The Nuttall Encyclopaedia Part 186

EPHIALTES, a Malian Greek who led the Persians across a pa.s.s in the mountains, whereby they were able to surround and overcome Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae.

EPHOD, a richly and emblematically embroidered vestment worn by the high-priest of the Jews, and consisting of two parts, one covering the breast and supporting the breastplate, and the other covering the back, these being clasped to the shoulders by two onyx stones, with names inscribed on them, six on each, of the 12 tribes, and the whole bound round the waist with a girdle of gold, blue, purple, scarlet, and fine-twined linen.

EPH'ORI (i. e. overseers), the name of five magistrates annually elected in ancient Sparta from among the people as a countercheck to the authority of the kings and the senate; had originally to see to the execution of justice and the education of youth; their authority, which resembled that of the tribunes in Rome, was at last destroyed in 225 B.C.

EPHRAEM SYRUS, the most famous of the Church Fathers in Syria, and called "prophet of the Syrians," also "Pillar of the Church" and "Help of the Holy Ghost," born at Nisibis, Mesopotamia; lived a hermit's life in a cave near Edessa; left exegetical writings, homilies, and poems, and so great was his piety and self-denial, that he was looked upon as a saint, and is still so reverenced in several Churches (320-370).

EPHRAIM, one of the 12 tribes of Israel, the one to which Joshua belonged, located in the centre of the land; powerful in the days of the Judges, the chief of the 10 tribes that revolted under Jeroboam after the death of Solomon, and is found often to give name to the whole body of them.

EPIC, a poem that treats of the events in the life of a nation or a race or the founder of one, agreeably to the pa.s.sion inspiring it and in such form as to kindle and keep alive the heroism thereof in the generations thereafter; or a poem in celebration of the thoughts, feelings, and feats of a whole nation or race; its proper function is to _disimprison_ the soul of the related facts and give a n.o.ble rendering of them; of compositions of this kind the "Iliad" of Homer, the "aeneid" of Virgil, and the "Divine Comedy" of Dante take the lead.

EPIC MELODY, melody in accord with the feeling of the whole race or the subject as a whole.

EPICHARIS, a Roman lady who conspired against Nero and strangled herself rather than reveal her accomplices after undergoing the cruellest tortures.

EPICHARMUS, a Greek philosopher and poet in the island of Cos; studied philosophy under Pythagoras; conceived a taste for comedy; gave himself up to that branch of the drama, and received the name of the "Father of Comedy"; lived eventually at the court of Hiero of Syracuse (540-430 B.C.).

EPICTETUS, a celebrated Stoic philosopher of the 1st century, originally a slave; lived and taught at Rome, but after the expulsion of the philosophers retired to Nicopolis, in Epirus; was lame, and lived in poverty; his conversations were collected by Arrian, and his philosophy in a short manual under the Greek name of "Enchiridion of Epictetus,"

written, as is alleged, in utter obliviousness of the fact that "the end of man is an action, not a thought."

EPICUREANS, a sect of philosophers who derived their name from Epicurus, and who divided the empire of philosophy with the STOICS (q. v.), at the birth of Christ; they held that the chief end of man was happiness, that the business of philosophy was to guide him in the pursuit of it, and that it was only by experience that one could learn what would lead to it and what would not; they scouted the idea of reason as regulative of thought, and conscience as regulative of conduct, and maintained that our senses were our only guides in both; in a word, they denied that G.o.d had implanted in man an absolute rational and moral principle, and maintained that he had no other clue to the goal of his being but his experience in life, while the distinction of right and wrong was only a distinction of what was found conducive to happiness and what was not; they had no faith in or fear of a divine Being above man any more than of a divine principle within man, and they scorned the idea of another world with its awards, and concerned themselves only with this, which, however, in their hands was no longer a cosmos but a chaos, out of which the quickening and ordinative spirit had fled.

EPICURUS, a Greek philosopher, born at Samos, of Athenian origin; settled at Athens in his thirty-sixth year, and founded a philosophical school there, where he taught a philosophy in opposition to that of the Stoics; philosophy he defined as "an activity which realises a happy life through ideas and arguments," summing itself up "in ethics, which are to teach us how to attain a life of felicity"; his system comprised "the three branches included in philosophy, viz., logic, physics, and ethics,"

but he arranges them in reverse order, logic and physics being regarded only as the handmaids of ethics; for he "limited logic to the investigation of the criterion of truth," and physics he valued as disillusioning the mind of "the superst.i.tious fear that went to disturb happiness"; he was a man of a temperate and blameless life, and it is a foul calumny on him to charge him with summing up happiness as mere self-indulgence, though it is true he regarded "virtue as having no value in itself, but only in so far as it offered us something--an agreeable life."

EPICYCLE, an expression used in the PTOLEMAIC (q. v.) system of astronomy; the old belief that the celestial bodies moved in perfect circles round the earth was found to be inadequate to explain the varying position of the planets, a difficulty which led Ptolemy to invent his theory of epicycles, which was to the effect that each planet revolved round a centre of its own, greater or less, but that all these centres themselves moved in procession round the earth, a theory which fell to pieces before the investigations of Kepler and Newton.

EPIDAURUS, a town of ancient Greece, in Argolis, on the eastern sh.o.r.e of the Peloponnesus; was at one time an independent State and an active centre of trade, but was chiefly noted for its famous temple of aesculapius, to which people flocked to be cured of their diseases, and which bore the inscription "Open only to pure souls"; ruins of a magnificent theatre are still extant here.

