Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Epicurus, son of Neocles and Chaerestrate, was an Athenian of the deme of Gargettus and belonging to the clan of the Philaidae, as Metrodorus says in his work On Noble Birth. Various writers, including Heraclides in his Epitome of Sotion, state that when the Athenians settled Samos as a cleruchy, he was brought up there. At the age of eighteen he came to Athens, while Xenocrates was teaching in the Academy and Aristotle in Chalcis. But after Alexander of Macedon died and the Athenians were driven out by Perdiccas, he moved to Colophon to join his father.

​Having spent some time there and gathered disciples, he returned again to Athens in the archonship of Anaxicrates. For a while he practiced philosophy in communion with others, but later set up the sect named after him and began to expound his doctrines independently. He himself says that he touched upon philosophy when he was fourteen years old. But Apollodorus the Epicurean, in the first book of his Life of Epicurus, says that he turned to philosophy out of contempt for the elementary school teachers, when they were unable to explain to him the passages concerning the Chaos in Hesiod. Hermippus, however, says that he was a schoolteacher himself, but then, having happened upon the books of Democritus, rushed headlong into philosophy.

​Hence Timon also says concerning him: "Once again the last and most shameless of the natural philosophers, coming from Samos, son of a wretched schoolmaster, the most uneducated of living men." Persuaded by him, his brothers too, three in number—Neocles, Chaeredemus, and Aristobulus—pursued philosophy with him, as Philodemus the Epicurean says in the tenth book of the Syntaxis of the Philosophers; and moreover, a slave named Mys, as Myronianus says in his Historical Parallels. But Diotimus the Stoic, bearing ill will toward him, bitterly slandered him by bringing forward fifty lewd letters as if written by Epicurus, as did the person who compiled the little letters attributed to Chrysippus as if they were Epicurus's.

​Furthermore, the circle of Posidonius the Stoic, Nicolaus, and Sotion in the twelfth book of the works entitled Dioclean Refutations (which is book twenty-four), and Dionysius of Halicarnassus also slander him. For they say that he went around with his mother to small cottages reading purifications, and helped his father teach letters for a meager wage. Moreover, they say that he was a procurer for one of his brothers, and lived with the courtesan Leontion; that he passed off Democritus' doctrines on atoms and Aristippus' on pleasure as his own; that he was not a citizen by birth, as Timocrates says and Herodotus in his work On the Ephebia of Epicurus; and that he flatteringly fawned upon Mithres, the administrator of Lysimachus, calling him "Paean" and "Lord" in his letters.

​They also say that he lauded and flattered Idomeneus, Herodotus, and Timocrates for the very act of publishing his secret doctrines. In his letters, to Leontion he wrote: "Lord Paean, dear little Leontion, with what an uproar of applause did you fill us when we read your letter!" And to Themista, the wife of Leonteus, he says: "If you do not come to me, I am ready to tumble head over heels and thrust myself wherever you and Themista invite me." To Pythocles, who was in the bloom of youth, he says: "I will sit waiting for your longed-for and godlike arrival." And writing again to Themista, he was in the habit of flattering her, as Theodorus says in the fourth book of his work Against Epicurus.

​They report that he also wrote to many other courtesans, and especially to Leontion, with whom Metrodorus too fell in love. And in On the End he writes as follows: "For I, at least, do not know what I can conceive of as the good, if I subtract the pleasures of taste, if I subtract those of sex, those of hearing, and those derived from beautiful form." And in the letter to Pythocles he writes: "Flee all education, blessed youth, hoisting your little boat's sail." Epictetus also calls him a filthy speaker and reviles him in the strongest terms. Moreover, Timocrates, the brother of Metrodorus, who had been his pupil but then withdrew from the school, says in the work entitled Delights that Epicurus vomited twice a day from indulgence, and recounts that he himself barely managed to escape those nocturnal philosophical sessions and that mystical fellowship.