Justice confused in Epicurus, Hermarch and Lucretius. An intellectual inequality of citizens?

Abstract

This article aims to confront a serious difficulty in Epicurean political thought, through the investigation of a likely contradiction between the universal and soteriological ambition of Epicureanism, which presents itself as wisdom addressed to all and adapted to all, and the portrayal of a humanity with highly diverse intellectual capacities; within this humanity some individuals would not be able to attain an active and autonomous political consciousness. Despite the weakness of the textual sources, some elements of this political thought are known thanks to fragments of Hermarchus’ Against Empedocles , which develop some of the lapidary hypotheses outlined by Epicurus in the last Kuriai Doxai . A particularly interesting point in Hermarchus’ testimony is the division between different ways of understanding legal rules, associated with different types of rationality within the same population. We therefore propose to examine this thesis of an intellectual inequality of citizens, trying in particular to identify some of its axiological consequences within Epicurean political theory, and suggesting clues for a re-evaluation of the role of the wise man as educator.