EPICTRUS, AND EPICUREANISM. Epicurus, an illustrious Greek philosopher, was b. in the island of Samos, 341 B.C., seven years after the death of Plato. His father, Neocles, is said to have been a schoolmaster, and his mother, Chmrestrate, to have practiced arts of magic. At the age of 18, he repaired to Athens, where it has been supposed that he may have had for his teacher Xenocrates or Theophrastus, or perhaps both, but he himself used to declare that he was self-taught. Of the older philosophers, he was most attached to Anaxagoras and Democritus, his system of physics being evi dently built upon the atomic speculations of the latter. E.'s stay at Athens on this occasion was short. At in his thirty-second year, lie first opened a school; and there and at Lampsacus he taught for five years. In 300 B.C., he returned to Athens, and established a school of philosophy in a garden which he purchased and laid out for the purpose. From this circumstance, his followers were called the "philosophers of the garden." Although E. laid down the doctrine, that pleasure is the chief good, the life that he and his friends led was one of the greatest temperance and simplicity. They were content, we are told, with a small cup of light wine, and all the rest of their drink was water; and an inscription over the gate promised to those who might wish to enter no better fare than barley-cakes and water. The chastity of E. was so incontest able, that Chrysippns, one of his principal opponents, in order to deprive him of all merit on the score of it, ascribed it to his being without passions. The calumnies which the Stoics circulated concerning him are undeserving of notice, and were at no time 'generally believed. E.'s success as a teacher was signal; great numbers flocked to his school from all parts of Greece, and from Asia Minor, most of whom became warmly attached to their master, as well as to his doctrines, for E. seems to have been charac terized not less by amiability and benevolence than by force of intellect. He died 270 B.C., in the seventy-second year of his age.
E. was a most voluminous writer. According to Diogenes Laertius, be left 300 vol umes. Among others, he had 37 books on natural philosophy, a treatise on atoms and the vacuum; one on love; one on choice and avoidance; another on the chief good; four essays on lives; one on sight; one on touch; another on images; another on justice and the other virtues, etc. Almost all these works are lost: the only writings of E. that
have come down to us are three letters, and a number of detached sentences or sayings, preserved by Diogenes Laertius, in his life of the philosopher. The principal sources of our knowledge of the doctrines of E., besides the above letters, etc., are Cicero, Sen eca, and, above all, Lucretius, whose great poem, De Rerum Hatura, contains substan tially the Epicurean philosophy.
Although the majority of E.'s writings referred to natural philosophy, yet he was not a physicist, properly speaking. He studied nature with a moral rather than with a scientific design. According to him, the great evil that afflicted men—the incubus on human happiness—was FEAR; fear of the gods and fear of death. To get rid of these two fears, was the ultimate aim of all his speculations on nature.
The following is a brief account of his views. E. regarded the universe (To Pan) as corporeal, and as infinite in extent, and eternal in duration. He recognized two kinds of existence—that of bodies, and that of vacuum, or space, or the intangible nature. Of his bodies, some are compounds, and some atoms or indivisible elements, out of which the compounds are formed. The world, as we now sec it, is produced by the collision and whirling together of these atoms. He also held the doctrine of perception by images (Gr. eidola), which are incessantly streaming off from the surface of all bodies, and which are necessary to bring us into rapport with the world without. In like man ner, he believed that sounding bodies threw off emanations, by which we are brought into sympathy with them; and that perception by smell took place in the same way. In psychology, E. was a decided materialist, holding, for various reasons, that the soul is a bodily substance, composed of subtile particles, disseminated through the whole frame, and having a great resemblance to spirit or breath with a mixture of heat.