The Garden and Its Critics

One of Epicurus's own pupils, Colotes, wrote a book arguing that on the teachings of every other philosopher it would be impossible even to live, and dedicated it to a king. Four hundred years later Plutarch answered it, philosopher by philosopher: Democritus, Empedocles, Parmenides, Plato, Socrates, and the sceptics of Colotes' own day. Then, in the last five sections, he turns the charge around and asks the question that has followed the Garden ever since: the Epicureans write in praise of laws and government, so where are the Epicurean lawgivers, generals and magistrates?

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 student asked Epicurus for a short account of the things in the sky, and this is what he sent: the sun, the moon, eclipses, clouds, thunder, lightning, whirlwinds, earthquakes, snow, hail, rainbows and comets, each with several possible natural causes and no decision between them. Choosing a single cause when the evidence allows several, he says, is how people slide back into myth. The point of knowing about thunder is not to know about thunder. It is to stop being afraid of it.

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.

Epicurus advised his followers to 'live unnoticed', to stay out of politics, public life and the notice of powerful people. Plutarch thought this was the most dangerous thing the school taught, and in seven short sections he argues against it: that the advice defeats itself by being published, that it would have cost Greece its Epaminondas and its Socrates, and that a life no one sees is a kind of living burial. It is the shortest statement of the political objection to Epicureanism, and the objection has never quite gone away.

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.

Epictetus, a Stoic and a former slave, taught that a person is made for a household and a city, and in three discourses recorded by his student Arrian he turns on the Epicureans who said otherwise. Against Epicurus himself: why tell the wise man not to raise children, when even a wolf will not abandon its young? Against the school: why does a man who denies any natural bond between people stay up at night writing books for them? And to a Roman official who was an Epicurean: if pleasure is the good, why should anyone trust you with a deposit, a verdict or a neighbour's wife? It is the strongest ancient statement of the charge that Epicureanism undermines civic duty and family life.

Horace hands the stage to Ofellus, a farmer, who explains how to eat: hunger is the best sauce, the peacock is bought for its tail and not its taste, and a man who has never been hungry cannot enjoy bread. A miser is mocked as hard as a glutton. Then Ofellus himself appears, his farm confiscated and given to a soldier, still working the same land as a tenant, and the dinner-table advice turns out to have been about how to lose everything and stay yourself.

Before he copies out Epicurus's three letters, Diogenes Laertius stops to explain how an Epicurean decides whether anything is true. Six sections: the senses are never wrong, because a sensation reports only what struck it; an opinion is true if what we see confirms it and false if what we see contradicts it; and a 'preconception' is the general idea of a thing that lets you recognise it at all. It is the rule book for everything else Epicurus says, and the shortest one in ancient philosophy.

Between two of Epicurus's letters, Diogenes Laertius puts down a list of what the Epicurean wise man will and will not do, and it is stranger than the modern word 'epicurean' suggests. He will not marry or raise a family, except sometimes. He will not go into politics. He will feel more than other people, and cry out under torture, and still be happy. He will like the countryside, look after his property, earn money by his wisdom only if he is poor, and pay court to a king if he has to. He will not punish his slaves. He will die for a friend. Five sections, and the most compact picture of the Epicurean life that survives.

Horace had been given a farm in the Sabine hills by Maecenas, and this is the poem in which he thanks the gods for it and asks for nothing more. Then it takes him back to Rome for a day: shoved through the streets, dragged into court as a guarantor, stopped by strangers who assume that a friend of Maecenas must know state secrets. Then back to the farm, to beans and bacon and dinners with neighbours where the talk is whether money or virtue makes people happy. And then the neighbour tells a story: a town mouse visits a country mouse and persuades him to come and taste the good life in the city, where they are nearly eaten by the dogs. It is the classic ancient picture of having enough.