INTRODUCTION: PHILODEMUS AND THE PAPYRI FROM HERCULANEUM
J T. F
Scholarly assessments of Philodemus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often sharply negative. Domenico Comparetti and Giulio De Petra, for example, described him in 1883 as “an obscure, verbose and unauthoritative Epicurean of the days of Cicero.”1 Sir John Pentland Mahaffy, writing in 1906, contemptuously dismissed him as “a very tenth-rate pupil” of Epicurus and condemned him as being “morally as bad as bad could be.”2 A similar verdict about Philodemus’ works was given in 1908 by Ethel Ross Barker, who said that they were “quite third-rate in character” and thus “of little or no value as philosophy or as literature.”3 This generally low appraisal of Philodemus,4 which was often ac- companied by a hostile attitude toward the Epicurean tenets which he espoused,5 began to change during the course of the twentieth
1 Domenico Comparetti and Giulio De Petra, La Villa ercolanese dei Pisoni: I suoi monumenti e la sua biblioteca. Ricerche e notizie (Turin: E. Loescher, 1883; repr. Naples: Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi, 1972), 79: “un oscuro, verboso, non autorevole epicureo dei tempi ciceroniani.” This assessment is quoted with approval by Charles Waldstein and Leonard Shoobridge, Herculaneum: Past, Present, and Future (London: Macmillan, 1908), 83. 2 John Pentland Mahaffy, The Silver Age of the Greek World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), 161 and 255. 3 Ethel Ross Barker, Buried Herculaneum (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908), 82 and 118. 4 Not all treatments of Philodemus from this period are as negative as those given in the text. A much more balanced assessment is provided by Franz Susemihl, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur in der Alexandrinerzeit, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1891–92), 2:267–78, who argues that Cicero’s depiction of Philodemus as an edu- cated man (Pis. 68–70) is richly confirmed by his works (268). The most lavish praise of this period is bestowed on Philodemus’ poetry, often at the expense of his prose works. For example, Alfred Körte, Hellenistic Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 402, praises Philodemus as “the finest of the later epi- grammatists” yet thinks that his philosophical writings “are of little significance” in terms “both of style and of content.” 5 See, for example, Mahaffy, The Silver Age of the Greek World, 158, whose low esti- mate of Philodemus is connected with his contempt for Epicureanism as a “very demoralising theory.” 2 century.6 By the century’s end a more positive estimate of Philodemus had emerged among most scholars.7 This heightened current appre- ciation is the result of at least four converging factors. First, con- temporary scholars, building upon the work of their predecessors, have a generally better understanding of Epicureanism and often are more sympathetic toward it.8 The school was much more diverse and innovative than most previous scholars had imagined,9 and this new perspective on Epicureanism is partly the result of paying greater attention to Philodemus’ works, which reveal several important inter- nal debates within the school10 and “contain a wealth of informa- tion about Epicureanism as practiced among the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Italy in the first century ...”11 Second, some of Philodemus’ works are largely transcripts of lectures
6 See, for example, the brief comments by Piero Treves, “Philodemus,” OCD1 (1949): 681–82 and OCD 2 (1970): 818–19. Although he disparaged Philodemus’ prose as “dull and colourless,” Treves also referred to the “taste and ingenuity” of Philo- demus’ epigrams and called his theory of art “particularly remarkable.” Of course, purely negative statements about Philodemus’ works continued to be made. Raleigh Trevelyan, for example, in 1976 called Philodemus’ On Music “a ridiculous diatribe.” See his The Shadow of Vesuvius: Pompeii A.D. 79 (London: Michael Joseph, 1976), 47. 7 For an example of this new appreciation of Philodemus, see esp. Michael Erler, “Die Schule Epikurs,” Die hellenistische Philosophie, ed. H. Flashar, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, Die Philosophie der Antike 4.1 (Basel: Schwabe, 1994), 289–362, esp. 337–43. I gratefully acknowledge here my great indebtedness to Erler’s work on Philodemus and other members of the Epicurean school. His dis- cussions and bibliographies are utterly indispensable for research on any member of the Garden and especially for those whose writings are preserved among the Herculaneum papyri. 8 On ancient Epicureanism, see esp. the studies produced by members of the Association Guillaume Budé and published in the Actes du VIII e Congrès (Paris, 5–10 avril 1968) (Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1969), the essays in Jean Bollack and André Laks, eds., Etudes sur l’Epicurisme antique, Cahiers de philologie 1 (Lille: Publications de l’Université de Lille III, [1976]), and the studies in Gabriele Gian- nantoni and Marcello Gigante, eds., Epicureismo greco e romano: Atti del congresso inter- nazionale, Napoli, 19–26 maggio 1995, Elenchos 25, 3 vols. (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1996). On Roman Epicureanism, see John Ferguson and Jackson P. Hershbell, “Epicureanism under the Roman Empire,” ANRW 2.36.4 (1990): 2257–2327, and Catherine J. Castner, Prosopography of Roman Epicureans from the Second Century B.C. to the Second Century A.D., Studien zur klassischen Philologie 34 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1988). 9 On tradition and innovation in Epicureanism, see the studies published in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 30 (1989): 144–335. 10 The importance of Philodemus’ writings for intramural debates within Epicu- reanism was recognized by earlier scholars, but this information was seldom exploited in depictions of the school. See, for example, Friedrich Überweg and Karl Praechter, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 1: Die Philosophie des Altertums, 12th rev. ed. (Berlin: Mittler, 1926), 444. 11 Pamela Gordon, “Epicureanism,” Encyclopedia of Classical Philosophy, ed. D. J. Zeyl (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 208–14, esp. 212.