ABSTRACT
We began the previous chapter with a picture of Dante consigning Epicurus and his followers to lidless coffins, there to remain for all eternity. We may begin this chapter with an image of rebirth: ‘E tumulo eum exsuscitas.’ The writer is Louis Emmanuel de Valois, Comte d'Alais, Governor of Provence, in a 1645 letter to Pierre Gassendi, 1 and such is the dominant role which Gassendi played in the seventeenth-century revival of Epicureanism that the major portion of this chapter must be devoted to it. 2
