Adversus Colotem

Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

Colotes, whom Epicurus used to call by the pet names Colotaras and little Colotarion, has published a book, Saturninus, entitled "That According to the Doctrines of the Other Philosophers It Is Not Even Possible to Live." That book has been dedicated to King Ptolemy. But what occurred to me to say against Colotes I imagine you would be glad to go over in writing, since you are a lover of what is fine and a lover of antiquity, and you consider it the most kingly pursuit to keep in mind, and as far as possible in hand, the words of the ancients.

Recently, then, when the treatise was being read aloud, one of our companions, Aristodemus of Aegium — you know the man, no mere wand-bearer among the Academics but a most frenzied celebrant of Plato's mysteries — somehow, contrary to his usual habit, held himself in patient silence and gave himself as an orderly listener to the very end. But when the reading was finished, he said, "Well then, whom shall we set up to fight this man on behalf of the philosophers? For I do not admire Nestor's way of doing things, when, though he ought to have chosen the best of the nine, he left it to fortune and cast lots." "But you see," I said, "that he too submitted himself to the lot, so that the roster came about under the arbitration of the wisest man; and from the helmet the lot leapt out that they themselves wanted — Ajax's.

Still, if you order me to make the choice, how then could I forget godlike Odysseus afterward? See to it, then, and consider how you will ward the man off." And Aristodemus said, "But you know Plato's saying, that when he was angry with his slave-boy he did not himself lay on the blows, but bade Speusippus do it, saying that he himself was too angry; so you likewise take the man in hand and punish him however you wish, for I am angry."

Since the others too were urging the same thing, I said, "Speak I must, then, but I am afraid I may seem to have taken the book more seriously than I ought, out of anger — because of the man's boorishness and buffoonery and insolence, flinging out some sort of fodder for a discourse: as with Socrates, and how it is that one does not put food into the mouth but into the ear, so he asks. Yet perhaps at this one might even laugh, reflecting on the gentleness and charm of Socrates.

"But 'on behalf of the whole army of the Greeks' " — that is, of the other philosophers, among whom are Democritus and Plato and Stilpo and Empedocles and Parmenides and Melissus, men who have been ill spoken of — it is not only 'shameful to be silent,' but not even pious to give way at all or to detract anything from the utmost frankness owed on their behalf, seeing that they have advanced philosophy to this height of reputation.

And yet life itself our parents, together with the gods, gave us; but from the philosophers we think we have received, as an ally of justice and law, reason as chastiser of the passions, for living well. And living well is living sociably and with friendship, with self-control and with justice. Of none of these do the men fall short who cry that the good lies in the belly — no, they would buy all the virtues together with a perforated copper coin, if pleasure were driven out entirely from every side; and it is enough for them, they say, that there is no account to give of gods and of the soul — as though the soul perishes when it is dissolved, and they care nothing for anything belonging to us.

Now the others charge these men, because they abolish living with self-control; but these charge the others in turn, because they teach living basely and like beasts." "And yet these things are mixed into Epicurus's own words and pervade his whole philosophy. But as for Colotes — that he pulls certain phrases stripped of their subject matter, and fragments of arguments, and mute scraps deprived of what confirms and supports understanding and conviction, and drags them together as if into a market or a picture-gallery of monstrosities, so composing his book — you, I think, know this better than anyone, since you have the writings of the ancients constantly in hand.

To me it seems that, like the Lydian who opened not one door upon himself but flung Epicurus round with the most numerous and the greatest difficulties. For he begins from Democritus, receiving from him fine and fitting instruction — and yet for a long time Epicurus himself proclaimed himself a Democritean, as others say and especially Leonteus, one of Epicurus's foremost pupils, who, writing to Lycophron, says that Democritus was honored by Epicurus because he was first to grasp correct knowledge, and that the whole undertaking is called Democritean because he was the first to hit upon the first principles concerning nature; and Metrodorus has said outright, concerning philosophy, that if Democritus had not led the way, Epicurus would not have come forward to wisdom.

But if it is not possible to live according to the doctrines of Democritus, as Colotes supposes, then Epicurus was ridiculous to follow Democritus, who leads one to not living. He charges him, first, with this: that by saying each of the things that exist is 'no more this than that' he has thrown life into confusion. But Democritus is so far from holding that each of the things that exist is no more this than that, that he fought against Protagoras the sophist for saying so, and wrote much that is persuasive against him — writings which Colotes, never having met with them even in a dream, has erred about the man's actual wording, in which he distinguishes 'den' as being no more than 'meden,' calling 'den' the body and 'meden' the void, on the ground that this too has a nature and a substance of its own.

He, then, who thought that 'nothing' exists no more as such-and-such than as such-and-such has made use of an Epicurean doctrine — namely, that all impressions coming through sense-perception are true. For if two men, one saying the wine is dry and the other that it is sweet, neither is lying as far as his perception goes, why should the wine be dry any more than sweet? And indeed one can see people using the same bath, some as if it were hot, others as if cold; for some bid one pour it on cold, others hot.

And they say that a certain Berenice, one of the Spartan women who had gone to visit Deiotarus, when she came near another woman, immediately turned away, the one, it seems, disliking the perfume, the other the rancid butter. If, then, one perception is no more true than the other, it is likely also that water is no more cold than hot, and that the perfume and the rancid butter are no more sweet-smelling than foul-smelling. For if one says that the same appearance is different to different people, without realizing it he is saying that it is both."

"And the much-talked-of symmetries and harmonies of the passages about the sense-organs, and the manifold minglings of the seeds which they say are scattered about in all flavors and smells and colors, moving a different sense-perception in one person than in another — do they not drive matters straight to the 'no more this than that,' as far as these men themselves are concerned? For those who suppose that perception is false, because opposite experiences arise in people using the same things, they console by teaching that, since all things are as it were jumbled and mingled together, and one thing is naturally fitted to one person and another to another, the contact and apprehension of the same quality is not the same, nor does the underlying thing move all its parts alike in everyone.

Rather, each person, encountering only those things toward which he has a proportionate perception, wrongly contends about whether the thing is good or bad, white or not white, thinking to confirm his own perceptions by destroying those of others; whereas one ought to quarrel with no perception at all, for all of them lay hold of something, each drawing, as it were from a spring of manifold mixture, what is suited and proper to it; and one ought not to make predications about the whole while touching only parts, nor think that all must be affected in the same way, different people being affected according to a different quality and power belonging to the thing."

It is now time to consider who are more the men who impute 'no more this than that' to things than those who declare every sensible object to be a mixed compound of qualities of every kind, like an unfermented must fit for the flute-player — men who confess that their own standards go to ruin for them and that their criterion is utterly lost, unless they leave each thing pure and unmixed and not manifold. "See what Epicurus himself has made Polyaenus say concerning the heat of wine, in the Symposium, conversing with himself. For when someone said, 'Do you not affirm, Epicurus, that there are heatings produced by wine?' — did anyone suppose he was declaring wine to be, universally, heat-producing? — and shortly after: 'For it appears that wine is not universally heat-producing, but that so much of it might be said to be heat-producing for this particular person'; and again, having stated as cause the compressions and dispersals of atoms, and having alleged as cause, in the mingling with the body, the combinations and conjunctions of other atoms,

he adds concerning the wine: 'Wherefore one must not say, universally, that wine is heat-producing, but that so much of it, of such a nature and so disposed, is heat-producing for this person, or that so much of it is cooling for that one; for there are present in such an aggregate natures of such a kind also, from which a cold effect might be composed, and which, when conjoined suitably with others, might bring about the nature of coldness. Whence those are deceived who say that wine is universally cooling, and those who say it is universally heat-producing.'

He, then, who says that most people are deceived in supposing that what heats is heat-producing, or what cools is cooling-producing, if he does not think that the 'no more this than that' of each thing follows from what he himself has said, is himself the one deceived. And he adds further that 'often the wine does not even enter the body bearing a heat-producing or a cooling power, but when the mass has been set in motion and a transposition of the bodies has occurred, the atoms that produce heat now have come together into the same place and, by their multitude, have furnished heat and a burning to the body; and now again, having fallen out, they have cooled it.'"

