Political organization and ασφαλεια: Why does there need to be security for a political organization to exist?

The two most representative figures of the Greek political imagery - the ship and the body - highlight the complex unity of the polis, its dependence on the satisfaction of needs as well as its exposure to external and internal dangers.² This vision of the polis is framed by the presence of the terms security [ασφαλεια] and safety [σωτηρ(α], and other related terms such as freedom from fear [αδεια, αφοβ(α], in texts of various kinds which, with greater or lesser theoretical pretension, refer to the nature of the polis.³ These concepts play an especially central role in genealogies of civilized life and the considerations of speakers and philosophers around the ideas of civil war and good order.⁴ We will offer some examples that demonstrate the continuity between these considerations and the recognition that the Epicureans give to the security that the political groupings provide.

In Plato's Protagoras, one can find one of the most famous genealogies of civilized life in antiquity. According to Plato, political associations arose to protect people from wild animals and other people. In the framework of the myth, Prometheus stole ‘artisanal wisdom' from Hephaestus and Athena since he was desperate to find some means of survival for the human race, the only species devoid of the suitable equipment for survival [σωτηρfα]. However, human beings did not yet have wisdom for living together in society, ‘political wisdom' which was in the keeping of Zeus (Plato, Prot. 321c7-d5). After the machinations of Prometheus and his theft from the gods for the sake of preserving humanity, human beings invented houses and produced clothes, shoes and blankets; they also were nourished by food from the earth.

Aristotle's view that the polis is the highest of all political associations is well known; in fact, to Aristotle, the polis embraces all other such structures, like the household and village. In addition, the polis aims at good to a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good ( Pol. 1252a6-8); the polis is also the best- developed form of political association insofar as it can provide better security for its members than a household or village. While Aristotle underlines that the purpose of the polis is to facilitate living well [ ευ ζην ], he never loses sight of the demand for security that the polis involves. Polis security and self-sufficiency require different constitutive elements, which imply the risk of conflicts and polarizations that can lead to civil war (Pol. 1261a10-b15).⁶ Aristotle, like Thucydides and Plato, understood στασις as one of the fundamental challenges to political theory. In Cohen's opinion,⁷ none of these authors attribute political instability to the machinations of particular political groupings, but rather to underlying moral-psychological dispositions whose genealogy and consequences, as we shall see, were of profound interest to the Epicureans.

Aristotle applies the twofold use of the term ‘preservation' [σωτηρfα] in politics and psychobiology to the traditional analogy of the polis and the body. On the one hand, understanding the aetiology of preservation and corruption in terms of political regimes, oriented to the design of ‘the best political regimen', constitutes a fundamental task in Aristotle's Politics; on the other hand, the aetiology of preservation and corruption of living beings is a central concern of his treatise On the Soul and the biological treatises. In both cases, necessities, threats and dangers evince the fragile ontological condition of preservation; as observed by Rashed, in such an ontological condition the hypothetical necessity and contingency are combined.⁹

Within the framework of the topic of ‘good order' [ ευνομfα], the last fragment of Anonymous Iamblichus offers, in a contractualist background which assigns praises to virtue and condemnation to ‘advantage' [πλεονεξfα], one of the most interesting recognitions of the benefits of the security furnished by laws and the polis. Without laws, it can be read in the fragment, any form of life in common between human beings would be impossible; the absence of laws would turn out to be a greater chastisement than that of a primitive lonely life (100, 13-15). The Anonymous Iamblichus makes trust [πfστις] the key achievement of ‘good order' in both the public and private spheres. Trust promotes the circulation of goods, benefits relations among social classes, reduces the time citizens must devote to public affairs, and lessens the risks of civil or non-civil war.

Demosthenes' Against Meidias also provides interesting insights regarding these issues. A crucial argument of Demosthenes against the rich and violent Meidias is that, though there are citizens (like Meidias himself) who have more strength and wealth than many, freedom from fear [αδεια] is a common patrimony provided by the laws (την αδειαν, ην ημtν κοινην ουσ(αν οt νoμοι παρεχουσι; 210, 6). In order for the judges to condemn Meidias, Demosthenes says to them:

T1 Look: immediately after the court recesses, each of you will go back home, one more quickly perhaps, another more leisurely, without worrying or turning around, not afraid about [ ουδε φοβουμενος] whether he will encounter a friend or a foe, a man who is big or small, strong or weak, or anything like this.

Against Meidias 221; trans. Harris 2008

Demosthenes argues that Meidias' insolence (or even ‘violence': υβρις) and impiety [ασεβεια] must be punished,¹⁰ since otherwise the freedom from fear that is made possible by laws will be snatched away by him and other citizens like him. The violence Meidias has inflicted on him, Demosthenes emphasizes, is therefore violence against the community. If it remains unpunished, the common heritage represented in the state of ‘freedom from fear' [αδεια] suffers. In fact, as noted by Cohen, Demosthenes emphasizes the fact that the punishment of an offender is a real benefit for the polis.¹¹ The citizen's duty is to be solicitous for what is best in the sense of what is ‘commonly best', i.e. in a communal way [υπερ του κοινη βελτiστου δεt μελειν υμtν]. In fact, Demosthenes contends that the many crimes that do occur are due to the failure to punish the offenders; therefore, the only way to prevent such crimes (which are taken to be real outrages or atrocities; υβρiζειν) is to adequately punish every offender who is caught. The offender, then, not only insults the individual who receives the offense but also, through the experience of the individual, outrages the political community.

