In Our Time - Epicureanism

Episode Date: February 7, 2013

Angie Hobbs, David Sedley and James Warren join Melvyn Bragg to discuss Epicureanism, the system of philosophy based on the teachings of Epicurus and founded in Athens in the fourth century BC. Epicurus outlined a comprehensive philosophical system based on the idea that everything in the Universe is constructed from two phenomena: atoms and void. At the centre of his philosophy is the idea that the goal of human life is pleasure, by which he meant not luxury but the avoidance of pain. His followers were suspicious of marriage and politics but placed great emphasis on friendship. Epicureanism became influential in the Roman world, particularly through Lucretius's great poem De Rerum Natura, which was rediscovered and widely admired in the Renaissance.With:Angie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of SheffieldDavid Sedley Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of CambridgeJames Warren Reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of CambridgeProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1819, the retired American President Thomas Jefferson wrote to his former secretary, giving a revealing account of his personal philosophy. I too am an Epicurean, he said. I consider the genuine doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. Epicureanism was one of the major philosophical schools of ancient Greece. It was founded in the 4th century BC by Epicurus, an Athenian who taught that the aim of human life was pleasure. His followers were wary of politics and religion, cast off their fear of death and stressed the importance of friendship.

Epicurean ideas were a major influence or Renaissance thinkers and offered a radical view of the universe that anticipated far later scientific discoveries such as Darwinian evolution and even quantum mechanics. With me to discuss Epicureanism are Angie Hobbes, Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. David Sedley, Lawrence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and James Warren, reader in ancient philosophy also at the University of Cambridge. Angie Hobbes, would you begin by telling us about who Epicurus was and what's known about him? Yes, he seems to have been a very likable, even lovable man.

He was born in 341 BC on the island of Seamus, and he died in 270 BC in Athens. As a young man, he studied under a follower of Democritus, who was, of course, one of the founders of the atomic theory. And that was clearly going to be the basis of his future thought. When he was 18, he moves to Athens for two years to do the compulsory military service. And then he spent about 15 years travelling around the eastern Mediterranean, teaching and setting up his own philosophical circles. Then when he's 34, he comes back to Athens, buys a house, and then he's 134. the even more famous garden and sets up this philosophical community of friends, including women and slaves. And there they live this very simple life. Epicura says that cheese is enough to turn

bread and water into a feast. He treasures his friendships. He doesn't seem to have married or had children himself. And he writes prodigiously. He worked very, very hard in this garden. We apparently there were 300 scrolls that he left. So he wrote on physics, astronomy, ethics, psychology, theory of knowledge, theory of language. So enormously prodigious output. You mentioned the garden twice for listeners to know how significant the garden was. His philosophical school was known as the garden. Yes, yes.

I don't know if they did any actual gardening. You began there, but can you give us even more information about the range of his philosophical concerns. Okay, so the primary natural good is pleasure and pleasure is the only thing that's good in itself and it's the criterion by which we judge the value of absolutely everything else, including virtue even. The maximum of pleasure is reached when we attain a state of tranquility where we're free from. bodily pain and free from mental cares and anxieties, particularly religious superstitions about divine retribution and the fear of death.

We'll be coming to that in a moment, but I was thinking of the range in terms of he seems of studied physics and astronomy and written about a great number of different subjects. Yes, we've got his, there are remnants of his work on nature in which he talks about the physics. We have, he also touches on that in his, one of his, one of his, his letters, we've got the ethics which we have in his letter to Menoicius, we've got astronomy in the letter to Pythocles, we've got the canon on epistemology, yes, an enormous, an enormous range.

But the centre of it was this pleasure that you were then talking about. James Warren, how much of Epicure's work has survived and in what form? Why do we know so much about him? We're very fortunate in the case of Epicurus because perhaps unusually compared with some of his contemporaries some complete works of his have survived. Angie's already mentioned these letters, letters to friends, that set out, there are three of them that we have that are complete, that set out in summary his major teachings in physics and theory of knowledge,

in natural philosophy and cosmology and then ethics. Those come down to us because they were cited in full by a later ancient writer who wrote biographies of the philosophers, He was called Diogenes Laertius. And they've survived through the standard means of transmission by which these ancient works come down to us. They were copied through later antiquity, through the Renaissance and so on.

