History of the Literature of Ancient Greece Volume 3

History of the Literature of Ancient Greece Volume 3

John William Donaldson

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John William Donaldson’s History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, Volume 3 is an incredibly comprehensive examination of the seminal Greek works in antiquity, but it focuses mostly on the infamous philosophical schools and legendary figures like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

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HISTORY OF THE LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. THIRD PERIOD (Continued).

CHAPTER XLVTI. SCHOOLS OF PHILOSOPHY.

Ι. STATE OF ATHENS IN REGARD TO LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE DEATH OF ARISTOTLE. § 2. DEVELOPMENT OF THE DIFFERENT SCHOOLS OF PHILOSOPHY. § 3. THE OLD ACADEMY: SPEUSIPPUS, XENOCRATES, POLEMON, CRANTOR, AND CRATES. § 4. THE PERIPATETICS : THEOPHRASTUS, ARISTOXENUS, DICAEARCHUS, AND STRATO. § 5. THE SCEPTICS: PYRRHON AND TIMON. § 6. THE EPICUREANS. § 7. THE STOICS: ZENO, ARISTON, HERILLUS, CLEANTHES, CHRYSIPPUS, PANAETIUS, AND POSEIDONIUS. § 8. THE MIDDLE AND NEW ACADEMY: ARCESILAUS, CARNEADES, CLEITOMACHUS, PHILO, ANTIOCHUS.

We must now return to Athens, which had been the chief seat and centre of Greek literature during the second or classical period of its development, but had now, in all respects but one, resigned the leadership to the city of the Ptolemies. While Alexandria was producing the series of learned poets, acute grammarians, polyglot scholars, and original discoverers in mathematics and inductive science, which we have discussed in the two preceding chapters, Athenian literature was represented only by a chronicler or two, by a transient activity of the comic muse, and by the successive or contemporaneous establishment of certain forms of mental and moral philosophy, founded on the various Socratic schools which have been already traced to their origin. Before we examine separately these feebler manifestations of the intellectual activity of Athens, it will be desirable to take a general view of the state of literature and society in that city.

The death of Aristotle was speedily followed by the unsuccessful issue of the Lamian war; and the degradation of Athens was completed when Demetrius Phalereus, who half governed the city as the literary and oratorical organ of the Macedonian powers, gave place to his namesake Poliorcetes, before whom the Athenians prostrated themselves with impiously servile adulation, and whose residence at Athens tended more than any other circumstance to debase the character of the people. Political oratory became impossible. The historical labours of Philochorus resembled rather those of the Alexandrians than those of his countrymen in a former age. New tragedies no longer appeared on the stage, which had been restored to the Homeric rhapsodists, the original representatives of the tragic dialogue. The only safe pursuit was that of pleasure, and literature was considered to have done all that was left to it, when it sought to combine some amount of intellectual refinement with the coarser gratifications of the senses. Its only available channels were the new comedy, which still kept its place on the stage, and the schools of philosophy, which echoed, in strangely altered accents, some traditions of the doctrines of Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato. The chief ministers of the combination of intellectual refinement with social pleasure, which alone represented the sometime elegance (εὐτραπελια) peculiar to Athens, were the courtesans, who studied philosophy and literature in order to enhance by the charms of their conversation the victory which their personal attractions had already gained over the neglected duties of domestic life. While theories of various kinds were propounded for the speculative amusement of those who frequented the gardens in the neighbourhood of Athens, the comic stage presented in the most attractive colours the lax morality of the age, and exhibited in ingenious complications of incidents the love-stories, which were of common occurrence in the best circles at Athens, and of which the heroines, unfortunately, were not the well-born daughters of citizens, the legitimate objects of a lawful attachment, but the accomplished and beautiful hetoeroe for whom alone the young men of Athens felt any approximation to the passion of love. Such comedies could have no attraction for those who were not accustomed by practical experience to the events represented on the stage, and it was with pungent truth that Antiphanes indicated this apprenticeship to Alexander the Great as the necessary condition for a due appreciation of his plays. The courtesans, who were famous for their wit no less I than for their beauty, were the chosen companions of the greatest comedians. Menander was devoted to Glycera, and Diphilus was notoriously submissive to the facetious Gnathsaena. And while they thus influenced the public by means of the Mage, they were careful to gain what accomplishment they could from the best intellectual refinement of the day: Nicarete raven attended the subtle lectures of Stilpo, and Leontion and many others were pupils of Epicurus. It must indeed have been from a sense of the important effects which these comedians and courtesans had produced on the society of Athens, that learned writers, like Eratosthenes, Apollodorus, and Aristophanes of Byzantium, thought it worth their while to corn-lose elaborate books on one or other of these subjects; and though these works arc lost, modern writers have endeavoured to give us some idea of the nature and effects of this alliance between the writers of the new comedy and the philosophizing hetoeroe of degraded Athens.

