Greek translation. They consist chiefly of commentaries on scripture, homilies, and hymns. His collected works have been edited by the Brothers Assemanni, in six folio volumes, Romæ, 1732-40. A volume of his select works translated into English by the Rev. J. B. Morris, appeared in 1847; and two volumes of translations from his poetical works have been published by Dr. Henry Burgess, London, 1853.—W. L. A.
EPHRAEM, Patriarch of Antioch from the year 526 or 527 till 546. Before his elevation to the patriarchate he had held the office under Justin I. of count of the East. Ephraem was equally remarkable for his liberality to the poor and his zeal against heretics. He left several works—none of which have come down to us. An account of two of them will be found in the Bibliotheca of Photius.—J. S., G.
EPICHARMUS, the greatest of Dorian comic poets, was born at Cos, 540 b.c. A physician of the family of Æsculapius, he came to Megara in Sicily with Cadmus, who had voluntarily abdicated the sovereignty of Cos; and on the destruction of Megara by Gelon, 484 b.c., he removed to Syracuse, where he lived till his death, thirty-four years later, in the society of Xenophanes and Simonides, Æschylus and Pindar, and the other distinguished men whom Hiero attracted to his court. "Epicharmus is the prince of comedians," says Plato, "as Homer is the prince of tragedians." Even if the comedy of Susarion had found its way from continental Megara to Sicily, it was rude, full of broad jokes, without purpose or plan. Epicharmus treated of definite subjects, with a regular plot. The titles of thirty-five of his plays are extant; more than half of them connected with mythology. In these he seems to have travestied the legends about the gods and heroes: in the "Hephæstus" not scrupling to exhibit the deities of Olympus as a company of quarrelsome, brawling drunkards. In his other comedies, such as "The Countryman," "Hope or Wealth," he appears to have taken up human character and real life, partly from a contemplative, partly from a satirical point of view. His position precluded him from the free allusion to politics which marks the old comedy of Athens. The parasite and drunkard, afterwards so familiar on the stage, were brought in by Epicharmus. He is said to have been the chief model of Plautus. His comedies had one remarkable feature—there ran through them a large element of moral reflection and scientific theory. Fragments are still extant of a translation by Ennius of his "Physical Theory of the World."—G. R. L.
EPICTETUS, the philosopher, was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia, and must have flourished towards the close of the first century though no fixed date in his life has been ascertained. The freedman of a freedman, poor and lame, living, they say, in a doorless hut, with no furniture but a lamp; he attained a reputation as a stoic philosopher which lasted even into the early christian centuries. He left Rome when Domitian banished the philosophers, and withdrew to Nicopolis (Prevesa) in Epirus, where he probably spent the remainder of his life; though a statement that he enjoyed the friendship of Adrian has led some to suppose that he may have been recalled to Rome. Though he left no writings, he was fortunately provided with a Boswell in the person of the historian Arrian, his devoted pupil, who edited his lectures and wrote several works upon his life and doctrines. Of these, four books of the lectures, and the Manual, an epitome of the system of Epictetus, still survive. His whole philosophy was practical; he seems to have regarded himself as a preacher of righteousness, and that in no sourly-ascetic sense; for he cultivated gracefulness of manner, avoided admonition out of season, and enjoined on his pupils attention to their dress and to the elegancies of life. He divided things into—Things in our power, such as our conceptions and our desires; and things out of our power, such as our bodies and our possessions; our whole attention is to be concentrated on the former class, the latter concerns us not, and is wholly in the hands of that Providence which manifestly governs the world. Our great duty is to choose right conceptions, i.e. those which are in accordance with nature; to them we are guided by "reason," which is in harmony with the good, and with God who is the supreme reason. Our "opinions" are aids given us by nature towards the attainment of truth, which we must not, like the sceptics, reject. The philosopher must deliberately determine what it is that he means to do; he must desire the appropriate, and strive after the good; then is he truly free, holding loosely to the attractions of the world, "like a sailor on shore, half of whose attention is employed in listening for the signal to go to his ship" (Manual, c. xii.); self-sufficient as far as things in his power are concerned, but not absolutely, for circumstances are in the hands of God. The self-reliance, "the life according to nature," in Epictetus is all stoical. He differs from the older stoics in allowing room for the social nature of man, in his greater gentleness, in being less philosophical, more religious. He, as well as his master Epaphroditus, a captain of the horse of Nero has been claimed as a christian. But even apart from his supposed allusion to the christians, where he speaks of the "stupidity or frenzy of the Galileans in their readiness to die"—(i. 4—7)—the conjecture is baseless. He partakes rather of the interest which gathers round several of the minor philosophic names of those times, from their attitude towards the new religion. With so much in common with it, both of thought and language, their path ran paralled to it without mixing with it—unsympathetic and unappreciating.—T. E. H.
