The atomic theory is the foundation of modern science. Most people do not know how ancient it is, and how well developed it was before it was rubbished by theologians and philosophers, and buried until the 17th century AD. Its origins can be traced back to the shadowy figure of Leucippus, possibly from Miletus, and it was perhaps an offspring of the physicalist speculations about nature that began in that city in the 6th century BC. Almost nothing is known about Leucippus, but both Aristotle and Theophrastus identify him as the originator of atomism. One sentence asserting what we would now call determinism survives from his book The Great World System: ‘Nothing happens at random, but everything from a scientific principle and of necessity.’
It is, however, to the less remote Democritus of Abdera (c. 460–c. 370 BC) that we can trace the first details of ancient deterministic atomism. His writings, had they survived, would in length rival those of Plato. But even with him all we have are scraps and quotations, from which we can discern someone capable of wise and witty remarks about human life, and one who worked out a deterministic account of nature in terms of the existence, movement and combination of invisible particles. Epicurus (341–c. 270 BC) gave us the account of atomism as random movements of particles, in which he was followed by the Roman poet Lucretius (c. 98–c 55 BC), whose great book, De rerum natura (‘On the nature of the universe’), was held in being for us by the chance survival of a single manuscript.
Epicurus was born on the island of Samos as an Athenian citizen. In 323 he went to Athens to do his two years’ military and civic service for the city. He then probably lived for a period in Colophon, in Mytilene on Lesbos, and then in Lampsacus on the coast of Asia Minor, just before the Hellespont opens out into the Sea of Marmara. He returned to Athens in about 306, and stayed there for the rest of his life, teaching, writing and establishing ‘the Garden’ – the community outside the city walls that carried forward his name and teaching.
The Garden was not like the Academy or the Lyceum: it was not a college, club or research institute, but rather a society of friends living according to the principles of Epicurus, in semi-isolation from civic society. Its teachings and way of life spread. By the 1st century BC communities existed in many parts of the Roman world, from Gadara, south-east of the Sea of Galilee, to Naples and Gaul. Even Julius Caesar was reputed to have had Epicurean sympathies.
Epicurus’ most important work, On Nature, is lost, although parts of it are being painstakingly reconstructed from carbonized papyrus rolls found at Herculaneum. Three letters, his brief Principal Doctrines, a cluster of sayings and his will survive. We have a complete statement of his philosophy and physics only in Lucretius, together with partial developments in works (again being retrieved from Herculaneum) by Philodemus of Gadara, and – unique in the entire world as a philosophical document – in the surviving parts of the immense stone inscription erected in Oinoanda by one Diogenes in about AD 130.
The Epicureans and their rivals the Stoics shared just one very general view of reality. They both advocated what can be called ‘one-world’ philosophies. The Pythagoreans, the Platonists, the Christians and, by the 3rd century AD, the Gnostics and Neoplatonists all espoused two-(or more!) world philosophies, distinguishing between body and soul, this world and the next world, the perishing body and the immortal body, matter and spirit, and the natural and the supernatural. In contrast, for the Epicureans and Stoics all that is real is, or is a part of, a single universe in which the contrast between matter and spirit is meaningless. This is not to say that either school was obliged to deny the existence of gods, or the experiences or phenomena we call ‘spiritual’. It is just that they both – in different ways – say that those things, if they exist, are parts or functions of one all-embracing universal system, not two.
The two schools also shared a method of organizing and presenting their ideas. Both developed a logic that makes possible the exposition of a physics, which in turn implies a right way of living: an ethic. They began with an account of language, logic and what we can know – the Stoic account being vastly better than the Epicurean. They follow this with what we might call scientific accounts of the nature of reality: the physics. The Epicurean account is closer to the chemistry and particle physics that it helped to originate; the Stoic, as we shall see in the next chapter, is closer to Big Bang cosmology and the idea of a dynamically evolving universe. Given that each school claims to have provided a true account of physical reality (the word ‘physical’ is redundant, since there is no other sort of reality with which to contrast the physical), how should we live? Both ethical prescriptions are attractive. (As for the logic, let me at once disappoint you: there is no room here for its intricacies.)
