Episode 199 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 08
Date: 11/03/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3458-episode-199-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-08/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 199 continues Cicero’s On Ends Book Two, covering sections 7 and 8. Joshua reads Principal Doctrine 10 in the Hicks translation — the controversial statement that if people who pursue pleasure freed themselves from fear of the gods, death, and pain, and understood the limit of their desires, we should find nothing to blame in them. The panel works through Cicero’s response: he conflates Epicurus’s affirmation of pleasure as such with moral approval of profligacy, compares profligates to assassins, and uses elaborate dining analogies (Galonius, Laelius, Lucilius) to argue that “dining well” requires uprightness rather than luxury, and therefore pleasure cannot be the supreme good of life. Key topics include: the Letter to Menoikeus passage on what Epicureans mean by pleasure; the sybarite vs. profligate distinction in different translations of the text; carpe diem (from Horace) and forum member Don’s note that it is better translated as “pluck the ripe fruit”; Ben Jonson’s 1610 play The Alchemist with its character Sir Epicure Mammon as an example of the stock “Epicurean glutton” image; an allegorical Christian painting showing Epicurus crushed under the sin of gluttony; and Cicero’s irony in calling assassins evil while having supported the assassination of Julius Caesar. Callistheni closes by saying she is beginning to dislike Cicero for twisting things around, and Joshua reads the opening of Lucretius On the Nature of Things Book Two (Rolfe Humphries translation) on how nature demands very little from us.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 199 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
This week, we’re continuing our discussion of Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends, which is largely devoted to Cicero’s attack on Epicurean philosophy. Over the last several weeks, we have begun Book Two, and this week we’re going to be starting with Section 7 of On Ends. We’re using our translation, and if you have access to that PDF, it’s going to be the middle of page 38, indicated as line 20, Section 7. We’re still in the middle of Cicero’s attack on Epicurus for combining under the single name of pleasure both those feelings that are those of excitement and stimulation, and also those feelings of normal, non-excited, non-stimulated life, which he considers to be pleasure if it is not painful. Cicero’s continuing his attack. This week, the first thing he says is this:
“Lest you should suppose that the words only differ, I say that the things denoted also differ too. Freedom from pain is one thing, possession of pleasure another. You attempt not merely to compound out of these two things, diverse as they are, one single term — for I’d find that easier to endure — but to roll the two things into one, which cannot possibly be done. Your philosopher who approves both things was bound formally to adopt both as he does in fact, without distinguishing them in words. For when in numerous passages he eulogizes that very pleasure which all men call by the same name, he makes bold to say that he can’t even imagine any form of good unconnected with that kind of pleasure which Aristippus approves. And he makes this declaration in passages where his whole language refers to the supreme good. But in another book in which by putting briefly his most weighty maxims” — which sounds a lot like the Principal Doctrines — “he is said to have published the oracles as it were of wisdom. He writes in these terms, which of course are familiar to you, Torquatus — who indeed of your school has not got by heart the Κύριαι Δόξαι — that is, maxims tersely expressed, the most authoritative, so to speak, because they have the most important bearing on happiness.”
Joshua, go ahead and read for us the doctrine that Cicero cites.
Joshua: Right, Cassius. So this is Principal Doctrine 10, and I have the Hicks translation in front of me: “If the objects which are productive of pleasures to profligate persons really freed them from fears of the mind — the fears, I mean, inspired by celestial and atmospheric phenomena, the fear of death, the fear of pain — if further, they taught them to limit their desires, we should never have any fault to find with such persons, for they would then be filled with pleasures to overflowing on all sides and would be exempt from all pain, whether of body or mind, that is, from all evil.”
Cassius: Yeah, we’ll stop and begin some discussion at this particular point, but there are several interesting things in what we’ve already read so far. I remember Dr. Boeri saying in our interview with him that Cicero clearly had before him the Principal Doctrines of Epicurus, and he was familiar with them — sort of taunting Torquatus that “who indeed of your school has not got them by heart,” and that these are the maxims tersely expressed, the most authoritative because they have the most important bearing on happiness. So it’s interesting that we really have here in Cicero a confirmation of what Diogenes Laertius has left to us at the end of his book on Epicurus’s life as being something that they were referring to even at that particular time.