"But that it is possible to apply to any and everything what is called and reckoned bitter, sweet, purgative, sleep-inducing, luminous — as though nothing had a self-sufficient quality and power, nor acts rather than is acted upon, whenever it comes to be present in bodies, but takes on a different differentiation and blending in different subjects — this is not unclear. For Epicurus himself, in the second book of his work against Theophrastus, saying that colors are not innate in bodies, but are generated according to certain positions and arrangements relative to the sight, says that in accordance with this argument a body is no more colorless than colored.

Higher up, in his own words, he has written this: 'But apart from this point too, I do not know how one ought to say that these things, being as they are in the dark, have colors' — and yet, though the air is often equally dark all around, some perceive a difference of colors while others do not, on account of the dullness of their sight.

Further, when we enter a dark room we see no appearance of color at all, but after waiting a little we do see it: so it will be said that each of the bodies no more has color than lacks it. And if color is relative to something, then white too will be relative to something, and blue as well; and if these, then sweet and bitter too; so that of every quality it will be truly predicated that it no more is than is not — for to those affected in this way it will be of such a kind, but to those not so affected it will not be.

"The mire, then, and the mud in which he says those who declare things to be 'no more this than that' come to be mired, Colotes pours over himself and over his own master." "Is it, then, only here that our noble friend is revealed as 'a healer of others, himself teeming with sores'? Not so, indeed; but even more, in the second book of his Objections, he does not notice that he is expelling Epicurus, along with Democritus, from the realm of the living. For as to the statement that color exists by convention, and sweet by convention, and compound by convention, but in reality only the void and the atoms exist — this, said by Democritus, he asserts fights with the senses, and that one who abides by this argument and makes use of it could not even conceive of himself as to whether he is dead or alive."

Against this argument I have nothing to say in reply, except to say that these doctrines are just as inseparable from those of Epicurus as shape and weight are said by his own followers to be inseparable from the atom. For what does Democritus say? That there are substances infinite in multitude, indestructible atoms, and moreover without qualities and unaffected by anything,

borne about scattered in the void; and that whenever they draw near one another, or collide, or become entangled, of the things thus aggregated some appear as water, some as fire, some as a plant, some as a man; but that all things are the atoms, called by him by their own peculiar name, and nothing else; for out of what is not, there can be no coming-to-be, and out of the things that are, nothing

could come to be, since the atoms, by reason of their hardness, neither are affected nor change; whence neither color could arise out of colorless things, nor nature or soul out of things without quality and unaffected. Democritus, then, is to be blamed, not for failing to acknowledge the consequences of his first principles, but for adopting first principles to which these consequences belong. For he ought not to have posited the primary bodies as unchangeable, but having posited them, he ought then to have seen that all coming-to-be of quality is thereby done away with;

and to deny this while perceiving the absurdity is most shameless. This is what Colotes says Epicurus does: that he posits the same first principles, but does not say that color and sweetness and whiteness exist 'by convention,' along with the other qualities. Now if by 'does not say' he means something like 'does not admit,' this is one of the things Epicurus is accustomed to do: for even while abolishing providence he says he leaves piety intact; and while choosing friendship for the sake of pleasure he says he is ready to undergo the greatest pains on behalf of his friends;

and while positing the universe as infinite, he does not do away with 'up' and 'down.' There are those who, having taken the cup, drink as much as they wish and then give back what is left over; but in this argument above all one must remember that saying of this same wise man: 'those things whose first principles are not necessary, their ends are necessary.'

It is not, then, necessary to posit — or rather, borrowing it from Democritus — that atoms are the first principles of all things; but having posited the doctrine and adorned it with its first plausibilities, one must go on to swallow down the difficult consequence, or else show how qualityless bodies furnish all manner of qualities by their mere coming together. Take at once: whence has what is called heat come to you, and how has it arisen in the atoms, if

they neither came possessing heat nor became hot by coming together? For the one belongs to a thing that has a quality, the other to a thing naturally disposed to be affected — and you say that neither is proper to the atoms, on account of their indestructibility." "What then? Did it not likewise happen to Plato and Aristotle and Xenocrates, that gold comes to be out of what is not gold, and stone out of what is not stone, and the other things are generated out of four simple and primary

—of all things? Certainly. But in their case the first principles immediately combine for the generation of each thing, bringing with them, as it were, great contributions of the qualities they contain; and whenever they come together into one place and coincide—wet with dry, cold with hot, solid with soft—bodies moving upon one another and changing throughout under mutual affection, one blending gives birth to another generation out of another mixture. The atom, however, taken by itself, is solitary and stripped bare of all generative power, and when it collides with another, from hardness and resistance it undergoes nothing more than a mere jolt—it neither suffers nor produces any further effect—but atoms strike and are struck for all time, unable, out of themselves, to produce so much as a common multitude or a single heap, since they are forever being shaken together and pulled apart, let alone a living creature or a soul or a nature.

Colotes, as though addressing an illiterate king, again attacks Empedocles for breathing the very same doctrine: ‘I will tell you something else: there is no “nature” of any single mortal thing, nor any accursed begetting through death; there is only the mixing and interchanging of things mixed, and it is this that men call “nature.”’ Now I, for my part, do not see how these words are opposed to the position of those who suppose that there is neither a coming-into-being of what does not exist nor a destruction of what does exist, but rather that, certain things existing, their coming together with one another is called birth, and their separation from one another is called death; for Empedocles has made it plain that he used the word “nature” in place of “birth,” setting death over against it.

But if those who take mixtures to be births and dissolutions to be destructions do not live and cannot live, what different thing are these men doing? And yet Empedocles, by cementing and fitting the elements together through degrees of heat, softness, and moisture, does at least grant them, in some fashion, a mixture and a unifying growing-together; whereas those who drive the unalterable, unsympathetic atoms together into one place produce out of them nothing at all, but only many continuous collisions among them—for their interlocking, far from preventing dissolution, only intensifies the clash, so that on their view what is called “birth” is neither a mixing nor a cementing but a turmoil and a battle. For an instant the atoms recoil from one another because of the collision, and then, once the force of the blow has spent itself, they approach again, so that for more than twice as long they are apart from one another as they are touching and close together—with the result that nothing whatever is produced out of them, not even something lifeless.

As for sensation, soul, mind, and thought—these atomists cannot, even if they wished, form any conception of how such things could arise in void and atoms, entities which, taken by themselves, possess no quality, and which, when they come together, undergo neither affection nor change, nor indeed any coming-together that produces blending, mixture, and organic union, but only collisions and rebounds. So that by their own doctrines both living and being a living creature are abolished, since they lay down as first principles things that are empty, unaffected, godless, and soulless, and, further, incapable of mixing or being blended. How then do they leave any place for nature, soul, and living creature? Only as one leaves a place for an oath, a prayer, a sacrifice, an act of worship—in word and speech, by saying, pretending, and naming things which, by their own first principles and doctrines, they have abolished.

But if in fact they simply call the thing that has come to be by nature “nature,” and the thing that has come to be “birth”—just as people, using a loose figure of speech, call timber “woodwork” and things that are in harmony “harmony”—then where did it occur to Colotes to raise such objections against Empedocles? ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘do we wear ourselves out, taking such pains for our own sake, reaching after certain things and guarding against others? For we do not exist, nor do we live by making use of other things.’ But take heart, one might say, my dear little Colotes—no one is stopping you from taking pains on your own behalf, once you have been taught that the “nature” of Colotes is simply Colotes himself and nothing else, and that making use of things is nothing else either, while pointing out that for you “things” are pleasures—

on the ground that there is no “nature” of pastries, or of perfumes, or of intercourse, but only pastries, perfumes, and women that exist; just as the grammarian who says that ‘the might of Heracles’ means Heracles himself does not thereby do away with Heracles, nor do those who claim that “harmonies” and “beam-frames” are mere figures of speech thereby deny that there exist notes and beams—seeing that even those who deny the existence of soul and thought do not, for all that, seem to deny that we live or think.

