piety, and I would silence the noisiest tongue in | no better: they mar what is solid in earthly bliss Athens with it. Leontion. Simpleton! we were speaking allegorically. Ternissa. Never say that I do believe the God himself hath conversed with Epicurus. Tell me now, Epicurus, tell me yourself, has not he? Epicurus. Yes. Ternissa. In his own form? Epicurus. Very nearly it was in Ternissa's. Ternissa. Impious man! I am ashamed of you. Leontion. Never did shame burn brighter. Ternissa. Mind Theophrastus, not me. Leontion. Since, in obedience to your institutions, O Epicurus, I must not say I am angry, I am offended at least with Theophrastus, for having so misrepresented your opinions, on the necessity of keeping the mind composed and tranquil, and remote from every object and every sentiment by which a painful sympathy may be excited. In order to display his elegance of language, he runs wherever he can lay a censure on you, whether he believes in its equity or not. Epicurus. This is the case with all eloquent men and all disputants. Truth neither warms nor elevates them, neither obtains for them profit nor applause. Ternissa. I have heard wise remarks very often and very warmly praised. Epicurus. Not for the truth in them, but for the grace, or because they touched the spring of some preconception or some passion. Man is a hater of truth, a lover of fiction. Leontion. How then happens it that children, when you have related to them any story which has greatly interested them, ask immediately and impatiently, is it true? Epicurus. Children are not men nor women: they are almost as different creatures, in many respects, as if they never were to be the one or the other they are as unlike as buds are unlike flowers, and almost as blossoms are unlike fruits. Greatly are they better than they are about to be, unless Philosophy raises her hand above them when the noon is coming on, and shelters them at one season from the heats that would scorch and wither, and at another from the storms that would shatter and subvert them. There are nations, it is reported, which aim their arrows and javelins at the sun and moon, on occasions of eclipse, or any other offence: but I never have heard that the sun and moon abated their course through the heavens for it, or looked more angrily when they issued forth again to shed light on their antagonists. They went onward all the while in their own serenity and clearness, through unobstructed paths, without diminution and without delay it was only the little world below that was in darkness. Philosophy lets her light descend and enter wherever there is a passage for it she takes advantage of the smallest crevice, but the rays are rebutted by the smallest obstruction. Polemics can never be philosophers or philotheists they serve men ill, and their gods : by animosities and dissensions, and intercept the span of azure at which the weary and the sorrowful would look up. Theophrastus is a writer of many acquirements and some shrewdness, usually judicious, often somewhat witty, always elegant: his thoughts are never confused, his sentences are never incomprehensible. If Aristoteles thought more highly of him than his due, surely you ought not to censure Theophrastus with severity on the supposition of his rating me below mine; unless you argue that a slight error in a short sum is less pardonable than in a longer. Had Aristoteles been living, and had he given the same opinion of me, your friendship and perhaps my self-love might have been wounded; for, if on one occasion he spoke too favourably, he never spoke unfavourably but with justice. This is among the indications of orderly and elevated minds; and here stands the barrier that separates them from the common and the waste. Is a man to be angry because an infant is fretful? Is a philosopher to unpack and │ throw away his philosophy, because an idiot has tried to overturn it on the road, and has pursued it with jibes and ribaldry? Leontion. Theophrastus would persuade us that, according to your system, we not only should decline the succour of the wretched, but avoid the sympathies that poets and historians would awaken in us. Probably for the sake of introducing some idle verses, written by a friend of his, he says that, following the guidance of Epicurus, we should altogether shun the theatre, and not only when Prometheus and Edipus and Philoctetes are introduced, but even where generous and kindly sentiments are predominant, if they partake of that tenderness which belongs to pity. I know not what Thracian lord recovers his daughter from her ravisher: such are among the words they exchange. Father. Insects, that dwell in rotton reeds, inert Of labour, of ambition, of distress, A wanderer, e'er could think what friends were mine, Thy fortieth birthday is not shouted yet Epicurus. I would never close my bosom against the feelings of humanity: but I would calmly and well consider by what conduct of life they may enter it with the least importunity and violence. A consciousness that we have promoted the happiness of others, to the uttermost of our power, is certain not only to meet them at the threshold, but to bring them along with us, and to render them accurate and faithful prompters, when we bend perplexedly over the problem of evil figured by the tragedians. If indeed there were more of pain than of pleasure in the exhibitions of the dramatist, no man in his senses would attend them twice. All the imitative arts have