And we’ve had many discussions about Principal Doctrine 10, because it is a very challenging, in-your-face assertion by Epicurus, probably intended to some extent to stir up exactly the kind of reaction that we’re going to get here — from Triarius particularly. And Joshua, you pointed out that you read the Hicks translation instead of our translation. Our translation uses the word sybarite instead of profligate. Did you look that up to see if there’s a distinction there?
Joshua: They both have the same sort of connotation. A sybarite is “a person who is self-indulgent in their fondness for sensuous luxury.” And the definition of profligate is “recklessly extravagant or wasteful in the use of resources — but also a licentious, dissolute person.”
Cassius: Maybe I should have left sybarite as the better word, even though to my ear it sounds worse for some reason — because going by the dictionary definition, profligate clearly is the worst charge. We don’t use the word sybarite very often. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard it used in conversation or normal writing. But especially when you read the very end of the doctrine, the way our translation has it — “would not experience in any direction anything painful or grievous, which is what we mean by evil” — equating those two terms, pain and evil, is a shocking idea to many people who consider pain to be something that is actually good in some moral sense. This reminds me to some extent of what Frances Wright chose to focus on when she has Epicurus speaking directly to Zeno in A Few Days in Athens. One of the big issues in that dialogue back and forth between the two of them is that Epicurus says the number one charge being made against him is that his philosophy leaves open the idea that living in ways that people consider to be evil is acceptable — and he goes on to address that. But this is the first example I think we’re going to see of a series as Book Two continues, where Cicero shifts the focus of his argument away from his vocabulary test — “you’re considering two separate things under one word and that’s a no-no” — to “what you’re describing with pleasure is not only imprecisely named, but is an evil, depraved concept.”
Joshua: Right, and there’s a very good paragraph, Cassius, in the Letter to Menoikeus — this translation also from Hicks: “When we say then that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of merrymaking, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life. It is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest disturbances take possession of the soul. Wherefore, prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy. From it spring all the other virtues, for it teaches that we cannot lead a life of pleasure which is not also a life of prudence, honor, and justice, nor lead a life of prudence, honor, and justice which is not also a life of pleasure, for the virtues have grown into one with a pleasant life, and a pleasant life is inseparable from them.”
Reading them both side by side, Cassius, it’s clear to me that when Epicurus says “we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality,” comparing that to Principal Doctrine 10, you would almost have to say that there should be the word only in there. It’s not only sensual pleasures that are the good. That’s not a total description of the good. So in that sense, I think Principal Doctrine 10 — which is what Cicero is going to make a big to-do about — is actually quite on point.
Cassius: Yeah, I’ve always thought that as you read [Section 132 of the letter], “it’s not an unbroken succession” — in English, it would be critical to decide whether you are limiting the unbroken succession to drinking-bouts and revelry, or whether you also mean to say it’s not an unbroken succession of all of these things: drinking-bouts, sexual love, enjoyment of fish and delicacies, and so forth. The point being that Epicurus does like the pleasures of drinking, sexual love, fish, and delicacies — it’s just the unbroken succession of them. I would say this is what he’s focusing on here, because you cannot indulge in an unbroken succession of those things without undue pain being the result. But if you prudently pursue those, as he says in the letter, when they are available to you and you’re not concerned about losing them, then there’s nothing wrong with what he’s listed in and of themselves. It’s the imprudent pursuit of them and unbroken succession that ends up being the real problem.
So I think Principal Doctrine 10 and the relevant section of the Letter to Menoikeus are very consistent with each other. But what Cicero is focusing on here is just the very idea that you could say that it would be possible to pursue these pleasures in life and find no blame with such a person. Because to continue on in Cicero’s presentation, at this point, Triarius could not contain himself. “Pray, Torquatus,” said he — and then Cicero injects: “From my part, I think that though he knew it, he still wanted to hear Torquatus admit it” — which is something he has no need to insert whatsoever if he was not rubbing it in that he was taking Triarius’s position. But he continues: Torquatus, however, did not shrink, but very boldly answered, “Yes, in those very words, but you here do not see through his meaning.”