We also have works by various Epicurean followers, perhaps most prominently the complete poem by the Roman poet Lucretius that was written in the first century BC that also came down in that similar transmission tradition. But for Epicureanism, we also, are fortunate, to have two very unusual sources of evidence. So first of all, we have a more or less preserved library

that was owned by a, must have been a very rich Roman senator, in his villa just outside Herculaneum in southern Italy. Now, this was covered in the eruption of 79 AD, and the scrolls of papyrus were carbonized and preserved in that way, and they were discovered in the 17th century. So this is a case of direct transmission of ancient texts. and this library contained some more texts of Epicurus that we didn't otherwise have, but also text by other Epicureans, perhaps later Epicureans, including someone like Philidemus,

that we'll perhaps talk about later. The second unusual case is an enormous wall from southwest Turkey that was set up sometime probably in the middle of the second century AD by a well-meaning citizen of the town who decided what his townspeople really needed was an 80-meter-long, three-and-a-half-meter-tall wall inscribed with various of epicurist teachings and indeed his own epicurean thoughts on the world. And how did that survive?

It's already astonishing that lava and that Vesuvius, his work turned out to have great benefits in that case, and we may find... But how did the wall survive? Well, it survives in fragments. It's not there intact, and various painstaking efforts have been made to try and excavate and then re-eathing. and reconstruct what we have.

Some of it was reused, and you can go to the village and see bits of it on the floor still lying down. So we're very fortunate in that it hasn't been more disturbed than it is. His philosophical system was it, was it founded on the idea that everything we see consists of atoms? If so, where did it get it from and where did it lead him to? Yes, his physical system sets out with the idea that everything in the world is either a body or it's void

or it's some combination of these two. This isn't novel with him. There were people 100 and so years before him, including Democritus that I think we've already mentioned, who may have originated this idea. But we have, from Epicurus, the first detailed exposition of his argument for this view. And it's rather interesting.

He sets out from the idea that our senses tell us that there are bodies in the world. There's no doubt about that. And they also tell us that there must be void, because otherwise there'd be nowhere for the bodies to be and the bodies wouldn't be able to move because everything would be full up and there'd be no motion possible.

If you add to this two other thoughts, the first that nothing can come to be out of nothing and the second that nothing ever disappears entirely out of nothing, plus the idea that we see things around us change and grow and decay, the idea is that those things that we see around us can't be these fundamental bodies, they must be made up of further tiny, individual, bodies of which there are

innumerable numbers of them. They've lasted forever. The void goes on forever spatially and temporally. And our cosmos just happens to be a collection of them that's around at the moment. It seems, David Seller, this idea of discovering items by thinking that it was like a, rather than by any examination, obviously no microscopes, obviously none of the

machinery, as it were, technology of the last three or four hundred years, is an astonishing active thought, isn't it? But he had this atomic, he thought that there were a great number of atoms. Did you think there were an infinite number or a finite number? And they swerved around, they collided with each other, and they made up everything.

They made up the gods, they made up the humans, they made up everything. And therefore there was no division between the gods and the humans. Well, you're right, yes, there's a lot in that. First of all, yes, there are infinitely many atoms moving around in infinite space. space must be infinite because it seems simply to be in coherence

suppose that space could come to an end the question arises of what would mark the end wouldn't there be something beyond it to mark it given that space is infinite the atoms must be infinitely many as well because if there were only finitely many atoms in an infinite void then they would be infinitely thinly distributed so they'd never come together to form a world like ours

but given that there are infinitely many atoms in infinite void it's entirely possible for what we see it have happened have happened, namely that they've come together into complex patterns of motion, which produce worlds like ours. But given that the atoms obey what could be called with the later phraseology, laws of gravity, and moving in the way they are, he hit on a problem, as I understand it, from reading what you should be written,

where does that leave free will? If these things are predetermined and whizzing around on predetermined causes, causes, sorry, what does that mean for free will? Right, this was, here we have a major, difference between Epicurus and Democritus. Democritus had insisted that everything changes as a result of upwards causation from the bottom up

and mechanically determine motions of atoms. They bounce off each other in certain regular patterns. Everything that happens is predetermined by the laws of physics. It's like the billiard ball universe that later became familiar. And Epicurus, who though he was an enormous admirer of democracy, And indeed, as a young man, he called himself a democratian. But he said that democratists had unwittingly gone wrong here

because he created the problem of determinism without realizing its consequences. Epicurist's objective, that can't be right because if democracy was right, we would all just be helpless spectators of our own body's actions, and those actions would be predetermined for the rest of our lives. That would make morality impossible, and it was simply conflict with our experience, which tells us that we and perhaps other animals too are capable of initiating genuinely new courses of motion. So Epicurus concluded that determinism, as described by democracies,

simply cannot be true. How does one get out of determinism? Answer, there must be at least a minimal degree of indeterminism. And Epicurus introduced this famous, but I should also say notorious doctrine, the swerve. That is the doctrine that an atom, when traveling in a straight line, may at no predictable place or time very, very slightly, just to a minimal degree, change its course.

