Ερως, Φιλια, and Parental Love

There is no extant evidence of Epicurus himself employing either of the Greek terms for parental love that are routinely used in later sources (στοργή and φιλοστοργία). It is illuminating, however, to consider parental love in the framework of his hedonist treatment of sexual desire (ἔρως) and friendship (φιλία).

Epicurus’ treatise Περὶ ἔρωτος (On Love) is recorded by Diogenes Laertius (10.27), but it is unfortunately no longer extant. It is clear, however, that Epicurus addresses ἔρως in the framework of his division of desires into natural and unnatural, necessary and unnecessary (RS 29-30; Ep. Men. 127-32). The desire for sex (ἔρως) is a natural and unnecessary desire and so it might be readily acted upon and indulged, if no pains arise from doing so (Sent. Vat. 21, 51; Lucr. 4.1030-1287; Plut. Brut. an. rat. uti 989B-C; Diog. Laert. 10.118).Footnote ⁵ There is no extant evidence that the Epicureans also thought of parental love as a natural and unnecessary desire, but such a position might seem eminently plausible for them to hold. In an analogous manner to ἔρως, it could be maintained that one has natural parental love for one’s offspring, perhaps in the form of a naturally occurring desire for the safety and well-being of one’s children. Acting on this desire – for instance by protecting and nurturing one’s children – is acceptable as long as it leads to no harm, even if it is not necessary for one’s own happiness.Footnote ⁶ However, since Epicurus evidently denied that parental love is natural, this option is unavailable. Is parental love, then, to be declared an unnatural and unnecessary desire, something to be avoided altogether since it is detrimental to happiness? In that case, one should not have children in the first place and, failing that, should not love and care for them. Such a stance would appear to be the obvious conclusion of Epicurus’ denial of the naturalness of parental love, if it is to be understood as some sort of desire. One can derive support for this interpretation from Lucretius: at the start of the final book of De rerum natura, he declares that Epicurus saw that honour, wealth, fame, and pride in successful children (bona gnatorum excellere fama) – all things that may seem legitimate objects of desire – are all alike empty, neither necessary nor sufficient for happiness (6.11-16). However, although there is clear evidence that Epicurus advocated remaining childless barring exceptional circumstances (Diog. Laert. 10.119; Clem. Alex. Strom. 2.23.181.25; Lactant. Div. inst. 3.17.5),Footnote ⁷ there is no evidence that he advocated actively neglecting one’s children beyond the aspersions cast by Epictetus, who suggests that his logic condones infanticide (Arr. Epict. diss. 1.23.1, 7, 10).Footnote ⁸

It appears instead that Epicurus saw parental love as something akin to friendship (φιλία). The denial of the naturalness of parental love accords with well-documented Epicurean views on the instrumental judgements involved in forming and maintaining friendships (e.g. Sent. Vat. 23; Cic. Fin. 1.69; Plut. Adv. Col. 1111B).Footnote ⁹ According to Epicurus, one is motivated to have friends for security and for confidence of aid in times of need and distress (Sent. Vat. 34, 56-7; frag. 175 Usener). Friendship qualifies as ‘a natural good’ (κατὰ φύσιν ἀγαθόν) in so far as it provides for the satisfaction of natural and necessary desires for things like security, but there is no necessary connection between having friends and having security (RS 6-7, 27; Sent. Vat. 78). Indeed, in keeping with his views on kingship and political rule, which can also qualify as natural goods (as indeed can anything whatsoever that happens to provide security in practice; RS 6-7; Plut. Adv. Col. 1124D),Footnote ¹⁰ Epicurus maintains that the good of friendship is conditional and must be judged on a case-by-case basis: friendships are not by definition natural goods, since certain cases might have detrimental effects – for example, if one has an extremely demanding friend or if one is betrayed by a friend (Sent. Vat. 28, 39, 56-7). This leads to a somewhat delicate Epicurean position: friendship does not appear in the original state of nature, in which humans are unattached individuals, and so it is not a natural state of affairs for human beings (neither, notoriously, are justice and political community).Footnote ¹¹ Friendship only emerges as a result of the development of domestic units and a shared desire for security, neither to harm nor be harmed (Lucr. 5.1018-23; cf. RS 31-3). This explains why friendship qualifies as a ‘natural good’ in so far as it provides security, while not itself being natural. All these elements can be seen also in the case of parental love.

