by Will Durant
Such men made Alexandria the Vienna of the ancient medical world. But there were great schools of medicine also at Tralles, Miletus, Ephesus, Pergamum, Taras, and Syracuse. Many cities had a municipal medical service; the physicians so employed received a modest salary, but were honored for making no distinction between rich and poor, free and slave, and for devoting themselves to their work at any time and risk. Apollonius of Miletus fought the plague in near-by islands without reward; when all the doctors of Cos were laid low by an epidemic which they had labored to control, others came to their rescue from neighboring towns. Many public decrees of gratitude were issued to Hellenistic physicians; and though ancient jests railed at mercenary incompetence, the great profession kept high that standard of ethics which had come down to it from Hippocrates as its most precious inheritance.
CHAPTER XXIX
The Surrender of Philosophy
THREE strains merged in Greek philosophy: the physical, the metaphysical, and the ethical. The physical culminated in Aristotle, the metaphysical in Plato, the ethical in Zeno of Citium. The physical development ended in the separation of science from philosophy in Archimedes and Hipparchus; the metaphysical ended in the skepticism of Pyrrho and the later Academy; the ethical remained until Epicureanism and Stoicism were conquered or absorbed by Christianity.
I. THE SKEPTICAL ATTACK
Amid this spreading Hellenistic culture Athens—mother of much of it, mistress of most of it—retained her leadership in two realms: the drama and philosophy. The world was not too busy with war and revolutions, new sciences and new religions, the love of beauty and the quest of gold, to spare some time for the unanswerable but inescapable problems of truth and error, matter and mind, freedom and necessity, nobility and baseness, life and death. From all the cities of the Mediterranean young men made their way, often through a thousand hardships, to study in the halls and gardens where Plato and Aristotle had left almost living memories.
At the Lyceum the industrious Theophrastus of Lesbos carried on the empirical tradition. The Peripatetics were scientists and scholars rather than philosophers; they devoted themselves to specialist research in zoology, botany, biography, and the history of science, philosophy, literature, and law. In his thirty-four years of leadership (322-288) Theophrastus explored many fields, and published four hundred volumes dealing with almost every subject from love to war. His pamphlet “On Marriage” severely handled the female sex, and was severely handled in turn by Epicurus’ mistress Leontium, who wrote a learned and devastating reply.1 Nevertheless it is to Theophrastus that Athenaeus attributes the tender sentiment that “it is through modesty that beauty becomes beautiful.”2 Diogenes Laertius describes him as “a most benevolent man, and very affable”; so eloquent that his original name was forgotten in that which Aristotle gave him, meaning that he spoke like a god; so popular that two thousand students flocked to his lectures, and Menander was among his most faithful followers.3 Posterity preserved with especial care his book of Characters, not because it created a literary form, but because it sharply satirized the faults that all men ascribe to other men. Here is the Garrulous Man who “begins with a eulogy of his wife, relates the dream he had the night before, tells dish by dish what he had for supper,” and concludes that “we are by no means the men we were” in former times. And here is the Stupid Man who “when he goes to the play, is left at the end fast asleep in an empty house . . . after a hearty supper he has to get up in the night, returns only half awake, misses the right door, and is bitten by his neighbor’s dog.”4
One of the few events in Theophrastus’ life was the issuance of a state decree (307) requiring the Assembly’s approval in the selection of leaders for the philosophical schools. About the same time Agnonides indicted Theophrastus on the old charge of impiety. Theophrastus quietly left Athens; but so many students followed him that the storekeepers complained of a ruinous fall in trade. Within a year the decree was annulled, the indictment was withdrawn, and Theophrastus returned in triumph to preside over the Lyceum almost till his death at eighty-five. “All Athens,” we are told, attended his funeral. The Peripatetic school did not long survive him: science left impoverished Athens for affluent Alexandria, and the Lyceum, which had dedicated itself to research, subsided into a penurious obscurity.