And this means that although there's still overwhelming regularity in nature, there's just a fractional deviation which can't be predicted. And this is enough to determine that the laws of physics alone are not sufficient to predetermine everything that happens. And somehow that is meant to leave room for something like what we would call free will. It's a huge question whether actually the idea of atomic indeterminacy helps to explain free will, and that's an interpretive problem that's still with us. But if I could just add, the problem of explaining how a degree of indeterminacy in the motion of atoms can help to account for free will

recurred in the most fascinating way after the long reign of Newtonian physics. In 1928, when Heisenberg published his uncertainty principle, it turned out that Epicurus was basically right. there is at the subatomic level a small degree of genuine unpredictability and indeterminacy. And scientists and philosophers threw up their hands in relief and said at last we can go back to believing in free will

because determinism turns out not to be true. But when they came down to the question, how does determinacy in, let's say, the motion of a given electron at a given time, how does that actually help to explain free will? Exactly the same problems arose as a rise in the interpretation of Epicurus.

I love it. From Epicurus Heisenberg in one elegant sentence. Terrific. And Angie Hobbes. What's epicure's view of how we can come to knowledge about the world? Okay, so we need to emphasise again that absolutely everything is composed of atoms in void, including our souls and our minds, absolutely everything. So it's a mechanistic theory, it's an empiricist theory, and it has a basic trust in human sensation.

and a denial of mind-body dualism. So Epicure says, we all have sensations, and he asserts, as far as I can see without argument, though David and James might correct me here, that the causes of these sensations must come from things outside the sensations themselves. What are these things that cause our sensations? And he says, well, there are these very thin atomic films, which are usually effluences from the surface of physical objects,

though not always, but usually, which float off from those surfaces and enter into our bodies, enter into our sense organs. Then through a complex process, which we can return to if we want, that sort of filmic input is converted into what we call a sense, impression, a fantasia. Now, the fantasia is an accurate and true report, and the same word in Greek, Alifazes, means both accurate or true and real. It's an accurate and true report of the atomic films at the stage they are when they enter our bodies. And we're accurate about our

impressions of those films when they enter our eyes or ears. And this film is. This is emanations from, say, that bottle of water in front of me. Exactly. But that does not mean to say that the films which enter our sense organs are exactly in the same state as they were when they left the physical body. Because it might have been some distance away and the intervening medium, air or water, might have altered the atomic structure. So what we can say for sure is that our sense impressions accurately report the films as they enter us. There's still a plenty of room for error in how we interpret those sense impressions with the mind, and we can get all sorts of things wrong.

We may not realise that the straight wall in water is going to appear bent to us over the distance. we may have become confused and think that the rainbow is actually represents a solid object that we could slide down or that the mirage really does indicate a pool of water that we can drink from. So there's plenty of room for error at that stage, but not at the stage of the sense impressions themselves. James Warren, can we take many Greek philosophers with sceptics and they believed that in a sense it was impossible really to,

to know anything. How does that play, if I can use a disgraceful really word, come thinking of it, with what Angie's been saying? Well, the way Angie's explained it is Epicurus' his physical doctrine of perception and how that might bolster his confidence in the way our senses were. And in the way we gather knowledge. That's right. That's the track we're on at the moment.