Now when Epicurus says, ‘the nature of existing things is bodies and void,’ are we to take this as meaning that he intends “nature” to be something other than the things that exist, or rather that he is simply pointing to the things that exist and to nothing else—just as, no doubt, he is also in the habit of calling the void itself “the nature of void,” and, by Zeus, of calling the universe “the nature of the universe”? And if someone were to ask, ‘What do you mean, Epicurus—that one thing is void and another the nature of void?’ he will say, ‘No, by Zeus; but this manner of speaking has somehow become customary, and I too, in using it, appeal to convention.’

What else, then, by Zeus, has Empedocles done, in teaching that “nature” is nothing beyond the thing that comes to be, and “death” nothing beyond the thing that dies? Rather, just as the poets, personifying things, often say, ‘and among them mingled Strife, and Tumult, and deadly Doom,’ so most people give the names “birth” and “destruction” to things that are being formed and things that are being dissolved. He was so far from disturbing reality and fighting against the appearances that he did not even banish the customary word from use, but, having removed only whatever deceptive harm it did to the facts, restored to the names their accustomed sense in these lines:

‘But when the light of ether, mingling, comes to dwell within a man, or within the race of wild beasts, or within bushes, or within birds, then men speak of this as “being born”; and when the elements separate apart again, this in turn they wrongly call “ill-starred fate”; and I too, following convention, use the accustomed term.’ In quoting these lines, Colotes failed to see that Empedocles has not done away with men, beasts, bushes, and birds—which he himself says come to be when the elements mix together—but rather, in teaching that those who apply to this combining and separating the terms “nature,” “ill-starred fate,” and “destructive death” are mistaken, he did not thereby take away the use of the customary words about these things.

To me, however, it seems that Empedocles is not disturbing this figurative usage at all, but rather, as has already been said, is contesting in earnest the notion of a coming-into-being out of what does not exist—which some call “nature.” And he makes this especially clear in these verses: ‘Fools—for their thoughts do not reach far—who suppose that what previously was not can come into being, or that anything can die and be utterly destroyed.’ These verses cry aloud, to those who have ears, that he is not abolishing coming-into-being as such, but only coming-into-being out of what does not exist; nor destruction as such, but only destruction ‘utterly,’ that is, destruction that reduces a thing to what does not exist.

Since, indeed, for anyone willing to misrepresent him not so savagely and foolishly but a little more gently, what follows would furnish grounds for the very opposite accusation, given that Empedocles says: ‘A man wise in judgment would not divine anything like this—that so long as men live what indeed they call life, so long they exist and have their share of things both terrible and good, but that before mortals were compounded and once they are dissolved, they are then nothing at all.’ For these words are not the words of one who denies that those who have come to be and are living exist; rather, they are the words of one who supposes that even those not yet born and those already dead exist as well.

But in fact Colotes has not even brought this charge; instead he says that, according to Empedocles, we shall not fall sick or be wounded at all. Yet how can one who does not exclude suffering from those who exist before life and after it fail to leave room for suffering among the living as well? To whom, then, does it truly belong not to be wounded and not to fall sick, Colotes? To you—to you who are compacted out of atom and void, neither of which has any share in sensation. And this is not even the worst of it: there is nothing that can produce pleasure for you either, since the atom does not admit the things that could act upon it, and the void cannot be affected by them.

Now since Colotes, right after Democritus, wished to bury Parmenides along with him, while I have passed over that order and taken up Empedocles first, because his case follows more directly upon Colotes’ opening charges, let us now return to Parmenides. As for the things which Colotes says Parmenides speaks as shameful sophistries, that man did not, by means of them, make friendship any less respectable, nor love of pleasure any bolder, nor did he take away the power of the good to draw us toward itself and to be honored for its own sake, nor did he throw our beliefs about the gods into confusion; and by declaring that the All is one, I fail to see how he has kept us from living.

For indeed Epicurus too, when he says that the All is infinite, ungenerated, and indestructible, neither increasing nor diminishing, is speaking of the All as some single thing; and at the beginning of his treatise, having already stated that the nature of existing things is bodies and void, he has divided into two what is really one thing, one part of which really is nothing at all, though it is called by you “intangible,” “void,” and “incorporeal”—so that for you too the All is one, unless you wish merely to bandy empty words about the void, shadow-boxing against the ancients. ‘But,’ you will say, ‘by Zeus, according to Epicurus the bodies are infinite in number, and each of the visible things comes to be out of them.’

Consider, though, what sort of first principles you posit for generation: infinity and void—of which the one is inert, unaffected, and incorporeal, while the other is disorderly, irrational, and unbounded, forever dissolving and disturbing itself because, owing to its multitude, it is neither mastered nor bounded. Parmenides, at any rate, has done away with neither fire nor water nor cliff nor cities, as Colotes claims, inhabited throughout Europe and Asia; indeed he has even composed an ordered account of the world, and, by mixing the elements—the bright and the dark—produces from them, and through them, all the phenomena.

For he has said a great deal about the earth, and about the heaven, the sun, the moon, and the stars, and has narrated the generation of mankind; and, as befits an ancient man versed in natural philosophy who composed a treatise of his own—not a corruption of someone else’s—he has left out nothing essential. And since, even earlier than Plato and Socrates, he understood that nature possesses something that is an object of opinion and also something that is an object of intellect—the object of opinion being unstable and wandering, subject to many changes and affections, through waning and waxing, appearing differently to different observers, and never remaining the same even to the same observer's perception at all times—

while the object of intellect is of a different kind: whole of limb, unmoving, and ungenerated, as he himself has said, like unto itself, and abiding in being. Misrepresenting these matters on the strength of mere wording, and pursuing the phrase rather than the meaning, Colotes says flatly that Parmenides does away with everything by positing that being is one. But Parmenides does away with neither reality; rather, assigning to each what properly belongs to it, he places the intelligible under the form of the one and of being—calling it “being” as eternal and indestructible, and “one” because of its likeness to itself and its admitting of no distinction—while under the disorderly and the moving he places the object of sense. One can see the very criterion for these in the lines: ‘both the unshaken heart of well-persuasive truth,’ which lays hold of the intelligible, that which remains ever the same in the same way,

‘and also the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true reliance,’ because these deal with things subject to every sort of change, affection, and dissimilarity. And yet it is impossible to say how he could have left room for sensation and opinion had he not also left room for an object of sense and an object of opinion. Rather, he held that whereas it belongs to what truly is to remain constant in being, these other things—which now are and now are not, forever passing out of themselves and changing their nature—required, he thought, a name different from that of true Being, since they always stand in need of some designation.

His argument, then, that being is one, was not a denial of the many and of the objects of sense, but a demonstration of their difference from the intelligible—a distinction which Plato, setting it forth still more fully in his treatment of the Forms, likewise gave Colotes an occasion to seize upon. For this reason I think it best to take up next what has been said against Plato. And first let us examine the diligence and wide learning of our philosopher, who claims that Aristotle, Xenocrates, Theophrastus, and all the Peripatetics followed these very doctrines of Plato.

In what uninhabitable wilderness, then, were you living when you wrote your book, that in compiling these charges you never came across their treatises, and never took into your hands Aristotle's On the Heavens and On the Soul, or Theophrastus's Against the Natural Philosophers, or Heraclides's Zoroaster, his On the Things in Hades, or his On Difficulties in Natural Philosophy, or Dicaearchus's On the Soul—works in which, on the most important and greatest questions of natural philosophy, they persist in opposing and contending against Plato? Moreover, among the other Peripatetics, Strato, their most eminent figure, agrees with Aristotle on many points, yet holds opinions opposite to Plato's concerning motion, mind, soul, and generation;

and, to crown it all, he says that the cosmos itself is not a living creature, and that what happens according to nature follows upon what happens by chance; for the spontaneous supplies the starting point, and thereafter each of the natural processes is brought to completion in this way. As for the Forms, on account of which Colotes brings his charge against Plato, Aristotle himself, attacking them at every turn and raising every possible difficulty against them—in the ethical treatises, in the Metaphysics, in the Physics, and in the exoteric dialogues—seemed to some, on the strength of these very doctrines, to be acting more out of contentiousness than out of philosophy, as though he had set out to demolish Plato's philosophy; so far was he from following it.