Coming back to Epicurus and his theory of harm, it is interesting to examine his use of the verb ‘to harm' ( βλαπτειν ). Goldschmidt highlights the repeated use of the verb in the active and passive voices in the Principal Doctrines where the significance of the pact is stressed.¹² In fact, regarding the actions that the pacts intend to avoid, these Principal Doctrines never use the verb αδικεtν (‘to commit injustice', ‘to injure'; in the passive voice ‘to suffer injustice', ‘to be injured'), nor do they enter into distinctions about voluntary and involuntary actions. The meaning of this lack of distinction is clearly understood when one reads a passage from Hermarchus' genealogy of laws, transmitted by Porphyry, which, as we will show in what follows, helps clarify one of Aristotle's observations. Hermarchus points out:

T2 The legislators did not exclude even unintentional homicide from any punishment, so as not to concede any excuse to those who intentionally [εκουσtoς] choose to imitate the deeds of those who act unintentionally [ακουσtoς], and also to prevent many genuinely unintended killings happening through negligence or inattention Since they wanted to prevent the

negligence which harms our neighbours, they laid down that not even unintentional acts were exempt from penalty and they more or less eradicated this fault through fear of punishment [φoβω των επιτιμtoν].

Porphyry, Abst. 1.9, 1-16, trans. G. Clark, slightly modified, which is based on Bouffartigues 1977 text

At the end of Politics Book 2, Aristotle refers to several legislators, including Pittacus, one of the seven sages. Aristotle attributes to him the law that says if a drunken person commits a crime, she must be punished more severely than a sober one. Aristotle comments on this thus:

T3 For since more drunken people than sober ones commit more acts of arrogance, [Pittacus] paid attention not to the greater indulgence [πρoς την συγγνωμην] one should show to those who are drunk, but to what is convenient [πρoς τo συμφερον].

Pol. 1274b 19-23; transl. Reeve, slightly modified¹³

Aristotle observes that indulgence and compassion are reactions sometimes produced by more or less involuntary actions (EN 1109b31-32). Pittacus, like Hermarchus, seems to pay attention to the damage produced by the crime and its frequency, and subordinates indulgence to the usefulness of laws and punishments. It is not irrelevant that considerations on justice and the usefulness of pacts and laws are fundamentally attached to homicide here, because they show that the fundamental meaning and validity that the Epicureans ascribe to pacts, justice and laws is the security [ ασφαλεια] of human life and the elementary resources it requires.

As a matter of fact, there cannot be a political community if there is no security, but just a set of individuals which would be adequately characterized as a ‘herd of wild beasts' (or beasts that live ‘scattered about' to use Aristotle's terminology; Pol. 1256a23: σποραδικα), trying to destroy each other. This does not need to be proven insofar as Epicurus himself explicitly says that justice or injustice is impossible regarding those animals which are unable to make pacts about neither harming one another nor being harmed. In this vein, the Epicurean Hermarchus argues that if animals had been able to make pacts with other animals in the same manner as do human beings, then neither should we kill them nor they us, and it would be well to extend the concept of justice to cover animals too. Indeed, it would have been a ‘safety prescription'. Unfortunately, because animals cannot participate with us in law due to their lack of reason, then usefulness [τo συμφερον] cannot be provided more by security.¹⁴ That explains why human beings are authorized, so to speak, to kill irrational animals; otherwise, we cannot have security (Porphyry, Abst. 1.12, 23-25). Justice or injustice is also impossible, Epicurus states (in Goldschmidt's view, polemicizing against Stoic cosmopolitanism),¹⁵ regarding ‘those nations (των εθνων δσα) which were unable or unwilling to make pacts about neither harming one another nor being harmed' (PD 32). Thus, there seems to be a sense in which Epicurus suggests that security provides pacts with their ‘real character of pacts', as it were; otherwise, if those pacts are not real agreements but merely nominal accords, there cannot be a political association. So, security endows pacts, justice and laws with ‘reality'. If individuals do not have security regarding their possessions and lives, the ‘social pact' that constitutes the state disappears, and they no longer have any reason to obey the basic rule that regulates life in the Epicurean conception of society: ‘neither harming one another nor being harmed'. To some extent, we argue, this is in line with Epicurus' tenet that human beings do everything for the sake of being neither in pain nor in terror; in fact, as soon as we are able to remove these disturbances, ‘every storm in the soul is dispelled' (LM 128). As is clear in these passages (and as was clear to both Plato and Aristotle), although certain issues can be analysed in a particularly ethical context, they may certainly have an impact upon, or be closely related to, the political domain.¹⁶