We shall consider the lack of parental love in the state of nature in detail in the next section. When it comes to the desire for security, children clearly might perform the same function as friends. Indeed, Lucretius alludes to this explicitly when he says that people have children so that they may have security in their old age (4.1256: ut possint gnatis munire senectam).Footnote ¹² Thus, in so far as parental love is akin to φιλία, it too is a matter of rational calculation about advantages to oneself, but it might so happen that (for most people at least) loving one’s children is an excellent strategy to gain things such as security and the confidence of aid in the future. Treating parental love under the category of φιλία explains why parental love is clearly ubiquitous and indeed in most cases a natural good (as a matter of fact, most children do provide security and aid to their loving parents in their old age), while not itself being natural. Further, it also explains why Epicurus maintains the provocative view that one should not have children barring exceptional circumstances: there are other candidate friends readily available and there is simply no need to have children in order to have security in one’s old age (especially since, as Democritus notes, they may in fact turn out to be sources of pain and disappointment – so why take the risk?).Footnote ¹³ Moreover, on this model we can appreciate that even if one does have children there is no compulsion to love them regardless of what sort of person they are: if they do not provide advantages presently and if they do not inspire the confidence of doing so in the future, it is best not to love them and one is free and able to make that choice.Footnote ¹⁴ It is very tempting to conclude that, for Epicurus, one’s children are just other candidate friends, with no privileged position beyond that.Footnote ¹⁵

Epicurean Engagement with Plato’s Lysis:Do Children Belong to their Parents by Nature?

By aligning the Epicurean account of parental love with their instrumental account of φιλία, strong resonances appear with a section of Plato’s Lysis in which parental love is also placed under the category of φιλία and discussed in instrumental terms (207d-210d).Footnote ¹⁶ In this passage, Socrates presents a provocative argument that Lysis is loved by his parents not for his own sake but only in so far as he is useful and provides advantages. Lysis had presumed that his mother and father love him purely out of a concern for his happiness, but Socrates develops the line that, since they do not let Lysis do whatever he wants, they are not really concerned with his happiness. Rather, it seems that they are concerned with their own happiness and how he contributes to it. Socrates contends that Lysis fails to contribute to his parents’ happiness unless he is wise: only then would his parents let him do what he wants, for then they will benefit from being subject to his wisdom. Hence, it is questionable whether his parents do in fact truly love him for his own sake (despite their efforts in securing his well-being by caring for him in various ways), whether he is worthy of such love if they do love him for his own sake (perhaps he is only worthy if he seeks to become wise), and whether they would love him for his own sake if they themselves were already wise and did not need him for anything.Footnote ¹⁷ In addition to such questions about parental love, Socrates appears to advance the thesis that wisdom is sufficient for happiness: either one’s own wisdom suffices or else one can perhaps rely on that of another.

Epicurus’ own engagement with Plato’s Lysis is uncertain, but his follower Colotes wrote a tract Against Plato’s Lysis, very few parts of which survive in a fragmentary papyrus from Herculaneum (PHerc 208).Footnote ¹⁸ These include a sequence criticising the thesis that wisdom is sufficient for happiness. Most scholars identify this as a response to Lysis 207d-210d, which also contains discussion of the nature of parental love (PHerc 208 T. VI, p. 12ba17-12c16 Crönert).Footnote ¹⁹ The extent of Colotes’ engagement with Plato’s treatment of parental love throughout the Lysis is uncertain, but it is possible that the Epicureans latched upon the idea of parents weighing the advantages that their children might provide in the pursuit of their own end, since it suggests that parental love does not arise ‘by nature’ but rather by rational calculation. At any rate, the Lysis as a whole raises some key questions about the basis of ‘natural love’ that ought to have caught Epicurean attention.

In particular, towards the end of the dialogue, Socrates suggests ‘what belongs to us by nature has shown itself to us as something we must love’ (222a: τὸ μὲν δὴ φῦσει οἰκεῖον ἀναγκαῖον ἡμῖν πέφανται φιλεῖν). On the one hand, he entertains the view that it is things that are like (ὅμοιον) or akin to us which present themselves as necessary objects of our love – like belongs with like (222b). He does not explicitly say that, on this criterion of likeness or kinship, children fit the category of ‘what belongs to us by nature’ (φύσει οἰκεῖον).Footnote ²⁰ On the other hand, he also entertains the view that what ‘naturally belongs to us’ (φύσει οἰκεῖον) are those things that we need or those things in which we are deficient (ἐνδεές) – like belongs with unlike (221d-e). The question of whether or not friends or children qualify as such things is left open at the end of the dialogue.Footnote ²¹ We can infer that the Epicureans deny that parents and children ‘belong to each other’ in either of the relevant senses for parental love to be classified as natural and we can go some way in reconstructing their arguments.