What sort of recklessness is it, then, to misrepresent, without having learned them, the views these men actually held, and, believing oneself to be refuting others, to publish under one's own name a proof of one's own ignorance and rashness—by claiming that those who disagree with Plato agree with him, and that those who contradict him follow him? ‘But,’ he says, ‘Plato claims that horses are vainly called horses by us, and men, men.’ In what hidden corner of Plato's writings did Colotes discover this? For throughout all his works we read that man is called man, horse is called horse, and fire is called fire, each of these being, in his view, an object of opinion—and he does indeed call each of them exactly that: an object of opinion.

But he, having not the slightest share in wisdom, took it as one and the same thing to say that the...

a human being — and to “not-being” as “being not a human being.” But Plato held that it made a marvelous difference whether one said “not to be” or “to be not-being”: the one signifies the removal of all being whatsoever, the other the otherness of the participated from the participant. This distinction the later philosophers reduced merely to the difference of genus and species, or of what is said in common and what is said properly of qualities, and they advanced no higher, falling instead into more logical puzzles.

There is, in fact, a relation of the participated to the participant, the same relation that a cause bears to its matter, a model to its image, a capacity to its affection. And it is precisely by this relation that what exists in itself and remains ever the same continually differs from what exists through another and is never in the same state — because the one neither will be, nor has become, not-being, and for this reason is altogether and truly being, while the other has no security even in the borrowed being it possesses from another, but slips away through weakness, since matter, sliding about the form and admitting many affections and changes, constitutes the image of real being, so that it is subject to motion and disturbance. Just as one who says that the image is not Plato does not thereby deny that it can be perceived and does exist as an image, but rather points out a difference between something that exists in its own right and another thing that has come to be in relation to it — so too, those who call each of us an image, coming to be by participation and by form in a common kind of being, do not thereby deny the nature, the use, or the perception belonging to human beings; for indeed

a person who denies that heated iron is fire, or that the moon is the sun, but calls it instead, in Parmenides’ words, “a light shining by night, wandering about the earth, an alien light,” does not thereby deny the use or the nature of iron or of the moon. But if he should deny that it is a body at all, or that it is illuminated, then he is already at odds with the senses — as would be the case with someone who denied it body, living creature, coming-to-be, and perception altogether. But the one who supposes that these things exist by virtue of participating,

and insofar as they fall short of that which always is and which furnishes them their being, does not overlook the perceptible but rather looks past the intelligible; nor does he deny the things that come to be and appear around us as affections, but rather, by showing that other things are more secure and more abiding with respect to being — because they neither come to be nor perish nor undergo any affection — he demonstrates this to those who follow him, and teaches them, with greater precision than the ordinary distinction, to call the one class of things ‘beings’ and the other ‘things that come to be,’ fastening their names to this difference.

This same thing has happened among the moderns as well: for they deprive many great things of the designation of being — the void, time, place, and, in a word, the whole class of ‘sayables,’ in which all truths are included; for these, they say, are things that are not, though they are “somethings,” and yet they make use of them as subsisting and existing both in daily life and in their continued practice of philosophy.

“But I should be glad to ask the accuser himself whether he does not see this same distinction in the doctrines of his own school — the distinction between things that are stable and unchangeable in their being, as they say the atoms are, remaining forever the same by virtue of their impassibility and hardness, while all compounds are fluid and changeable, coming to be and perishing— since countless images are forever streaming away and flowing off, and, as is likely, countless others flow in from the surrounding medium and refill the aggregate, which is made variegated and remixed by this exchange, inasmuch as the atoms deep within the compound are never able to cease their motion or their mutual vibrations, as they themselves say.

Yet even granting that such a difference of being exists among these things, Epicurus proves himself wiser than Plato by calling all things alike ‘beings’ — the intangible void, the resisting body, the first principles, and the compounds — holding, by Zeus, that the eternal shares a common being with what comes to be, and the indestructible with what perishes, and those impassible, enduring, unchangeable natures that can never fall out of being, with those very things whose being consists precisely in undergoing affection and change, and which are never for any time in the same state. And if Plato erred as badly as possible in this matter, he ought to have been held accountable only for a confusion of terms by these more precise Hellenists and clearer reasoners — not charged with abolishing the facts themselves and driving us out of life — on the ground that he called things that come to be ‘not beings,’ as these men themselves do.

“But since, after Parmenides, we have passed over Socrates, he must be taken up at once, since Colotes has stirred him from the sacred hearth. Having related that Chaerephon brought back an oracle from Delphi concerning Socrates — which we all know — Colotes has added these words: ‘We shall pass over the story of Chaerephon, as being altogether the mark of a sophist and vulgar.’ Vulgar, then, was Plato, who set down this oracle in writing — to say nothing of the others. More vulgar still were the Spartans, who kept the oracle concerning Lycurgus recorded in their most ancient archives. A sophistic tale, too, was that of Themistocles, by which he persuaded the Athenians to abandon their city and defeated the barbarian in a sea battle. Vulgar as well were the lawgivers of Greece, who established the greatest and most numerous of their sacred institutions on the authority of Pythian oracles. If, then, the oracle

concerning Socrates — a man possessed by a god for his virtue — brought back as attesting his wisdom, was vulgar and sophistic, by what name shall we fittingly address your own ‘roarings’ and ‘wailings’ and ‘clamorous applause’ and ‘acts of reverence’ and ‘invocations of divinity,’ with which you turn in supplication and sing hymns to the man who summons you to continual and repeated pleasures? He who in his letter to Anaxarchus wrote these very words: ‘I for my part summon men to continual pleasures,

and not to virtues, which hold out empty, vain, and troublesome hopes of their fruits.’ And yet, for all that, Metrodorus, exhorting Timarchus, says: ‘Let us do some noble deed befitting noble men, all but plunging ourselves into fellow-feeling with him and freeing ourselves from the life lived close to the ground, into the truly god-revealed mysteries of Epicurus.’ And Colotes himself, while listening to Epicurus discoursing on nature, suddenly fell at his knees,

and Epicurus himself writes this of the incident, priding himself upon it: ‘For as you were showing reverence toward what was then being said by us, there fell upon you an impulse, beyond all natural explanation, to embrace us, clasping our knees, and to perform the whole customary act of supplication, in the manner of those paying honor and offering prayers of reverence. You made us, accordingly,’ he says, ‘consecrate you in return and revere you as well.’ One may well forgive, by Zeus, those who say they would pay any price

to behold a painted image of that scene — the one falling at the knees and embracing them, the other returning the supplication and the reverent bow. Yet this act of devotion, however well composed on Colotes’ part, did not bear a fruit worthy of it: he was not proclaimed a sage, but was told only, ‘Walk about before me as one imperishable, and think of us as imperishable too.’ Well aware, then, of such words, gestures, and feelings of their own,

they call other people vulgar. And indeed, after setting forth these wise and noble sayings of his about the senses — that ‘we take in food and not fodder, and when rivers are large we cross them by boat, but when they become fordable, on foot’ — Colotes exclaims: ‘But you, Socrates, cultivated boastful arguments, and said one thing to those you conversed with while doing another.’

For how are the arguments of Socrates not boastful, when he professed to know nothing himself, but to be forever learning and seeking the truth? And if, Colotas, you fell in with such utterances of Socrates, what of those which Epicurus writes to Idomeneus: ‘Send us, then, first-fruits for the care of our sacred body, on behalf of yourself and your children — for so it occurs to me to put it’? What cruder words could you have used?

