The natural place to look when trying to figure out the role of the swerve in free action is Lucretius' description in DRN 2 251–293 of why the swerve is needed to preserve our voluntas, and a great deal of attention has been lavished on this passage. So, in this chapter I will consider what we can learn about the Epicurean position from Lucretius. As far as the swerve itself is concerned, my conclusions will be mostly negative: Lucretius' description of the swerve tells us remarkably little about the role it is supposed to play in preserving our freedom. However, his descriptions in DRN 4 877–896 of voluntary action and in DRN 2 251–293 of the voluntas the swerve preserves both show what sort of freedom the Epicureans are concerned to defend against the threat of determinism. I will first examine DRN 2 251–293, and then DRN 4 877–896, and show that the De rerum natura undercuts the thesis that Epicurus' concerns are much like those of modern libertarians. Finally, I will turn explicitly to a consideration of the traditional interpretation, that every volition is constituted by a swerve, since the main textual support for this family of interpretations is DRN 2 251–293, and I will argue that De rerum natura actually gives us good reason to reject this interpretation of the Epicurean position.

DRN 2 251–293

DRN 2 251–293 is the longest passage we have by an Epicurean that describes the connection of the swerve to free action.

If our sources can be trusted, Epicurus asserts an incompatibility between libera voluntas (sometimes translated as ‘free will’) and determinism, and he denies that determinism is true, positing a mechanism, the swerve, by which it is rendered false, saying that the swerve is needed in order for us to be free. Because of this, Epicurus has been hailed as the first person to discover the free will problem. But this is too hasty. Much of the recent discussion of Epicurus has been muddled by assimilating his position and his concerns to those of modern libertarians. Before we answer the question of how the swerve is supposed to secure our freedom, at least two other questions need to be addressed: What type of freedom is the swerve supposed to secure? And why should we care about having freedom in this sense – that is, why does it matter? Only if Epicurus is concerned to secure the same type of freedom as are modern libertarians, and for the same sort of ethical concerns, are we justified in calling Epicurus a ‘libertarian.’ Before considering in detail the passages in which Epicurus' theory of freedom and the role of the swerve are discussed, in this chapter I will lay some conceptual groundwork that I hope will clarify the following discussion. First, I will set forth (rather schematically) some varieties of ‘problems of free will,’ and I will situate interpretations of Epicurus, including my own, in terms of these varieties.

Before I turn to the role the swerve plays in preserving human freedom, I wish to consider the other reason Lucretius gives for why there must be an atomic swerve: without the swerve, there would be no atomic collisions, and thus no macroscopic bodies, as there evidently are. Compared to the extensive treatment of the anti‐fatalist function of the swerve, the ‘cosmogonic’ argument for the swerve has garnered relatively little attention. Most treatments of Epicureanism either paraphrase Lucretius' argument in De rerum natura without giving any extensive analysis of whether the argument is cogent or simply dismiss it as inadequate.

This disparity of attention is understandable. In connection with determinism, the swerve may ultimately be a mistake, but at least it opens up interesting questions about the relationship between causal determinism and free will. Lucretius' argument that the swerve is needed for atomic collisions, however, appears to rest on a simple misunderstanding – i.e., that there needs to be a start for collisions – and once this misunderstanding is pointed out, the argument has, at best, some minor historical interest. In this chapter, however, I want to rehabilitate the idea that Epicurus had good reasons to think that the swerve was needed as an archê of collisions, and that the swerve – in this connection, at least – was not simply a blunder or a misguided oversight.

This chapter contains five main sections.

A natural strategy to pursue when trying to understand Epicurus' position is to find a precedent in the works of previous philosophers in the light of which we can better understand how Epicurus thinks the swerve preserves our freedom. After all, it is more likely that the swerve was introduced by Epicurus as a reaction to a problem already placed on the philosophical agenda by his predecessors, instead of it being a radically new innovation without precedent. The predecessor most commonly enlisted to play this role since David Furley's influential study is Aristotle.