EPIDEMIC, a name given to contagious diseases which, arising suddenly in a community, rapidly spread through its members, often travelling from district to district, until often a whole country is affected; the theory of the transmission of disease by microbes has largely explained the spread of such scourges, but the part which atmospheric and other physical, and perhaps psychic, causes play in these disorders is still matter of debate, especially as regards epidemic mental diseases. See ENDEMIC.

EPIGONI (the Descendants), the name given to the sons of the Seven who perished before Thebes; they avenged the death of their fathers by razing Thebes to the ground; the war first and last has been made the subject of epic and tragic poems.

EPIGRAM, in modern usage, is a neat, witty, and pointed utterance briefly couched in verse form, usually satiric, and reserving its sting to the last line; sometimes made the vehicle of a quaintly-turned compliment, as, for example, in Pope's couplet to Chesterfield, when asked to write something with that n.o.bleman's pencil;--

"Accept a miracle; instead of wit, See two dull lines by Stanhope's pencil writ."

The Latin epigrammatists, especially Martial and Catullus, were the first to give a satirical turn to the epigram, their predecessors the Greeks having employed it merely for purposes of epitaph and monumental inscriptions of a laudatory nature.

EPILEPSY, a violent nervous affection, manifesting itself usually in sudden convulsive seizures and unconsciousness, followed by temporary stoppage of the breath and rigidity of the body, popularly known as "falling sickness"; origin as yet undecided; attributed by the ancients to demoniacal possession.

EPIMENIDES, a philosopher of Crete of the 7th century B.C., of whom it is fabled that he fell asleep in a cave when a boy, and that he did not awake for 57 years, but it was to find himself endowed with all knowledge and wisdom. He was invited to Athens during a plague to purify the city, on which occasion he performed certain mysterious rites with the effect that the plague ceased. The story afforded Goethe a subject for a drama ent.i.tled "Das Epimenides Erwachen," "in which he symbolises his own aloofness from the great cause of the Fatherland, the result of want of faith in the miraculous power that resides in an enthusiastic outbreak of patriotic feeling."

EPIMETHEUS (i. e. Afterthought), the brother of Prometheus (Forethought), who in spite of the warnings of the latter opened Pandora's box, and let loose a flood of evils on the earth, which oppress it to this day.

EPINAL (21), the capital of the dep. of Vosges, in France, charmingly situated at the foot of the Vosges Mountains, on the Moselle; is elegantly built, and has ruins of an old castle, surrounded by fine gardens, a 10th-century church, and a fine library, &c.; a suspension bridge spans the Moselle; there is industry in cotton, paper, &c.

EPINAY, MADAME D', a French writer, unhappily married in her youth; became notorious for her illicit intimacy with Rousseau and Grimm; her "Memoires et Correspondence" give a lively picture of her times (1725-1783).

EPIPHANIUS, ST., one of the Fathers of the Greek Church; of Jewish descent; flourished in the 4th century; led a monastic life, and founded a monastery in Eleutheropolis; was bishop of Constantia in 367; bigoted and tyrannical, he became notorious for his ecclesiastical zeal, and for his indictments of Origen and St. Chrysostom; left writings that show great but indiscriminate learning (330-402).

EPIPHANY, as observed in the Christian Church, is a festival held on the 12th day after Christmas, in commemoration of the manifestation of Christ to the Magi of the East; but up to the close of the 4th century the festival also commemorated the incarnation of Christ as well as the divine manifestation at His baptism.

EPI'RUS, was the NW. portion of ancient h.e.l.las, Dodona its capital, and Acheron one of its rivers; in 1466 became part of the Ottoman empire, but in 1881 a portion was ceded to Greece.

EPISCOPACY, the name given to the form of Church government in which there are superior and inferior orders among the clergy, as between that of bishop and that of a presbyter; called also Prelacy.

EPISCOPIUS, SIMON, a Dutch theologian, born at Amsterdam; the head of the Arminian party after the death of Arminius; was unjustly misrepresented, and tyrannically, even cruelly, treated by the opposite party; he was a man of great ability, enlightened views, and admirable temper, and set more store by integrity and purity of character than orthodoxy of belief (1583-1643).

EPISTOLae OBSCURORUM VIRORUM (i. e. letters of obscure men), a celebrated collection of Latin letters which appeared in the 16th century in Germany, attacking with merciless severity the doctrines and modes of living of the scholastics and monks, credited with hastening the Reformation.

EPITAPH, an inscription placed on a tombstone in commemoration of the dead interred below. The natural feeling which prompts such inscriptions has manifested itself among all civilised peoples, and not a little of a nation's character may be read in them. The Greeks reserved epitaphs for their heroes, but amongst the Romans grew up the modern custom of marking the tombs of relatives with some simple inscription, many of their sepulchres being placed on the side of the public roads, a circ.u.mstance which explains the phrase, _Siste, viator_--Stay, traveller--found in old graveyards.

EPITHALAMIUM, a nuptial song, sung before the bridal chamber in honour of the newly-wedded couple, particularly among the Greeks and Romans, of whom Theocritus and Catullus have left notable examples; but the epithalamium of Edmund Spenser is probably the finest specimen extant of this poetic form.

EPPING FOREST, as it now exists in the SE. of Ess.e.x, is a remnant--5600 acres--of the famous Epping or Waltham Forest, which once extended over all Ess.e.x, and which then served as a royal hunting-ground, is now a favourite pleasure-ground and valuable field for explorations of botanical and entomological collectors.