Epicurus: Better the Myth of the Gods Than the Fate of the Physicists

The Quote

"It would be better to follow the myth about gods than to be enslaved to the fate of the natural philosophers" is Epicurus's rejection of universal necessity, from the Letter to Menoeceus, preserved in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Philosophers, Book X. It is the clearest surviving statement of Epicurus's defense of free agency.

Context

The Letter to Menoeceus is Epicurus's conspectus of his ethics, addressed to his disciple. In the passage on fate, Epicurus confronts the views of earlier natural philosophers who taught that everything happens by necessity. He argues that neither necessity nor chance should be made the master of our lives: "necessity destroys responsibility," while chance is unstable; what remains is our own agency, which is the proper object of praise and blame. The doctrine of the swerve — the spontaneous deviation of atoms — reported by Lucretius in On the Nature of Things (Book II), provided the physical basis for this ethical claim.

Meaning & Interpretation

The sentence has a polemical edge: Epicurus says that even the popular mythology of gods, which he elsewhere criticizes, is preferable to a philosophy of necessity, because mythology leaves room for hope and propitiation, while necessity leaves no room for anything. The point is ethical, not merely theological: the belief that our actions are free is a condition of meaningful deliberation, responsibility, and happiness. Physics must be built so as to leave room for agency; if it cannot, so much the worse for that physics.

Legacy

Epicurus's defense of freedom became one of the major ancient alternatives to Stoic determinism, and the swerve remained the standard example of indeterminism for centuries. The passage influenced the Renaissance revival of Epicureanism, the debates of the early modern period about free will and necessity, and modern discussions of indeterminism and responsibility — where the question whether mere chance can ground freedom is still posed in Epicurus's terms.

Sources

1. Konstan, D. (2018). "Epicurus." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/
2. Inwood, B. & Gerson, L. P. (1994). The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia. Hackett Publishing.
3. O'Keefe, T. (2020). "Epicurus." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/epicur/
4. Lucretius (c. 55 BCE). On the Nature of Things, Book II, trans. R. Melville. Oxford University Press.