§ 2. Although the female sophists of the day attended the schools of philosophy, just as ambitious demagogues had sought the society of Socrates, for the purpose of increasing their ascendancy over the minds of those whom they wished to influence, we must consider this as a proof rather that there was a general demand for speculative inquiries, which found its way into the ordinary Conversation of Athens, than that the philosophers were united with the writers of the new comedy in disparaging the rules of morality and in encouraging the social laxity of their countrymen. It would be doing a great injustice to most of the teachers of philosophy at Athens to suppose that their practice or their principles were at variance with the ethical doctrines which they taught. Whatever may be said against Epicurus and his garden, the well-known story of Xenocrates and Polemon truly represents the general effects of the academic teaching on the dissolute youth who were brought into immediate contact with it. There is no reason to believe that either the Sceptics or the Peripatetics gave the slightest countenance to any laxity of morals. And the Stoics undoubtedly insisted on the strictest and severest code of self-discipline. The degradation of speculative philosophy at Athens did not arise from any unworthy compliances with the spirit of the age, which fostered it as the substitute for other forms of intellectual excitement. It was the natural effect of the want of life and vigour, which in this as in other fields sooner or later followed the downfall of political independence, and converted the free utterances of those who felt that they had a vocation to speak on the human mind and on nature, into the artificial and ingenious euphuism of men, who played with systems, who had a professional vanity to gratify, who were resolved to be original, and who had no fixed principles or normal convictions to regulate the wayward extravagances of their intellectual ambition. This was the main difference between Plato, who struggled with the difficulty of expressing thoughts which rose spontaneously in his mind, and Epicurus and Chrysippus, who vied with one another in writing for writing’s sake, and who multiplied disquisitions without caring much either for the foundations of their arguments or the consistency of their results.

In tracing the development of these later schools of philosophy, we must go back for a starting-point to the classical period of Greek literature. At the death of Aristotle, two schools of philosophy were established at Athens: that of the Academy, in which he had himself studied, and which was maintained in Aristotle’s life-time by Speusippus, the nephew of Plato, and his own friend and travelling companion, Xenocrates; and that of the Lyceum, which he. had founded as the scat of his peripatetic system, and which after his death was conducted by his scholar, Theophrastus. For a while the Socratic family was represented at Athens only by these manifestations of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle. But the older Socratic schools soon reappeared with new names and corresponding extensions of teaching. The Megaries, with an infusion of the doctrines of Democritus, revived in the sceptic philosophy of Pyrrhon; Epicurus founded the sect, to which he gave his name, by a similar combination of Democritean philosophy with the doctrines of the Cyrenaics; the Cynics were developed into Stoics by Zeno, who borrowed much from the Megaric school on one hand, and from the old Academy on the other; and finally the middle and new Academy arose from a fusion of much that was peculiar to many of these sects, for the Sceptics, the Peripatetics, the Megaries, and the old Academy, all furnished materials for the teaching of Arcesilaus.

In this order we propose to discuss the various schools, which flourished in rivalry or succession at Athens, while Greece was under the dominion of Alexander’s successors.