First, the reasoning on display at Lysis 221d-e fits closely with the Epicurean view that natural and necessary desires direct us to those things that we need and in which we are naturally deficient (such as food and drink or shelter), which are those things that we seek ‘in accordance with what belongs to nature’ (RS 7: κατὰ τὸ τῆς φύσεως οἰκεῖον), and which we must love if we are to attain the end and be happy (Ep. Men. 127-32). As we have seen, for Epicurus, children do not fit into this picture: despite the natural urge to have sex, having and loving children is not necessary for our happiness and the sage will ordinarily remain childless.Footnote ²²

Secondly, the Epicureans are not committed to the view that our children are things that are like (ὅμοιον) or akin to us and therefore present themselves as necessary objects of our love. Epicurus’ follower Hermarchus refers to the possible effects of a natural οἰκείωσις among human beings, but his account of the original development of justice and laws against homicide, preserved by Porphyry (Abst. 1.7.1-12.7), does not admit that other human beings in general or our children in particular are like or akin to us in any deep sense.Footnote ²³ This position is further apparent in Lucretius’ treatment of parental love in De rerum natura. To be sure, from the very beginning of the poem, Lucretius stresses that offspring resemble or are like their parents: in the proem to the first book, he describes how Venus strikes love into the hearts of all creatures and causes them to propagate new generations of their own kind (1.19-20: omnibus incutiens blandum per pectora amorem, | efficis ut cupide generatim saecla propagent; cf. 1.159-73, 2.342-70).Footnote ²⁴ This likeness between human parents and children does not, however, entail that our children belong to us by nature. In the fifth book, Lucretius presents human beings in the state of nature as essentially unattached individuals, belonging by nature to nobody except themselves. These original humans are not able to look to the communal good (5.958: nec commune bonum poterant spectare) and are aware of no bonds of custom or law (5.958-9: neque ullis | moribus inter se scibant nec legibus uti). There is no notion of a natural human community, of belonging together: these humans live alone and look out solely for themselves (5.960-1: quod cuique obtulerat praedae fortuna, ferebat | sponte sua sibi quisque valere et vivere doctus), with nature readily providing each individual with what is necessary (5.925-1010).

As Campbell rightly observes, ‘clearly there is no sign here of any innate affection of φιλαλληλία between the first humans that we find in Stoic and Aristotelian theories’.Footnote ²⁵ This lack of interpersonal affection extends to the case of parents and children: there is no sign of any parental love, let alone natural parental love. There appears to be no relationship between parent and child beyond the biological facts of birth: there is no notion of any impulse to care for one’s offspring nor is there any notion of parental possession or ownership of one’s children. Human reproduction is explained as being a result of chance sexual encounters (5.962-5). There is, to be sure, a natural human desire to come together and procreate (Venus is explicitly mentioned at line 5.962), but Lucretius does not mention the lot of the resulting children at all. Perhaps he assumes that they were merely left to their own devices after birth and, by chance, some happened to survive and become the unattached individuals he describes.

Much earlier in his account of creation, however, Lucretius makes it clear that, unlike the offspring of other animals, the human child is helpless at birth and needs parental care to survive (5.222-7):

Lucretius then states that nature does not provide for the survival of human children in the same fashion as other animals (5.228-34). Given the vulnerability and dependency of human children, a story of random survival in the state of nature would seem highly unlikely as an account of the survival of the human race. Lucretius himself voices such concerns again later in the fifth book when he suggests that the total breakdown of concordia between people would lead to the destruction of the human race (5.1024-5) and also that without such concord successful propagation to the present day would not have been possible (5.1026-7: aut genus humanum iam tum foret omne peremptum, | nec potuisset adhuc perducere saecla propago). A serious tension thus emerges within the fifth book: there is a clear picture of unattached individuals concerned solely with themselves alongside a powerful statement that human infants need care if they are to survive and the human race continue.

