Note 6 — Chapter XIX · THE MORAL SCIENCE OF THE EPICUREANS. GENERAL PRINCIPLES.

Diog. 11; Stob. Floril. 17, 34; Cic. Tusc. v. 31, 89; Sen. Ep. 25, 4. Epicurus lived very abstemiously. The charge of luxury brought against him was fully disposed of by Gassendi, De Vit. et Mor. Epic. 153. Timocrates, on the strength of one of his letters, asserts that he spent a mina every day on his table. If this statement be not a pure invention, it must refer to the whole circle of his friends. It could otherwise only have happened at such a time as the siege of Athens by Demetrius Poliorcetes, when a modius of wheat cost 300 drachmæ, and when Epicurus counted out to his friends the beans on which they lived. Plut. Demetr. 33. The further statement of Timocrates—(Diog. 6: αὐτὸν δὶς τῆς ἡμέρας ἐμεῖν ἀπὸ τρυφῆς)—is certainly an unfounded calumny. The moderation of Epicurus is admitted by Sen. Vit. B. 12, 4; 13, 1; and Epicurus flatters himself, in Sen. Ep. 18, 9: Non toto asse pasci, Metrodorum, qui nondum tantum profecerit, toto; and, in Diog. 11, because he was satisfied with bread and water. Ibid. he writes: πέμψον μοι τυροῦ Κυθνίου, ἵν’ ὅταν βούλωμαι πολυτελεύσασθαι, δύνωμαι. Still less have we any reason to connect the diseases of which Epicurus and some of his scholars died (as Plut. N. P. Suav. V. 5, 3 does, herein following Timocrates in Diog. 7) with their presumed luxuriousness. ↑