But you're quite right that for a long time, various Greek philosophers, in fact, most Greek philosophers would have been skeptics of one stripe or another. They vary from people who say we can't know anything at all to people who say on occasion our senses might be a little wonky and not quite tell us the truth. Now, let's remember that at some point in his establishment of atomic theory, Epikycus has relied on the senses. He said our senses tell us that there are bodies in the world

and they tell us that things move. So to better not be solely on the basis of that atomic theory that he then tells us that's why we can rely on our senses because otherwise there'd be something of an argumentative circle there. So he goes on the attack against the sceptics. He says really, if you look at how a sceptic lives their life, they don't really disbelieve what their senses tell them. No one really doesn't leave a room by the door

or walks out into the road in front of moving traffic because they really don't believe the way that their eyes are telling them things look. So he has a pragmatic attack on the sceptics. he also takes on their various arguments because some of them are based on the supposition that two sense impressions might conflict and if two sense impressions conflict these sceptics argue they can't both be true

so at least one of them is false and if we can't tell which is false then we ought to be careful which ones we believe in To come back just to help and then please go on one of Angie's examples of the ore in the water we know it's a straight blade of wood going into the water but we see it as a bent wood in the water that's right and you might take

that as a suggestion that at least one of our senses must be telling us something that's not true. One of our senses tells us it's bent and the other one says it's not. But Epicure says if you think carefully they're not really conflicting. It really does look bent. At least the part of it that enters the water as we would

say the light refracts makes it look bent. But if you run your finger along it, it would feel straight. But these don't conflict. It looks one way and feels the other. There's no logical conflict between those two. David Sedley, Central goal of his life, according to Epicurus, is pleasure.

This is the thing that most people remember, and you began to talk about it. Earlier on, what did he mean when he used the word pleasure? And why, and let's just start with that. What did he mean by when he used the word pleasure? Well, Epicurus is not really into definitions, so we don't expect him to answer your question, as Plato would have done with a definition. Rather, he says, pleasure is an immediate date of experience from birth.

every human newborn infant, probably every other animal as well, from the moment of birth, recognises pleasure as the good and pain as the bad. So he says it's as obvious what pleasure is and what its value is as it is that snow is cold and that fire is hot. None of that needs justification. But what Epicurus, so what he contributes to beyond that is a much gradually refined idea of, of what kinds of pleasure there are and what their relative values are. And that's how his hedonist system

is going to be built up. So if I could just elaborate a bit, the familiar notion of pleasure, the one that everyone experiences from birth is positive sensory stimulation of a welcome kind and pain is as a negative sensory stimulation of a certain kind. That's what we start from.

And Epicurus calls those, has a technical term for it, he calls them kinetic pleasures. But what is not initially clear but becomes clear is that actually the simple removal of pain is itself a kind of pleasure because although the process, let's take drinking, suppose though the process of quenching thirst is itself a pleasure because you're drinking,

the pleasure, sorry, I should say the state of having your thirst now quenched so that you're not in pain in that respect is itself a pleasant state, not only is it a pleasant state, but the remarkable claim he makes, which I owned him a good deal of criticism from other schools, is that it is as pleasant as a kinetic pleasure. He calls these static pleasures,

and there are two kinds. There's the static pleasure of not being any bodily pain. If you're not hungry or thirsty or cold, then you are in a state of static pleasure. and what most people think quite incorrectly, according to Epicurus, is that you can further enhance that state by adding, for example, luxury. So if you already had enough to eat, if you have a box of chocolates as well, most people would think you've added an extra pleasure, a kinetic one,

and that increased some total of pleasure. Not so, according to Epicurus, what the additional pleasures do, the glass of port after dinner or the chocolate, is vary your state of pleasure, but they don't actually increase it. I think this is his, although this is counterintuitive, it's his way of putting a point that's often put in popular thought by saying that being rich doesn't make you happy, it just enables you to be miserable in comfort.

Merely adding, people think that you can have the pleasantest life simply by accumulating as many kinetic pleasures as possible, one luxury after another. Actually, the height of pleasure is achieved when all the pain has gone. Now, I just have to add one more distinction, which is of great importance to him. we've so far been talking about bodily pleasures and those are the ones through which we learn the nature of pleasure

but the ones that are really important are mental pleasures mental pleasures are superior partly because with your mind you can enjoy all your past pleasures and all your future pleasures you can look forward you can reminisce so the mind is a much more powerful source of pleasure than the body Moreover, the most pleasant state that you could possibly achieve would be one of mental painlessness.