And as for the claim that Socrates said one thing and did another, the events at Delium bear you marvelous witness, and those at Potidaea, and those under the Thirty, and his dealings with Archelaus, and with the people, his poverty, his death — for these are not worthy of Socratic arguments. That man, my good friend, would have been a refutation of Socrates — saying one thing and doing another — if,

having set down pleasant living as his goal, he had lived accordingly. So much, then, in answer to the slanders. But that in the very matters for which he brings his accusation about self-evident things Colotes himself is guilty, he has failed to notice. For it is one of Epicurus’ own doctrines that no one, save the sage alone, is unshakably convinced of anything. Since, then, Colotes was not a sage — not even after those acts of reverence — let him first ask himself those very questions:

how it is that, being suited to take in food and not fodder, he nonetheless is not unshakably convinced that clothing is clothing and food is food, wrapping his garment about his own body and not about a pillar. And if he does these things, and likewise does not wade on foot through rivers when they are large, and flees serpents and wolves, without being unshakably convinced that any of these is really what

it appears to be, but acts in each case according to appearance — then neither, surely, was Socrates hindered by his view about the senses from making use of appearances in just the same way. For it was not the case that bread appeared as bread to Colotes, and fodder as fodder, because he had read the god-given Canons, while Socrates, out of boastfulness, got an impression of bread as fodder and of fodder as bread.

For these wise men make use of the same doctrines and reasonings as we do; but perceiving and being impressed by appearances is a common affection, brought about by causes that have nothing to do with reason. It is the reasoning that is brought to bear upon the senses — holding that they are not exact nor secure grounds for certainty — that does not abolish the fact that each thing appears to us as it does, but rather, while men make use of appearance for the purpose of action,

denies to the senses the claim to be trusted as wholly true and infallible in every case; for what is necessary and useful is sufficiently supplied by them, since nothing better is available — but the knowledge and understanding of each thing that the philosophic soul longs to grasp, these the senses do not provide.” “On these matters, then, Colotes will again give us occasion to speak, since he has leveled the same charge against many others. But in the passage where he utterly

derides and mocks Socrates for inquiring what a human being is, and for boasting, as he says, that he himself did not even know — it is clear that Colotes himself never once came near that question. Heraclitus, however, as though he had accomplished something great and solemn, says, ‘I searched out myself,’ and among the inscriptions at Delphi the most divine seemed to him to be ‘Know thyself’ — the very saying that, as Aristotle says in his works on Plato, gave Socrates the starting point

for this perplexity and this inquiry; but to Colotes it seems laughable. Why, then, does he not likewise laugh at his own master, who does this very thing whenever he writes or discourses about the being of the soul and about the coalescence at its origin? For if, as they themselves maintain, a human being is the compound of both — a body of such-and-such a kind together with a soul — then one who inquires into the nature of the soul is inquiring into the nature of the human being,

proceeding from the more authoritative principle. And that this principle is hard to discern by reasoning and impossible to grasp by sense-perception, let us learn not from Socrates, ‘that sophist and boaster,’ but from these wise men themselves, who, even in dealing with the powers of the soul that concern the flesh — those by which it furnishes warmth and softness and tension to the body — in constructing its being out of something hot and breath-like and airy, do not

attain to the most authoritative part, but rather give up the attempt. ‘For that by which the soul judges and remembers and loves and hates, and in general the intelligent and reasoning faculty,’ he says, ‘arises from a certain quality that cannot be named.’ And that this ‘unnamable’ is a confession of an ignorance that is ashamed of itself — men admitting that they cannot name what they are unable to comprehend — we know well: ‘let this too be granted forgiveness,’ as they say.

For it appears to be no trivial or easy matter, nor one within just anyone’s reach, to come to understand — but something deeply embedded in some inaccessible place and terribly concealed, a thing for which, among so many names, not one is proper to make it plain. Socrates, then, was not foolish for inquiring into himself, but rather all those are foolish who are moved to inquire into anything else before this, seeing that the knowledge of it, necessary as it is, is so difficult

to discover; for no one could hope to grasp knowledge of anything else, when he has failed to comprehend the most authoritative part of his very self. “But granting him that nothing is so useless or so vulgar as inquiring into oneself, let us ask what this confusion in his account of life amounts to, or how it is that a man cannot, in the course of living, at some point pause and reason with himself: ‘Come now, who am I,

this self that I happen to be? Am I a kind of blend mixed together out of soul and body? Or rather is it the soul that makes use of the body, just as a horseman makes use of a horse, and not the compound of horse and man? Or is it the most authoritative part of the soul, by which we think and reason and act, that each of us is, while the rest — all the remaining parts both of soul and of body — are merely

instruments of this faculty’s power? Or is there, in fact, no substance of soul at all, but the body itself, once blended together, has acquired the power of thinking and living?’ Now by raising these questions Socrates does not abolish life — questions which, indeed, all the natural philosophers pursue. Those other questions were the terrifying and disturbing ones, the ones in the Phaedrus, where he thought he must examine himself, to see ‘whether he is

a beast more complex and more inflamed with passion than Typhon, or whether by nature he shares in some portion that is divine and free of arrogance.’ But even with these further reflections he was not abolishing life; rather, he was driving frenzy and arrogance out of life, along with the burdensome, swollen conceits and vainglories — for these are the very ‘Typhon’ that your master has bred so abundantly in you, warring against the gods

and against godlike men.” “After Socrates and Plato, he attacks Stilpo next; and the true doctrines and arguments of that man, by which he adorned himself, his country, his friends, and those kings who were devoted to him, Colotes has not recorded — nor how great was the loftiness of spirit in his soul, joined with gentleness and moderation of feeling. Instead, from among the playful arguments Stilpo used in jest against the sophists,

he singled out one little argument that Stilpo had proposed to them, mentioning it while saying nothing in reply to it and without refuting its plausibility, and then piles on tragic language against Stilpo, declaring that ‘his life is done away with’ by his own argument — the argument that one thing cannot be predicated of another. ‘For how shall we live,’ he asks, ‘if we do not say “a good man” nor “a man general,” but “man” separately and “good” separately and “general” separately, nor “ten thousand horsemen” nor “a city

...but cavalry are cavalry, and ten thousand are ten thousand, and so on for the rest? Who ever lived worse because of such talk? Who, hearing the argument, failed to understand that it is the utterance of a man playing wittily, or offering this as a dialectical exercise for others? It is no terrible thing, Colotes, to refuse to call a man ‘good’ or to refuse to say ‘ten thousand cavalry’; but to refuse to call god ‘god,’ or to refuse to believe it—that is another matter—

since you yourselves are unwilling to acknowledge Zeus as Genethlios, Demeter as Thesmophoros, or Poseidon as Phytalmios: this stripping away of names is a wicked business, and it fills life with godless neglect and insolence, since by tearing off the epithets that are joined to the gods you destroy along with them the sacrifices, the mysteries, the processions, the festivals. To whom shall we sacrifice the Proerosia? To whom the Soteria? How shall we keep the Phosphoria, the Bacchic rites, the wedding proteleia, unless

we also give up the Bacchic gods, the Bearers of Light, the Lords of the Plowing-Season, and the Saviors? For these matters touch what is most authoritative and greatest, and the deception they involve lies in actual practice, not in certain sounds, nor in the arrangement of words, nor in the customary use of names. Yet if even such things as these overturn life, who trespasses more against language than you, who utterly abolish the whole class of ‘sayables,’ which furnishes reason with its very substance,

leaving only the sounds and the objects referred to, while declaring that the meanings that lie between them—through which learning, teaching, preconceptions, acts of understanding, impulses, and assents all come about—do not exist at all? —“No, but the case of Stilpo is rather this: ‘If we predicate running of a horse,’ he says, ‘the predicate is not the same thing as that of which it is predicated, but something different;

nor, if we predicate good of man, [is it the same]: rather, the account of what-it-is-to-be is one thing for man and another for the good; and again, being a horse differs from being running, for when asked to give an account of each we do not render the same account for both.’ Hence those who predicate one thing of another go astray: for if good is the very same thing as man, and running the same as horse,

how is it that we predicate ‘good’ also of food and of medicine, and, by Zeus, again ‘running’ of a lion and of a dog? But if it is something different, then we are wrong to say ‘man is good’ and ‘horse runs.’ If indeed it is over matters such as these that Stilpo draws blood so bitterly, leaving no connection at all between what is said of a subject and what is said within a subject,

