For centuries human beings have lived lives dictated by the seasons and the growing of crops, a slow and relatively unstressful life. We are not adapted to the furious pace that modern technology, globalization and a flat earth are forcing upon us. Anyone feel like imploding?
Boon and blessing, the computer allows me to compose music and listen to the notes I have put down. A modern miracle! But for this priviledge I spend at the least an hour a day simply keeping the computer up and running and attending to technical matters, not to mention sending and receiving messages that twenty years ago I would never have sent or received. And not to mention the spam. Mmmmh.
I’m sure the reason that Americans troop off to church on a Sunday has to do with this feeling of being overwhelmed. Europeans stay in bed and make love, but most of them have governments that offer some sort of safety net that lowers the anxiety somewhat. Americans are stressed out and need some reassurance and at least a break from their frenetic chasing after the dollar and enough cash to pay for their health insurance. If they can’t get peace and contentment in this life then maybe they will in the next one.
Too many people, too many issues. Government has become just too complex for ordinary human beings to cope with, and thus we have a raft of semi-performing governments everywhere. Those who purport to be pro-business cannot manage their way out of paper bags. Do we expect too much altogether? Should we be Epicurean, opt out and let them all get on with it.
I am new to this blog and to the philosophy of Epicurus; I love this blog! tell me, is there any evidence that shows how the ancient epicureans actually lived on a daily basis? Did they work? Share assets? have any sort of daily ritual?
It’s a very good question. So much of the written evidence was destroyed, mainly by the early Christians, who, for instance, burned down the huge and priceless library in Alexandria. Sounds just like the Taliban now.
In any case, I think the famous garden in Athens was more of a meeting place, a sort of club where you could go for discussion and companionship and mutual support. I don’t know that there were shared assets. It was not a commune. I assume people worked at normal jobs and resorted to the garden when they could. Epicurus lived there and no doubt raised funds from his supporters in order to live. What separated it from other philosophic “clubs” was that it was open to everyone, including women and slaves, anyone who could make a thoughtful contribution. As you know, it was otherwise a very class-based, good-ole-boy society.
If you haven’t done so visit:
http://www.hanrott.com/epicureanism01.html
http://www.epicurus.info/etexts/wallace_epicureanism.html
http://www.epicurus.net/
and the Yahoo discussion group on Epicureanism. You get some very knowledgable people on that.
Maybe it’s, ahem, the inescapable advance of involuntary maturity that gives urgency to the big question implied in Bob’s post: how best to spend our greatest asset, that is, the minutes, hours, and days of our life? Epicurus had it right about many things — satisfying conversation with family and friends, nature, trying to figure out the Big and the Little Things in the company of our friends, be they alive or present to us through books, music, and nature.
Some difficulties which get in our way, Epicurus couldn’t foresee. The sheer number of choices we have to make takes a psychic toll and the crowds of people who can intrude on our privacy in a nanosecond because of satellites and bytes, e-mails and phones, have to be resisted. As brutal as life could be for people in the distant past, they were spared the knowledge of the gigantic horrors that have transpired in the last two centuries including our destruction of nature itself.
Day-to-day, I find that the difficult issue is: what do I pitch out? In no particular order I’d say incessant noise, people who take up all the oxygen in a room or who never listen — along with a pack of other irritations that make up a too-long list. No need to go on about those, though, because one doesn’t want to be pitched from a blog for being too wordy.
I asked Victor, from the Epicurean Yahoo Epicurean discussion group waht he thought about life in The Garden. This is his reply;
By way of an answer both brief and limited by my own ignorance: we *do* know that Epicureans did not pool their assets all together, in any communal fashion, as other philosophical groups actually *did*; the argument was that such a practice would either indicate or, worse yet, foster mutual suspicion.
It is hard to define such terms as “job” in the context of the ancient world; “Old Money”, Athenian patricians –men only, of course– were landed gentry, and looked down on the dirty business ov actually *making* money; many (most?) members of the large, mercantile class were “metoikoi”, i.e. resident-aliens, Greeks usually, but non-Athenians, who had significant monetary/economic power but no political, citizen rights; craftsment and artisans were yet a rung lower; farmers, lowest of all.
The short version of my answer is a call to caution, lest we seek to superimpose *present*-day concepts on a socioeconomic reality long, long gone.
It is also difficult, or rather impossible to impute our modern sense of “tuition” in Greek antiquity. Suffice it to say that teachers of all sorts (philosophers, sophists, etc.) *did* customarily receive some sort of payment or other “for services rendered”. There appears to be some evidence that Epicurus was somehow “paid”, albeit probably very modestly, and that he disposed of his modest possessions with generorosity both prodigious and judicious. After all, he was totally committed to making do with less than most other people.
It is hard to imagine what “normal jobs” other Epicureans would/could have had: Athenian women were notoriously under their husbands’ thumbs. Paradoxically, the permissive Athenians were scandalized by the hyper-macho, militarist Spartans, whose society they (the Athenians) derided as “gynekokratia” , i.e. Women’s Rule: with men in the barracks from the cradle to the grave, Spartan women took care of just about EVERYthing in that city’s everyday life. But Athenian women were tightly tethered, and domesticated to a fault. The only notable exception would have been prostitutes, and we do know that Epicurus allowed *those* in his microcosm, much to the shock and disapproval of everyone else in his society at large.
Slaves were a special case, and one particularly hard to fathom, due to lack of documentation: some were modestly “educated”, although of course not in the fullness of the liberal arts, reserved for free-born citizens alone; they may have caught a glimpse of reading/writing skills, looking over their masters’ shoulders. Epicurus’ reliance on rote memorization may have had a practical tie-in with the low level of literacy anywhere below the upper crust of Athenian society.
So, yes, it is plausible that the Garden was more a *meeting* place than some sort of a “full-time residence”. Again, Athenians were (and we still are! 😉 notoriously outgoing: early in the 20th (!) century, a literary tourist wrote that “these people are like cats in midsummer”, always strolling about, stopping to chat with whoever might have been in the Agora (still extant, albeit in ruins), spending the bare minimum in their *own* houses. I get the strong impression that “home” for ancient Athenians meant little more than “a place to sleep”. Free-born Athenian men were the quintessential roaming tomcats; domesticity, and LOVE thereof, is distinctly a *Roman* sentiment.