Greek Texts & Translations

Epicurus, son of Neocles and Chaerestrate, was as citizen of Athens of the deme Gargettus, and, as Metrodorus says in his book On Noble Birth, of the family of the Philaidae. He is said by Heraclides ^note in his Epitome of Sotion, as well as by other authorities, to have been brought up at Samos after the Athenians had sent settlers there and to have come to Athens at the age of eighteen, at the time when Xenocrates was lecturing at the Academy and Aristotle in Chalcis. Upon the death of Alexander of Macedon and the expulsion of the Athenian settlers from Samos by Perdiccas, ^note Epicurus left Athens to join his father in Colophon. 10.1.2 For some time he stayed there and gathered disciples, but returned to Athens in the archonship of Anaxicrates. ^note And for a while, it is said, he prosecuted his studies in common with the other philosophers, but afterwards put forward independent views by the foundation of the school called after him. He says himself that he first came into contact with philosophy at the age of fourteen. Apollodorus the Epicurean, in the first book of his Life of Epicurus, says that he turned to philosophy in disgust at the schoolmasters who could not tell him the meaning of "chaos" in Hesiod. ^note According to Hermippus, however, he started as a schoolmaster, but on coming across the works of Democritus turned eagerly to philosophy. 10.1.3 Hence the point of Timon's allusion ^note in the lines :

Again there is the latest and most shameless of the physicists, the schoolmaster's son ^note from Samos, himself the most uneducated of mortals.

At his instigation his three brothers, Neocles, Chaeredemus, and Aristobulus, joined in his studies, according to Philodemus the Epicurean in the tenth book of his comprehensive work On Philosophers ; furthermore his slave named Mys, as stated by Myronianus in his Historical Parallels. Diotimus ^note the Stoic, who is hostile to him, has assailed him with bitter slanders, adducing fifty scandalous letters as written by Epicurus ; and so too did the author who ascribed to Epicurus the epistles commonly attributed to Chrysippus. 10.1.4 They are followed by Posidonius the Stoic and his school, and Nicolaus and Sotion in the twelfth book of his work entitled Dioclean Refutations, consisting of twenty-four books ; also by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. They allege that he used to go round with his mother to cottages and read charms, and assist his father in his school for a pitiful fee ^note ; further, that one of his brothers was a pander and lived with Leontion the courtesan ; that he put forward as his own the doctrines of Democritus about atoms and of Aristippus about pleasure ; that he was not a genuine Athenian citizen, a charge brought by Timocrates and by Herodotus in a book On the Training of Epicurus as a Cadet ; that he basely flattered Mithras, ^note the minister of Lysimachus, bestowing on him in his letters Apollo's titles of Healer and Lord. 10.1.5 Furthermore that he extolled Idomeneus, Herodotus, and Timocrates, who had published his esoteric doctrines, and flattered them for that very reason. Also that in his letters he wrote to Leontion, "O Lord Apollo, my dear little Leontion, with what tumultuous applause we were inspired as we read your letter." Then again to Themista, the wife of Leonteus : "I am quite ready, if you do not come to see me, to spin thrice on my own axis and be propelled to any place that you, including Themista, agree upon" ; and to the beautiful Pythocles he writes : "I will sit down and await thy divine advent, my heart's desire." And, as Theodorus says in the fourth book of his work, Against Epicurus, in another letter to Themista he thinks he preaches to her. ^note 10.1.6 It is added that he corresponded with many courtesans, and especially with Leontion, of whom Metrodorus also was enamoured. It is observed too that in his treatise On the Ethical End he writes in these terms ^note : "I know not how to conceive the good, apart from the pleasures of taste, sexual pleasures, the pleasures of sound and the pleasures of beautiful form." And in his letter to Pythocles : "Hoist all sail, my dear boy, and steer clear of all culture." Epictetus calls him preacher of effeminacy and showers abuse on him.

Again there was Timocrates, the brother of Metrodorus, who was his disciple and then left the school. He in the book entitled Merriment asserts that Epicurus vomited twice a day from over-indulgence, and goes on to say that he himself had much ado to escape from those notorious midnight philosophizings and the confraternity with all its secrets ;