delight for the principal object: the first of these is poetry: the highest of poetry is tragic. man: even if he could have clasped you in his arms, imploring the Deities to resemble you in gentleness, you would have done it. Ternissa. He looked so abandoned by all, and so heroic, yet so feeble and so helpless; I did not think of turning round to see if anyone was near me; or else perhaps ... Epicurus. If you could have thought of looking round, you would no longer have been Ternissa. The Gods would have transformed you for it into some tree. Leontion. And Epicurus had been walking under it this day, perhaps. Epicurus. With Leontion, the partner of his sentiments. But the walk would have been earlier or later than the present hour: since the middle of the day, like the middle of fruits, is good for nothing. Leontion. For dinner surely. Epicurus. Dinner is a less gratification to me than to many: I dine alone. Ternissa. Why? Leontion. The epic has been called so. Epicurus. Improperly; for the epic has much more in it of what is prosaic. Its magnitude is no argument. An Egyptian pyramid contains more materials than an Ionic temple, but requires less contrivance, and exhibits less beauty of design. My simile is yet a defective one; for, a tragedy must be carried on with an unbroken interest; and, undecorated by loose foliage or fantastic branches, it must rise, like the palm-tree, with a lofty unity. On these matters I am unable to argue at large, or perhaps correctly: on those however which I have studied and treated, my terms are so explicit and clear, that Theophrastus can never have misunderstood them. Let me recall to your attention but two axioms. Abstinence from low pleasures is the only means do after dinner . . . (aside to him) now don't of meriting or of obtaining the higher. Kindness in us is the honey that blunts the sting of unkindness in another. Leontion. Explain to me then, O Epicurus, why we suffer so much from ingratitude. Epicurus. We fancy we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love. Passion weeps while she says, "I did not deserve this from him" Reason, while she says it, smoothens her brow at the clear fountain of the heart. Permit me also, like Theophrastus, to borrow a few words from a poet. Ternissa. Borrow as many such as anyone will entrust to you; and may Hermes prosper your commerce! Leontion may go to the theatre then; for she loves it. Epicurus. Girls! be the bosom friends of Antigone and Ismene; and you shall enter the wood of the Eumenides without shuddering, and leave it without the trace of a tear. Never did you appear so graceful to me, O Ternissa; no, not even after this walk do you; as when I saw you blow a fly from the forehead of Philoctetes in the propylea. The wing, with which Sophocles and the statuary represent him, to drive away the summer insects in his agony, had wearied his flaccid arm, hanging down beside him. Ternissa. Do you imagine then I thought him a living man? Epicurus. The sentiment was both more delicate and more august from being indistinct. You would have done it, even if he had been a living Epicurus. To avoid the noise, the heat, and the intermixture both of odours and of occupations. I cannot bear the indecency of speaking with a mouth in which there is food. I careen my body (since it is always in want of repair) in as unobstructed a space as I can, and I lie down and sleep awhile when the work is over. Leontion. Epicurus! although it would be very interesting, no doubt, to hear more of what you smile: I shall never forgive you if you say a single word . . . yet I would rather hear a little about the theatre, and whether you think at last that women should frequent it; for you have often said the contrary. Epicurus. I think they should visit it rarely; not because it excites their affections, but because it deadens them. To me nothing is so odious as to be at once among the rabble and among the heroes, and, while I am receiving into my heart the most exquisite of human sensations, to feel upon my shoulder the hand of some inattentive and insensible young officer. Leontion. O very bad indeed! horrible! Leontion. I seldom go thither. Epicurus. The theatre is delightful when we erect it in our own house or arbour, and when there is but one spectator. Leontion. You must lose the illusion in great part, if you only read the tragedy, which I fancy to be your meaning. Epicurus. I lose the less of it. Do not imagine that the illusion is, or can be, or ought to be, complete. If it were possible, no Phalaris or Perillus could devise a crueler torture. Here are two imitations: first, the poet's of the sufferer; secondly, the actor's of both: poetry is superinduced. No man in pain ever uttered the better ordination of thoughts, and that just proportion of numbers in the sentences which follows a strong conception, are the constituents of true harmony. You are satisfied with it and dwell upon it; which you would vainly hope to do when you are forced to turn back again to seize an idea or to comprehend a period. Let us believe that opposition, and even hard words, are (at least part of the language used by Sophocles. We admit it, and willingly, and are at least as much illuded by it as by anything else we hear or see upon the stage. Poets and statuaries and painters give us an adorned imitation of the object, so skilfully treated that we receive it for a correct one. This is the only illusion they aim at this is the perfection of their