§ 3. When Plato died in b.c. 347, he was succeeded in his school near the Academia by his nephew Speusippus, who occupied his post for eight years from that time. The two most eminent scholars of the great philosopher, Xenocrates of Chalcedon, and Aristotle, went, as we have mentioned in a former chapter, to visit Hermeas, the ruler of Atarneus, and they passed from thence to Macedonia, where Aristotle became the tutor of Alexander. Xenocrates did not reside any long time at Philip’s court, but he was sent as ambassador more than once to that monarch and his successor Antipater. When Speusippus died of a lingering paralytic affection in b.c. 339, Xenocrates succeeded to his office, which seems to have been attached to the possession and occupancy of Plato’s house and garden, and he presided over the academy for twenty-five years. It · is probable that owing to the failing health of Speusippus, he had taken an active part in the teaching of the school before the decease of that philosopher. Polemon, the son of Philostratus, succeeded Xenocrates in b.c. 315. His conversion to philosophy is one of the best known anecdotes in ancient history. He had been, up to the age of thirty, distinguished only by the shameless profligacy of his life. Early one morning, after a debauch prolonged through the night, he entered the school of Xenocrates, still adorned with the insignia of his revelry; but the philosopher, undisturbed by the interruption, continued his discourse on modesty and temperance with such effect, that the young man, who came to scoff, flung down his chaplet of flowers, and became from that hour a regular attendant at the Academia, over which he ultimately presided till his death, at an advanced age, in b.c. 270. Polemon had two friends, supporters, and colleagues, in the management of Plato’s school ,· Crantor, of Soli, who had been a pupil of Xenocrates, and was carried off by a dropsy before the death of Polemon, and Crates of Athens, who for a short time succeeded to the presidency of the Academia. These were the chief philosophers of the old academy, and a new modification of their teaching was introduced, as we shall see, by Arcesilaus, the inheritor of Crantor’s fortune.

It cannot be said that the old academy occupies a prominent place in the history of Greek philosophy, and its contributions to Greek literature, which were sufficiently numerous, are now represented only by the Epinomis included among the works of Plato, which, whether or not the work of Philip of Opus, is beyond all doubt a product of this school; and, by the version which Cicero has given us of Crantor’s treatise ‘On Sorrow,’ (περί πένθους), in the third book of his Tusculan Disputations. Both Speusippus and Xenocrates were learned men, and the former collected a library of so much value, that Aristotle was glad to buy it for three talents.

We observe in these two leaders of the old academy a tendency to that Pythagorean fondness for mystic numbers and musical harmonies which we discern even in Plato, and Xenocrates carried this so far that he insisted on a distinction between two forms of the supreme God, according to his place in the harmonic scale. It was Xenocrates who first made til formal division of philosophy into the three great branches of dialectics, ethics, and physics ; but as we have seen, he only gave by this arrangement an external definiteness to what Plato had already done. The importance, which Plato manifestly assigns to pure mathematics, was formally maintained by Xenocrates, who assigned to geometry a place of equal rank with that which he claimed for philosophy in general. Polemon comparatively neglected dialectics, and bestowed his chief attention on ethics. His rule was that men should live agreeably to nature, and the recollections of his own early career, which he abandoned for a higher code of morality, must have led him to very different conclusions from those of the Cyrenaics and Epicureans, in regard to his natural criterion. In literature, his tastes led him to prefer the great poets to the prose writers, and we are told that his favourites were Homer and Sophocles. His friend Crantor was the earliest commentator on Plato ; but he too had his favourites among the poets, from whom he selected Homer and Euripides as most worthy of admiration. He wrote poetry himself, and in an epitaph upon him by Thesetetus,—not the geometer of that name—it is said that he pleased men, but pleased the Muses still more. His poems do not appear, however, to have been published, but were sealed up by him, and deposited in the temple of Minerva in his native city of Soli in Cilicia.

§ 4. There is a well-known story that Aristotle on his death­bed, being asked whether Theophrastus of Lesbos, or Eudemus of Rhodes, was the better fitted to assume the presidency of his school, sent for Lesbian and Rhodian wine, and after tasting both, pronounced them equal in excellence, but gave his own preference to the Lesbian. Whether this anecdote is well-founded or not, it is clear that he left his books to Theophrastus, and made him one of his executors; and it is equally certain that the Lesbian was better fitted by his originality and literary talents to represent his master at the Lyceum than the Rhodian, who was a mere commentator on Aristotle, and sometimes little better than a copyist, as we see from the Eudemian Ethics, which were probably composed by him.