So Josh, when you say that Principal Doctrine 10 is right on point here — again, it’s a very bold thing to say that if these pleasures that people of ill repute pursue did in fact free them from the fear of the gods and of death and of pain, and produced in them an understanding of the limitation of their passions, we would have nothing to blame in those people. And that’s a very difficult position for some people to accept, which is why Triarius reacted the way he did and why Cicero is bringing it up. But I think we’re all at this point confident, as Torquatus was, in being able to explain that in a way that is not as ridiculous as Cicero intends it to be understood.
Joshua: Yeah, in Book One of On Ends, Torquatus gives his description of the happy life. And while I’m not going to go find that and read it right now, he describes the highest state of happiness as the fullness of pleasure on all sides unmixed with anything painful. And so pleasure is the good. The pleasures of the prodigal are good because it’s not the cause of the pleasure that is good or bad — it’s the feeling itself that is good. Or in the case of pain, it’s the feeling itself that is bad. Epicurus uses words like prudence, choice, and avoidance in the Letter to Menoikeus because that’s how we know where to draw the line. That’s how we know which pleasures to avail ourselves of and which not to. There’s wisdom involved. But to say that the pleasure of drinking is good because it’s pleasure, and the pleasure of sex is good because it’s pleasure — it’s all true for Epicurus. The question is: how should we go about pursuing those pleasures? And that’s where the rest of the ethical philosophy comes into play.
Cassius: But of course, Cicero wants to hang a straw man out here. So let’s go forward with Cicero’s attempting to flesh out that straw man before he hangs him. Cicero continues:
“If he means one thing and utters another, I shall never understand what his meaning is. But whatever he grasps, he states clearly. And if what he states is this — that profligates are not to be blamed if they be wise men — then he states nonsense, just as much as if he were to declare that assassins are not to be blamed if they are not passionate and if they fear neither the gods nor death nor pain. And yet what propriety is there in allowing any saving clause for profligates, or in imagining persons who, though they live like profligates, are not blamed by the prince of philosophers on that account, at least when they guard against all else? But for all that, would you not, Epicurus, blame profligates for this very reason — because they so live as to aim at pleasures of every class, and that although the supreme pleasure, as you yourself say, is to feel no pain?”
So here again, Cicero is trying to say: why are you saying you wouldn’t blame them, Epicurus, for pursuing these pleasures when you yourself say that the ultimate pleasure is to feel no pain? And we’ll have to come back to that — but that’s again the situation where there is no contradiction in Epicurus’s position if absence of pain is defined as the same thing as pleasure. But Cicero is not going to let that go.
Cicero continues: “But even so, we shall find profligates who in the first place are so destitute of superstition as to dine off the patina, and next are so thoroughly without fear of death that they have on their lips the line of Ennius: ‘For me six months suffice of life; the seventh to death I vow.’ Further, they’ll produce, as though from a medicine chest, the Epicurean panacea for their pain: ‘If tis hard, tis short; if tis long, tis light.’ One thing I do not know — how a man can, if a sybarite, keep his passions within bounds.”
I guess the first thing Cicero is saying is: what propriety is there in allowing a saving clause? He’s attacking the whole idea of why would you bring this up, Epicurus? Why would you talk about people who pursue pleasure in any positive sense whatsoever? If they’re profligates, they’re evil, they’re bad, they’re doing the wrong thing — why give them any defense at all?
Callistheni: Yeah, not just bad, but as bad as an assassin — that’s what we get from reading this. Because when the profligates are compared to assassins, that’s totally incorrect. If you’re a profligate, you’re not harming somebody else. You’re not doing anything bad to somebody else. Whereas an assassin — we clearly know that that’s night and day. And in my mind, that’s why I see that there is no problem with a profligate in principle. What it does is it leaves the door open for each person to say, “Wait a minute — I’m taking responsibility for what I feel. And if I feel something is pleasure and it is not causing me harm, and I’m not obviously harming anyone else, then what is wrong with what one does?” Of course, it requires somebody to completely understand what harm is, so that they’re clear that they’re not harming somebody else, and also clear that they’re not harming themselves. So it’s all about this subjective inner sense of what is going on internally and in the experience of the body.