Security, both physical and psychological, is widely recognized in ancient literature as a constituent element of political associations. This convergence suggests it is necessary to reconsider the Hermarchus extract from a broader perspective than the strictly genealogical and Epicurean one to which it is usually confined. As we showed in chapter 1 and have just repeated, the Hermarchus fragment represents a valuable testimony of the Epicurean genealogy of justice and law. The interpreters insist on this and so, for example, Roskam notes that the absence of references to the famous Epicurean slogan ‘live unnoticed' is due to the fact that, in the first human groupings (the subject of the fragment) this slogan is meaningless.¹⁷ This suggestion by Roskam can be challenged; probably Porphyry selected from Hermarchus the sections relevant to the purpose of his treatise De abstinentia, and the theme of ‘live unnoticed' is certainly not relevant for that purpose. It could also be objected that the Hermarchus fragment is not merely genealogical because it explicitly and implicitly offers repeated allusions to the present. This emphasis of the fragment is not detached from genealogy but transitively applies the aetiology of the constitutions of the first human groupings to the societies of the present.¹⁸ A passage from Colotes, preserved by Plutarch, agrees with the complementary interpretation of Hermarchus' fragment that we propose:

T4 He says that ‘those who appointed laws and usages and established the government of cities by kings and magistrates brought human life into a state of great security and peace [εiς πολλην ασφαλειαν καi ησυχtαν εθεντο] and delivered it from turmoil [θορυβων aπηλλαξαν].¹⁹ But if anyone takes all this away, we shall live a life of brutes, and anyone who chances upon another will all but devour him'.

Plutarch, Col. 1124D; trans. Einarson and De Lacy

As can be seen, Colotes, like Hermarchus, extrapolates the achievements of the first legislators to the present, to which he refers implicitly, in the same manner as Hemarchus, by using the personal pronoun ‘we'. In this passage from Colotes, which picks up on the same themes discussed above in the Anonymous Iamblichus and Demosthenes' Against Meidias, the psychological benefit of the security provided by the laws is emphasized to a greater extent than in the Hermarchus excerpt. Nevertheless, Hermarchus notes tangentially that in the first human associations the merciless killing of harmful animals and the preservation of useful ones contributed to fearless (αφοβfα; Abst. 11.2).²⁰ Lucretius adds ‘the voice of Epicurus' to these considerations regarding security by Hermarchus and Colotes. In the eulogy to Athens and Epicurus that begins book 6, Lucretius writes:

T5 It was Athens of glorious name that in former days first imparted the knowledge of corn-producing crops to suffering mortals and remodelled their lives and established laws... He [Epicurus] saw that almost everything that necessity demands for subsistence had been already provided for mortals, and that their life was, so far as possible, established in security.

RN 6.1-11

On the Nature of Things, book 6, closes with a description of the plague of Athens, inspired by the account in Thucydides. Its beginning, in our opinion, also evokes Thucydides, as when in the so-called ‘Archaeology' he underlines that Athens was the first city in Greece that represented a stable refuge for those fleeing from war or rivalries (1.2, 6). The Athenians, according to Thucydides, were the first to stop carrying weapons due to their more relaxed way of life (1.6, 3). The interpretation of the dramatic end of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things has given rise, as is well-known, to an extensive literature. Perhaps the crude scenes of the end represent a confirmation of the caution with which Lucretius refers, at the beginning of book 6, to the security that a city like Athens was able to achieve (‘their life was, so far as possible, established in security'; RN 6.10-11; US. 396). Certainly, Lucretius reiterates (in a quasi-Heraclitean way) that time transforms the nature of the whole world, and everything passes on from one condition to another with nothing remaining constant and everything in permanent flux ( nec manet ulla sui similis res: omnia migrant, omnia commutat natura et vertere cogit; RN5.830-831). The human world is not exempt from this kind of process: humans are subject, like the rest of living creatures, to change and eventual destruction.²¹

If war, especially civil war, is one of the great threats to the security of the polis, the plague is no less so, although, as Gardner has recently suggested, it may also represent a metaphor for the illness of the body politic brought on by destructive competitions undertaken for individual glory, a phenomenon which Lucretius also observed in his time.²² In any case, for Lucretius the plague seems to show that, as we read in Epicurus' V^rS 31, one can attain security against many things; but when it comes to death, all men live in a city without walls. Lucretius, as Erler points out, uses the story of Thucydides as a starting point to introduce his contemporaries to the doctrine of Epicurus.²³ While Epicurus recognizes the need for the security of the polis, he starts from the premise of V S 31 and therefore puts forward the purest security (see PD 14: εiλικρινεστατη ασφdλεια)²⁴: ‘nothing is more blissful’, writes Lucretius, ‘than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise' (RN 2.7-8).²⁵

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