had written a book arguing that the doctrines of every other philosopher make life impossible to live; Plutarch answered it in a companion piece and then wrote this, which turns the charge round. His case is not that Epicurean pleasure is wicked but that it does not work — that a philosophy which locates the good in the belly, denies the soul's survival, withdraws from public life and strips religion of hope has cut off most of the actual sources of human happiness and left a thin one. It is a dialogue among named friends walking after a lecture, and it is the fullest sustained attack on Epicurean ethics that survives from antiquity.

Epicurus's own summary of his physics, written to be memorised. He says so in the first sentence: this is for people who cannot work through the thirty-seven books of On Nature, and its purpose is to be held in the mind and reached for at need. Inside forty-nine sections he sets out that nothing comes from nothing, that the universe is bodies and void and nothing else, that atoms are infinite and worlds are infinite, that the soul is a body of fine particles which disperses when the frame breaks up — and therefore that death is not an experience. The argument is relentless and almost entirely unillustrated. It is the only complete statement of Epicurean physics by Epicurus that survives.

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.

Forty numbered sentences, each short enough to memorise, covering the whole system: the gods are untroubled and untroubling; death is nothing to us; the limit of pleasure is the removal of all pain; if you had never feared the heavens or death you would have had no need of physics. The last eight are the surprise. Doctrines 31 to 38 make justice a contract — nothing is just or unjust in itself, justice is an agreement not to harm or be harmed, it does not exist between creatures that cannot make agreements, and a law that stops being mutually useful stops being just. It is the earliest surviving statement of a social-contract theory of justice, and it sits at the end of a text usually filed under how to be happy.

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.