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Epicurus and the Modern Mind
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12119 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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12 / 1987 |
8,409 Words |
| Author
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Sharon David Rives
Sharon Davis Rives is professor of philosophy at the
University of Texas at El Paso. |
Few people would express surprise or even disagreement upon hearing that the International Epicurean Circle of London declared recently that the Scottish national dish, haggis, is the "most horrible" culinary concoction in existence in the twentieth century. A greater number of people appear perplexed when informed that Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who lends his name to our adjective, lived a life of strict abstention from the delights of the body. In his own day Epicurus and his followers were known as "the water-drinkers," a rather disparaging name for one living in Greece in the third century B.C., when the common drink was not water but wine. Only on occasion did the Epicureans drink wine, and it was watered down in the Greek fashion. Bread and water were Epicurus' daily staples and once in a while "a little potted cheese…for a sumptuous feast," as he once wrote to a friend. As for erotic pleasure, Epicurus had written that "sexual intercourse has never done a man good, and he is lucky if it had not harmed him." Epicurus himself never married but was devoted to his parents and brothers and the close circle of students who came to be his friends. He serenely, even cheerfully, suffered through two weeks of physical agony before his death from renal calculus at the age of seventy-one in 270 B.C. and would roll over in his grave, no doubt, at our praises of "epicurean delights" or our admiration for the "epicure." While Epicurus was alive, his philosophy was subject to the same misinterpretation as today, but at that time his thought was the subject of accusation, not misguided praise.
Epicurus spent his boyhood on the island of Samos, an Athenian colony. In 323 B.C., the year Alexander the Great died and a year before Alexander's great tutor Aristotle died, Epicurus returned to Athens to register as a citizen and to fulfill the military duty required of Athenian men between the ages of eighteen and twenty. Having met his obligation, he left Athens to join his parents in Asia Minor, where they had settled after the tyrant Perdiccas ordered the Athenian settlers to leave Samos. While in Asia Minor, Epicurus opened a small school and succeeded in attracting a few devoted students. He left after ten years, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and went back to Athens to stay. For eighty minae he bought a house with a garden and hung up his shingle, adding his school, which came to be known as the Garden, to the others then existing in Athens, notably Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum. The peaceful setting of the Garden, a retreat from the worries and troubles of the world, came to represent epicurean philosophy, and a less disparaging name for Epicurus and his disciples was the Garden Philosophers. Unlike the other schools, the Garden accepted women and slaves as students, but there were
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