unless a thing is called strictly identical with that to which it belongs, and not thinking it necessary to speak of it merely as an attribute—being difficult over certain expressions and setting himself against ordinary usage—he is plainly not doing away with life, nor with the realities themselves.” Having finished, then, with the ancients, Colotes turns to the philosophers of his own day, naming not one of them—though it would have been better either to refute these too by name,

or else not to have named the ancients either. But the man who set down Socrates and Plato and Parmenides so many times under his pen is plainly one who lost his nerve before the living, restrained not by reverence, since that is a thing he never granted even to his betters. His aim, I suspect, is to refute first the Cyrenaics, and second the Academics who followed Arcesilaus. For these were the ones

who suspended judgment about everything, while the Cyrenaics, placing the affections and the appearances within themselves, did not think that the conviction arising from these was sufficient ground for making assertions about external things; rather, as if under siege, withdrawing from what lay outside, they shut themselves up within their affections, positing ‘it appears,’ but no longer adding ‘it is’ concerning external things. This, Colotes says, is why

they cannot live or make use of the things around them; and then, mocking them, he says: ‘These men do not say that man exists, or horse, or wall, but that they themselves are being-walled, being-horsed, and being-manned.’ In this, first of all, like a common informer, he twists their words maliciously. It is true that this does follow, in a sense, from what these men say; but he ought to have made clear—as they themselves teach—what is actually meant, since they speak of ‘being sweetened’

and ‘being embittered’ and ‘being chilled’ and ‘being warmed’ and ‘being illumined’ and ‘being darkened,’ each of these affections having its own activity within the perceiver, self-contained and undisturbed; whereas whether the honey itself is sweet, the young shoot bitter, the hail cold, the unmixed wine warm, and the night air dark, is contradicted by many witnesses—animals, things, and men alike—of whom

some find honey disagreeable, others relish the young shoot, some are scorched by the hail while others are chilled by the wine, and some are dazzled looking toward the sun while others see well by night. Hence, so long as belief stays close to the affections themselves it preserves its freedom from error; but once it steps outside and busies itself with judging and pronouncing upon external things, it often both throws itself into confusion and clashes with others who, from the very same objects, receive opposite affections and different appearances.”

Colotes seems to suffer the same thing as children just learning their letters, who, having grown used to naming the characters on their own writing tablets, are baffled and thrown into confusion when they see the same letters written elsewhere. So too this man: the very arguments that he embraces and loves in the writings of Epicurus he neither understands nor recognizes when spoken by others.

For when an image reaches us that is round, and another that is bent, these philosophers say that the sensation is truly imprinted as it is, yet they do not allow one to go further and assert that the tower itself is round or the oar itself bent; they stand by their own affections and appearances, but are unwilling to agree that external things are actually so—just as, in the other case, one must say ‘being-horsed’ and ‘being-walled,’ not that there is a horse

or a wall, so likewise one must say that the sight is ‘being roundened’ or ‘being made scalene,’ without any need to call the oar or the tower itself scalene or round: for the image by which the sight is affected is bent, but the oar from which the image comes is not bent. Since the affection, then, differs from the external object underlying it, one must either rest one’s confidence on the affection alone, or be refuted the moment one goes further and asserts that being follows appearing.

As for their loud protest and indignation on behalf of sensation—that they are not saying the external object is hot, but that the affection within the sense itself has become of such a kind—is this not exactly the same as what is said concerning taste, that they do not claim the external thing is sweet, but rather that a certain affection and

movement of that kind has occurred within the perceiver? The man who says he receives a man-shaped appearance, while denying that, if it is truly a man, he perceives it as such—where did he get the grounds for this distinction, if not from those who say they receive a curved appearance, while denying that, if the object is curved, the sight should go further and assert that it is round, rather than saying only that an appearance and impression of a roundish shape has arisen in it? ‘Yes, by Zeus,’ someone will say, ‘but I, going up to the tower and touching the oar with my own hand,

will declare the one straight and the other many-angled’—while that other man, even coming close, will grant only ‘it seems’ and ‘it appears,’ and nothing more. ‘Yes indeed, by Zeus, and more truly than you, my good fellow,’ since he sees and holds fast to what actually follows: that every appearance is equally trustworthy as evidence about itself, but that concerning anything beyond itself none is more trustworthy than another—they all stand on the same footing.

But for you, the claim that all appearances are true and none untrustworthy or false has already collapsed, if you think it necessary, in the case of some, to go on and make assertions about external things on their basis, while in the case of others you trusted them no further than the bare being-affected. For if the appearances stand on equal footing for credibility whether one comes near or stays far off, then either it is right to follow all of them into the judgment that further asserts being, or to follow none of them;

but if a difference in the affection does arise between withdrawing and approaching, then it is false to say that ‘neither appearance nor sensation is ever clearer than another’—just as the confirmations and counter-confirmations they speak of belong not to sensation but to opinion. So that if they bid us follow these in making assertions about external things, they are making the verdict of ‘being’ belong to opinion, and the ‘appearing’ belong to the affection of sense,

and are thereby transferring judgment away from what is altogether true and onto what often fails. But how much turmoil and self-contradiction all this is full of—why should one say more of it at present? Epicurus seems to have been troubled beyond measure by the reputation of Arcesilaus, who was esteemed above all the philosophers of that age, for he says that Arcesilaus, ‘having nothing of his own to say,’

‘produced belief and opinion in unlettered men’—this from a man himself thoroughly lettered and cultivated! Yet Arcesilaus was so far from courting any reputation for novelty, or appropriating any doctrine of the ancients as his own, that he used to reproach the sophists of his day for foisting upon Socrates and Plato and Parmenides and Heraclitus the doctrines of suspension of judgment and non-apprehension, though these men had no need of any such thing, but were rather made

into a kind of derivation and confirmation of those doctrines by being enlisted as famous men. For this, then, thanks are due to Colotes, and to everyone else who declares that the Academic doctrine descends from of old down to Arcesilaus. But universal suspension of judgment not even those who labored hard at it, and devoted whole treatises and arguments to it, ever managed to set in motion; rather, in the end, from the Stoa itself they gave it up, bringing forward inactivity like a Gorgon’s head, protesting that, however much

they twisted and turned the matter, impulse simply would not obey them so as to become assent, nor did their sensation ever admit any beginning of that inclination—rather, of itself it proved able to lead them into action, with no need of assent being added to it. For the contests waged against these men are fair and lawful ones, and ‘whatever word you speak, such a one you may hear in answer.’ But to Colotes, I think, discussions of impulse and assent are like music played for a donkey’s ears—

nothing to him. It is said, however, by those who follow the argument and listen closely, that of the three movements that occur about the soul—the imaginative, the impulsive, and the assenting—the imaginative one cannot be abolished even by those who wish it, but of necessity, on first encountering things, a person is imprinted and affected by them; and the impulsive movement, roused by the imaginative one, moves a person practically toward what suits him, there being, as it were, an inclination and a settling in the ruling part of the soul,

and this too those who suspend judgment about everything do not abolish, but rather make use of the impulse that naturally leads toward what appears fitting. What, then, do they alone avoid? Only that in which falsehood and deception alone take root: namely, opining and rushing headlong into assent—a yielding, through weakness, to what merely appears, and one that serves no useful purpose. For action requires two things: an appearance of what suits one,

and an impulse toward the fitting thing once it has appeared—and neither of these is in conflict with suspension of judgment, for reason does away with opinion, not with impulse or with appearance. So whenever the pleasant appears as fitting, there is no need of opinion, nor of any movement of opinion, to produce the motion and drive toward it; rather, impulse arrives at once, being itself a motion and drive of the soul.” And indeed, by these very men’s own words—since, as they say, ‘one must have sensation and be a creature of flesh, and pleasure will appear a good’—

then to the man who suspends judgment too it will appear good, since he too shares in sensation and is a creature of flesh; and having received the appearance of a good thing, he reaches for it and feels impulse toward it, doing everything so that it will not escape him, but so that, as far as possible, he will always remain with what suits him, drawn by natural necessities, not geometrical ones—‘for without any teacher these fine things invite themselves,’

and ‘the smooth, gentle movements of the flesh,’ as these men themselves put it—drawing in even the man who altogether refuses and denies that he can be bent and softened by them. ‘But then how is it that the one who suspends judgment does not go running off to the mountain instead of to the bathhouse, or walk toward the wall rather than toward the doors when he rises, wishing to go out to the marketplace?’ You ask me this, while claiming that the senses are exact

and the appearances true? It is because, surely, to him the bathhouse appears as a bathhouse and not as the mountain, and the door as a door and not as the wall—and so likewise with everything else. For the doctrine of suspended judgment does not divert sensation, nor does it produce any alteration in its irrational affections and movements that would disturb the imaginative faculty; it does away only with opinions, and makes use of everything else just as nature provides it.

