Epicharmus of Cos
Late 6th/early 5th century BC Greek dramatist and philosopher
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Literary evidence
Most of the information about Epicharmus comes from the writings of Athenaeus, Suda and Diogenes Laërtius, although fragments and comments come up in a host of other ancient authors as well. The standard edition of his fragments was made by Kaibel (1890) to which there has been various additions and emendments. There have also been some papyrus finds of longer sections of text, but these are often so full of holes that it is difficult to make sense of them. Plato mentions Epicharmus in his dialogue Gorgias and in Theaetetus. In the latter, Socrates refers to Epicharmus as "the prince of Comedy", Homer as "the prince of Tragedy", and both as "great masters of either kind of poetry". Aristotle (Poetics 5.1449b5) writes that he and Phormis invented comic plots (μῦθοι, muthoi).
The 12th-century philosopher Constantine of Nicaea cites Epicharmus.
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Life
All of his biographical information should be treated as suspect. Epicharmus' birthplace is not known, but late and fairly unreliable ancient commentators suggest a number of alternatives. The Suda (E 2766) records that he was either Syracusan by birth or from the Sikanian city of Krastos. Diogenes Laërtius (VIII 78) records that Epicharmus was born in Astypalea, the ancient capital of Kos on the Bay of Kamari, near modern-day Kefalos. Diogenes Laërtius also records that Epicharmus' father was the prominent physician Helothales, who moved the family to Megara in Sicily, when Epicharmus was just a few months old. Although raised according to the Asclepiad tradition of his father, as an adult Epicharmus became a follower of Pythagoras.
It is most likely that sometime after 484 BC, he lived in Syracuse, Magna Graecia, and worked as a poet for the tyrants Gelo and Hiero I. The subject matter of his poetry covered a broad range, from exhortations against intoxication and laziness to such unorthodox topics as mythological burlesque, but he also wrote on philosophy, medicine, natural science, linguistics, and ethics. Among many other philosophical and moral lessons, Epicharmus taught that the continuous exercise of virtue could overcome heredity, so that anyone had the potential to be a good person regardless of birth. He died in his 90s (according to a statement in Lucian, he died at ninety-seven).
Diogenes Laërtius records that there was a bronze statue dedicated to him in Syracuse, by the inhabitants, for which Theocritus composed the following inscription:
As the bright sun excels the other stars,
As the sea far exceeds the river streams:
So does sage Epicharmus men surpass,
Whom hospitable Syracuse has crowned.
Theocritus' Epigram 18 (AP IX 600; Kassel and Austin Test. 18) was written in his honour.
The cosmopolitan scientist and traveler Alexander von Humboldt turned Epicharmus into the protagonist of the only literary text he ever published; it appeared 1795 in Friedrich Schiller's journal Horen under the title "Die Lebenskraft oder der Rhodische Genius" [The Vital Force or the Rhodian Genius]. Epicharmos figures here as a natural philosopher and interpreter of art.
Quotations
The translations below are from Kathleen Freeman's Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, which contains English translations of the 65 Epicharmus fragments included in Diels' Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.
- "Then what is the nature of men? Blown up bladders!" DK23 10
- "The best thing a man can have, in my view, is health." DK23 19
- "A mortal should think mortal thoughts, not immortal thoughts." DK23 20
- "The hand washes the hand: give something and you may get something." DK23 30