Tyrtamus, of Eresus, in the island of Lesbos, usually known by his surname Theophrastus, which he is said to have received from Aristotle on account of his eloquence, was probably born about b.c. 374, and died in b.c. 287. He came to Athens before b.c. 347, for he was at first a pupil of Plato. It has been supposed that his connexion with Aristotle commenced while the latter was engaged in the education of Alexander. The selection of Theophrastus to act with Anti-pater as the executor of Aristotle, and the favour with whieh he was always regarded by the Macedonian party at Athens, encourage the supposition that he had formed an early connexion with the court of Pella. Demetrius Phalereus, the agent of Cassander, procured for him a house and garden of his own after the death of Aristotle, and this property, which probably included the original establishment of the Peripatetic school, was left by Theophrastus to his successor Straton and his other friends, on the express condition that it was to be regarded as a philosophical college. His residence at Athens to the end of his long life was only once interrupted, when, on the proposal of Sophocles in b.c. 306, he was banished from Attica, together with the other philosophers. But this decree was rescinded in the following year on the proposal of Philo, one of Aristotle’s scholars, and Theophrastus returned to the Lyceum. He was surrounded by a crowd of pupils, it is said by as many as two thousand, and the most eminent men at Athens, including the poet Menander, attended his lectures. In speculative points he often departed from the theories of Aristotle, which perhaps he did not always understand. But in many departments, especially in some branches of natural history, he extended and improved what had been done by his master. His treatise ‘on stones,’ published b.c. 315, 314, that ‘on the causes of plants,’ which appeared a year or two afterwards, and the great work on botany, which was put forth after the year 307 b.c., have superseded Aristotle’s works on similar subjects, and his collection of laws would have been a valuable appendage to Aristotle’s great work on the polities, had the two books been preserved to our time. With the exception of the botanical treatises, and a little book ‘on characteristics.’ the numerous writings of Theophrastus are either lost altogether, or have come down to us in mere fragments. He is best known to Greek students by the last-named book—the Χαρακτήρες, or notationes morum—which, in a prefatory letter to Polycles, or Polycleides, he describes as the fruit of a long life’s experience, of much social intercourse and careful observation. Traits, similar to those which Aristotle personifies in the second book of his Rhetoric, are represented in a series of personal pictures very carefully finished. The illustrations are of course taken from the every-day life of Athens, but there is so much intrinsic truth in the descriptions, that they must always possess a general interest. It seems pretty clear, however, that the Χαρακτήρες, as they have come down to us, arc only a series of extracts made by the rhetoricians for their own use from the original work of Theophrastus, which was lost as early as the time of Stobaeus. All these fragments are found in manuscripts of the Greek rhetoricians, and the text is not only corrupt, but deformed by many transpositions, by which the characteristics are intermixed.

Arestoxenus of Tarentum, and Dicaearchus of Messana, the former in some sense the rival, the latter the friend, of Theophrastus, were next to him the most celebrated Peripatetics among the immediate disciples of Aristotle. The former is best known by an elaborate work on the principles of musical harmony, which is still in existence, and which is probably made up of the fragments of two or more original treatises, and he was the founder of a school of music in opposition to that of the Pythagoreans. Dicaearchus, whose numerous writings have all perished, with the exception of fragments more or less considerable, and more or less of doubtful authenticity, was chiefly distinguished as a writer on history, geography, and antiquities. His work, entitled ‘the life of Greece’ (βίος της Ελλάδος), seems to have been an elaborate L account of the topography, political condition, and religious) and social usages of all the Greek states. It was perhaps suggested by Aristotle’s work on the polities, and by Theophrastus’ collections of laws. We have a long fragment of the second book, which is perhaps derived from some epitome of the work. His ‘ measurements of mountains’ (καταμετρήσεις τῶν ορῶν) may have belonged to the accessory labours required by his great work; and his ‘ description of the world’ (γῆς περίοδος) seems to have been merely the description attached to the set of maps which he constructed for his friend Theophrastus, to whom he has dedicated the description of Greece (αναγραϕη της Ελλάδος), still extant in 105 iambic lines, if it is not one of those later paraphrases, of which we have many examples, derived from the γῆς περίοδος. The τριπολιτικος of Dicaearchus has been made the subject of a good deal of ingenious speculation. The most plausible opinion about it is that which is derived from the definition in Photius of the Dicaearchian form of government, as consisting of a combination of the best ingredients in monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Both Aristoxenus and Dicaearchus introduced important modifications into Aristotle’s theory of the soul. They both regarded it as a harmony or condition resulting from a certain adjustment of the composite elements of the body, and Dicaearchus did not shrink from the conclusion that the soul was therefore not immortal.

