Epicurus (341-270BC)

History records surprisingly few cheerful people. Philosophers, in particular, have the reputation for being about as miserable as comedians, but Epicurus (341-270BC) isn’t one of them. His poor reputation is of a very different kind: as the high priest of high living and sensual pleasure, the philosopher of the debauchee and the gourmand.

Except that he wasn’t. Far from indulging in orgies and banquets, Epicurus lived on barley bread and fruit, with cheese as a special treat on only feast days. Celibate himself, he discouraged sexual relations among his followers, and his students were allowed no more than a pint of wine a day.

But Epicurus had the misfortune to live in the highly competitive golden age of Greek philosophy, where he found himself up against the Academy, founded by Plato, and the porch (stoa) of the Stoics- both articulate and well-organized opponents. The mud they slung at him more than two millennia ago has stuck firm.

He was born into an Athenian family but grew up on the island of Samos, a mile off the coast of what is now Turkey. He was thirty-five before he arrived in Athens, taking a house with a large garden and setting up a school. He had brought his pupils with him, and unlike the Academicians and Stoics, with their very public disputations, the Epicureans kept themselves to themselves. Inscribed over the entrance arch were the alluring words: “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.” You can see how the rumors started.

In fact, the Epicurean definition of pleasure is quite precise. It is simply “the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.” Or ataraxia. This tranquil state is to be attained by “sober reasoning” and most specifically not by “an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry,” “sexual lust,” and “the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies.”

Epicurean’s idea of “the good life” was also not what you’d expect. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly.” Decent behavior depends on a decent standard of living. Asked to name the bare necessities, most of us would list food, water, warmth, and shelter, but Epicurus insisted on a few more: freedom, thought, and friendship. “Of all the things,” he wrote, “which contribute to a blessed life, none is more important, more fruitful, than friendship.” Food and wine are pleasurable mainly because they are sociable. “Eating or drinking without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.”

For a good meal with friends, something you can well do without (“fish and other delicacies” aside) is fear. “It is better to be free of fear while lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.” The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed: “Wisdom hasn’t come a step further since Epicurus, but has often gone many thousands of steps backward.” One such backward step is to forget Epicurus’s core idea: that freedom from pain depends on the absence of fear- fear of loss, fear of being found out, and worst of all, fear of death. Epicurus solved the last one by dropping the whole idea of an afterlife- and with it the fear of eternal punishment. When you’re gone, you’re gone. What matters is a calm and contented life in the here and now. Ideally, sitting under a tree, talking philosophy with friends. But what Epicurus meant by “philosophy” was different, too. “Vain is the work of a philosopher,” he said, “which does not heal any suffering.”

This cheery benevolence makes Epicurus one of the sanest and most attractive of the major Greek philosophers. But there is much more to him than that. He was the first person to advocate equal rights for slaves and for women, and the first to offer free schooling. In teaching that we should believe only what we can test through observation, he laid the cornerstone of scientific method; and he was also one of he founders of atomic physics. Democritus of Abdera (460-570 BC)- known as the “laughing philosopher” for finding life more comic than tragic- had guessed that the world was composed of atomoi, units of matter that were too small to be divided, but Epicurus took this further: “Events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space.” That implied no organizing intelligence- any gods were made of atoms like the rest of us. These ideas- of fundamental randomness and the lack of a planned design for nature- anticipate both quantum mechanics and natural selection. Furthermore, Epicurus’s dictum “Minimize harm, maximize happiness” was the first Greek version of the Golden Rule (“Do as you would be done by”). It has inspired thinkers as diverse as Thomas Jefferson (the words “the pursuit of happiness” in the U.S. Constitution are based on it) and Karl Marx (who gained his doctorate from a study of Epicurus). The humanist movement also claims him. The ancient sentence, engraved in Latin on the tombstones of his many Roman followers- non fui, fui, non sum, non curo, “I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind”- is often used at humanist funerals. The philosophy of Epicurus is closer to Buddhism than any other Western philosopher’s. Maxims such as “If you will make a man happy, add not to his riches, but take away from his desires” and “A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs” suggest he may have known of the teachings of Gautama Buddha (about 563-483 BC), who had died more than a century earlier. Equally likely, Epicurus had simply come to the same conclusions from the same close observation of human life and suffering.

We don’t know much about Epicurus the man, perhaps because he advocated the “hidden life”: keeping the company of friends, not getting married, and refusing the limelight that other philosophers craved. But even his opponents praised him for his humane and genial temperament. His three hundred books have survived only as quotations in the work of other writers. All we have by him are three letters. One was written to his friend and pupil Idomeneus as Epicurus was dying, painfully, from kidney stones:

I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attached by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions. And I beg you to take care of the children of Metrodorus, in a manner worthy of the devotion shown by the young man to me, and to philosophy.

This mix of courage, humor, and concern for others is the real Epicureanism. Weathering the unjust slurs, it became, with stoicism, the most popular belief system in the classical world for more than eight hundred years, until the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in AD 312. You can see why the church suppressed it. Here is Epicurus’s mantra, known as the Tetrapharmakon, or “Four Cures.”

Don’t fear God,

Don’t worry about death;

What is good is easy to get, and

What is terrible is easy to endure.

It was almost two thousand years before anything this simple and useful was produced again in the West: a kind of How to Be Cheerful in Four Easy Lessons.

Copied from “The Book of the Dead” by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson;

Copyright 2009 QI Ltd.- Pages 38-42