Cassius: Yeah, that was very good. And I totally agree with you that there is no comparison really between the profligate and the murderer. But seeing it from Cicero’s point of view — you know, a profligate or a prodigal is someone who is extravagantly wasteful. Cicero, as I’ve said many times, has a very rigid social and moral order that he’s trying to prop up here at the end of the Roman Republic. It’s in line with much of Plato’s political theory. It’s something you hear even today — I think there’s that John Adams quote that the United States is fit for a moral and religious people and it will survive no other, or something to that effect. It’s that kind of anxiety over these Epicureans. Possibly — I can imagine one aspect of this is — if Epicurus is out there saying this stuff and your son comes home one day and you find out he’s been talking to the Epicureans, is he going to become one of these people? Is he going to become a prodigal or a profligate? So there is a very rigid moral order that Cicero is trying to maintain here, and Epicurus is well outside the bounds of that. And it’s good to see that Torquatus is not willing to apologize for that.
Joshua: Yes, Cicero is advancing an absolute code of morality in which there’s a list of things in life that are always wrong and always evil, and profligacy is something that fits on that list. He is never going to admit a situation where being profligate or indulging in luxury is anything but evil. But this is the point that Epicurus is hitting over and over again — that there really is no ultimate absolute evil. And to the extent that there is a way to identify something we would call evil, it’s that which brings us pain. So pain and pleasure are the only standards given by nature to decide what to choose and what to avoid. Nature does not give us a list of evil and good.
So in Lucretius, there is though something that recommends prudence in not spending away one’s money. Isn’t there something in there?
Cassius: Absolutely, yes. When he’s talking about the romance section in Book Four, I believe he talks about how imprudent romance can end up causing you to waste away your family’s fortune and so forth. But again, the way to deal with that is: spending money is what’s going on there. If you’re spending money prudently for good purposes that bring you pleasure, then you should spend money. If you’re imprudently spending money, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s romance or anything else that brings that pain of having wasted money for no good reason. But even in Lucretius, he’s not saying that spending money is always a bad thing to do. You have to judge the individual context and the result.
Joshua: It’s more to do with: if you don’t have enough funds, you don’t want to just spend away your finances until you become poor.
Cassius: Yeah, I think that’s a very good point. So there are two questions for me involved here. Is Epicurus going to license wasting money and resources? It’s not his project to get people to throw all their money and food and resources away. His project is to get people to understand that pleasure is good, and that whether a particular source of pleasure is worth pursuing is a question that has to be dealt with on separate terms. But the pleasure itself is always good, and pain is always bad. Whether you make the decision to undergo certain pains in order to get at increased pleasures, or a more secure basis for pleasure, is a choice that you have to make — and you have to use the rest of Epicurean ethical philosophy to make these choices. Epicurus is not going to offer a blanket condemnation of the pleasure of the profligate because pleasure is the good.
And what Joshua, you’re saying, I think is totally consistent with Principal Doctrine 10 that Cicero has quoted. Epicurus is saying that you judge whether something is good or bad by the result. You judge by the result — over and over, you judge by the result. You don’t have an absolute list of evil and good that God has given you. There is no source of absolute right and wrong other than the result of your actions. You spend money or engage in romance or sex or any other type of activity according to the result that it’s going to bring you under these individual circumstances. And if you look for some absolute rule, you are deluding yourself because an absolute rule does not exist.