The foundation of the system is that the universe – the ‘all viewed as one’ – has two real constituents: body and void space. The existence of body is proved to us by sensation; if we cannot know by sensation that there are bodies, then we cannot know anything at all. But bodies have location, and they move. That is to say, the universe is not as it might have been – solid, packed tight, immobile. In brief: ‘All nature … is built of those two things: for there are bodies, and there is the void in which they are placed and where they move’ (Lucretius, De rerum natura, Book I). The Epicurean contention is that the occurrence and working of bodies in space – all of them, including, eventually, ourselves – can be accounted for by the existence and movement of an infinite number of irreducibly tiny particles, for which the Greek language provided the name atomoi, ‘uncuttables’, and the Latin primordia, ‘first things’.
The atomoi or primordia may well be of a limited range of sizes, but all are too small to be seen. Their existence can be inferred only from what can be seen, and they can be used to explain the things that we do see. They are everlasting, they contain no void within themselves, they cannot be split or divided, and they move.
Why should anyone think of matter as made up of particles no one could ever see? In the background lies the Greek inclination to look behind surface appearances for explanations; in the particular case of the particles proposed by Democritus and Epicurus, the fact of their existence was arrived at explicitly through the questioning of common observations. For example, how is it that two objects of identical volume, say a cube of gold and a cube of marble, weigh differently? It could be that one has more, or larger, particles packed into its apparent solidity than the other. Or again: we may notice normally invisible motes in a sunbeam, and infer from this the existence of even smaller bodies that we cannot see. Another reason for the particle hypothesis is that it provides a way of explaining things. Solids, for instance, could be composed of particles clogged together in virtue of their shapes; fluids of smoother or less densely packed particles; and air of even finer particles that slip over each other with very little stickiness. The attrition of hard objects by soft – coins rubbed by fingers, steps worn down by feet – without the visible disappearance of any part might be explained by the loss of imperceptible particles.
Why are there primary particles? Simply because there are. They exist as an ultimate fact about reality much as for some people God exists. For Epicurus, to ask why there are primary particles is foolishness, because the question tries to look outside all that really exists for an explanation of what exists, and nothing exists outside all that exists. But the primary particles do not merely exist, they move. They ‘wander through the void’. They ‘move of themselves’. The problem of Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’ is thus solved. He accepted the stuff of the universe as eternal, not needing or having an explanation, but sought an explanation of its movement. Epicurus takes it that matter and its movement are not separable: they are together part of the given.
Yet the particles move in a particular way – not guidedly, or in a deterministic manner, as Democritus supposed, but randomly. According to Epicurus, the particles swerve or alter direction in such a way that no prior knowledge of the particles and their movements could ever give knowledge of when and in what manner any given particle will change direction. The outcome of such particle swerves would be chaos: an infinite number of random collisions taking place eternally. How, then, does this chaos of primary particles result in the ordered cosmos we experience all the time? Epicurus has a sort of answer. It is this.
Particles come in a large but finite number of variations of size and shape. The modern idea of elements might help to convey the idea. The shapes of the various sorts of particles limit the ways they can link up with other particles when collisions take place. Primordial collisions and movements are chaotic, but the successful and semi-enduring unions that take place are not. These produce everything from suns to grains of sand, and us. Things we can sense are thus the result of the primary particles’ different combining powers, or ‘stickiness’.
There is an obvious gap in this account. Once the chaos of particles has produced things and categories of things, the things behave according to regularities we call the ‘laws of nature’. Most of these laws are not readily explicable in terms of the movement and combination of primary particles. Or are they? The Stoics thought not. For us, the jury is still out.
To sum up: the whole universe is comprehended within two natures, void space and primary particles in random motion. The universe is eternal. The motion and combinations of the primary particles account for all that happens, and all sensible bodies that exist, and for sensation itself. (Epicurus’ account maintains that things emit surface particles that strike our sense organs, causing sight, hearing, etc.)