Strato of Lampsacus, who succeeded Theophrastus in b.c. 287, had previously spent some time at Alexandria, and was one of the teachers of Ptolemy Philadelphus. He obtained a great reputation as an acute disputant, and evinced considerable ability in his criticisms of other systems of philosophy, which he did not scruple to misrepresent. His own views tended, like those of Aristoxenus and Dicaearchus, to a sort of materialism. He not only made the soul a mere function of the body, but even phrenologized it by placing it in the forehead. He was called distinctively ‘ the naturalist‘ (ο ϕυσικός), because he referred everything to nature, without requiring the intervention of a deity. He thus passed from Aristotle’s doctrine of the eternity of motion into a sort of pantheism. He departed still more from the principles of Aristotle in neglecting entirely both natural science and political history, to which Theophrastus and Dicaearchus had made important contributions, and in reducing the peripatetic system to controversial metaphysics, and merely speculative views of nature unsupported by an appeal to experience, he prepared the way for the disrepute into which the Lyceum very speedily fell. His successors, Lycon, Ariston of Ceos, and Critolaus, became merely the exponents of the philosophy of rhetoric, to which the ethics of Aristotle furnished some commonplace illustrations, until the school was virtually superseded by that of I the Stoics.

§ 5. Among the literary men and artists who accompanied Alexander on his eastern expedition was Pyrrhon of Elis, originally a painter, afterwards a small poet, then a disciple of the Megaric school, and finally a humble companion of Anaxarchus, the Democritean philosopher, under whose patronage he attached himself to the Macedonian camp. He attracted the favourable notice of Alexander by a poem, for which he received the munificent reward of ten thousand pieces of gold. Pyrrhon took a part in the Indian campaign, and in this way became acquainted with the doctrines and practices of the gymnosophists. The tenets of these Indian sages are now well known to us, and there does not appear to be any sufficient reason for the statement quoted by Diogenes from Ascanius of Abdera, that Pyrrhon derived all the details of his scepticism from his intercourse with them, though they no doubt produced their influence on his system. It is inferred that he was born in b.c. 375, and that his life was prolonged to b.c. 285. His career, therefore, was co-extensive with one of the most important periods in the history of ancient philosophy. Trained in the Megaric school, initiated at an early period into the materialism of Democritus, he had been within the reach of the comprehensive teaching of Plato and Aristotle, he had surveyed the imperturbable calmness and sublime indifference of the sages of India, and he lived long enough to see the decline of the old Academy and of the Peripatetics, and to witness the rise of the Stoics and Epicureans. Though the martyrdom of Socrates was for him a story of the past, he knew how his own friend and companion Anaxarchus had endured the horrid tortures inflicted on him by Nicoereon.

The camp and the court had taught him the falsehood and vanity of the world. And when he returned to Greece probably to his native city, Elis he was prepared by a long apprenticeship for the establishment of a system of negative philosophy. Retiring from the world into the citadel of his own inner being, he regarded all that was external to his soul, even his bodily frame, with much indifference and some doubt as to its existence. He revived in its most uncompromising form the argument which Plato so elaborately refutes in his Theoetetus, and maintained that the only criterion of reality was the outward appearance. ‘ I do not assert,’ he would say, ‘ that anything is sweet: I admit that it appears so.’ He conceived that the only condition that was worthy of a philosopher was one of suspended judgment (ἐποχή). The doctrines of the Pyrrhonians were thus expressed by four names which they assumed or accepted : they were inquirers (ζητητικοί), who sought the truth; examiners or sceptics (σκεπτικοί), who always considered and never discovered; ephcetics (εϕεκτικοί), from the suspense (εποχή) to which we have just referred; and doubters (απορητικοί), from the logical dilemma in which their reasonings entangled them. They carried their suspension (επογη) or abstinence from assertion (αϕασία) so far that they would not even assert that they enunciated any proposition. In morals, they aimed at an absence of emotion (άταραζίαν) in regard to what was agreeable, and a moderation of the feelings (μετριοπάθεια) in regard to things compulsory and unpleasant. In general, the true Pyrrhonian sceptic proclaimed his indifference to the ordinary interests of humanity, and endeavoured, as far as was possible for a Greek, to imitate the incredulous apathy of the Indian gymnosophists.

