Book 10
EPICURUS (341-271 B.C.)
1.1
Epicurus, son of Neocles and Chaerestrate, was as citizen of Athens of the deme Gargettus, and, as Metrodorus says in his book On Noble Birth, of the family of the Philaidae. He is said by Heraclidesi.e. Heraclides Lembos (F.H.G. iii. p. 70). in his Epitome of Sotion, as well as by other authorities, to have been brought up at Samos after the Athenians had sent settlers there and to have come to Athens at the age of eighteen, at the time when Xenocrates was lecturing at the Academy and Aristotle in Chalcis. Upon the death of Alexander of Macedon and the expulsion of the Athenian settlers from Samos by Perdiccas,Diod. Sic. xviii. 18. 9. Epicurus left Athens to join his father in Colophon.
1.2
For some time he stayed there and gathered disciples, but returned to Athens in the archonship of Anaxicrates.307-306 b.c. And for a while, it is said, he prosecuted his studies in common with the other philosophers, but afterwards put forward independent views by the foundation of the school called after him. He says himself that he first came into contact with philosophy at the age of fourteen. Apollodorus the Epicurean, in the first book of his Life of Epicurus, says that he turned to philosophy in disgust at the schoolmasters who could not tell him the meaning of chaos in Hesiod.Cf. Sext. Emp. Adv. math. x. 18, where the story is well told. According to Hermippus, however, he started as a schoolmaster, but on coming across the works of Democritus turned eagerly to philosophy.
1.3
Hence the point of Timon’s allusionFr. 51 D. in the lines: Again there is the latest and most shameless of the physicists, the schoolmaster’s sonThe meaning is: a schoolmaster like his father before him. Cf. Dem. De cor.§ 258 ἅμα τῷ πατρὶ πρὸς τῷ διδασκαλεί ῳ προσεδρεύων. From Aristophanes, Acharn. 595-7, it seems that patronymics were used of persons engaged in hereditary occupations. from Samos, himself the most uneducated of mortals.
