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How malicious philosophers can be! I know nothing more poisonous than the joke which Epicurus permitted himself against Plato and the Platonists: he called them Dionysiokolakes. The literal meaning of that, what stands in the foreground, is "flatterers of Dionysus," hence accessories of tyrants and lickspittles.6 But the phrase says still more than that -"they are all actors , with nothing true about them" (for Dionysokolax was a popular description of an actor). And that last part is the real maliciousness which Epicurus hurled against Plato: the magnificent manners which Plato, along with his pupils, understood, the way they stole the limelight - things Epicurus did not understand! - that irritated him, the old schoolmaster from Samos, who sat hidden in his little garden in Athens and wrote three hundred books, who knows, perhaps out of rage and ambition against Plato? - It took a hundred years until Greece came to realize who this garden god Epicurus was.- Did they realize?