Meanwhile Speusippus had succeeded Plato, and Xenocrates Speusippus, at the Academy. Xenocrates governed the school for a quarter of a century (339-314), and brought new credit to philosophy by the honorable simplicity of his life. Absorbed in study and teaching, he left the Academy but once a year, to see the Dionysian tragedies; when he appeared, says Laertius, “the turbulent and quarrelsome rabble of the city made way for him to pass.”5 He refused all fees, and became so poor that he was on the verge of being imprisoned for taxes when Demetrius of Phalerum paid his arrears and had him freed. Philip of Macedon said that among the many Athenian ambassadors sent to him Xenocrates was the only one who proved incorruptible. His reputation for virtue annoyed Phryne. Pretending that she was being pursued, she took refuge in his house; and seeing that he had but one bed she asked if she might share it with him. He consented, we are told, out of humane considerations; but he proved so cold to her entreaties and her charms that she fled from his bed and board, and complained to her friends that she had found a statue instead of a man.6 Xenocrates would have no mistress but philosophy.
With his death the metaphysical strain in Greek thought neared exhaustion in the very grove that had been its shrine. The successors of Plato were mathematicians and moralists, and spent little time on the abstract questions that had once agitated the Academy. The skeptical challenges of Zeno the Eleatic, the subjectivism of Heracleitus, the methodical doubt of Gorgias and Protagoras, the metaphysical agnosticism of Socrates, Aristippus, and Eucleides of Megara resumed control of Greek philosophy; the Age of Reason was over. Every hypothesis had been conceived, aired, and forgotten; the universe had preserved its secret, and men had grown weary of a search in which even the most brilliant minds had failed. Aristotle had agreed with Plato on only one point—the possibility of acquiring ultimate truth.7 Pyrrho voiced the suspicions of his time in suggesting that it was above all on this point that they had both been mistaken.
Pyrrho was born at Elis about 360. He followed Alexander’s army to India, studied under the “Gymnosophists” there, and perhaps learned from them something of the skepticism for which his name became a synonym. Returning to Elis he lived in serene poverty as a teacher of philosophy. He was too modest to write books, but his pupil Timon of Phlius, in a series of Silloi or Satires, sent Pyrrho’s opinions abroad into the world. These opinions were basically three: that certainty is unattainable, that the wise man will suspend judgment and will seek tranquillity rather than truth, and that, since all theories are probably false, one might as well accept the myths and conventions of his time and place. Neither the senses nor reason can give us sure knowledge: the senses distort the object in perceiving it, and reason is merely the sophist servant of desire. Every syllogism begs the question, for its major premise assumes its conclusion. “Every reason has a corresponding reason opposed to it”;8 the same experience may be delightful or unpleasant according to circumstance and mood; the same object may seem small or large, ugly or beautiful; the same practice may be moral or immoral according to where and when we live; the same gods are or are not, according to the different nations of mankind; everything is opinion, nothing is quite true. It is foolish, then, to take sides in disputes, or to seek some other place or mode of living, or to envy the future or the past; all desire is delusion. Even life is an uncertain good, death not a certain evil; one should have no prejudices against either of them. Best of all is a calm acceptance: not to reform the world, but to bear with it patiently; not to fever ourselves with progress, but to content ourselves with peace. Pyrrho tried sincerely to live this half-Hindu philosophy. He conformed humbly with the customs and worship of Elis, made no effort to avoid dangers or prolong his life,9 and died
at the age of ninety. His fellow citizens so approved of him that in his honor they exempted philosophers from taxation.