There are three consequences of Epicurean physics that touch very closely upon human life and hopes. Epicurus was fully aware of them.
The first is that, very probably, neither we nor the earth are unique. If particles and space are infinite, they will produce the same things more than once: other earths, with other or the same creatures on them, will exist. The human race is not alone; but neither are we the result of any purposeful evolution of primary particles. Neither this nor any other world was made by God, or gods, for our convenience. We thus have no significance beyond that which we give ourselves: no final purpose, no metaphysical or religious objective. We and our world are like all other things. We form, we grow, we decay and return to the universe’s primordial store of particles. Lucretius – the verses are a paraphrase from Book II – describes the process thus:
Nothing abides. The seas in minute haze
Depart; those moonèd sands forsake their place;
And where they are shall other seas in turn
Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.
The antipathy of the early (and later!) Christians to this species of Hellenistic philosophy will cause little surprise, but there is worse to come.
The second consequence of the Epicurean physics is that either God and gods do not exist, or they are parts of the universe of void space and moving particles. Perhaps out of a real piety towards the multitude of gods with which his culture surrounded him – or perhaps because he recognized their importance as the focus for civic, and later imperial, ceremony, loyalty and identity – Epicurus subscribed to the latter view. In so doing, he required the gods to be described in a way that would become offensively unacceptable to religion. The gods exist as bodies of unobservably fine particles in space. They are forever happy, inactive, self-sufficient, and totally without concern for us or knowledge of us. Lucretius again, in Book III of De rerum natura:
At ease they dream, and make perpetual cheer
Far off. From them we nothing have to fear:
And nothing hope. How should the calm ones hate?
The tearless, know the meaning of a tear?
Their only value to us is to provide some example of the sort of happy life to which we might remotely aspire.
The third consequence of the Epicurean physics, but also backed up by numerous other arguments in Lucretius, is that no human being can survive bodily death, the break up of the structure of particles that is the individual. Mind and life are complex parts or movements of the briefly existing structures of primary particles that constitute you and me. That is all. Since the mind moves the body – we experience this – it must in some sense be touching it, connected with it as part of the same structure. The mind no more survives the corruption of the physical body than the scent of a rose can outlive the rotting of the bloom. Here, for the last time, is Lucretius in his great poem:
Observe this dew-drenched rose of Tyrian hue –
A rose today. But you will ask in vain
Tomorrow what it is; and yesterday
It was the dust, the sunshine and the rain.
Where is the coolness when no cool winds blow?
Where is the music when the lute lies low?
Are not the redness and the red rose one,
And the snow’s whiteness one thing with the snow?
In Book III of De rerum natura, Lucretius goes far beyond any arguments for mortality known to have been set out by Epicurus himself. The whole section is a concentrated presentation of almost all the arguments and evidence – metaphysical, physical, moral and psychological – for the mortality of the soul that have ever been assembled. Why are mortality and its glad acceptance advocated so fervently by Lucretius, and more prosaically by Epicurus? Because acceptance of mortality removes mankind’s fear of the one absolute certainty of human existence – death – and thus provides one of the conditions for living well.
In bare outline, the Epicurean prescription for the good life is simple. It is the happy life, and happiness is living in peaceful friendship and good relations with others, a body free from pain of whatever kind, and a mind free from fear and anxiety.
Living among friends, and how to do so from the point of view of the individual, was a cardinal concern of Epicurus – hence his founding of the Garden, a community of like-minded people living in amicable cooperation. And for Epicurus (as, later, for the early Christians), ‘people’ meant anyone who would live in accordance with the teaching – men, women and slaves without social distinction.
The friendship, philia, that Epicurus advocated is sometimes translated ‘love’. But Greek, unlike English, has three words for love: eros, meaning sexual love; philia, meaning the friendship possible between any human beings without regard to sex; and agape, a somewhat rarified concept usually rendered as ‘spiritual love’. Perhaps one can have spiritual love for a dead saint or even for a Beethoven symphony, but whatever agape is, it was not the friendship Epicurus advocated for normal relations with other human beings.