You end up in the same place in many situations by applying Epicurus’s rule or Cicero’s rule — because indeed in most cases, imprudent, insane, unrestrained pursuit, or as Epicurus says in the Letter to Menoikeus, “an unbroken succession” of these things, is going to lead to a bad result by nature. So you’re going to come down in the end to a very similar conclusion. But the essential point is the reasoning process by which you get there, because you do not get there by thinking there is absolute right and wrong. And I would say, as we’ve discussed many times, that that’s the purpose of Principal Doctrine 10 and a number of other things that Epicurus expresses in a very challenging way. He’s not telling you to go out and do things in a crazy way to prove Cicero wrong. He’s insisting that you examine the foundation of the rules that Cicero is giving you and realize that the result proves whether the rule is right or wrong, and that there’s no independent way to justify the rule other than through the result.
Let me read what’s become one of my favorite passages from Lucretius — this is from Book Five, about line 1200, in the Rolfe Humphries translation. What it gets at is the heart of this whole text, which is a gross misunderstanding between two people because their ideas are really at war with one another — between Cicero and Epicurus, between Plato and Epicurus and so forth. So Lucretius says in Book Five: “What sorry creatures, unhappy race of men, to grant the gods such feats and add bitter vindictiveness! What sighs and groans they gave themselves, what wounds for us today, what tears for our descendants. Is this devotion — putting on a veil, making yourself all too conspicuous, turning in the direction of a stone, running to all the altars, falling flat, prone on the ground, holding out hands to pray, sprinkling the altars with the blood of beasts — swine, sheep, and ox — entwining vow with vow? Ah, no, in true devotion lies the power to look at all things” — and I would add the word in nature there — “to look at all things in nature with a peaceful mind.” Elsewhere in the book, Lucretius refers to the law and aspect of nature. It’s nature that we have to come back to here. You don’t look to the gods to give you morality. You don’t look to the gods to define piety, and you don’t look to the gods to set the terms of your own happiness. You have to look to nature for all of those things, and it’s nature that gives us the grounds of choice and avoidance for deciding among competing moral positions.
Joshua: Go ahead, Cassius. You’re quoting what Torquatus said earlier — and what does nature give us to make those decisions other than pleasure and pain? Nature doesn’t inscribe on tablets a list of things that are right and wrong. Nature gives us only pleasure and pain.
Cassius: That’s right, and Cicero at the bottom of Section 7 here is sort of mocking the Epicureans. He says, “further, they, the Epicureans, will produce as though from a medicine chest the Epicurean panacea for their pain.” Like Epicurus is a mountebank or a snake oil salesman or something. But the Epicureans really did see themselves as offering a medicine for the soul. Lucretius says that his poetry is like the honey that you smear around the cup so that the sick child will drink it unthinkingly and thereby swallow also his medicine. And the philosophy is the medicine. So Cicero’s getting a few jabs in there, but it’s actually very much on point. The word tetrapharmakos means literally — as you can tell by tetra for four and pharma, which means pharmacy, pharmacology — tetrapharmakos, the four-part cure. And apparently that word was used in the ancient world, although I’m not sure. But it’s clear that Epicurus has come here with what he thinks is not just an invitation to have a good time, but a real moral solution to the problems facing Greece and that will go on to face Rome and face us in our own time. So I think it’s very appropriate to talk in those terms, but Cicero is making light of that.
Joshua: Do we want to go into this, Cassius? He says: “This is Epicurus on pain: if pain is intense, it is short; if it is long in duration, it tends to be slight.” And then Cicero responds to that by saying, “one thing I do not know — how a man can, if a sybarite, keep his passions within bounds.”
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I’m thinking the operative word here — which you used a few minutes ago — is that Cicero was trying to characterize this as snake oil. He’s trying to ridicule it, take it out of context, and imply that you can simply repeat something like this and somehow cure yourself of pains. And that last sentence — “how can a man, if a sybarite, keep his passions within bounds” — is just, I think, part of the same criticism. He’s saying there’s just no way that this can work, that Epicurus is suggesting something ridiculous. It’s equally ridiculous to say anything good about the profligate, and therefore Epicurus is just way out of bounds in even going down this road in the first place.