I am quite sympathetic to this way of approaching Epicurus' thought. In fact, I will be arguing (in chapter 6) that a key to understanding Epicurus' use of the swerve is to look back to Aristotle's arguments in de Int. 9, in which he contends that the unrestricted application of the Principle of Bivalence to all statements (including ones concerning contingent matters in the future) would have unacceptable fatalist consequences. In this chapter, however, I will be examining a different set of Aristotelian texts, particularly those dealing with voluntary action in Nicomachean Ethics book 3. In NE 3, Aristotle says that, in order for an agent to be responsible for what he does, the ‘origin,’ or archê, of his action and character must be within him.

Other than Aristotle, Democritus is most often cited as the person Epicurus is responding to when formulating his position on freedom. Surely this is correct. For the most part, Epicurus appropriates his atomist metaphysics from Democritus. However, the swerve is one of his major modifications to Democritus. The Epicurean Diogenes of Oinoanda writes that Epicurus ‘discovered’ the swerve, an atomic motion that Democritus did not discern, because Democritus failed to recognize that a swerving motion was needed in order for us to be free, and Epicurus himself writes that Democritus' metaphysics, if true, would have disastrous consequences for our agency – consequences that Democritus himself did not see.

Of course, it is one thing to say that Epicurus feels the need to modify Democritus' metaphysics because it has unacceptable consequences as far as our freedom is concerned, quite another to specify what those consequences are, why Epicurus thinks they follow, and how exactly he modifies Democritus' metaphysics to avoid them. I will make two related claims about Epicurus' response to Democritus. The first is that Epicurus objects to the consequences of Democritean eliminativism; in response, Epicurus tries to show how a reductionist atomism need not discount the reality and causal efficacy of phenomena like minds and reason. The second is that Epicurus primarily worries about the fatalist consequences of Democritus' eliminativism, not determinism as such. Let me briefly expand on these two cryptic claims.

In Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, interesting theories concerning various aspects of language were prolific. In intellectual energy, these centuries could compete with those of Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Epicurus and Chrysippus. One might add the first half of the fourteenth century, but I shall leave it out of account, mainly because the new developments in semantics (due to Burley, Ockham, Buridan and others) were accompanied by an astonishing loss of interest in grammar.

In trying to compare and connect some pieces of scholastic theory with Hellenistic theory I use a totally conventional limitation of the Hellenistic age to the years between 323 bc and 31 bc. I take it for granted, though, that linguistic doctrine attested in Quintilian and/or Sextus Empiricus is almost invariably of Hellenistic origin.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century we do not possess a single major work on linguistic issues from the time between Aristotle and Apollonius Dyscolus. Our scholastic predecessors in academe had even less access to the theories of that age than we have. Inter alia, most of the Greek texts from which we collect our fragments of the theories of the various schools had not been translated into Latin, and nobody read Greek. Besides, some of our Latin ‘classics’ were virtually unknown. Quintilian, for instance, was not a household name to medieval scholars.

For all that, the influence of Hellenistic theorising on developments more than a thousand years later cannot be doubted.

The Stoics were notorious for their addiction to etymology. Chrysippus very likely invented the term, which is first attested in book titles of his (D.L. 7.200). And many Stoic etymologies have come down to us. So, for instance, Chrysippus derived λαός (laos, people) from λαλѽ (lalō, speak), and maintained that people are so called because speech is what sets human beings apart from other animals; ἄνθρωπος (anthrōpos, human being) yields a similar message by alluding to the possession of articulate voice (διωρθρωμἑνη ὄψ, diōrthrōmenē ops) (Herodianus, Reliquiae GG 3.1.108, 9–16 Lentz = FDS 671). Fate (ἡ πεπρωμἑνη, peprōmenē, or ἡ εἱμαρμἑνη, heimarmenē) is the perfected (πεπερασμἑνη, peperasmenē) administration of the world and, so to speak, something strung together (εἰρομἑνη, eiromenē) by the will of god (Diogenianus apud Eusebium, PE 6.8.1–10 = SVF 2.914). It would be easy to add more examples, but these should be enough to give the flavour of Stoic etymology. The belief that words encode descriptive content that can be recovered by finding the words from which they are derived is the basis for Stoic etymology as it was for the etymologies proposed by Socrates in the Cratylus. And as these examples show, the information that the Stoics believed that they were able to recover in this way may be important and illuminating. On their view, the opinions reflected in the words that were formed at the beginning of human history, when language was young, were in important points superior to those of their own day, and their motive for practising etymology was the recovery of this primitive wisdom.