arts. Leontion. Do you derive no pleasure from the in the beginning) no certain proofs of hatred; representation of a consummate actor? Epicurus. High pleasure; but liable to be overturned in an instant; pleasure at the mercy of anyone who sits beside me. Rarely does it happen that an Athenian utters a syllable in the midst of it but our city is open to the inhabitants of all the world, and all the world that is yet humanized a woman might walk across in sixty hours. There are even in Greece a few remaining still so barbarous, that I have heard them whisper in the midst of the finest scenes of our greatest poets. Leontion. Acorn-fed Chaonians! Epicurus. I esteem all the wise; but I entertain no wish to imitate all of them in everything. What was convenient and befitting in one or other of them, might be inconvenient and unbefitting in me. Great names ought to bear us up and carry us through, but never to run away with us. Peculiarity and solitariness give an idea to weak minds of something grand, authoritative, and godlike. To be wise indeed and happy and selfpossessed, we must often be alone: we must mix as little as we can with what is called society, and abstain rather more than seems desirable even from the better few. Ternissa. You have commanded us at all times to ask you anything we do not understand: why then use the phrase "what is called society?" as if there could be a doubt whether we are in society when we converse with many. Epicurus. We may meet and converse with thousands: you and Leontion and myself could associate with few. Society, in the philosophical sense of the word, is almost the contrary of what it is in the common acceptation. Leontion. Now go on with your discourse. Epicurus.When we have once acquired that intelligence of which we have been in pursuit, we may relax our minds, and lay the produce of our chase at the feet of those we love. Leontion. Philosophers seem to imagine that they can be visible and invisible at will; that they can be admired for the display of their tenets, and unobserved in the workings of their spleen. None of those whom I remember, or whose writings I have perused, was quite exempt from it. Among the least malicious is Theophrastus: could he find no other for so little malice but you? Epicurus. The origin of his dislike to me, was my opinion that perspicuity is the prime excellence of composition. He and Aristoteles and Plato talk diffusely of attending to harmony, and clap rhetorical rules before our mouths in order to produce it. Natural sequences and right sub although, by requiring defence, they soon produce heat and animosity in him who hath engaged in so unwise a warfare. On the other hand, praises are not always the unfailing signs of liberality or of justice. Many are extolled out of enmity to others, and perhaps would have been decried had those others not existed. Among the causes of my happiness, this is one: I never have been stimulated to hostility by any in the crowd that has assailed me. If in my youth I had been hurried into this weakness, I should have regretted it as lost time, lost pleasure, lost humanity. Leontion. We may expose what is violent or false in anyone; and chiefly in anyone who injures us or our friends. Epicurus. We may. Leontion. How then? Epicurus. By exhibiting in ourselves the contrary. Such vengeance is legitimate and complete. I found in my early days, among the celebrated philosophers of Greece, a love of domination, a propensity to imposture, a jealousy of renown, and a cold indifference to simple truth. None of these qualities lead to happiness; none of them stand within the precincts of Virtue. I asked myself, "What is the most natural and the most universal of our desires:" I found it was, to be happy. Wonderful I thought it, that the gratification of a desire which is at once the most universal and the most natural, should be the seldomest attained. I then conjectured the means; and I found that they vary, as vary the minds and capacities of men; that, however, the principal one lay in the avoidance of those very things which had hitherto been taken up as the instruments of enjoyment and content; such as military commands, political offices, clients, hazardous ventures in commerce, and extensive property in land. Leontion. And yet offices, both political and military, must be undertaken; and clients will throng about those who exercise them. Commerce too will dilate with Prosperity, and Frugality will square her farm by lopping off the angles of the next. Epicurus. True, Leontion! nor is there a probability that my opinions will pervade the heart of Avarice or Ambition: they will influence only the unoccupied. Philosophy hath led scarcely a single man away from commands or magistracies, until he has first tried them. Weariness is the repose of the politician, and apathy his wisdom. He fancies that nations are contemplating the great man in his retirement, while what began in ignorance of himself is ending in forgetfulness on the part of others. This truth at last appears to find it at all. We may purify the idea in our to him he detests the ingratitude of mankind: he declares his resolution to carry the earth no longer on his shoulders: he is taken at his word: and the shock of it breaks his heart. Ternissa. Epicurus, I have been listening to you with even more pleasure than usual, for you often talk of love, and such other things as you can know nothing about: but now you have gone out of your way