I think that takes us into Section 8 here. A lot of what we’re talking about today is under this same theme — that Epicurus is leaving the door open to pursuing what Cicero would believe is evil. Cicero says this:
“What propriety then is there in saying, ‘I should find nothing to blame if they kept their passions within bounds’? This is as much as to say, ‘I should not blame profligates if they were not profligates,’ nor, on the same method, unprincipled people if they were good men. At this point, the stern fellow declines to think that sybaritism is in itself a thing to blame. And emphatically, Torquatus — to be candid — he is very right in declining to do so if pleasure is the supreme good. I should be sorry to imagine myself profligates — as you often do — who are sick at table and who are carried away from banquets, and though dyspeptic, gorge themselves again the same day. Who, as the saying has it, have never caught a glimpse of either the setting or the rising sun, who run through their inheritance and are beggars. There’s not a man on our side who thinks that profligates of that kind have an agreeable life. Those who are refined and tasteful — with excellent cooks and confectioners, with fish, fowl, and game, and all such things of similar descriptions — who avoid dyspepsia, whose wine is drawn golden from a full cask, as Lucilius says, which has no harshness but the strainer has removed it all, who introduce sports and accompaniments, the things in the absence of which Epicurus, as he noisily tells us, cannot understand what good means — let handsome youth stand by to wait, let dress, plate, bronzes, the room itself, and the building be all in keeping. Well then, even such profligates as these, I should never declare to live well or happily. From this it results, not that pleasure is not pleasure, but that pleasure is not the supreme good. Nor was the great Laelius, who in his youth had learnt of Diogenes the Stoic and later of Panaetius, surnamed the Wise, because he did not perceive what thing had the best flavor. It does not follow that when a man’s heart has true taste, his palate has none. But because he held such things in low esteem: ‘O Sorrow, how art thou despised, nor is thy worth truly known? ‘Twas over thee that Laelius the Great Sage used to utter loud praises, addressing our gourmands one by one.’”
These allusions he’s using now are getting harder and harder to follow. But it seems clear that what he’s doing is reinforcing that nobody in their right mind could consider elaborate sybaritic dining to be a good thing. So why then does Epicurus think that it is? The answer Cicero wants to always come back to is: not that pleasure is not pleasure, but that pleasure is not the supreme good.
Joshua: Yes, now I have a slight tangent to make here. On October 15th, I posted a thread to the forum. It was a picture of Ben Jonson’s copy of Lucretius — because the 15th of October is said to be the day that Lucretius died, in fact on the same day that Virgil assumed the toga virilis, the toga of manhood. So I posted a copy of Lucretius’s poem that was owned by Ben Jonson. I have here in front of me now a quote from one of Ben Jonson’s plays. It’s called The Alchemist, first performed in 1610. He was a contemporary of Shakespeare. There’s a character in it called Sir Epicure Mammon. And he says this:
“My meat shall all come in Indian shells, dishes of agate set in gold and studded with emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies. The tongues of carps, dormice, and camel’s heels boiled in the spirit of sol, and dissolved pearl — Apicius’ diet against the epilepsy — and I will eat these broths with spoons of amber headed with diamond and carbuncle. My footboy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons, knots, godwits, and lampreys. I myself will have the beards of barbel served instead of salads, oiled mushrooms, and the swelling unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow newly cut off, dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce — for which I’ll say unto my cook: ‘There’s gold — go forth and be a knight.’”
It’s obviously meant to be humorous, and we genuinely don’t know what Ben Jonson thought about Lucretius’s poem or Epicureanism in general. But he’s using it here as a kind of stock image of a glutton. And there’s a case to be made that this kind of approach starts here in Cicero, if not earlier. And Cicero is going on and on and on.
Cassius: But the main confusion in this passage — these few pages in Cicero — is that he’s confusing Epicurus’s affirmation of the pleasure experienced by profligates with moral approval of profligacy. And those are two different things. Pleasure is pleasure. Pleasure is always good because it is pleasure and pleasure is the good. But that doesn’t mean that every potential way that you can experience pleasure is good or worth pursuing. And Cicero is being, I think, intentionally obtuse on this point.