Friendship is the positive element that makes for a happy person and a successful community. In that way it functions for the Epicurean somewhat as love does for the Christian. On the negative side, the Epicureans held that bodily pain is to be avoided as far as possible. Pain will of course include violent and threatening discomforts such as starvation, paralysis, nausea, thirst, etc. Sometimes these things cannot be avoided: if they are very severe, they will kill you, and you will never feel suffering again; but if they are moderate, they can be endured. Epicurus himself died in the former way, by all accounts maintaining a quiet acceptance of what was happening. Part of his last letter survives: ‘Seven days before writing this, the stoppage [of urine] became complete, and I suffered pains such as bring men to their last day.’
The fear from which we need to be free, according to Epicurus, is not fear of political or military violence. Not a lot can be done about that, except making ourselves inconspicuous; and for the sake of a sustained prospect of a happy life, we should not make our happiness depend upon luxuries that are easily lost or taken away. The freedom that is within our power is freedom from superstitious fears, from fear of gods, and from the fear of death. As we have seen, for Epicurus either there are no gods, or they are unconcerned with us. Hence we are free to search for and to find the causes of natural phenomena, earthquakes, diseases, lightning and everything else without regarding them as god-sent (‘Nothing is ever created out of nothing by divine will’), and we are free to make the best we can of the only life we shall ever have. When death comes, it is nothing at all, no more fearful than looking back on the eternity of our non-being before we were born.
The humanity and kindly moderation of so much of what Epicurus had to say is best not summarized but seen in his own sayings. A few will show the man. Don’t hurry over them.
No pleasure is in itself evil, but the things that produce certain pleasures result in disturbances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.
You tell me that the stimulus of the flesh makes you too prone to the pleasures of eros. Do as you please, provided you do not break the law or defy good customs, and do not distress any of your neighbours, or harm your own body, or impoverish yourself.
Nothing satisfies him for whom enough is too little.
Poverty, when measured by the natural purposes of life, is great wealth, but unlimited wealth is great poverty.
If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not give him more money, but diminish his desires.
Let nothing be done in life that will cause you fear if it becomes known to your neighbours.
We must laugh and philosophize at the same time, and do our household duties.
We must free ourselves from the bondage of politics and public affairs.
Vain is the word of a philosopher that does not heal the sufferings of man.
Death is nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling, and that which has no feeling is nothing to us.
It is not difficult to see that the portrayal of Epicurus’ followers – as self-indulgent pleasure-seekers, satisfied with nothing but a fastidiously selected succession of sensual delights – stands the truth on its head. Step aside as far as possible from the disturbances of the world, yes. But then make your happiness depend as little as possible upon the possession of goods and their continual acquisition. Why? Because needless wealth leads to restless discontent, and it puts your happiness upon a footing that can be made precarious by others – a stock market crash, a war, a credit failure, a fire or a burglary.
So why, unlike the Stoic, is the Epicurean so falsely represented? It started with the hostility of the Stoics themselves. Both as philosophers and as men of affairs they were concerned with the performance of public duties and with action. They (particularly the Roman elite) tended to look unfavourably upon communities like the Epicureans, and later the Christians, who tried to live apart from the state and its obligations. The misrepresentation continued in the 2nd century AD and onwards with the understandable but unrelenting hostility of Christianity.
Epicureanism and Christianity were diametrically opposed at every point in their accounts of the universe, of life and of the afterlife – or lack of it. What was worse, they were not merely philosophically opposed, but were contending for followers in order to establish communities whose living precepts were, remarkable to note, not wildly different. The Epicureans were the losers. The more uncomfortable and precarious this world became, the greater the appeal to the poor, the dispossessed, the sick and the hopeless of a religion that offered eternal bliss in another world, and never mind what happens to you in this – the very proposition that the Epicureans so articulately rejected.
