EPICURUS. 



FROM B. C. 341 TO B. C. 270. 



PART I. LIFE. 



EPICURUS was born in the third year of the hundred and ninth Olym- Epicurus, 

 piad, seven years after the death of Plato. His birthplace was the B c rn 3 41> 

 island of Samos, to which his father had removed as a colonist from 

 Athens. This did not prevent Epicurus from being considered an 

 Athenian by birth, and as belonging to the deme Gargettus and the 

 tribe J^geis. Although the family would seem to have been origi- His parents, 

 nally not without distinction, his parents were in rather indigent cir- 

 cumstances. His father, Neocles, is said to have been a schoolmaster, 

 and his mother, Chcerestrate, to have practised arts of magic. It was 

 afterwards made a matter of reproach to Epicurus that while young, 

 when his mother went about among the cottages performing purifica- 

 tions, he had accompanied her and read the formula of incantaton ; 

 and that he had assisted his father to keep a school at very low te r ms. 

 He had three brothers, Neocles, Chceredemus, and Aristobulus, w horn 

 Plutarch cites as models of the rarest fraternal affection. 



Epicurus lived at Samos and Teos to the age of eighteen, when he Visits 

 repaired to Athens. Xenocrates was then teaching in the Academy, Athens - 

 and Theophrastus, the successor of Aristotle, in the Lyceum, and it is 

 probable that Epicurus may have been a pupil of one or both ; for we His masters 

 are told that he had begun the study of philosophy at the age of ^^Jo- 

 fourteen, and had received lessens in Samos from Pamphilus, a Plato- 

 nist. A number of other philosophers are mentioned, by various 

 authors, as having been at one time or other his instructors ; but he 

 himself used to boast that he was self-taught. Of the older philoso- 

 phers he was most attached to Anaxagoras and Democritus. The 

 writings of Democritus are said to have first attracted him to the 

 study of philosophy ; and his system of physics is evidently built upon 

 the atomic speculations of Democritus. 



His stay at Athens on this occasion was short: the troubles in 

 Attica that followed the death of Alexander caused him to remove 

 first to Colophon, and then to Mitylene and Lampsacus. It was at opens school 

 Mitylene, in his thirty-second year, that he first opened a school ; and ^^^ ene> 

 there and at Lampsacus he taught for five years. 



Epicurus now returned to Athens, B. C. 306, and there founded Returns to 

 that school which ever after was called by his name. The followers Athens - 

 of Plato occupied the Academy, those of Aristotle the Lyceum, the 



