sign in sign up
<<
Home , Diogenes of Oenoanda, Lucretius, Tetrapharmakos

EPISTOLARY EPICUREANS

Pamela Gordon

Send me a little pot of cheese, so that— when I wish—I may have a feast.1

Sayings, rejoinders, and retorts are the salient media for the construction of the biographies and teachings of most of the philosophers who appear in Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers (third cen- tury ad). The great Greek philosophers tend to speak in one-liners that Dio- genes presents alongside or within anecdotes about their lives. Occasionally Diogenes embeds a letter to, from, or about a philosopher, but these letters appear only sporadically. When letters do appear, each is presented either in full or as an extended quotation.2 The exception emerges in Diogenes’ last and tenth book, whose subject is and the Epicureans. In the biog- raphy of Epicurus, the prominent vehicles are the fragmentary letter and the allusion to letters. Why letters, when creative biographers could have continued the pattern set by the use of anecdote, aphorism or clever repar- tee in the accounts of Solon, , Diogenes the Cynic, and the other philosophers?3 And why fragments of letters, when the letters of the other

1 From a letter of Epicurus as recorded by Diogenes Laertius (10. 11): πέµψον µοι τυροῦ […] κυθριδίου, ἵν’ ὅταν βούλωµαι πολυτελεύσασθαι δύνωµαι. All texts of Diogenes Laertius quoted here are from Long 1964. For texts of Epicurus, I depart from convention by citing the text of Diogenes Laertius (the only source for Epicurus’ three extant epistles). Throughout this essay, all translations are my own unless otherwise stated. This chapter revisits some of the issues I raised in Gordon 2012. University of Michigan Press has kindly granted permission to reprint some of the material that appears on page 77 and pages 80–88 in that volume. 2 Examples include the letters of Solon (1.64–67), letters to and from Periander (1.99–100), letters from Pherecydes to Thales (1.22), to Anaximenes (8.49–50) and to Dionysius (3.22). 3 In contrast, the sayings—the Kuriai Doxai—of Epicurus are relegated to the end of Laertius’ work, entirely discrete from the bios that contains all of the biographical informa- tion and the survey of the friends and enemies of Epicurus. That the teachings of Epicurus could be conducive to explication via maxim or simpli ed version of Epicurus’ Principle Doc- trines is illustrated by Seneca’s epistles, which so often end with a pithy Epicurean saying. The (“four-fold remedy”) preserved by the  rst-century bc Epicurean represents the Epicureans’ own gnomic reduction of the central teachings. 134 pamela gordon philosophers are presented as complete texts or full paragraphs? I hope to show here that fragments of personal or intimate letters—or ersatz personal letters—were as essential to the invention of the Epicurean as philosophical epistles were to the promulgation of .

I. Epicurus’ Epistolary Oeuvre

In the case of Epicurus and his biographer, part of any answer to “why letters?” must acknowledge historical reality: Epicurus was a letter writer. The three main non-fragmentary surviving texts of Epicurus are epistolary: the Letter to Pythocles, the Letter to Menoeceus, and the Letter to . Diogenes Laertius (our only source for these letters) presents them not as part of Epicurus’ biography, but—because he has a special interest in Epicureanism—as texts that best outline the philosophy of the Garden.4 All three philosophical epistles ofered synopses of primary teachings or abridgements of longer non-epistolary books, the letter format being a ped- agogical tool.5 Thus the circumvention of the issue of authenticity (as pro- posed by Morrison in this volume) is often not necessary in the case of Epicurus. Unlike readers of the letters attributed to who are hoping to hear the “unmediated voice of Plato the man”, readers of Epicurus’ epis- tles turn to them as surveys of philosophy rather than as documents that reveal or create Epicurus as a person.6 The prominence of epistles in Epicurus’ oeuvre is tightly connected with the fundamental nature of Epicurean philosophy. Overt, systematic recruit- ment of new members may not have been standard practice.7 And yet, Epi- cureanism was a social movement that ofered its salvi c teachings to all comers, an outlook later encapsulated in the Epicurean tetrapharmakos,

4 “I will try to present his teachings [in the 41 best books] by providing three of his letters in which he epitomizes his entire philosophy” (῝Α δὲ αὐτῷ δοκεῖ ἐν αὐτοῖς ἐκθέσθαι πειράσοµαι τρεῖς ἐπιστολὰς αὐτοῦ παραθέµενος, ἐν αἷς πᾶσαν τὴν ἑαυτοῦ φιλοσοφίαν ἐπιτέτµηται, Diog. Laert. 10. 28–29). The case of Epicurean letters, intended to be circulated among a particular community with non-mainstream beliefs, bears some similarity to the community-building and -strengthening role of early Christian letters, on which see further McLarty’s contribution to this volume; also Olson (p. 362 note 49). 5 Cf. Epicurus’ acknowledgement of Pythocles’ request for a shorter presentation of earlier works (Diog Laert. 10.84). 6 See Morrison in this volume (pp. 107–108). 7 On recruitment during the  rst generation of the Garden, see Frischer 2007. On Epi- curean teachings as a medicine that cures human fears, see Kilpatrik 1996. The ancient sources include and Diogenes of in addition to Philodemus.