to defend an enemy, and to lead aside Leontion from her severity to Theophrastus. Epicurus. Believe me, my lovely friends, he is no ordinary man who hath said one wise thing gracefully in the whole of his existence: now several such are recorded of him whom Leontion hath singled out from my assailants. His style is excellent. Leontion. The excellence of it hath been exaggerated by Aristoteles, to lower our opinion of Plato's. Epicurus. It may be: I cannot prove it, and never heard it. Leontion. So blinded indeed is this great master of rhetoric.. Epicurus. Pardon the rudeness of my interruption, dear Leontion. Do not designate so great a man by a title so contemptible. You are as nearly as humiliating to his genius as those who call him the Stagyrite: and those are ignorant of the wrong they do him: many of them are his disciples and admirers, and call him by that name in quoting his authority. Philosophy, until he came among us, was like the habitations of the Troglodytes; vast indeed and wonderful, but without construction, without arrangement: he first gave it order and system. I do not rank him with Democritus, who has been to philosophers what Homer has been to poets, and who is equally great in imagination and in reflection: but no other has left behind him so many just remarks on such a variety of subjects. Within one olympiad three men have departed from the world, who carried farther than any other three that ever dwelt upon it, reason, eloquence, and martial glory; Aristoteles, Demosthenes, and Alexander. Now tell me which of these qualities do you admire the most? Leontion. Reason. Epicurus. And rightly. Among the three cha racters, the vulgar and ignorant will prefer Alexander; the less vulgar and ignorant will prefer Demosthenes; and they who are removed to the greatest distance from ignorance and vulgarity, Aristoteles. Yet, although he has written on some occasions with as much purity and precision as we find in the Orations of Pericles, many things are expressed obscurely; which is by much the greatest fault in composition. Leontion. Surely you do not say that an obscurity is worse than a defect in grammar. own bath, and adorn it with our own habiliments, if we can but find it, though among the slaves or clowns: whereas, if it is locked up from us in a dark chamber at the top of the house, we have only to walk down-stairs again, disappointed, tired, and out of humour. But you were saying that something had blinded the philosopher. Leontion. His zeal and partiality. Not only did he prefer Theophrastus to everyone who taught at Athens; not only did he change his original name, for one of so high an import as to signify that he would elevate his language to the language of the gods; but he fancied and insisted that the very sound of Theophrastus is sweet*, of Tyrtamus harsh and inelegant. Epicurus. Your ear, Leontion, is the better arbitress of musical sounds, in which (I speak of words) hardly any two agree. But a box on the ear does not improve the organ; and I would advise you to leave inviolate and untouched all those peculiarities which rest on friendship. The jealous, if we suffered them in the least to move us, would deserve our commiseration rather than our resentment: but the best thing we can do with them is to make them the comedians of our privacy. Some have recently started up among us, who, when they have published to the world their systems of philosophy, or their axioms, or their paradoxes, and find nevertheless that others are preferred to them, persuade their friends and scholars that enormous and horrible injustice has been done toward them. By degrees they cool however, and become more reasonable: they resign the honour of invention, which always may be contested or ascertained, and invest themselves with what they style much greater, that of learning. What constitutes this glory, on which they plume themselves so joyously and gaudily? Nothing else than the reading of those volumes which we have taken the trouble to write. A multitude of authors, the greater part of them inferior in abilities to you who hear me, are the slow constructors of reputations which they would persuade us are the solidest and the highest. We teach them all they know and they are as proud as if they had taught us. There are not indeed many of these parasitical plants at present, sucking us, and resting their leafy slenderness upon us: but whenever books become more numerous, a new species will arise from them, to which philosophers and historians and poets must give way, for, intercepting all above, it will approximate much nearer to the manners and intellects of the people. At last what is most Attic in Athens will be canvassed and discussed in their booths; and he who now exerciseth a sound and strong judgment of his own, will indifferently borrow theirs, and become so corrupted with it, Epicurus. I do say it for we may discover a truth through such a defect, which we cannot * Τύρταμος δ' ἐκαλεῖτο πρότερον ὁ Θεόφραστος, μετωνόμασε δ' αυτόν ὁ ̓Αριστοτέλης Θεόφραστον ἅμα μὲν φεύγων τὴν του through an obscurity. It is better to find the προτέρου ονόματος κακοφωνίαν, ἅμα δὲ τὸν τῆς φράσεως αυτοῦ object of our researches in ill condition than notoves. Strabo xiii. as ever afterward to be gratified to his heart's the use of metaphors: that man sees badly who content by the impudent laconism of their ora- sees everything double. He wants novelty and cular decisions. These people are the natural