Despite the fact that Greek culture (and consequently Roman as well) was intensely language conscious, the systematic investigation of language, its origin, its structure, and its varieties was a relative late bloomer in the ancient world. This is bound to surprise us. To be sure, there were reflections on the relation between speech and its objects from early on among the poets, the Presocratic philosophers, and especially among the sophists, the first professional rhetoricians and teachers of ‘how to do things with words’. That such concern did not immediately lead to the development of language as a field of research seems to be due to several factors. Though the Greeks were aware of the existence of different languages, the acquisition of a foreign language was not part of even an elite education in the Greek world, but was left, rather, to professional interpreters. Furthermore, despite a great wealth of speculation on the origin of culture, language was not a major topic in those considerations. Though there is a host of stories of divine gifts of craftsmanship to human beings, including the civic virtues as a means of survival and the Promethean clandestine handing down of fire, there is no parallel depiction of a miraculous distribution of language to a miserable horde of speechless primitive men. The lack of a mythological account of the origin of language is certainly no accident in a religious culture that presupposes that there is a language common to gods and men: such a mythical background quite unreflectively presupposes that language has ‘always’ been around, even before the creation of humankind (if such a creation was part of the common lore).

Stoic philosophers, probably at least from the time of Chrysippus, were interested in Plato's Cratylus and were influenced by the dialogue. This is not directly attested in so many words, but its correctness is frequently and rightly assumed. Two points of similarity are self-evident. First and most significant is the Stoics' recourse to etymologising. We have copious evidence of Stoic etymologies, especially for the names of gods. Some of these etymologies are identical to ones advanced by Socrates in the Cratylus, and the principles involved are also identical: interpreting the name under investigation by aligning it with one or more words whose meaning is known, on the basis of phonetic similarity between the two sets of words. Thus the Stoics, like Plato's Socrates, explain the name Zeus and its inflection Dia by reference to zēn, ‘to live’, and dia meaning ‘because of’: the name Zeus signifies ‘the cause of life’.

The second point of immediate similarity is the concept of elementary or primary sounds that signify things mimetically. Socrates advances this proposal as an analytical device for discovering whence names, that are compounded out of letters and syllables, derive their capacity for representing things correctly, i.e. as they really are (421c–425c). He then develops the hypothesis that the ancients took elementary sounds or letters to imitate things or properties of things, especially motion.

The prevalence of philosophical appeals to universal agreement in ancient thought indicates that a limited notion of ‘common sense’ was around, at least implicitly, from the fourth century bc. But, despite the partial justification Aristotle gave for such appeals, a developed theory of common sense was not possible until the Socratic insight that rationality is in some sense constitutive of all adult human beings was adapted and elaborated by the Stoics. In this paper, I argue that the earliest theory of common sense in the ancient world was not this Stoic doctrine – the theory of the ‘common conceptions’ – but a transformation of it found in Cicero's later rhetorical works.

This transformation is part of a broader series of developments, from the Stoic understanding of common conceptions, and in the direction of ‘common sense’, in a variety of later philosophical and rhetorical traditions ranging from Carneades in the second century bc to Simplicius in the sixth century ad. Some of the earlier stages of this process seem relatively clear. Carneades initiated a sceptical attack on Chrysippus' theory of common conceptions, by reducing them to common-sense beliefs, and showing how the Stoics' doctrines conflict with those beliefs. And in the hands of his more dogmatic Academic successors (Philo, Cicero, Plutarch), this form of argument acquired a more positive role, parallel to that of the various traditional arguments from consensus omnium of the Hellenistic schools, with the result that, rather than merely showing the inconsistency of the Stoics, it was taken to show the falsity of their basic doctrines.