With the exception of the verses by which Pyrrhon obtained from Alexander the same reward as that which he bestowed, according to Horace, on the faulty compositions of Choerilus, the founder of the Sceptics wrote nothing, and took credit to himself on this account for a freedom from literary vanity. The interpreter of his opinions was Timon of Phlius, whom we have already mentioned as a writer of Sulli and who was called the prophet or mouthpiece of Pyrrhon. Of this voluminous writer in what we should call Hudibrastic verse, we have the following account on the authority of Apollonides of Nicaea. His father Timarchus having left him an orphan at a very early age, he was obliged to seek a subsistence as a choric dancer. He then went to Megara to attend the lectures of Stilpo (this is supposed to have been about b.c. 310), and after some stay there returned home and married. Accompanied by his wife he proceeded to Elis where he attached himself to Pyrrhon. Poverty obliged him to migrate to Chalcedon, where he made some money as a teacher of rhetoric, and was enabled to establish himself at Athens. In the course of his travels he became acquainted with Antigonus and Ptolemy Philadelphus. Like his master Pyrrhon he died at the advanced age of ninety, when, it is not known; but he lived long enough to satirize the Museum of Alexandria, and to make caustic remarks on the criticism of the text of Homer, which was, as we have seen, a chief employment of that school from the time of Zenodotus to that of Aristarchus. Timon was a very voluminous writer, and, besides the Silli mentioned in a former chapter, he wrote, we are told, satyrical dramas, thirty comedies, sixty tragedies, the Python, and other satirical poems; he also published treatises on the perceptions, an attack on the natural philosophers, and other prose works amounting in all to 20,000 lines. Our acquaintance with his doctrines and those of his master is derived chiefly from the writings of Sextus Empiricus, a physician of the third century after Christ.

The philosophy of the negative school is only a link of connexion between Plato and Aristotle, and the Epicureans and Stoics. ‘At best,’ says Bitter, ‘scepticism is nothing more than a transition to a new intellectual development, and indicates a state of mental culture, in which, with a persuasion that truth is not to be found in sensible phenomena, there exists a conviction that the development, which science has already attained to, does not present a mean whereby the inquirer may raise himself above the sensible.’

§6. The Epicurean philosophy, which shows its wide and permanent influence by the fact that its founder’s name is a common term in our own language at the present day, owes its origin to EPICURUS the son of Neocles, an Athenian cleruchus or ‘ squatter,’ in the island of Samos, where the future philosopher was born on the seventh day of Gamelion, Ol. 109, 3. B.C. 342. His youth was spent in Samos and Teos. His first instructor was his father, who kept an elementary school ; and he used to assist his mother, who seems to have been a sort of sorceress, in the recitation of her magic spells. So that his beginnings in life were not unlike those of Æschines the orator. He used to boast that he had commenced the study of philosophy at the age of fourteen, and a story is told that he was remanded to this study by a grammatical teacher, perhaps his own father, who was reading Hesiod to him, and whom he

puzzled with a question about the origin of Chaos. He went to Athens at the age of eighteen, and was said, though he denied it, to have attended the school of Xenocrates. The troubles

consequent on the Lamian war induced him to remove to Colophon, where his family was now settled, and where he adopted his father’s profession of a grammarian or schoolmaster.

