Epicurus

" But that is no poverty at all, if it is cheerful.

I am still rifling Epicurus, whose saying I read this very day:

" Excellently said this third saying of Epicurus, when he wrote to one of the partners in his studies:

meanwhile I shall hold to this:

to Epicurus perhaps a foot wide.

And this principle has a wide range.

Are we, then, to allow Theopompus and Timaeus to compose fables and slanders, and Epicurus besides, the founder of atheism, and Hipponax and Archilochus to write with such shamelessness, and yet forbid the man who proclaims the truth to leave behind a benefit for those who come after?

Some say Epicurus was a pupil of this man.

Thus Plato thinks that some of the barbarians too are philosophers, while Epicurus, on the contrary, supposes that the Greeks alone are able to philosophize.

No one says that — though Epicurus charges it upon Democritus, the Democriteans deny it.

\"If the pain is extreme,\" he says, \"it must needs be brief.

What pain, then, follows Epicurus, when he says this very thing, that pain is the highest evil?

this Epicurus calls isonomia, that is, equal distribution.

For from Nature we all, of all nations, have no other notion of the gods' appearance than the human;

For he alone saw, first, that the gods exist, because Nature herself has imprinted a notion of them in the minds of all.

Whence he to us, a conqueror, reports

Wherefore Religion now is under foot,

And forward thus he fared afar, beyond

these draw its origin from one quarter, those draw its departure off to another — according as either the prestige of Plato, or the vigour of Zeno, or the steadiness of Aristotle, or the stupor of Epicurus, or the gloom of Heraclitus, or the frenzy of Empedocles has persuaded them.

And I do not mean only those who fashion it out of manifest bodily things — as Hipparchus and Heraclitus out of fire, as Hippo and Thales out of water, as Empedocles and Critias out of blood, as Epicurus out of atoms (if atoms too compose corporealities by their conjunction), as Critolaus and his Peripatetics out of some fifth substance I know not what (if that too is a body, since it includes bod …

And so, if even the causes themselves are freed from infamy, how much more the senses, before which the causes now freely go — since precisely from this very thing truth and faith and integrity must be claimed for the senses, in that they report nothing otherwise than that reason ordained which causes a thing to be reported by the senses otherwise than it is in fact.

for I am not the man to say that whatever appears is such as it appears — let Epicurus see to that, and to much else besides.

Epicurus says his senses are truthful.

For Epicurus, who wished to succour these errors of men who seem to throw the knowledge of truth into confusion, and said that it was the part of the wise man to separate opinion from clearness, accomplished nothing;

If he affected to entitle, under the name of Christ, some god out of the school of Epicurus — to the end that, being blessed and incorruptible, he should offer molestation neither to himself nor to another (for chewing over this maxim Marcion removed from him severities and judicial powers) — he ought either to have conceived a god altogether immobile and stupefied (and what has he to do with Chri …

We are taught God by the prophets and by Christ, not by the philosophers nor by Epicurus.

But let Marcion acknowledge the chief boundary of his faith from the school of Epicurus, bringing in a dull lord, that he may say he is not to be feared;

In most pains, indeed, let the saying of Epicurus come to your aid:

"In my sickness my conversations were not about the sufferings of my poor body, nor did I talk such things to those who came in, but I went on discussing the chief points of natural philosophy, and was intent on this very thing:

And so I shall not say, as most of my school do, that the sect of Epicurus is a teacher of vice, but I say this:

" This charge, you most malignant of creatures, you bitter enemies of every best man, was brought against Plato, brought against Epicurus, brought against Zeno;

For my own part I am of this opinion—and I shall say it to the displeasure of my own school—that Epicurus's teachings are holy and right and, if you draw nearer, austere;

So too Epicurus cheapens all torment and pain, pronouncing the slight to be contemptible, and the great to be not lasting.

some say he is of atoms, others of numbers, as Epicurus and Pythagoras;

As for natural philosophy, if I approved of Epicurus, that is, of Democritus, I could write as plainly as Amafinius does.

For whether you follow Zeno, it is a great task to bring anyone to understand what that true and simple good is which cannot be sundered from the honourable (a good of what kind it is Epicurus altogether denies he can so much as conceive without pleasures that stir the senses);

But Carneades, ignorant of no part of philosophy, and, as I learned from those who had heard him and especially from the Epicurean Zeno, who, though he dissented from him very greatly, yet admired him beyond all others, was of an incredible faculty and … " But why does Mnesarchus fret, why does Antipater fight it out with Carneades in so many volumes?

Epicurus introduced this theory for this reason:

But Epicurus thinks that by the swerve of the atom the necessity of fate is avoided.

For Epicurus, while granting that every proposition is either true or false, may yet not fear that all things must therefore come to pass by fate;

Of Epicurus alone I will willingly be forgetful, who thinks that God cares for nothing, being impious through and through.

for in banishing the providence of God from his system, he made justice nothing but an empty name, springing from human conventions, founded on self-interest, and restraining men from the commission of crimes by no other principle but that of fear.

"And so a god does not give benefits, but, untroubled and careless of us, turned away from the world, he does something else, or, what to Epicurus seems the greatest happiness, does nothing, and benefits no more move him than injuries.

"The wise man will not approach public affairs, unless something intervenes";

' Why do you preach to us the precepts of Epicurus in the very headquarters of Zeno?

Why should it not be in action, when Epicurus himself says that at times he will withdraw from pleasure and will even court pain, if either regret is likely to attend the pleasure, or a lesser pain is to be taken on in place of a heavier one?

We may dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, conquer human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics.

but we deny that all these are injuries.

This house of the wise man is narrow, without adornment, without din, without pomp;

Epicurus, whom you take as the patron of your idleness, and whom you suppose to teach soft and slothful doctrines that lead to pleasures, says:

But Epicurus, who had said, "What is above us is nothing to us," when he too desired to inspect the heaven, found the sun's orb a foot wide.

Therefore, since this world contains the elements — to treat summarily of the whole, as supplying its parts (for whatever its condition is, the same surely will be that also of the elements and members) — it must either have been instituted by someone, as Plato's humaneness has it, or by no one, as Epicurus's hardness has it;

Let this Bythos, then, be in greatest and deepest quiet through infinite past ages, in the abundant ease of a placid and, so to say, stupefied divinity, such as Epicurus enjoined.

For Enthymesis—or now Achamoth, which name from here on is written by this alone as untranslatable—when, with the vice of the inseparable Passion, she was expelled into the regions foreign to light (which is a thing of the Pleroma), into that void and empty of Epicurus, she is pitiable even by reason of place.

That nothing exists after death is the school of Epicurus.

Or are we to be nothing after death, according to some Epicurus, and not according to Christ?