The ‘garden in the wilderness’ of a meaningless universe, shared with friends who have learnt to enjoy quietness and to find happiness in simple things easily possessed, is an ideal as far from being realized today as the expectations of the Christian communities that replaced them. But in some ways the Epicureans have triumphed without being noticed. Their idea of an infinite universe of matter and space, indifferent to human hopes and concerns, whose workings can be understood without reference to supernatural powers, is the scientific ethos in which we now live. We have fellow feeling with the importance Epicurus attached to happiness in this life, with his desire to diminish pain and to overcome irrational fears, and with his attempt to understand and come to terms with death – the frontier we approach just as he did, but need not reach with fear and trembling if, as Lucretius so powerfully urges, it is the gateway to nothing at all.
There is a city in south-west Asia Minor you may visit. It is Oinoanda. It is somewhat difficult to reach, tumbled by earthquakes and long abandoned by man. But inscriptions of great value have been found there. There is, for example, a complete and detailed set of regulations granted by Hadrian for the holding of a music festival in the city. It is dated 29 August in the year AD 125. Of roughly the same date, or a bit later, is an inscription originally carved on what was probably a wall of the marketplace. It was in the region of 25,000 words – by far the longest stone inscription ever contrived in Classical (or any other?) times.
An ancient Epicurean (at rear) happy with his bread and water. At front, a modern Epicurean!
This inscription was constructed on the authority and at the expense of a certain Diogenes, who must have been rich, who was by his own admission old and in ill health, who wintered on Rhodes, and who left for posterity – albeit in a shattered state, with many of the stones broken, scattered or lost – the last known Classical exposition of the Epicurean philosophy. About 6,500 words have been recovered, much of it through the exertions of Professor Martin Smith of Durham University.
As with Epicurus, so with Diogenes: it is best to let him speak for himself. Lines near the beginning have achieved a certain fame:
Having already reached the sunset of my life (being almost on the verge of departure from the world on account of age), I wanted, before being taken by death, to compose a glad song to celebrate the fulness of my happiness, and so to help now those who are well-constituted. If one person, or two, or three or four, or any large number you choose, provided it is not very large, were in a bad predicament … [I would help each as best I can]. … But now, as I have said, the most of men lie sick, as it were of a pestilence, in their false beliefs about the world, and the tale of them increases; for by imitation they take the disease from one another, like sheep. And further, it is only just to bring help to those who shall come after us – for they too are ours, though they be yet unborn; and love for man commands us also to help strangers who may pass this way.
And later:
[We contrived this inscription] … for those who are called foreigners, though they are not really so. For while the various segments of the earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country, the entire earth, and a single home, the world.
Diogenes is a little verbose, as some old men (and not a few writers on philosophy) are, but he is also kindly, and conveys a gentle message in the afternoon of a world where the shadows of false belief are already falling. His Epicurean medicine is familiar, but freshly worded:
One must regard wealth beyond what is natural as of no more use than water to a container that is overflowing.
Public speaking is full of agitation and nervousness as to whether one can pull it off.
We ought to make statues of the gods genial and smiling so that we may smile back at them rather than be afraid.
In his wildest dreams Diogenes of Oinoanda could not have imagined that almost two thousand years later those who are well-constituted would be able to read his words in diverse places throughout his hoped-for single home of the world. But his largest hope is, alas, still our hope:
We shall not achieve wisdom universally, since not all are capable of it. But if we assume it to be possible, then truly the life of the gods will pass to men. For everything will be full of justice and mutual love, and there will be no need of armaments or laws and all the things we contrive on account of fear of one another.
* * *
For those who know Greek, the Epicureans are for the most part relatively easy to read in the original. There are dozens of translations of Lucretius. A good one by W. H. D. Rouse and M. Ferguson Smith can be found in the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). A very tolerable verse translation by R. Melville is in the Oxford World’s Classics series (1999). A complete edition of the works of Epicurus and Lucretius is available in one volume: The Epicurean Philosophers, edited by John Gaskin (London, 1995). For Diogenes, see Diogenes of Oinoanda: The Epicurean Inscription by M. F. Smith (Naples, 1993).