Died c. 219 BC, Athens. Wrote in Greek. Third head of the school, succeeding Hermarchus; his treatise On Irrational Contempt, defending objective value against a fashionable relativism, survives on papyrus from Herculaneum and is one of the few substantial post-founder Epicurean texts to survive at any length.
1. Key Texts
Or do you think, on the basis of the foregoing argument, that someone would not suffer the troubles which I mention but rather would make it convincing that fair, foul and all other matters of belief are wholly believed in, just because unlike gold and similar things they are not the same everywhere? After all, it must stare everybody in the face that bigger and smaller are also not perceived the same everywhere and in relation to all magnitudes ... So too with heavier and lighter. And the same applies also to other powers, without exception. For neither are the same things healthy for every body, nor nourishing or fatal, nor the opposites of these, but the very same things are healthy and nourishing for some yet have the opposite effect on others. Therefore either they must say that these too are false -- things whose effects are plain for everyone to see - or else they must refuse to brazen it out and to battle against what is evident, and not abolish fair and foul as falsely believed in either, just because unlike stone and gold they are not the same for everybody... Relative predicates do not have the same status as things said not relatively but in accordance with something's own nature. Nor does the one kind truly exist but not the other. So to expect them to have the same attributes, or the one kind to exist but not the other, is naive. And there is no difference between starting from these and eliminating those and starting from those and eliminating these: it would be similarly naive to think that since the bigger and heavier and sweeter are bigger than one thing but smaller than another, and heavier, and likewise with the other attributes, and since nothing has the same one of these attributes per sea it has in relation to something else, in the same way stone, gold and the like ought also, if they truly existed, to be gold in relation to one person while having the opposite nature in relation to another; and to say that, since that is not the case, these things are falsely believed in and do not really exist. (tr. Long & Sedley)
2. Forum Discussions
- All discussions of Polystratus in Epicureans of the Past
- Polystratus - Main Biography
- Surviving Quotations From Polystratus