If you get rid of all the fears you have, the fear of God, the fear of death, any fear of pain, any other fears of what the world can throw at you, then you are in the highest state of pleasure. And that is really the essence of epic, or the basis from which he develops his account of a good life. Angiard, can you take that on? I mean, how do he set about it?

obtaining these pleasures? Well, this is where the connections are between the different aspects of Epicurus' writing are so important because he's going to make it very clear that though the goal of his philosophy is this life of pleasure conceived as freedom from care, you can only attain that if you understand the nature of things, if you understand the physical structure of the universe and the nature of the gods and that if you understand that the gods have no control over our lives, have no control over what happens after our deaths,

because our deaths are simply going to be the dispersal of our souls and death is going to be nothing to us. Once you've come to understand those things, then you can set about achieving contentment and satisfaction in this life without worrying about what the gods have in store for you. Now, of course, many people have not felt, that Epicurus has got rid of the fear of death by saying we're going to be obliterated at death,

but he thought he had. So reason and understanding are crucial here, and so are the virtues. The virtues, as we've seen, are not good in themselves. They're good as means to the life of tranquility. So prudence, self-control, courage, these are all things that are going to help us

understand the nature of things. Do the hedonic calculus, weigh up the pleasures and pains in our own life. So we might accept a short-term pain and to get a long-term greater good and avoid a short-term good because we think it would bring us a greater long-term pain. And also in order to help us deal with pain

and evil and suffering in the right way and to understand that if they can be born with fortitude and as David was saying, we always have recourse to memory of people. past pleasures, and if you think you're going to live, you have the anticipation of future ones. So in all these ways, we can use our rational understanding and our virtues to help us achieve this life. It's a very self-disciplined life. It's not remotely the sybaritic excess of indulgence that it was later portrayed as by Christians and others.

Before I turn to James Warren, just to put a little piece, if I may, to what you're saying, Angie. He doesn't think that the gods have anything much to do with us because they must be successfully happy and why would they want to bother with us lot if they were happy because we'd give them nothing but trouble. Exactly. He says you've got to choose. You've got this view that the gods live this life of utter blessedness and peace and freedom from care.

And then you've also got this view that the gods are concerned with human affairs and bother about rewards and punishments. You can't have both. Which is the most important belief? And he says surely the crux of your belief is, that the gods are supremely, blessedly, happy and peaceful. So they're not going to bother with messy old humans. Well, back to the messy old humans here.

James, Warren, would you explain the importance of friendship in Epicureanism, which caught a lot of people's attention and pancy for centuries? That's right. So it's obvious that friendship played an important part in the way the Epicurean community was structured. And also Epicure's place is a great stress on friendship as, one of those sources of mental pleasures that David was talking about, that having friends to talk to, to discuss philosophy with, to chat over dinner is going to be one way in which you can maintain your mental tranquility

and feel happy about your own lives. Some people have found that there might be a problem with this, though, because as we've been developing his view of the good life, the idea seems to be that each person should be doing their best to structure their lives and their desires and their best, beliefs and so on, in order to make sure that they live a life that's as pain-free as possible and as full of pleasure as possible. Now, people's friendships differ, obviously, but sometimes it seems that friendships involve putting yourself out on behalf of a friend. And some people

have worried whether Epicurus can make room for a genuine sense of altruism within his, what seems like, an egoistic, hedonistic recipe for an individual's happiness. There's some evidence, I think, that some of the ancient Epicureans felt some pressure to give an account of this too. There's a sequence of thoughts in a work by Cicero, who is no friend of Epicurus, where he relates various possible stories that Epicureans came up with about how to make room for friendship within their good life. Some of them say, well, perhaps you start out in a sort of contract with a friend. I agree to help you out when you need help and you agree to help me out

and we need help and we both benefit. But over time, perhaps, a genuine sense of other regard might develop. Whatever you think about that, it's clear that the Epicureans do want to say that there's some genuine positive hedonic value, a genuine pleasure to be had in genuine friendship, in having that confidence that your friends are there when you need them, and engaging in the kinds of activities that friends do for one another.

That's part and parcel of how they will see a good, human life. David Sedley, Epicurus encapsulated his core beliefs in a formulation known as tetrafarmacos. Is that how you pronounce it? That is correct, yes. Right. What does that word mean? It means the fourfold remedy, and it's actually a metaphor borrowed from medicine. There really was a kind of medicine with four ingredients known as the tetrafaracost,

but Epicurus adapted it to the idea that philosophy is also a kind of medicine, namely the medicine. of the soul. And Epicurus devoted a large part of his ethical writing to attempts to show how we can actually memorize and master the principles which will heal the soul and heal it above all of fear, because fear of death and fear of God, he thinks these are the two great things that blight our lives. And here's how it goes. God holds no fears, death holds no worries. And while good can easily be attained, so too evil can readily be endured. Now, all of the content of that has already been covered by things we've said, but I'll just very briefly say what they are.