‘But it is impossible not to assent to what is self-evident; and to deny what is generally believed, or neither to deny nor affirm it, is even more irrational.’ Who, then, is it that unsettles what is believed and fights against what is self-evident? It is those who do away with divination, and who deny that there is any providence of the gods, claiming that the sun is not even a living being, nor the moon—beings to which all men sacrifice, pray, and pay reverence,

holding that by nature those who bear children are bound in affection to their offspring—do you not do away with what is evident to everyone? And do you not assert, against the sense of all mankind, that there is nothing intermediate between pain and pleasure, calling the mere absence of pain ‘pleasure,’ and the mere absence of pleasure ‘pain’?” “But—to let the rest go—what is so self-evident, so universally believed, as this: that seeing and hearing wrongly occur in states of ecstatic and melancholic derangement,

whenever the mind suffers and is thrown into such disturbance—as in the line, ‘torch-bearing women in black garments set my eye ablaze’? Indeed, these things, and many others more tragic still, resembling the ‘monstrosities’ of Empedocles—the very things at which they themselves laugh—‘shambling, handless, wandering creatures’ and ‘ox-born, man-faced beings’—and whatever strange shape or nature men have conjured up out of dreams and derangements, of all this they say

that none is an illusion, nor false, nor without real existence, but that all are true appearances, bodies and shapes arriving from the surrounding medium. Is there, then, anything at all among existing things that it is impossible to disbelieve, if such things as these can be believed? For things that no maker of properties, no fashioner of marvels, no skillful painter ever dared to combine, even for the sake of deception, as mere likenesses and toys—these men set down as existing in sober earnest; or rather, altogether,

they claim that if such things did not exist, then confidence, certainty, and the very judgment of truth would be gone—and in saying this they themselves cast all things down into obscurity, bringing fears into our judgments and suspicions into our actions, if the very things we do, and believe, and are accustomed to, and have constantly in hand, are carried on the same footing of appearance and conviction as those mad, monstrous, and lawless apparitions.

For the equality which they posit for all appearances alike removes confidence from what is customarily believed far more than it lends confidence to the irrational; hence we know that not a few philosophers would rather have laid it down that no appearance at all is true than that all are, and would sooner have distrusted men and things and words absolutely—everything, in fact, with which they have no direct acquaintance—than hold that even a single one of those strange appearances is true and real.

...than be persuaded that one of those images alone is true and real — the very images that people in a state of madness, Corybantic frenzy, or sleep receive. Now it is possible to reject these images; and it is likewise possible — indeed unavoidable — to suspend judgment about them, taking this very disagreement, if nothing else, as sufficient ground for suspicion regarding the facts; and even so nothing is sound, but everything is full of obscurity and confusion.

As for the doctrines of infinite worlds, the nature of atoms, indivisible particles, and swerves, even though they trouble a great many people, there is nonetheless some consolation in the fact that none of these questions lies close at hand, but rather that each of the things under investigation is situated altogether beyond the reach of sense-perception. But this distrust, ignorance, and confusion regarding the eyes, the ears, and the hands themselves — regarding sensible objects and the images we receive, whether true or false — what opinion does it not shake? What assent or judgment does it not turn upside down?

For if it is not men who are drunk, drugged, or deranged, but men sober, healthy, and writing treatises about truth, standards, and criteria, who — in the very clearest experiences and movements of sense-perception — suppose that what does not exist is true, or that what is false and nonexistent is the truth, then it is not their suspending judgment about everything that is remarkable, but rather that they assent to anything human at all. Nor is it incredible that they have no settled judgment about appearances, but rather that they hold contrary ones. One would be less surprised at a man who, instead of asserting either of two contrary and opposing claims, suspends judgment about them, than at men who contradict and oppose one another; for the man who neither affirms nor denies, but remains quiet, is at odds with the one who affirms an opinion less than the one who denies it is, and at odds with the one who denies it less than the one who affirms it. And if it is possible to suspend judgment about these matters, then it is not impossible in the case of other matters either — at least on your own premises, since you hold that one sense-perception does not differ in the least from another, nor one impression from another.

The doctrine of suspension of judgment, then, is not a fable, nor a device for hunting down impudent and reckless young men, as Colotes supposes; it is a settled state and disposition of grown men, one that guards against error and does not surrender judgment to senses so discredited and so at odds with themselves, nor lets itself be deceived along with those who claim that 'appearances offer proof of what is unclear,' even while observing so much unreliability and obscurity in the appearances themselves. But a fable, rather, is the infinite worlds and the images; and it is the man who, writing about Pythocles when he was not yet eighteen years old, declares that 'there is no finer nature in all of Greece,' and reports on him in extravagant terms, and who himself feels what women feel, praying that all things connected with the young man's excess be free of envy and reproach — he is the one who breeds recklessness and impudence in the young. Are not those men sophists and charlatans who write so insolently and arrogantly against men of repute? And yet Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Democritus disputed with those who came before them; but no one else has ventured to publish a book bearing such a title, directed against everyone at once.

Hence, like men who have transgressed against the divine and are confessing their own misdeeds, near the very end of the book he says that 'those who established laws and customs, and who set cities under kingship and government, brought human life into great security and tranquility and freed it from turmoil; but if anyone abolishes these things, we shall live the life of beasts, and whoever meets another will all but devour him.' These are Colotes' very words, and they are neither just nor true. For if one were to abolish the laws but leave in place the doctrines of Parmenides, Socrates, Heraclitus, and Plato, we should be very far from devouring one another and living the life of beasts; for we would fear disgraceful acts and honor justice for its own nobility, believing that we have good gods as our rulers and divine spirits as guardians of our life, and holding that 'not even all the gold above and beneath the earth is worth as much as virtue' — doing willingly, for reason's sake, as Xenocrates says, what men now do only unwillingly, for fear of the law.

When, then, will our life become bestial, savage, and unsociable? When the laws are abolished, but the doctrines urging us toward pleasure remain, the providence of the gods is no longer believed in, and men consider wise those who 'spit upon nobility, if pleasure is not attached to it,' mocking and laughing at the sayings, 'There is an eye of Justice that sees all things,' and 'the god stands near and watches close at hand,' and 'God, as the old saying has it, holding the beginning and middle and end of all things, accomplishes his straight course as he travels round according to nature; and Justice follows him, as avenger of those who fall short of the divine law.' For those who despise these sayings as mere fables, and who locate the good in the belly and the other channels through which pleasure arrives, need law, and fear, and the lash, and some king or ruler holding justice in his hand, so that they may not devour their neighbors once their gluttony is emboldened by atheism.

For indeed the life of beasts is of just this sort: they know nothing better than pleasure, they know no justice of the gods, nor do they revere nobility, but whatever boldness, cunning, or energy nature has given them, they employ toward the pleasure of the flesh and the satisfaction of appetite — just as the wise Metrodorus thinks proper, when he says that all the fine, wise, and extraordinary discoveries of the soul exist for the sake of the pleasure of the flesh and the hope of that pleasure, and that every accomplishment which does not tend toward this end is empty. If the laws were abolished by these reasonings and philosophical doctrines, nothing would be lacking to us but wolves' claws, lions' teeth, the bellies of oxen, and the throats of camels; and these same passions and doctrines, for lack of words and writing, beasts express in roars and whinnies and other such sounds, and every sound they utter is a sound of the belly, welcoming and fawning upon the pleasure of the flesh, present or expected — unless some creature is by nature simply fond of noise and chatter.

