THE THREE hundred volumes of treatises and essays attributed to Epicurus, only fragments remain; but these, while insufficient to define his philosophy as fully as Stoicism has been defined by its great authorities, show that he was a man of genius, capable of giving fitting expression to his ideas. What these ideas were we know not only from the fragments of his books, but from his disciples among whom were some of the most celebrated writers of the Greek and Roman decadence. While it is not true that Epicurus taught sensuality; while, indeed, he insisted on a moral life as the only means of attaining tranquillity, he made intellectual comfort the object of existence, and the mind’s own sensations the sole test of truth and the only guide of action. He believed in gods, who, however, had no concern in the government of the world and ought not to be appealed to as arbiters of events. He was opposed to those who attributed such natural phenomena as the noise of thunder to the acts of the gods, but he was not less opposed to the attempt to find a scientific explanation for them. He is thus separated from modern materialism, though it has been largely stimulated by the writings of his disciples. His philosophy is now called “Hedonism,” and while it may be inaccurate to define it as a system in which the attainment of pleasure is made the object of life, it is not unjust to him to say that he makes self-satisfaction his supreme good rather than achievement.

  “Wretches who never were alive,” Dante calls those who live merely to gratify themselves and “make through vulgarity the great renunciation.” In hell, he saw them in a vast multitude stung by wasps and weeping for lost opportunities, with tears which fell at their feet and bred loathsome worms. This metaphor, terrible as it is, does not adequately express the fierceness of the great Florentine’s contempt for those who withdraw from the world’s struggle and live out the rule of Epicurus as Horace Latinizes it:—

    Another class of those who follow “Hedonism,” Dante will not let into hell at all, “lest the damned should be made to seem respectable by them” (chè alcuna gloria i ret avrebber d’elli). But while Dante’s view is never likely to fail of sympathizers, among moralists, it ought to be remembered that Epicurus was struggling to find some escape from follies of popular superstition without accepting either cynicism or the scarcely more attractive theory of the Stoics, that the supreme object in life is the cultivation of fortitude, endurance, and of whatever else goes to make up perfect ability to suppress emotion.

  Epicurus was born in Samos, c. 341 B.C., from an Athenian father. Xenocrates is mentioned as one of his masters in philosophy. In the year 306 B.C. he himself began the life of a professional philosopher by opening a school in a garden at Athens, where he taught until his death in 270 B.C., gathering around him a coterie of friends and admirers of both sexes. To these he taught the theory of Democritus and Leucippus, that life and created matter in all its forms depend on a fortuitous or fated concourse of atoms. As Democritus also invented the famous canon of agnosticism:—“We know nothing, not even if there is anything to know,” it is evident that his philosophy, as Epicurus defined and supplemented it, was not less at home in the nineteenth century A.D. than in the fourth and third B.C.