"Remember that you are mortal, and you have a limited time to live, and in devoting yourself to discussion of the nature of time and eternity you have seen things that have been, are now, and are to come."
I see this synopsis. Kind of snippy and unnecessarily dismissive as to "bizarre" and "doing very little aside from maintaining....." Neither of those are necessary implications of the theory even as we have it in minimal form today. This also is too narrow: "needed to be considered real in order to be genuine, ethical models for mankind to follow, which was their main function within the Epicurean world-view." I will read the rest when I can.
The Polytheism of the Epicureans, 2016
Epicureans have been branded atheists since antiquity, but although they might have held unorthodox beliefs about divinity, they did nevertheless believe in gods, however unorthodox their beliefs about them were. They did not believe in the Olympians that Hesiod and Homer had depicted, but anthropomorphic yet bizarre gods: although these were compounds of atoms, they were immortal, unlike any other compound in the Epicurean universe, and there was quite possibly an infinite host of such deities, all alike and all nameless. These gods were not considered figments of the imagination by the Epicureans, but as real, living entities that actually existed, remotely, somewhere out there in the cosmos, doing very little aside from maintaining their supremely peaceful, painless, and tranquil dispositions. And these gods needed to be considered real in order to be genuine, ethical models for mankind to follow, which was their main function within the Epicurean world-view. The atoms of these gods, like everything in existence, were held to be perpetually in motion, constantly being emitted from their bodies as images that then travelled directly to the minds of mankind and thereby presented a true depiction of divinity, of peacefulness, and above all, of happiness, which would then be examples for individual Epicureans to follow on their individual journeys towards ἀταραξία, tranquillity.
