The Art of Happiness

What It Is

Not a book Epicurus wrote. He is said to have written some three hundred rolls. Nearly all are gone. What survives — three letters, forty numbered doctrines, a collection of sayings preserved in a Vatican manuscript, and a scatter of fragments — fits inside a slim paperback. This Penguin Classic gathers all of it, along with the ancient biography by Diogenes Laertius and the passages of Lucretius that carry the physics.

So what you are holding is a reconstruction. The shape of the book is not the shape of the philosophy; it is the shape of what happened to survive.

Epicurus taught in Athens from around 306 BC, in a house with a garden, which is what his school came to be called. He admitted women and slaves, which was not normal. The tone throughout is of a man writing to friends rather than lecturing a hall.

Why It Matters

The word epicurean now means a connoisseur of expensive food. Epicurus lived on bread and water with the occasional pot of cheese, and held that a man who cannot be content with little will never be content with much. The distortion was not an accident: his enemies, and later the Church, had every interest in turning the philosopher of pleasure into a glutton, and they succeeded.

What he taught was a therapy. Pleasure, for Epicurus, is what remains once pain is removed: freedom from bodily suffering, and freedom from disturbance of the mind. The disturbances he cared about were the fear of the gods and the fear of death, and he attacked them with physics rather than consolation. It is the most austere argument for cheerfulness ever made.

The influence runs far beyond the surviving pages. Lucretius turned the doctrine into the finest scientific poem in Latin; Gassendi revived the atomism in the seventeenth century and handed it to the scientific revolution; Jefferson called himself an Epicurean, and the pursuit of happiness is not a coincidence of phrasing. Secular ethics, and much of what we now mean by a good life, begins in that garden.

Before You Read

Two or three hours, and nothing in the language will trouble you.

Read the Letter to Menoeceus first, whatever order your edition prints things in. It is four pages, it contains the ethics entire, and it is the reason anyone still reads him.

The Letter to Herodotus summarises the atomic physics and is hard going: lecture notes rather than writing. Skim it on a first pass. Lucretius does the same job far better.

Which Translation to Read

• George K. Strodach (Penguin Classics, 2012) — recommended. Strodach's translation first appeared in 1963 as The Philosophy of Epicurus; Penguin reissued it with a foreword by Daniel Klein. It gives you everything of Epicurus that survives, and Strodach's introductory essay and running commentary are the clearest short account of Epicureanism in English. The cost: a scholar's translation from sixty years ago, dependable rather than beautiful, and the commentary sometimes runs longer than the fragment it explains. View on Amazon →
• The Epicurus Reader (Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson, Hackett, 1994). The fullest collection of the evidence, and the only one that gives you the hostile witnesses, Cicero and Plutarch among them. That matters: much of what we know about Epicurus we know from men trying to refute him. The cost: a source-book, arranged for study. It will not carry a reader.
• Cyril Bailey, Epicurus: The Extant Remains (Oxford, 1926). The scholar's edition, Greek on the facing page, with a rendering of the Principal Doctrines never bettered for clarity. The cost: a century old, out of print, and easier to find as a scan than a book.

Take Strodach; the commentary is what turns a heap of fragments into a philosophy. Add the Hackett reader if you want to hear the case against him. Then read Lucretius. Epicurus is the argument; De Rerum Natura is the argument set on fire.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the Principal Doctrines the way you would read Marcus Aurelius: a few at a time, slowly, aloud if the room is empty. They were written to be memorised and they are wasted at speed.

Notice what is missing. There is no politics here, no duty to the city, no ambition. Epicurus tells you to withdraw and cultivate your friendships, which is a direct challenge to the whole Greek and Roman ideal of a public life. Whether he is right is the question to take home.

And do not read him as a Stoic in a different hat. The two schools agree on almost nothing except that philosophy ought to leave you less afraid than it found you.