It appears certain that Lucretius envisions a vital role for parental love in the propagation of the human race. However, he depicts parental love emerging only at a surprisingly late stage of human cultural development. He places marriage before child rearing in the first stages of the development of human communities (5.1011-18):

Human beings do not appear to have concerns about their children until such time as the formation of domestic units and the softening effects of fire, of easy access to sex, and of exposure to the sweet charms of their own children, which result. On this Epicurean model, affectionate bonds between parent and child arise only following the softening of human nature, which finds its full unadulterated expression in the state of nature.Footnote ²⁶ Civilised life both produces and sustains this new softer nature, in which human beings are social animals with a genuine concern for the communal good.Footnote ²⁷ As a result, Lucretius can readily refer to the love and delight that parents in a civilised context get from and feel towards their children, which he does throughout the poem as a whole. In the first book, he refers to happy cities blooming with children (1.255: hinc laetas urbes pueris florere videmus), a good thing, since it means the race will continue and something that is made possible by the death of previous generations (1.250-64). In the proem to the third book, Lucretius calls Epicurus a father (tu pater es), who supplies us (his children) with fatherly precepts (tu patria nobis | suppeditas praecepta), so as to help us attain peace of mind (3.11-30). In the diatribe against the fear of death, sweet children are said to bring joy to the heart (3.895-6: nec dulces occurrent oscula nati | praeripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent), although a man will not miss such ‘gifts of life’ (praemia vitae) in death (3.898-903). In the fourth book, he maintains that compatible partners in marriage conceive successfully and gain the gift of sweet children, a source of security for their old age (4.1248-56). The conclusion of the plague in the sixth book contains the moving images of corpses of children and parents piled on top of each other (6.1256-8) as well as the fraught cremation of one’s own kin (6.1282-6: suos consanguineos). At the same time, Lucretius can somewhat uneasily uphold Epicurus’ denial of the naturalness of parental love, since children, like all humans, are essentially unattached individuals and do not belong to their parents by nature. It is civilised life that produces and sustains the conditions for parental love. Without it, humans’ intrinsically harsh nature will find expression once more. The explanation for children’s survival in the original state of nature can, in characteristic Epicurean fashion, be put down to chance.

Comparisons between Animals and Humans

Lucretius’ treatment of human parental love differs from his treatment of animal parental love.Footnote ²⁸ In the case of animals, parental love appears to be natural. Consider the following celebrated passage from the second book of De rerum natura (2.349-70):

At this point of the second book of De rerum natura, Lucretius is arguing that there is an indefinite variety of atomic shapes (2.333-41). This variety at the atomic level explains the individuality of different things (2.342-8), which (as lines 2.349-70 show) can be seen through examples such as a cow identifying her own calf from all the other calves or kids and lambs picking out their own mothers from among the flocks of goats and sheep (if there were a limited number of atomic shapes, it seems, such distinctions could not be made). However, the passage also betrays views on parental love. In addition to offspring being able to recognise their own mothers and vice versa, Lucretius suggests that nature provides for the care of offspring, most obviously in the form of mothers’ milk. Such innate abilities and physiological changes, governed by natura (2.369), seem to indicate that there is some sort of natural bond between at least mothers and their offspring. It would also appear that this bond is based on the fact that offspring ‘belong to’ their mothers by nature. At the climax of the famous image of the grieving heifer (2.366), Lucretius explains that she has lost ‘something of her own that she knows well’ (usque adeo quiddam proprium notumque requirit), her own calf that belongs to her and cannot be replaced by any other. The adjective proprius emphasises that the calf properly belongs to her, its mother, and nobody else, especially not the superstitious humans who have callously broken a natural bond in taking her calf to the sacrificial altar.

In this passage, Lucretius appears to powerfully uphold a natural bond between parent and child in the case of animal mothers. Humans, however, would not appear to be so different. Indeed, much of the scene’s emotive force comes from the personification of the grieving mother heifer, in particular the human emotion of desiderium that she experiences at the loss of her ‘young man’ (iuvencus) (2.360). Moreover, human mothers also produce mothers’ milk, nature’s way of providing care for offspring, and human parents can recognise their own offspring in the same way that different kinds of animal recognise theirs (2.349-51). So, if such factors are to be admitted as evidence for the naturalness of parental love in the case of animals, why should it be different in the case of human beings?