No praise, then, could be worthy enough for those who established laws, constitutions, offices, and legal codes against these bestial passions. But who are the ones confounding, overthrowing, and utterly abolishing these things? Is it not those who withdraw themselves and their associates from political life? Is it not those who say that 'the crown of tranquility is beyond comparison with great empires'? Is it not those who declare 'kingship a sin and a downfall,' and who write, in these very words, that 'one ought to explain how a man may best preserve the end set by nature, and how he may, of his own will, never in the first place approach positions of authority over the masses'? And further, in addition to these words: 'there is no more need to save the Greeks, or to win from them a crown for wisdom, but rather to eat and drink, Timocrates, in a way that is harmless and pleasing to the flesh'?

And yet, in the very ordering of laws that Colotes himself praises, belief concerning the gods is the first and greatest element; and Lycurgus consecrated the Spartans, Numa the Romans, Ion of old the Athenians, and Deucalion virtually all the Greeks together, making them susceptible to the divine, through prayers, oaths, oracles, and reports, by means of hopes and fears at once. Traveling about, you might find cities without walls, without writing, without kings, without houses, without wealth, having no need of currency, unacquainted with theaters and gymnasiums; but a city without temples and without gods, one that makes no use of prayers, oaths, divinations, or sacrifices either for the sake of blessings or for the warding-off of evils, no one has ever seen, nor will ever see. Rather, it seems to me, a city could sooner come into being without ground beneath it than a political community could either be formed, or having been formed, be preserved, once belief concerning the gods had been entirely removed.

This, then — the very support and foundation holding together every human community and system of law — they overturn, not by circling around it, nor secretly and through riddles, but by attacking it directly, as the first of the most authoritative beliefs. Then, as though driven by some avenging punishment, they confess to doing terrible things, throwing customs into confusion and abolishing the ordinances of the laws, so that they may not even obtain pardon. For to err in one's opinion, even if it is not the mark of wise men, is nonetheless human; but how could one describe the act of accusing others of the very things one does oneself, if one is sparing of the names such conduct deserves? For if, writing against Antidorus or Bion the sophist, he had made mention of laws, political community, and constitutional order, would not someone have said to him: 'You, poor wretch, quietly wrapping your little bit of flesh in your own bedclothes — let those who have lived their lives in household and civic responsibility bring charges against me on these matters!'? And these are all men whom Colotes has reviled.

Among them, Democritus advises that men be taught the political art, since it is the greatest of all, and that they pursue the labors from which great and splendid things come to human beings. Parmenides ordered his own homeland with excellent laws, so that the magistrates, every year, put the citizens under oath to abide by the laws of Parmenides. Empedocles, after exposing the leading citizens who were behaving arrogantly and plundering the public funds, drove them out, and he freed his country from barrenness and plague by walling off the clefts of a mountain, through which the south wind used to pour down upon the plain. Socrates, after his condemnation, when his friends had contrived an escape for him, did not make use of it, so as to uphold the laws, but chose to die unjustly rather than be saved unlawfully. Melissus, serving as general of his homeland, defeated the Athenians in a naval battle. Plato left behind beautiful writings on laws and political constitution, but he instilled far better ones in his companions, through whom Sicily was liberated by Dion, and Thrace by Pytho and Heraclides, who killed Cotys; and from the Academy came forth Athenian generals such as Chabrias and Phocion.

Epicurus, by contrast, sent men to Asia to revile Timocrates and to drive the man out of the royal court, because, though his brother, he had fallen out with Metrodorus — and this is written in their own books. Plato, on the other hand, sent out his companions: Aristonymus to the Arcadians, to set their constitution in order, Phormio to the Eleans, and Menedemus to the Pyrrhaeans. Eudoxus, who had been Plato's associate, wrote laws for the Cnidians, and Aristotle for the people of Stagira; and Alexander asked Xenocrates for advice concerning kingship; and the man sent to Alexander by the Greeks settled in Asia, who did the most to kindle and spur him to undertake the war against the barbarians, was Delius of Ephesus, a companion of Plato.

As for Zeno, the disciple of Parmenides, who attacked the tyrant Demylus and met with misfortune in the attempt, he proved the doctrine of Parmenides in the fire to be like gold, unadulterated and genuine, and demonstrated by his deeds that disgrace, not pain, is what a great man fears — pain being feared by children, and by women, and by men who have the souls of women; for he bit through his own tongue and spat it at the tyrant.

But from the words and doctrines of Epicurus, I will not even ask who among them became a tyrannicide, or a champion in war, or a lawgiver, or a ruler, or a king's counselor, or a leader of the people, or a man tortured or put to death on behalf of justice; but which of your sages ever sailed on his country's behalf, went on an embassy, or spent his own money for it? Where is any political act of yours recorded? And yet the fact that Metrodorus went down to the Piraeus — forty stades — to help a certain Mithres, a Syrian in the king's service who had been arrested, was written up and sent to everyone, in every letter, with Epicurus boasting grandly and solemnizing that little journey. What, then, would they have said, had they accomplished something like what Aristotle did — refounding his native city after it had been destroyed by Philip — or what Theophrastus did, freeing his city from tyranny twice over? Would not the Nile have sooner run out of papyrus to carry than these men have wearied of writing about themselves?

And the outrage is not merely that, among so many philosophers, they are almost the only ones who share in the goods of their cities while contributing nothing, but that even writers of tragedy and comedy always try to offer something useful and to speak on behalf of laws and civic order; whereas these men, even when they do write, write about politics so that we will not engage in politics, and about rhetoric so that we will not practice oratory, and about kingship so that we will avoid living alongside kings; and they name statesmen only to mock them and tear down their reputations, saying of Epaminondas that he 'had some good in him' — and even that, 'a small one,' phrasing it in just those words — calling him a man of 'iron guts,' and asking what possessed him to march through the middle of the Peloponnese instead of sitting at home in his little cap, devoted, no doubt, entirely to the care of his belly, as they are.

And what Metrodorus, dancing his contempt for political life, wrote in his book On Philosophy, I did not think I should leave out. He says: 'some of the wise, out of a great abundance of vanity, understood the business of political philosophy so well that they go rushing off toward the very same ambitions as Lycurgus and Solon, in their discourses about ways of life and virtue.' So it was vanity, and a great abundance of vanity, that Athens should be free, that Sparta should be well-governed by law, that the young should not grow insolent, that children should not be fathered on courtesans, and that wealth, luxury, and licentiousness should not rule, but rather law and justice in the cities — for these were the ambitions of Solon. And Metrodorus, heaping abuse, adds to what he has said: 'Therefore it is right for the truly free man to laugh a hearty laugh, both at the rest of mankind and at these Lycurguses and Solons.'

But this man, Metrodorus, is not free at all — he is servile and ill-bred, and deserves not even the whip fit for a free man, but that studded scourge with which they punish the Galli when they offend, in the temples of the Mother Goddess.

That it was not against lawgivers but against the laws themselves that they were waging war, one may hear from Epicurus himself; for he asks himself, in his Perplexities, 'whether the wise man will do any of the things the laws forbid, if he knows he will escape detection' — and he answers, 'the simple predicate does not admit an easy answer,' that is to say, 'I will do it, but I am unwilling to admit it.' And again, I believe, writing to Idomeneus, he urges him 'not to live in servitude to laws and opinions, so long as they do not, through the trouble caused by one's neighbor, bring on the annoyance that comes from being struck.'

If, then, those who abolish laws and civic constitutions thereby abolish human life itself, and Epicurus and Metrodorus do just this — turning their companions away from taking part in public affairs, showing hostility to those who do take part, speaking ill of the first and wisest of lawgivers, and urging men to despise the laws unless the fear of a beating and punishment is attached to them — then I do not know what falsehood of such magnitude Colotes has told against others, comparable to the truth he has himself, unwittingly, laid as a charge against the words and doctrines of Epicurus.

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