By the irony of time it was the followers of Plato who carried forward this attack upon metaphysics. Arcesilaus, who became head of the “Middle Academy” in 269, transformed Plato’s rejection of sense knowledge into a skepticism as complete as Pyrrho’s, and probably under Pyrrho’s influence10 “Nothing is certain,” said Arcesilaus, “not even that.”11 When he was told that such a doctrine made life impossible he answered that life had long since learned to manage with probabilities. A century later a still more vigorous skeptic took charge of the “New Academy,” and pressed the doctrine of universal doubt to the point of intellectual and moral nihilism. Carneades of Cyrene, coming to Athens like a Greek Abelard about 193, made life bitter for Chrysippus and his other teachers by arguing with galling subtlety against every doctrine that they taught. As they had undertaken to make him a logician he used to say to them (turning the tables on Protagoras): “If my reasoning is right, well and good; if it is wrong, give me back my tuition fee.”12 When he set up shop for himself he lectured one morning for an opinion, the next morning against it, proving each so well as to destroy both; while his pupils, and even his biographer, sought in vain to discover his real views. He undertook to refute the materialistic realism of the Stoics by a Platonic-Kantian critique of sensation and reason. He attacked all conclusions as intellectually indefensible, and bade his students be satisfied with probability and the customs of their time. Sent to Rome by Athens as one of an embassy (155), he shocked the Senate by speaking one day in defense of justice, and on the morrow deriding it as an impracticable dream: if Rome wished to practice justice it would have to restore to the nations of the Mediterranean all that it had taken from them by superior force.13 On the third day Cato had the embassy sent home as a danger to public morals. Perhaps Polybius, who was then a hostage with Scipio, heard these addresses or of them, for he speaks with the anger of a practical man against those philosophers
who in the discussions of the Academy have trained themselves in extreme readiness of speech. For some of them, in their efforts to puzzle the minds of their hearers, resort to such paradoxes, and are so fertile in inventing plausibilities, that they wonder whether or not it is possible for those in Athens to smell eggs roasted in Ephesus, and are in doubt whether all the time they are discussing the matter in the Academy they are not lying in their beds at home and composing this discourse in a dream. . . . From this excessive love of paradox they have brought all philosophy into disrepute. . . . They have implanted such a passion in the minds of our young men that they never give even a thought to the ethical and political qaestions that really benefit students of philosophy, but spend their lives in the vain attempt to invent useless absurdities.14
II. THE EPICUREAN ESCAPE
Though he described for many ages the theorist who loses his life in the cobwebs of speculation, Polybius was wrong in supposing that moral problems had lost their lure for the Greek mind. It was precisely the ethical strain that in this period replaced the physical and the metaphysical as the dominant note in philosophy. Political problems were indeed in abeyance, for freedom of speech was harassed by the presence or memory of royal garrisons, and national liberty was implicitly understood to depend upon quiescence. The glory of the Athenian state had departed, and philosophy had to face what to Greece was an unprecedented divorce between politics and ethics. It had to find a way of life at once forgivable to philosophy and compatible with political impotence. Therefore it conceived its problem no longer as one of building a just state, but as that of forming the selfcontained and contented individual.
The ethical development now took two opposite directions. One followed the lead of Heracleitus, Socrates, Antisthenes, and Diogenes, and expanded the Cynic into the Stoic philosophy; the other stemmed from Democritus, leaned heavily on Aristippus, and drew out the Cyrenaic into the Epicurean creed. Both of these philosophical compensations for religious and political decay came from Asia: Stoicism from Semitic pantheism, fatalism, and resignation; Epicureanism from the pleasure-loving Greeks of the Asiatic coast.
Epicurus was born at Samos in 341. At twelve he fell in love with philosophy; at nineteen he went to Athens and spent a year at the Academy. Like Francis Bacon he preferred Democritus to Plato and Aristotle, and took from him many bricks for his own construction. From Aristippus he learned the wisdom of pleasure, and from Socrates the pleasure of wisdom; from Pyrrho he took the doctrine of tranquillity, and a ringing word for it—ataraxia. He must have watched with interest the career of his contemporary Theodoras of Cyrene, who preached an unmoralistic atheism so openly in Athens that the Assembly indicted him for impiety15—a lesson that Epicurus did not forget. Then he returned to Asia and lectured on philosophy at Colophon, Mytilene, and Lampsacus. The Lampsacenes were so impressed with his ideas and his character that they felt qualms of selfishness in keeping him in so remote a city; they raised a fund of eighty minas ($4000), bought a house and garden on the outskirts of Athens, and presented it to Epicurus as his school and his home. In 306, aged thirty-five, Epicurus took up his residence there, and taught to the Athenians a philosophy that was Epicurean in name only. It was a sign of the growing freedom of women that he welcomed them to his lectures, even into the little community that lived about him. He made no distinctions of station or race; he accepted courtesans as well as matrons, slaves as well as freemen; his favorite pupil was his own slave, Mysis. The courtesan Leontium became his mistress as well as his pupil, and found him as jealous a mate as if he had secured her by due process of law. Under his influence she had one child and wrote several books, whose purity of style did not interfere with her morals.16
For the rest Epicurus lived in Stoic simplicity and prudent privacy. His motto was lathe biosas—“live unobtrusively.” He took part dutifully in the religious ritual of the city, but kept his hands clear of politics, and his spirit free from the affairs of the world. He was content with water and a little wine, bread and a little cheese. His rivals and enemies charged that he gorged himself when he could, and became abstemious only when overeating had ruined his digestion. “But those who speak thus are all wrong,” Diogenes Laertius assures us; and he adds: “There are many witnesses of the unsurpassable kindness of the man to everybody—both his own country, which honored him with statues, and his friends, who were so numerous that they could not be contained in whole cities.”17 He was devoted to his parents, generous to his brothers, and gentle to his servants, who joined with him in philosophical studies.18 His pupils looked upon him, says Seneca, as a god among men; and after his death their motto was: “Live as though the eye of Epicurus were upon thee.”