As it happens, in his De amore prolis (περὶ τῆς εἰς τὰ ἔγγονα φιλοστοργίας or On the Love of One’s Offspring) Plutarch attacks the Epicureans on just this point.Footnote ²⁹ He argues that both animals and human beings alike exhibit natural parental love for their offspring, citing as evidence various facts of human and animal behaviour and physiology, such as the shared production of mothers’ milk (495D-496A) and the courage, pain, and self-sacrifice shown by both human and animal parents when defending and nurturing their vulnerable and helpless offspring (496B-497C). The Epicureans, however, refuse to accept that such analogies between human beings and animals entail that parental love is natural in both cases: they accept that parental love is natural in the case of animals but claim that human parental love is unique (494F-495B). For Epicurus, it is the capacity to reason and calculate about gain that fundamentally distinguishes the unique case of human parental love from other animal examples, making one natural and the other not, even though they evidently have much in common (495A-B). Thus Plutarch fulminates: αἰσχρὸν γάρ, ὦ Ζεῦ, τὰς θηρίων γενέσεις καὶ λοχείας καὶ ὠδῖνας καὶ τεκνοτροφίας φύσιν εἴναι καὶ χάριν, τὰς δ’ ἀνθρώπων δάνεια καὶ μισθοὺς καὶ ἀρραβῶνας ἐπὶ χρείαις διδομένους (495B: ‘For it is disgraceful, o Zeus, that the begetting, the birth, the throes of labour, and the nurturing of beasts are by nature and a gift, but that those of humans are loans and wages and caution-money, given for a gain.’).Footnote ³⁰

Lucretius’ treatment of human and animal parental love appears to capture this Epicurean approach to the topic. There is no doubt that he does treat human parental love differently and indeed contrasts it negatively with the example of animal mothers, such as the grieving heifer. This is apparent when we consider the earlier account of the sacrifice of Iphigenia at the hands of her father Agamemnon (1.80-101), a passage that foreshadows and parallels the sacrifice of the calf. Throughout this moving scene, Lucretius provides no obvious sign of parental love and affection on the part of Agamemnon beyond his being ‘sorrowful’ (maestus, 1.89) as Iphigenia approached the altar. Any affection that Agamemnon might have had or the fact that Iphigenia had first called him pater (1.94), clearly nothing of this was sufficient to outweigh the calculations of gain – a fair wind for the fleet (1.100) – that would result from sacrificing his own daughter. Lucretius’ judgement on Agamemnon’s actions is explicit: tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (1.101: ‘To evils so great religion was able to persuade’).Footnote ³¹ The attitude that Lucretius presupposes and condones is obvious: parents should not put their children to death for gain but should love and care for them. That Agamemnon is prepared to sacrifice his innocent daughter for gain is abominable – and religio is to blame.

The human parent-child relationship on display with Agamemnon and Iphigenia is clearly very different in kind to that between the mother heifer and her calf. Assessing the force of the scene with the grieving heifer, Saylor comments: ‘As an example set in the discussion of diversity of kinds (333-87) and against the background of the earlier sacrifice, the whole description intimates that man (present here only by way of introduction in 342, 351) fails in a very significant way to know his own offspring so well as animals know theirs’.Footnote ³² The reason is the lack of a natural bond between human parents and their children, which is signalled by Agamemnon’s demonstration of the unique factor that sets apart human parental love: the calculation of gain in the choice to love or not love one’s children. Rather than a natural state of affairs, it is a cultural norm that human parents love their children – according to the Epicureans because of utilitarian considerations about gain (in most cases children do, as a matter of fact, provide security in old age, and so on). However, as Agamemnon illustrates, that norm might be violated in some cases (for valid or, in his case, invalid reasons).Footnote ³³ In contrast, there is simply no possibility of the cow even contemplating sacrificing her calf in the manner that Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter: her natural parental instincts do not allow it and, once her calf is gone, she is ‘unable even to comprehend the destructive act of man’.Footnote ³⁴ In both examples, the emotive force relies on the perversion of the normative model of a loving parent-child relationship by religio, but the foundation for the normative model differs in each case: the animal relationship is based on a natural bond; the human relationship is a cultural norm.

Taken together, then, these two scenes suggest that Lucretius himself admires the naturalness of animal parental love as human beings certainly compare unfavourably.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, we can appreciate that humans can only imitate the animal model with their cultural norms of parental love and affection. In the fifth book, as we have seen, Lucretius accounts for the development of such bonds and stresses their utility (5.1011-23). In the earlier books, however, he stresses that, unlike the case of the animals, such constructed bonds always risk breaking down or being perverted by other factors such as religio (1.80-101, 2.352-66) and misguided fears (3.59-93), concerns that return vividly with the account of the plague and the breakdown of Athenian society that concludes the poem (6.1138-1286).Footnote ³⁶ At this point, we can appreciate that the theme of parental love is central to the De rerum natura as a whole.Footnote ³⁷ From the first book to the last, Lucretius shows that the bonds between human parents and their children are fragile, lacking a firm basis in nature. However, he stresses, it is imperative that parents do love their children and nurture the bonds that ultimately underpin society and the propagation of the human race (5.1024-7) – failure to do so is both deplorable and potentially catastrophic.