EPICUREANS, a sect of philosophers who derived their name from Epicurus, and who divided the empire of philosophy with the STOICS (q. v.), at the birth of Christ; they held that the chief end of man was happiness, that the business of philosophy was to guide him in the pursuit of it, and that it was only by experience that one could learn what would lead to it and what would not; they scouted the idea of reason as regulative of thought, and conscience as regulative of conduct, and maintained that our senses were our only guides in both; in a word, they denied that God had implanted in man an absolute rational and moral principle, and maintained that he had no other clue to the goal of his being but his experience in life, while the distinction of right and wrong was only a distinction of what was found conducive to happiness and what was not; they had no faith in or fear of a divine Being above man any more than of a divine principle within man, and they scorned the idea of another world with its awards, and concerned themselves only with this, which, however, in their hands was no longer a cosmos but a chaos, out of which the quickening and ordinative spirit had fled.

EPICURUS, a Greek philosopher, born at Samos, of Athenian origin; settled at Athens in his thirty-sixth year, and founded a philosophical school there, where he taught a philosophy in opposition to that of the Stoics; philosophy he defined as “an activity which realises a happy life through ideas and arguments,” summing itself up “in ethics, which are to teach us how to attain a life of felicity”; his system comprised “the three branches included in philosophy, viz., logic, physics, and ethics,” but he arranges them in reverse order, logic and physics being regarded only as the handmaids of ethics; for he “limited logic to the investigation of the criterion of truth,” and physics he valued as disillusioning the mind of “the superstitious fear that went to disturb happiness”; he was a man of a temperate and blameless life, and it is a foul calumny on him to charge him with summing up happiness as mere self-indulgence, though it is true he regarded “virtue as having no value in itself, but only in so far as it offered us something—­an agreeable life.”

EPICYCLE, an expression used in the PTOLEMAIC (q. v.) system of astronomy; the old belief that the celestial bodies moved in perfect circles round the earth was found to be inadequate to explain the varying position of the planets, a difficulty which led Ptolemy to invent his theory of epicycles, which was to the effect that each planet revolved round a centre of its own, greater or less, but that all these centres themselves moved in procession round the earth, a theory which fell to pieces before the investigations of Kepler and Newton.

EPIDAURUS, a town of ancient Greece, in Argolis, on the eastern shore of the Peloponnesus; was at one time an independent State and an active centre of trade, but was chiefly noted for its famous temple of AEsculapius, to which people flocked to be cured of their diseases, and which bore the inscription “Open only to pure souls”; ruins of a magnificent theatre are still extant here.