Between his lessons and his loves he wrote three hundred books. The ashes of Herculaneum preserved for us some fragments of his central work, On Nature; Diogenes Laertius, the Plutarch of philosophy, handed down three of his letters, and late discoveries have added a few more. Above all, Lucredus enshrined the thought of Epicurus in the greatest of philosophical poems.
Perhaps already conscious that Alexander’s conquest was letting loose upon Greece a hundred mystic cults from the East, Epicurus begins with the arresting proposition that the aim of philosophy is to free men from fear—more than anything else, from the fear of gods. He dislikes religion because, he thinks, it thrives on ignorance, promotes it, and darkens life with the terror of celestial spies, relentless furies, and endless punishments. The gods exist, says Epicurus, and enjoy, in some far-off space among the stars, a serene and deathless life; but they are too sensible to bother with the affairs of so infinitesimal a species as mankind. The world is not designed, nor is it guided, by them; how could such divine Epicureans have created so middling a universe, so confused a scene of order and disorder, of beauty and suffering?19 If this disappoints you, Epicurus adds, console yourself with the thought that the gods are too remote to do you any more harm than good. They cannot watch you, they cannot judge y
ou, they cannot plunge you into hell. As for evil gods, or demons, they are the unhappy fantasies of our dreams.
Having rejected religion, Epicurus goes on to reject metaphysics. We can know nothing of the suprasensual world; reason must confine itself to the experience of the senses, and must accept these as the final test of truth. All the problems that Locke and Leibnitz were to debate two thousand years later are here settled with one sentence: if knowledge does not come from the senses, where else can it come from? And if the senses are not the ultimate arbiter of fact, how can we find such a criterion in reason, whose data must be taken from the senses?
Nevertheless the senses give us no certain knowledge of the external world; they catch not the objective thing itself, but only the tiny atoms thrown off by every part of its surface, and leaving upon our senses little replicas of its nature and form. If, therefore, we must have a theory of the world (and really it is not altogether necessary), we had better accept Democritus’ view that nothing exists, or can be known to us, or can even be imagined by us, except bodies and space; and that all bodies are composed of indivisible and unchangeable atoms. These atoms have no color, temperature, sound, taste, or smell; such qualities are created by the corpuscular radiations of objects upon our sense organs. But the atoms do differ in size, weight, and form; for only by this supposition can we account for the infinite variety of things. Epicurus would like to explain the operation of the atoms on purely mechanical principles; but as he is interested in ethics far more than in cosmology, and is anxious to preserve free will as the source of moral responsibility and the prop of personality, he abandons Democritus in mid-air, and supposes a kind of spontaneity in the atoms: they swerve a bit from the perpendicular as they fall through space, and so enter into the combinations that make the four elements, and through them the diversity of the objective scene.20 There are innumerable worlds, but it is unwise to interest ourselves in them. We may assume that the sun and the moon are about as large as they appear to be, and then we can give our time to the study of man.