Dear Editor:

Brian Dougall’s article ‘Epicureanism: The Hobo Test’ in Issue 98 is more a caricature than accurately characterizing Epicurus and his philosophy. Dougall concludes that anyone trying to live a pain-free, pleasurable existence would end up a hobo, the implication being such an ambition is not realistic or even possible in today’s world.

However, Epicurus was really the self-help guru for the ancient world. Through his philosophy he tried to help relieve peoples’ anxieties about pain, death, and religion. Like many of his philosophical contemporaries, he sought what was called ataraxia: a state of ease, peace, and tranquility. He thought that by ridding ourselves of pain we naturally bring on a state of pleasure. He was no wild-eyed hedonist, though, and thought that friendship was the greatest pleasure. Despite what the term ‘epicurean’ has come to mean today, fancy food and wild sex were not on his menu. He thought that simple pleasures were best, and the easiest to obtain. He wrote that morality was mostly dependent on time, place, and circumstance, and that it was largely an agreement among people in society not to harm each other. But pleasure was basically good and what characterized having a pleasant life. Moreover, he believed that atoms were the basis of the material world, but that personal freedom was a possibility insofar as we could understand our nature and be in accord with it.

Epicurus was one of the most popular philosophers of the classical world, perhaps the most popular philosopher for both Greeks and Romans. Many of his works were discovered in the ruins of the library of the Roman city of Herculaneum, which was destroyed, along with Pompei, by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. The Romans enjoyed their pleasures, and greatly esteemed the Greek philosopher who told them it was perfectly alright to do so.
(by Allan Saltzman, Hamden, Connecticut, published in Philosophy Now magazine 2018)