Conspiracy file · 341-270 BC

Epicurus

The Athenian philosopher who taught that pleasure is the goal of life, and then defined pleasure as the absence of pain and worry. Two thousand years of critics have preferred the first half of that sentence.

Also known as The Garden · Epicureanism · Epicurean

On the record Timeline From the comics In Paranoid American comics Sources & further reading

From Secret Mystery School #3

The story

Epicurus was born on Samos in 341 BC to Athenian parents and opened a school, the Garden, just outside Athens around 306 BC. Unusually for the time, it admitted women and slaves. He wrote about 300 books. Three letters and his Principal Doctrines survive in Diogenes Laertius, and more sayings turned up in a Vatican manuscript in 1888.

His physics came from Democritus: everything is atoms and void, the gods exist but take no interest in us, and the soul is made of atoms that scatter at death. So, he argued, death is nothing to us: where death is, we are not. The ethics followed. The pleasure worth having is ataraxia, freedom from disturbance, and the way to it is a simple life of friends, bread and water, and the occasional pot of cheese.

Rivals called it hedonism, and the slander stuck. A former student, Timocrates, claimed Epicurus vomited twice a day from overeating; medieval Christians remembered mainly that he denied the afterlife, and Dante put the Epicureans in burning tombs. The Roman poet Lucretius set the system to verse, and a copy of his poem found in 1417 helped feed the scientific revolution. Thomas Jefferson put it plainly in 1819: "I too am an Epicurean."

Memorandum for the recordSubject: Epicurus

On the record

Epicurus was born in 341 BC and died in 270 BC at 72, after a fortnight's illness from a kidney stone (Diogenes Laertius X.15).
On his last day he wrote to Idomeneus: "On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life..." (X.22).
He founded the Garden in Athens around 306 BC; it admitted women and slaves.
His Letter to Menoeceus rules out "the pleasures of the prodigal": "By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul."
"Death is nothing to us" is the second of his Principal Doctrines.
Lucretius' Epicurean poem On the Nature of Things was rediscovered by the book hunter Poggio Bracciolini in 1417.
Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Short on October 31, 1819: "I too am an Epicurean."

The theory

Epicureans were gluttons and libertines: the image rivals spread from Timocrates on, and the reason "epicure" now means a lover of fine food.
The "Epicurean paradox" on God and evil is his: Lactantius attributed it to Epicurus, though no surviving text of his contains it.
He was a secret atheist who only pretended to believe in the gods to stay safe (Posidonius, as quoted by Cicero).
The Church suppressed atomism until a lone book hunter rescued Lucretius (the story told in Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, 2011, and disputed by historians).

Timeline

341 BCEpicurus is born on Samos
c. 306 BCHe opens the Garden in Athens
270 BCHe dies of a kidney stone
c. 55 BCLucretius' On the Nature of Things
c. 1314Dante places the Epicureans in burning tombs in the Inferno
1417Poggio Bracciolini finds a copy of Lucretius
1750sExcavators uncover the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, with its library of Epicurean texts
1819Jefferson: "I too am an Epicurean"
1888The Vatican Sayings of Epicurus turn up in a Vatican manuscript

From the comics

Panels straight from the page. Click one to read it full size.

From Secret Mystery School #3 · Pages 2, 4

Maximize Comfort

Diogenes takes the group to visit an old drinking buddy, Epicurus, the philosopher of pleasure. They find a germaphobe in a sealed house. That is closer to the real Epicurus than the party-animal version: the pleasure he taught was the absence of pain.

Hedonism, sort of. Epicurus made pleasure the goal of life, but his Letter to Menoeceus rules out "the pleasures of the prodigal": "By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul."
True to the sources. "Death is nothing to us" is his second Principal Doctrine, he taught that body and soul dissolve together, and Diogenes Laertius says he died of a kidney stone after two weeks of pain, calling it a "blissful day" in his last letter.
Ataraxia (no disturbance) and aponia (no pain) were the Epicurean goals. Germ theory, for the record, arrived more than two thousand years after the Garden.

Get the evidence