Cicero continues on the same theme in terms of dining analogies. The next thing Cicero does is suggest we should think about what it means to dine well, and I’m going to read through this so that we cover the full section. Cicero says:
“Finally does Laelius speak, like a true sage, and this of his is true: ‘O Publius, O thou glutton Galonius, a wretched man art thou,’ says he, ‘thou hast never yet dined well in thy life, though thou hast spent it all upon thy lobsters and thy monstrous sturgeons.’ This language is used by one who, attaching no importance to pleasure, does not allow that a man dines well who stakes his all on pleasure. And yet he does not decline to admit that Galonius ever dined to his satisfaction — that would indeed be a falsehood — but merely that he ever dined well. So seriously and strictly did he divorce pleasure from good. From this the inference is drawn that all who dined well dined to their satisfaction, while not all who dined to their satisfaction thereby dined well. Laelius always dined well. What do we mean by well? Laelius shall say: on food well cooked, well seasoned. But tell me the pièce de résistance at the dinner. Good conversation. What was the result? To our satisfaction, if you want to know. For in coming to dinner he purposed with mind at rest to satisfy the cravings of nature. Rightly then does he refuse to allow that Galonius had ever dined well. Rightly called him wretched. And that though he expended all his thoughts upon the matter, yet no one declines to admit that he dined to his satisfaction. Why not well then? Because well means rightly, honestly, reputably. He, on the contrary — Galonius — dined wrongly, wickedly, flagitiously, so not well. It was not that Laelius ranked the flavor of sorrel above that of sturgeon — flavor was just what he disregarded — though he would never do so if he made the supreme good in pleasure.”
So Cicero’s gone on and given this further example: dining well means dining uprightly and reputably and honorably and honestly, and a person who’s just after the luxury of sturgeons and lobsters is not by any means dining well, even if he is satisfied. And so from that Cicero reaches this conclusion:
“You must then set pleasure aside, not only if you want to pursue a right course, but if you want it to be seemly for you to speak the language of honest men. Can we then assert that a thing is for the whole of life the supreme good, though we don’t think we can say it is the good even for a dinner?”
That’s kind of an interesting play on words. Can we assert that pleasure is the supreme good for the whole of life, if we can’t say that’s the case even for a dinner? Meaning that dining well has to mean dining honestly, justly, and reputably according to Cicero’s absolute standards of good and evil — and that if we can’t say that dining on lobsters and oysters is good, then how can we say that a whole life spent pursuing pleasure is good?
Again, we can say that — because we consider it in light of the whole ethical and physical philosophy of Epicurus. We’re not saying that every instance of pursuing pleasure is justifiable or praiseworthy. Cicero mentioned the assassin earlier in this text and said that basically the profligate was just as bad as the assassin. Well, if the assassin gets pleasure out of what he’s doing, we wouldn’t say go forth and be an assassin. That’s not what Epicurus is saying. Again, you have to separate the moral opprobrium — whether justified or not — of the action that produces pleasure, and the pleasure itself, because the pleasure itself is good. The action that produces it might or might not be.
Joshua: Right, Cassius, and that’s a very interesting example, since almost at the very time that Cicero is writing this and using the word assassin as an implicitly always bad thing, he is talking to Cassius Longinus, who was attempting to save the Roman Republic by assassinating Julius Caesar. And I think that Cicero is probably on record as having been greatly in approval of that very action. So it’s an interesting contradiction on Cicero’s part that he’s asserting that assassinating someone is always a terrible thing to do, when in fact he is aligned with Brutus and Cassius, who have done or will do the very same thing. So I think the contradiction and the hypocrisy here is clearly on Cicero’s side and not on the Epicurean side.
One of the things we’re noticing as we read this is how Cicero tends to pick something and then just go on and on and on about it. That was a section break back there between Sections 7 and 8, and I thought that would be the end of it, but he just goes on and on.
