intellectual activity was sustained by applying their doctrine to current topics
in the special sciences, and by carrying on polemics against Stoics and Aca-
demics. These activities were remarkable for the steadiness of the battle lines,
having little or no effect on either Epicurean doctrine or their opponents, nor
contributing much to the development of the special sciences.
One answer is that the Epicureans were organizationally more insulated
than the other schools as a lifestyle community principally concerned with
ritual devotion by lay followers. Epicureans seem to have had little contact
with the networks of the intellectual world, judging from the infrequency of
ties or crossovers to other schools (see Figures 3.4 and 3.5). It was well known
in antiquity that unlike in other schools, persons who joined the Epicureans
never left, giving rise to the famous jibe that they were like eunuchs in this
respect (D.L., 1925: 4:43).^26 But the lack of intellectual change remains a
puzzle; their commitment to a lifestyle of withdrawal and non-intellectual
contemplation is paralleled by other organizations elsewhere, such as Bud-
dhism, which nevertheless developed an active intellectual sector which got
swept up in the dynamics of doctrinal change.
The stagnation of Epicurean doctrine is attributable principally to the
lineup of factions across the intellectual field. The Epicureans anchored the
field as the most extreme doctrine, materialism. It was the positions nearer the
center that rearranged their alliances in the maneuvers over intellectual turf.
One might question why the opposite extreme on the idealist side did not
remain firm; here the answer seems to be that the holders of that side—at one
time the Megarians with their Eleatic principle, Eudoxus’ school of mathemati-
cal Idealism, the early Platonists—were nevertheless flanked by religious posi-
tions in the popular culture, including astrology, star worship, the mystery
cults. The transcendental-immaterialist side of the field was more crowded than
the materialist end. The Epicureans early got hold of a coherent statement of
extreme materialism and were subject to no competitive pressures to change
it. Although their slot was never a highly popular one, it had a sufficiently
steady clientele, and their lack of great size kept them from the danger of
fragmenting with success which characterizes the law of small numbers.
Within this general stability, the Epicureans show some perturbation at just
the time one might expect: the period of organizational transition, when the
school of Athens became defunct and intellectual life moved into the orbit of
Roman patronage. The upheaval in the organizational basis of intellectual life
affected Epicureanism as well. Zeno of Sidon, perhaps the last Epicurean
scholarch at Athens (166 in Figure 3.5), criticized the Stoic epistemology and
went on to develop a philosophy of mathematics, based on the derivation of
all knowledge from experience (DSB, 1981: 14:612). This was an innovation
in Epicurean doctrine, since Epicurus had pointedly disdained mathematics.
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^113