In his Letter to Herodotus (75f.), Epicurus offers a strikingly non-teleological theory of the origin of (spoken) names, the first phase of which (75) is emphatically and explicitly naturalistic:

The details are much contested, but the general picture seems to be the following: in early humans, involuntary vocal responses were produced indirectly by the external environment, directly by internal psychophysical states themselves caused by external objects. These vocalisations were shaped both by the different objects which came to be named by these vocalisations, and by the physiological and psychophysical idiosyncrasies of the populations of different regions. The notion that people may be differently constituted not only physiologically, but also psychologically, according to their physical environment, was, of course, a fairly common one in antiquity, and not at all a ‘curious idea’, as Bailey describes it (1926: 248, ad Ep. Hdt. 75.8). In brief, that different things have different names within languages, and that the same things have different names in different languages, are alike explained by differences in both the constitutions and the environments of different peoples, who come to make up different language communities.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in ancient Cynicism, which has benefited in particular from renewed attention to the notion of rhetorical practice. It was recognised that even though the Cynics never formulated an explicit body of philosophical theories, their life-style could be analysed as the exercise of a philosophical rhetoric, intended to convey a particular set of ethical messages.

In this contribution, I will focus on Cynic strategies of communication, and on problems of the interpretation of Cynicism resulting from their communicative choices. First, I will look at the Cynics' use of transgressive non-verbal communication with the help of modern socio-linguistic theories of non-verbal communication and impression management. The Cynics scandalise their audience by their conscious use of the body and its processes for philosophical purposes; anthropological ideas about transgression will be helpful here (section 2).

In section 3, I will turn to verbal communication, and investigate the Cynics' characteristic use of language and literature, regarded as an aspect of their self-fashioning. Here, I argue that Cynic ideas on language correspond to a specific type of folk-linguistics, represented for us by a well-delineated literary tradition of iambos and comedy. I claim that the literary representations of Cynicism that have come down to us cannot be fully understood, unless their intertextual relations with other ancient transgressive genres are explored.

Epicurus' theory of the origin of language has been investigated many times, both in the context of his general theory of the origin of culture and in its own right. Among the various aspects of his theory that have attracted attention, the epistemological has played the most important role. What I try to provide here is not a complete account of the successes and limitations of previous studies, but an outline of Epicurus' theory about the development of language as it can be reconstructed from his own writings and from other relevant texts. In trying to elucidate the details, I will concentrate on some which are controversial and others which have gone altogether unnoticed by scholars. It is, of course, possible that some of the texts I shall use to throw light on the less clear aspects of Epicurus' theory may reflect nothing more direct than the influence of Epicurean ideas. I hope I shall manage to use such evidence with suitable caution. As the title of this chapter suggests, my subject includes the relation of Epicurus to his predecessors. I will discuss this mainly from the point of view just mentioned, by asking what is known of the stages of development of human language discerned by thinkers before Epicurus.

In the Summer of 47 bc Varro promised to dedicate a large and important work to Cicero (Att. 13.12.3 = 13.24.3 Kasten). In mid 45 Cicero was still waiting for the fulfilment of Varro's promise, and his irritation over this delay may have caused him not to accede immediately to Atticus' advice to dedicate a work to Varro. Scholars agree that the large work Varro intended to dedicate to Cicero was the treatise De lingua Latina, which in its eventual twenty-five books was certainly weighty enough. It was also appropriate as a gift to Cicero, offering both theoretical discussions of the methods to be used in determining linguistic correctness and counsel on how to apply the methods deemed best in practice.

Varro organised his work according to a three-fold division of speech into the ‘imposition’, ‘flexion’, and ‘combination’ of words (8.1). For each of the first two of these, corresponding to the study of etymology and of analogy in inflection-derivation (or ‘flexion’: declinatio, Greek klisis), Varro wrote six books, the first three dealing with the discipline itself – one arguing against the existence and utility of such a discipline, one arguing for the discipline, and one expounding it – and the next three comprising applications of the discipline. Since we know, at least for the second century ad, that there were arguments for and against the existence of a discipline of syntax, it is likely that the last section of the work, that on syntax, followed a similar pattern, only at twice the length.