EPICURUS, Athenian philosopher, was born at Samos (whither his father Neocles, a teacher of grammar, had gone out as kleruch), according to the circumstantial account of Apollodorus (Chron. ap. Diog. Laert. x. 14.), in January, 341 b.c., seven years after the death of Plato. At eighteen years of age he came to Athens, but on the expulsion of the Athenians from Samos by Perdiccas, returned to Asia Minor, and taught with much success at Colophon, Lampsacus, and Mitylene. When thirty-seven years old he returned to Athens, where he purchased the famous "garden," in which most of his time was passed till his death by a painful disease, borne with cheerful fortitude, in the seventy-third year of his age, 270 b.c. Many sources have been assigned to his philosophy. Cicero gives the names of several who were said to have been his masters—Xenocrates and Pamphilus, Platonists, and Nausiphanes a Democritean. Most authorities concur in representing him as a man of little cultivation. The popular notions of his extreme profligacy may be seen in Alciphron's imaginary letter about him from the Hetæra Leontium; they are emphatically contradicted by all we know of his manner of living. But these, as well as most other details of his life, are involved in the utmost obscurity, from the party spirit in which they have been treated by his admirers and opponents respectively. There are, however, several traits of character which seem to be authentic; for instance, that he used to repudiate his undeniably great debt to former schools, and claimed to be "self-taught" (though we have the testimony of his disciple Leontius that he did sometimes warmly acknowledge his obligations to Democritus); that he wrote voluminously; that he made his pupils learn his system by heart; that his personal friends were very numerous. From these we get the impression of a genial, confident, one-sided man, a little spoiled by popularity into too great conceit of originality. Of the wreck of his writings but few pieces have come down to modern times. There are some fragments in Sextus Empiricus, and a few in Plutarch. Diogenes Laertius, whose whole tenth book is devoted to Epicurus, has there preserved his will, together with three letters containing an epitome of his system, and forty-four κύριαι δοξαι. These the critics, with some exceptions, allow to be genuine, though corrupt and hardly distinguishable from Diogenes' own remarks. Parts of the treatise περι θύσεως were discovered at Herculaneum, and were published by Corsini, and subsequently by Orelli, Leipzig, 8vo, 1818. Cicero (De Nat. Deor.) is not more happy than usual in his estimate of Epicurus. From the above sources we will give a very brief outline of his philosophy.
Philosophy he defined as "an activity, bringing about by argument and discussions the happy life."—(Sext. Emp. adv. math. xii. 169.) Naturally, therefore, the first and most important of the three parts into which he divided it was—Ethics. The second, Physics, was only valuable to him as subservient to the first. "If forebodings about natural phenomena, and about death, did not stand in our way, . . . we should not need physiology."—(κ. δ. xi.) The third, Canonic, or logic, was useful only as an instrument for the knowledge of physics, under which head it is accordingly sometimes included. To begin with the lowest grade. In the Canonic he taught—Sense, being irrational, and neither adding to nor substracting from its objects, is never in error; thus even impressions in dreams are true. One sense cannot criticise another, for their objects are dissimilar; nor can reason criticise sense, for it is dependent on sensation. We must carefully keep the
