What if the Epicureans had prevailed?

[Lemonvariable72]

I often wonder what would history would look like if Epicurean thought had prevailed over cults of the roman era and Christianity had died like Mithraism.
What do you think?

[Minimalist]

Anything would be an improvement over any of the angry desert god shit.

[Angrboda]

Epicureanism would have never prevailed. Epicureanism is fundamentally a satisficing with the pragmatics of what is real. People will always prefer a confident certainty to a qualified pragmatism. It was simply a non starter.

[MindForgedManacle]

I think Apo's right on the monney here. Epicureanism just doesn't seem to meld well with how the average person is, even though it has some admirable aspects (if the gods exists they would be fools to get involved in human affairs, etc.)

[Lemonvariable72]

I guess people prefer a made up truth, to a uncertain reality.

[Anomalocaris]

Epicureanism would have never prevailed. Epicureanism is fundamentally a satisficing with the pragmatics of what is real. People will always prefer a confident certainty to a qualified pragmatism. It was simply a non starter.

I would think the widespread success of Buddhism and taoism suggest an philosophy like epicureanism could also gain widespread and lasting traction under the right circumstances. A philosophy need not directly satisfy every psychological need to establish itself as a major driver. In most societies an entire array of superstitions and folk religions coexist with dominant intellectual thought to provide relatively confident but utterly unfounded certainties to the needy and unintellectual.

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I often wonder what would history would look like if Epicurean thought had prevailed over cults of the roman era and Christianity had died like Mithraism.
What do you think?

I don't think Epicureanism would have helped Rome much against her internal breakdown and the barbarian incursions that overtaxed her defenses. In the west Rome would still have fallen. It is not clear to me how Epicureanism would have fared in the dark ages after 500 AD.

One possibility is without a powerful amd proselytizing church the civilization western Europe would have collapsed even more thoroughly than it did historically, while without the rise of Islam the eastern empire would have remain much richer and less territorially and militarily pressed than it was, and subsequent center of western civilization would have permanently shifted to the east.

To many uncertainty.

[MindForgedManacle]

Christianity's rise also more or less ended any chance Epicureanism might have had, and it already was rejected by many Romans. The idea that consciousness ends with death, the rejection of interventionist gods and the atomist hypothesis just wouldn't be made to fit with the religion (although Pierre Gassendi later tried to).

[xpastor]

Judging from Lucretius' De rerum natura, I think we would have been centuries ahead in terms of science.

[Anomalocaris]

Christianity's rise also more or less ended any chance Epicureanism might have had, and it already was rejected by many Romans. The idea that consciousness ends with death, the rejection of interventionist gods and the atomist hypothesis just wouldn't be made to fit with the religion (although Pierre Gassendi later tried to).

Epicureanism just didn't fit the classical roman ideal of virtue to be able to take hold in Rome while Roman republic was on the ascendant. Romans were much more susceptible to stoicism then to epicureanism.

When Rome ascended to its imperial heights, and the empire became inclusive of different cultural and philosophical trends, epicureans did themselves no favors by eschewing politics, and thus fail to appeal to the class with power and jnfluence, while also eschewing superstition, thus fail to appear to the class with the numbers.

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Judging from Lucretius' De rerum natura, I think we would have been centuries ahead in terms of science.

You must also contend with possibility that epicurean Rome culture would be less able to survive the subsequent barbarian incursion, as a result dark ages would last longer and we would now be centuries behind in terms of science.

[xpastor]

Judging from Lucretius' De rerum natura, I think we would have been centuries ahead in terms of science.

You must also contend with possibility that epicurean Rome culture would be less able to survive the subsequent barbarian incursion, as a result dark ages would last longer and we would now be centuries behind in terms of science.

Since we can't rerun history, we can never be confident about the answers to hypothetical questions like this. Maybe someone should write an alternative history novel on the theme of an Epicurean, non-Christian Roman Empire.

Nevertheless, I'm going to say that the rise of Christianity with its focus on otherworldly theology probably did more to set back science than the barbarian invasions.

In the first place, the barbarians often wanted to emulate the Romans and might have conquered and absorbed Roman science as the Romans did earlier with the Greeks. In the second place, the eastern Byzantine Empire did not fall to the barbarians. It lasted almost a thousand years after the Goths sacked Rome, and yet as far as I know, it produced no scientific or technological advances comparable to those in the golden age of Greco-Roman science with original thinkers like Archimedes, Heron and Galen. However, it did produce lots of theologians, lots of icons and lots of illuminated manuscripts of devotional literature.