John Mitchinson - The Book of the Dead

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.”

Epicurus’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 word 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 the 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 attacked 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.”

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.

Vegetarianism, brotherly love, and kidney stones also figure in the action-packed life of Benjamin Franklin(1706–90), “the only President of the United States who was never President of the United States.”

Of all America’s Founding Fathers, he best represents the excitement, energy, and originality of the new colony. Born in Boston, the fifteenth of seventeen children and the youngest son of a youngest son, his parents were English Puritans. His father, Josiah, was a candle maker who had emigrated from Northampton in 1683. The family wasn’t rich, and Ben left school at ten. By twelve, he was working as a printer, apprenticed to his elder brother James.

In 1721, James had established the New-England Courant , the American colonies’ first independent newspaper. The following year, the paper ran a series of letters purporting to be from a Mrs. Silence Dogood, a middle-aged widow. They caused a small sensation; not only were they a fine political satire, aimed at embarrassing the Puritan establishment in the city, but the character of Mrs. Dogood was so convincing that several gentlemen wrote in with proposals of marriage. When James discovered the letters were in fact the work of his younger brother, he was furious. But the sixteen-year-old Ben, flushed with his first literary success and tired of being bullied by James, responded by doing the unthinkable: He quit his job and ran away, first to New York and then to Philadelphia, where he found work in another printing house.

Mischievousness, courage, and standing up to tyranny were to be the hallmarks of Ben Franklin’s life, finding their ultimate expression in the Declaration of Independence. After an adventurous two-year interlude in London consorting with “lewd women,” impressing the British by swimming in the Thames, and learning the art of typesetting, he returned to Philadelphia, where he set up his own printing firm and founded a society of like-minded tradesmen called the Junto—loosely derived from the Spanish for “joined”—whose innovative thinking was to revolutionize the city.