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Updated: June 22, 2025
And yet Metrodorus, writing to Timarchus, says: "Let us do some extraordinarily excellent thing, not suffering ourselves to be plunged in reciprocal affections, but retiring from this low and terrestrial life, and elevating ourselves to the truly holy and divinely revealed ceremonies and mysteries of Epicurus."
Metrodorus, that when the sun casts its splendor through a cloud, the cloud gives itself a blue, and the light a red color. These rods and the mock-suns are constituted of a double nature, a real subsistence, and a mere appearance; of a real subsistence, because the clouds are the object of our eyes; of a mere appearance, for their proper color is not seen, but that which is adventitious.
Metrodorus, indeed, thinks that man perfectly happy whose body is free from all disorders, and who has an assurance that it will always continue so; but who is there who can be assured of that? No; his wise man, even if he were in Phalaris's bull, would say, How sweet it is! how little do I regard it! What, sweet? Is it not sufficient, if it is not disagreeable?
Thus do Epicurus and Metrodorus, while they make avoiding of evil to be the very essence and consummation of good, and so receive but as it were the satisfaction of slaves or of rogues newly discharged the jail, who are well enough contented if they may but wash and supple their sores and the stripes they received by whipping, but never in their lives had one taste or sight of a generous, clean, unmixed and unulcerated joy.
A set of harpers and pipers, Anaxenor and Xuthus, the dancing-man Metrodorus, and a whole Bacchic rout of the like Asiatic exhibitors, far outdoing in license and buffoonery the pests that had followed out of Italy, came in and possessed the court; the thing was past patience, wealth of all kinds being wasted on objects like these.
So much for his enemies; now for his partisans: Metrodorus, Hermachus, Meneceus, and numerous others, who philosophize according to his school, have as much veneration as friendship for him personally. Diogenes Laertes could not have written his life to better advantage for his reputation. Lucretius adored him. Seneca, as much of an enemy of the sect as he was, spoke of him in the highest terms.
Hicetes the Pythagorean, that there are two earths, this and the Antichthon, or the earth opposite to it. The Stoics, that this earth is one, and that finite and limited. Xenophanes, that the earth, being compacted of fire and air, in its lowest parts hath laid a foundation in an infinite depth. Metrodorus, that the earth is mere sediment and dregs of water, as the sun is of the air.
Plato and some of the mathematicians conspire in the same opinion; others place the sun as the centre of the planets. Anaximander, Metrodorus of Chios, and Crates assign to the sun the superior place, after him the moon, after them the fixed stars and planets. Anaxagoras, Democritus, and Cleanthes say that all the stars have their motion from east to west.
I am not inquiring how great a memory Simonides may be said to have had, or Theodectes, or that Cineas who was sent to Rome as ambassador from Pyrrhus; or, in more modern times, Charmadas; or, very lately, Metrodorus the Scepsian, or our own contemporary Hortensius : I am speaking of ordinary memory, and especially of those men who are employed in any important study or art, the great capacity of whose minds it is hard to estimate, such numbers of things do they remember.
It may likewise contribute to soften that resentment which pride naturally raises against opposition, if we consider, that he who differs from us, does not always contradict us; he has one view of an object, and we have another; each describes what he sees with equal fidelity, and each regulates his steps by his own eyes: one man with Posidippus, looks on celibacy as a state of gloomy solitude, without a partner in joy, or a comforter in sorrow; the other considers it, with Metrodorus, as a state free from incumbrances, in which a man is at liberty to choose his own gratifications, to remove from place to place in quest of pleasure, and to think of nothing but merriment and diversion: full of these notions one hastens to choose a wife, and the other laughs at his rashness, or pities his ignorance; yet it is possible that each is right, but that each is right only for himself.
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