God is not to be feared. That's because, as Angie has explained, once you understand the true divine nature, you realise no divine being would take an interest in you, let alone be malevolent towards you. The death holds no worry as well. This is because the whole battery of arguments designed to show that, since the human soul is simply made of atoms.

When the body is destroyed, the soul will be dissipated with it. There is no survival of death. Therefore, death is non-existence. Non-existence is not to be feared because you can't experience it. You're not there to experience it. So that's the second item. The third one, good can easily be attained. That's because all you have to do in order to achieve Epicurean pleasure

is to satisfy your basic natural and necessary desires. and those are very easily satisfied. And all that leaves is the one that we haven't really touched on much, which is evil can be endured. That's to say pain can be endured, because that's the one remaining fear an Epicurean is in danger of having. What if I suffer an illness with intense pain? The answer is that there are strategies for enduring pain.

Epicure is on his own deathbed described in a letter he wrote, intense pain he was suffering, but he said that was completely outweighed by the pleasure he got in reliving past conversation, with his friends. So that's one of the strategies. You use the power of memory to overcome bodily pain. And the other is this is something on which Epicurus has not been found generally convincing,

at least in modern times, although he had his ancient admirers on the point. Severe pain can be endured because it doesn't last long. Mild pains are tolerable anyway. If the pain is severe enough, it'll be short-lived. presumably what he means, it'll kill you. So you can deal with that as long as you realise that you're going to pass very quickly to a state of painlessness.

James Warren, what competing philosophical systems existed at that time? Was he a... Well, that's a question. Well, in Athens of his day, there were still followers of Plato about of various sorts in the academy. Aristotle's school was still a going concern,

the Lyceum. then perhaps a generation after Epicureus, Stoicism came on the scene. Again, a philosophy drawing its inspiration from Socrates, like many others of the time, but that became perhaps its major competitor for the remainder of the Hellenistic period and on into the Roman world. Stoicism in many ways is quite different from Epicureus on all major philosophical topics. So they believe that our world is unique, and it's governed thoroughly and maintained by a rational divine force

that makes sure everything is for the best. They stressed the importance of living virtuously in harmony with this cosmic nature rather than living for pleasure and so on. So in many ways, the Epicureans and they were easy to set against one another in terms of debates or in terms of discussions. There are also various kinds of skeptics still on the same. seen, urging us not to form knowledge because it's much too difficult and we can never

be sure about the world. Can we, David Sedley, can we just talk about how his influence, how his teachings moved through from 300 BC into the Roman age and what it encounters, what it takes to itself and so on? Well, the Epicureans were regarded in their own day. as very conservative in the sense that they were thought to be a very committed to the word of the founder of the school. It wasn't actually just Epicurus, but Epicurus and his three leading associates,

Polyinus, Metrodorus and Hermachus, their words were treated as kind of canonical. So the outside perception was that the school didn't really adapt very much. It simply went back to the Epicurean Gospels. But the reality is very different from that. It did actually, it moved into the Roman. world, particularly around, starting around 100 BC, the power of Rome in the Mediterranean had grown, Athens, which had been where the centre for philosophical schools was in decline.

And Philodemus, who James mentioned earlier, is a very good example of the way that Epicureanism adapted itself to the Roman world. Philodemus had studied and lived and worked in Athens, but at some time in the early first century BC, he moved westwards set up a school in the Naples region, this was probably at Herculaneum, and that was a very well-chosen spot because it was where wealthy and powerful Romans went to spend their leisure time,

Campania, the area around Naples. And there he won the ear of many influential Romans, for example, Paiso, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and Virgil, the poets, had Epicurean backgrounds in the Naples region at that time. So we could get a very clear sign of not only of Epicureanism adapting to different geopolitical circumstances, but also adapting itself to the cultural interests of the Roman world. Philademus wrote many works on aesthetics, for example, which had not been a preoccupation of the early school.