vigour in his remarks both on men and things: enemies of greater: they cannot sell their platters neither his subject nor his mind is elevated: here of offal while a richer feast is open to the public, however let me observe, my fair disciples, that and while lamps of profuser light announce the he and some others, of whom we speak in cominvitation. I would not augur the decay of philo- mon conversation with little deference or reserve, sophy and literature: it was retarded by the good may perhaps attract the notice and attention of example of our ancestors. The seven wise men, the remotest nations in the remotest times. Supas they are called, lived amicably, and, where it pose him to have his defects (all that you or was possible, in intercourse. Our seventy wiser anyone ever has supposed in him), yet how much (for we may reckon at least that number of those greater is his intellect than the intellect of any who proclaim themselves so) stand at the distance among those who govern the world! If these of a porcupine's shot, and, like that animal, scatter appeared in the streets of Athens, you would run their shafts in every direction, with more profu- to look at them, and ask your friends whether sion than force, and with more anger than aim. they had seen them pass. If you cannot show as much reverence to Theophrastus, the defect is yours. He may not be what his friends have fancied him but how great must he be to have obtained the partiality of such friends! How few are greater! how many millions less! Hither, to these banks of serpolet; to these strawberries, whose dying leaves breathe a most refreshing fragrance; to this ivy, from which Bacchus may have crowned himself; let us retire at the voice of Discord. Whom should we contend with? The less? it were inglorious. The greater? it were vain. Do we look for Truth? she is not the inhabitant of cities nor delights in clamour: she steals upon the calm and meditative as Diana upon Endymion, indulgent in her chastity, encouraging a modest, and requiting a faithful love. Leontion. How Ternissa sighs after Truth! Epicurus. If Truth appeared in daylight among mortals, she would surely resemble Ternissa. Those white and lucid cheeks, that youth which appears more youthful (for unless we are near her we think her yet a child), and that calm open forehead... Leontion. Malicious girl! she conceals it! Epicurus. Ingenious girl! the resemblance was, until now, imperfect. We must remove the veil ourselves; for Truth, whatever the poets may tell us, never comes without one, diaphanous or opaque. If those who differ on speculative points, would walk together now and then in the country, they might find many objects that must unite them. The same bodily feeling is productive in some degree of the same mental one. Enjoyment from sun and air, from exercise and odours, brings hearts together that schools and council-chambers and popular assemblies have stood between for years. I hope Theophrastus may live, to walk with us among these bushes when they are shadier, and to perceive that all questions, but those about the way to happiness, are illiberal or mechanical or infantine or idle. Ternissa. Are geometry and astronomy idle? Epicurus. Such idleness as theirs a wise man may indulge in, when he has found what he was seeking and, as they abstract the mind from what would prey upon it, there are many to whom I would recommend them earlier, as their principal and most serious studies. : We will return to Theophrastus. He has one great merit in style; he is select and sparing in Leontion. A slender tree, with scarcely any heart or pith in it, ought at least to have some play of boughs and branches: he, poor man, is inert. The leaves just twinkle, and nothing more. Epicurus. He writes correctly and observantly. Even bad writers are blamed unjustly when they are blamed much. In comparison with many good and sensible men, they have evinced no slight degree of intelligence: yet we go frequently to those good and sensible men, and engage them to join us in our contempt and ridicule, of one who not only is wiser than they are, but who has made an effort to entertain or to instruct us, which they never did. Ternissa. This is inconsiderate and ungrateful. Epicurus. Truly and humanely have you spoken. Is it not remarkable that we are the fondest of acknowledging the least favourable and the least pleasurable of our partialities? Whether in hatred or love, men are disposed to bring their conversation very near the object, yet shrink at touching the fairer. In hatred their sensibility is less delicate, and the inference comes closer: in love they readily give an arm to a confidant, almost to the upper step of their treasury. Leontion. How unworthy of trust do you represent your fellow men! But you began by censuring me. In my Treatise I have only defended your tenets against Theophrastus. Epicurus. I am certain you have done it with spirit and eloquence, dear Leontion; and there are but two words in it I would wish you to erase. Leontion. Which are they? Epicurus. Theophrastus and Epicurus. If you love me, you will do nothing that may make you uneasy when you grow older; nothing that may allow my adversary to say, "Leontion soon forgot her Epicurus." My maxim is, never to defend my systems or paradoxes: if you undertake it, the Athenians will insist that I impelled you secretly, or that my philosophy and my friendship were ineffectual on you. Leontion. They shall never say that. |