Chance threw the writings of Democritus in his way, and he found a congenial pursuit in the study of the atomic theory. He set up a school of Democritean philosophy, first at Mitylene,

and afterwards at Lampsacus. His success induced him to return to Athens, where he was established from B.C. 306 to his death in B.C. 270, in the same year with Polemon of the old

Academy and Straton of the Lyceum. At first he appeared simply as a Democritean, with perhaps some admixture of the Pyrrhonian doctrines. But he eventually set up for himself,

and renouncing in the most contemptuous manner all connexion with any existing school, gathered around him his friends and admirers in a country house and garden near Athens, of which he had become the proprietor. Here, in a sort of Pythagorean College, with a common table, to which all contributed, the Epicureans indulged in social intercourse, and tranquil enjoyment. Frequented as the school was by literary courtesans, it is not likely that prudery or puritanism restrained the members of this Agapemone ; but it is a slander to say that they were guilty of the grosser immoralities of the day. And whatever may be thought of Metrodorus, it seems clear that Epicurus himself did not violate his own principles by an immoderate pursuit of sensual pleasure.

An adequate discussion of the philosophy of Epicurus, such as it was, does not belong to a work like the present. As his voluminous writings have perished, with the exception of three letters, and the summary of his ‘leading principles’ (κνριαι δόξaι), he occupies a very unimportant place in Greek literature. Even if we had more of his writings, it is doubtful whether his literary eminence would be much enhanced. He was a man of little learning, and perhaps no philosophical originality. His physical system, which was mainly derived from the Democriteans, was only pursued with a view to his ethical principles, which were based upon those of the Cyrenaics, with some corrections derived from Aristotle. And his logic, or, as he called it, canonic, was designed to furnish a basis for both the moral system, which made happiness, the end of life, to consist in a recollection or mental anticipation of sensual enjoyments, when they were no longer present; and for his physics, in which he endeavoured by means of the atomistic theory to relieve the mind from all apprehensions of a future state, which might have tended to mar the tranquillity of its present enjoyments. As far as we can judge, he was neither a lucid, nor an eloquent, nor a consistent writer; and he has derived more credit than was due to him from the exposition of his views by Lucretius, one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, of the Latin poets. As far as we can see, the only object which Epicurus proposed to himself was the gratification of his personal vanity by gathering around him a body of admirers, to whom he would be everything; and by providing for the perpetuation of his name and memory. He predicted that those to whom he wrote letters would become immortal by his mention of them ; and he settled his house and garden on his school, with the express provision that his philosophy should be taught there, and that his memory should be celebrated by annual commemorations. In the perpetuation of his name he has been amply gratified; but the discrimination of his successors has not exempted from the fate of many better contributions to Greek literature the bulky works of a man who was both vain and shallow, who dwelt on the same ideas with wearisome repetition, and who having but little originality, thought to secure his personal importance by disparaging the labours of those to whom he was most indebted. Still it cannot be denied that by his concentrated energy in the pursuit of one object—the establishment of a system of which he was to be the centre—Epicurus produced a great effect on the theories of the few centuries immediately succeeding his own, and rivalled the influence of the Stoics when his doctrines and theirs were domesticated at Rome. In an age of growing scepticism and reckless luxury, men were too apt to seize upon anything like a systematic justification of their maxim—’let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’ And Epicureanism became a ve, like other fallacies, because it met half-way the natural inclinations of a corrupted society.

§ 7. As the Cyrenaics and Cynics exhibited two opposite applications of a principle derived from Socrates, the Stoics, who were regarded as a continuation of the latter, no less than the Epicureans, who represented the characteristic positions of the former, may be considered as corresponding divergencies from the negative philosophy of Pyrrhon. They both originated in the sense of isolation which arose in the minds of thinking men, when they looked on the misery and corruption of the world around them. To this feeling the Sceptics gave merely a negative expression. The Epicureans sought a vulgar and perhaps instinctive remedy in a theory, which annihilated the future life, and made the most of present enjoyments. The Stoics proclaimed the nobler doctrine, that, for the wise man at any rate, the outer world and present circumstances had neither charms nor terrors, and he, at all events, would find the true end of life and the real happiness of man, in the performance of duty and in the pursuit of virtue. In the effects which they produced upon the literature of Greece, the Stoics were as superior to the Epicureans as they were in the consistency of their logic and the validity and worth of their moral system. While the only literary product of the Epicurean school, which has obtained a permanent reputation, is the