His most important influence was Angie Hobbes, was that on Lucretius, If so, why? Well, I don't know why Lucretius felt that Epicurist spoke specifically to him. But yes, de Rerum Natura on the nature of things is your work of genius, I think. I mean, Cicero, who, as we've heard, is no friend of Epicureanism, but he said it has elements of genius in it, of it, calls it sublime. I mean, it is the most fabulous hexameter poem, the power of its imagery,

the vividness of the depictions of human fears of death and anxious human squabbles over power and wealth. He really, really moves you to want the kind of salvation that he believes Epicurus is offering. Is he paying tribute to Epicurus throughout this poem? Do we know? Oh, yes, no, no question about it. I mean, he treats Epicurus, I would say, as a quasi.

He says he was a god. A God. I mean, of course, that's a loaded thing to say, given what the Epicureans felt about the gods. So it's no surprise to me that when the Renaissance, as we're hearing probably in a bit, rediscovers Epicureanism, it does so through Lucretius.

It's a poem that really grabs you. And the rhythm and the cadences of, its verse. Talking about the nature of things. Yes, absolutely. They're talking about everything really. Yes, I mean, it is, yes. And also the power of the arguments.

And we owe to Lucretius our understanding of certain key elements of Epicureanism. He may well have, I'm sure he did get them from Epicurean texts which are lost to us, but we only know about the swerve that we were hearing about earlier, which may or may not create a space for free will. We only know about that from Lucreanism.

The intricate mechanism whereby the images, the filmic, atomic films that enter our sense organs get transformed into sense impressions, that that very intricate mechanism is from Lucretius. Did the arrival, did the growth and arrival and spread of Christianity have an effect on Epicureanism? It's hard to tell whether it had an effect on. Epicureanism, but they weren't, I think, comfortable bedfellows. It's very hard to see much common ground between these two views of the world or views of human condition. We've already touched on more than once the idea that Epicure says we should be made confident not in the knowledge that this life is all that we have and when you die, that's it, that's annihilation

and that's a good thing for you to come to terms with. And God will not, do not interfere in human affairs. That's another difference. They don't interfere in human affairs, they didn't create the world, there is no retribution for doing wrong, there's no reward for doing right in this life. So every basic tenet of Christianity. More or less. It was challenged Epicureanism on the other way around.

Absolutely. There are many other ancient philosophies that are much more friendly to that kind of Christian outlook. Platonism, for example, had a much easier ride. Did this, therefore, was this one of the main factors in the ebbing of the influence of everything? Epicureus at that time in the early years of the AD years. I think it's quite possible.

I mean, we know that nevertheless, various ancient texts that talk about Epicureanism continued to be copied and read, otherwise we might not have had them at all. But there was, I think, an unease dealing with Epicurean thought. I've got to push forward about 1,000 or 1,200 years just for the final question. When did Epicureanism re-emerge in the... the West in the knowledge bank, as it were, and become effective again. Can we go around the table? Start with you, Angela. In 1417, Podgio, who was a former papal secretary of the now disgraced Pope John

23rd, had time on his hands, and he went travelling in Germany, visiting the German monasteries, searching for the pagan texts that were his private hobby. And we think in the Benedictine Abbey of Fulder, he just by chance pulled down a copy of of De Rarim Dutura, which had been gathering dust for hundreds of years. And he was the man who reintroduced it into the West. And initially, there was a very interesting debate, actually, between Christians and followers of Epicurus about whether Epicureanism could be assimilated into the Christian faith, and Moore and Erasmus have a very fascinating discussion about that.

But it's really with the rise of the new science at the end of the 16th and in the 17th centuries, that you get the philosopher scientists like Bacon, Galileo, Gassendi in France, thinking that Epicureanism was extremely congenial to the mechanistic theories of the universe that they were developing.

James Warren, do you want to add to that? No, but I would add just that even in the 17th century when there was more of an interest, perhaps as a result of Gassendi's commentaries on Dajunis Lershus and so on, even then I think there was an attempt to try to accommodate some idea of divine causation in our cosmos within the Epicurean system. So they weren't going to revive this wholesale. There were still qualms that were strong enough that meant that they really had to qualify what was the unadulterated Epicurean worldview.

Yeah, I mean, Gassendi says that God created the atoms and God has ordained all the movements of the... Attenes. David Tedley. Well, not much to add to what's just been said, but it is worth saying that Gassonde who's just been mentioned is a particularly important figure because not only is he a leading scientific and philosophical thinker of the 17th century,

but he was also a scholar of Epicurean text, and he brought the two together as no one previously had managed to do. Well, thank you very much, Angie Hobbs, James Warren and David Sedley. And next week we'll be talking about Ice Ages. Thank you for listening. There are many more

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