Monumentality

How malicious philosophers can be! I know nothing more stinging than the joke Epicurus took the liberty of making on Plato and the Platonists: He called them dionysiokolakes. In its original sense, and on the face of it, the word signifies "flatterers of Dionysius" -- however, it is as much as to say, "They are all actors, there is nothing genuine about them". The latter is really that which Epicurus cast upon Plato; he was annoyed by the grandiose manner of which Plato and his scholars were masters -- of which Epicurus was not! He, who sat concealed in his little garden at Athens, and wrote three hundred books, perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of Plato, who knows! Greece took a hundred years to find out who Epicurus was. But did she ever really find out?