Stoicism and Epicureanism
With their philosophical roots grounded in ancient Greece, Stoicism and Epicureanism had contrary yet significant impacts on Roman society. These two philosophies differed in many of their basic theories. Stoics attempted to reach a moral level where they had freedom from passion, while Epicureans strove for pleasure and avoided all types of pain. Stoics like the Epicureans, emphasized ethics as the main field of knowledge, but they also developed theories of logic and natural science to support their ethical doctrines. Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism, saw death as a total extinction with no afterlife to ensue, he regarded the universe as infinite and eternal and as consisting only of space and atoms; where the soul or mind is constructed of indestructible parts that can never be destroyed. He sought to free humanity from the fear of death and of the gods, which he considered the main cause of unhappiness. Lucretius, a famous Epicurean poet, took a stand against the superstitions and fears that the Romans had toward the state religion. He claimed that religion and the fear of gods was what caused unhappiness. Lucretius wrote a story where the Greek princess Iphigeneia was killed by her father Agamemnon, with the hope that he could win the favor of the gods by sacrificing his own daughter. In this case “religion stood with all that power for wickedness . . .too many times /religion mothers crime and wickedness” (Lucretius 452). The Romans at that time saw themselves as “laying foully groveling on earth, weighed down /by grim religion looming from the skies, threatening mortal men”(Lucretius 451). Epicureanism offered some Roman people something that they could seek in order to escape the fears of the gods and religion in general. Epicurean’s physics was atomistic; meaning that the entire universe merely consisted of atoms and the space or void in which the atoms floated, collided, and whirled about. Lucretius