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especially to the Epicureans and the Stoics, whose schools would become
especially influential during the Hellenistic period, when the political center of
Europe shifted from Greece to Rome.
Epicurus (341-270 b.c.e.) not only espoused an atomist metaphysics but inte-
grated it into a philosophy of life according to which pleasure is the only good,
pain the only evil, and fear of death a needless source of human distress. “God
presents no fears,” he wrote, and “death no worries. And while good is readily
attainable, evil is readily endurable.”
19
The problem, he claimed, is not death but
the fear of death. And the way to conquer that fear is to accept death for exactly
what it is, the physical coming apart of the complex of atoms that is one’s soul,
resulting in the cessation of any subject that could experience pleasure or pain.
“The correct understanding that death is nothing to us,” he wrote, “makes our
mortality enjoyable, not by adding infinite time, but by taking away the yearn-
ing for immortality.”
20
Unlike other atomists who went before him, Epicurus
denied determinism in order to allow free will. He was not only intellectually
but also socially radical. In the community that he founded, men, women, chil-
dren, slaves, and even prostitutes participated on equal terms.
Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium (335-263 b.c.e.). According to his
view, the world as a whole, which is divinely planned and permeated by reason
(logos), is the best possible organization of matter. His most celebrated disciple,
Chrysippus (280-206 b.c.e.), is credited with developing this philosophy into a
comprehensive system. A cardinal tenet of this system is that the world is an ide-
ally good organism, the behavior of which is completely determined and whose
rational soul governs it for the best. Ultimately, the world is composed of earth,
water, air, and fire, the latter two of which constitute a pervasive life force, called
pneuma
(or “breath”). This life force constitutes the souls of all living things. The
world as a whole is evolving inexorably toward a great, all-consuming fire, after
which the entire sequence of world events repeats itself in every detail, over and
over, without end. Individual humans are thus fated to do everything they do.
Nevertheless, they are responsible for their actions. What allows them to be
responsible is that the causal determination of their actions works through their
agency.
Stoics also thought about the psychological construction of the self, that is,
about how conscious beings, especially humans, originally arrive at the view
that “I am this self.” Their interest in this issue can perhaps be traced to an
extension by them of the idea of property ownership to that of a human indi-
vidual’s relationship to him-
or herself.
21
And this extension may in turn have
been related to their rejection of the commonly held Greek idea of natural slav-
ery. That is, since the Stoics regarded all human beings as equal, regardless of