Cassius: Yes, he’s not finished yet. But just before we go onto the next section, there is a painting that we discussed recently, and I cannot remember the name of it. I think it’s called something like Saint Augustine at the Head of the Order or something like that. It’s an allegorical Christian painting. I think it’s in a church. It shows, at the top center, Saint Augustine. The next level down from him are Jewish and Christian thinkers on one side and noble pagans like Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates on the other side. The next row down are the virtues, and at the very bottom, crushed beneath the weight of their sins, are the vices or the sins themselves. And so on the far bottom right of that painting, you see Epicurus hunched over, sort of prostrate on the ground — we know it’s Epicurus because it’s labeled — and he is in that position representing gluttony, the sin of gluttony for which he is being crushed to the earth.
And it’s so fascinating because any reading of Epicurus’s surviving literature, any reading of Lucretius, there’s no way to justify that conclusion from the surviving text. In fact, most of what we get people saying is, as it says in Diogenes Laertius, that there are untold numbers of people who are willing to testify to Epicurus’s goodwill, that his friends numbered in whole cities, that he led a simple life in comparison to most people. He’s not out there pursuing riches. He’s not pursuing high positions in politics that would bring him lots of money. He’s focused here in his Garden, in the Ceramicus just outside the walls of Athens, on the pursuit of pleasure. But it’s the pursuit of pleasure in light of what he knows about nature, and particularly about human nature. And if you lose sight of all of that and just turn Epicurus into a stock character — like we see in the painting, like we see in Ben Jonson’s play, like we see here in Cicero — you lose so much that is otherwise so, so good. So it’s actually quite tragic to me that Cicero is harping on about this, because it becomes the standard image, and it’s so wrong.
Joshua: Yes, Cassius, what you’ve just said is exactly the point that we’re needing to stress here in the series of episodes as we go through Book Two. We probably can begin to bring today’s session to a close, because I suspect there’s going to be more to say about what we’ve already said.
As we go into Section 9, which we’ll pick up on next week, Cicero is going to do exactly the same thing he’s been doing, but he’s going to take — instead of Principal Doctrine 10 — what is said in both the doctrines and in the Letter to Menoikeus about the natural and necessary divisions of pleasure. He’s going to take that and do the same thing, saying this is not logically consistent. If Epicurus were smarter, basically, he would have divided it differently. But even going past the logic and the vocabulary problem, he’s going to make the point that this ends up being a sort of depravity. As Cicero says later on: “What sort of philosophy is this which does not lead to the extinction of depravity, but is satisfied with moderation in sin?” Boy, in reading that, I can almost see exactly where Frances Wright has picked up this argument to make it the centerpiece of her argument in A Few Days in Athens. Because Cicero and Frances Wright are both seeing that it’s a huge problem for Epicurus if you can get people to believe that Epicurus is telling them to be satisfied with a way of life that most people do — or should — consider to be sinful in some way. So we’ll deal next week with that argument about natural and necessary pleasures and how to respond to it.
And I think we’re bringing out the explanation here. Cicero’s not allowing Torquatus to say very much in this section of Book Two, but at least he’s characterizing Torquatus as resistant to these allegations. And I don’t think we ever have an example, as the book goes on, of Torquatus agreeing with something that Cicero has alleged — in the way that Plato has his interlocutors start to agree with him in his attacks on pleasure in the Philebus. Torquatus is remaining confident and assertive in batting back Cicero’s allegations. We say Socrates could talk to a brick wall and get exactly the same result at the end of the thing, because the people he’s talking to just agree with him or say, “Oh, tell me more, tell me more.”
Cassius: Yes, and that, of course, reminds me of what you quoted last week, Joshua, in terms of the dialectical aspects of Aristotle and Plato and Socrates — [the way it] lifts open an avenue for Christianity and other religions to come back in and wrestle them to the ground and inscribe a cross on their foreheads — whereas Torquatus and Epicurus do not leave that avenue open, and so they have continued to be for two thousand years the arch-villain to those people who are asserting a religious understanding of life. They cannot be wrestled to the ground and incorporated into a religious absolutist morality. They stand almost alone in the great traditions of Western philosophy as standing firmly and saying “no, you are wrong” to this monotheistic absolutist viewpoint.
Cassius, there were a couple of lines that you said we would come back to where there were some words that needed to be explained or defined.
Joshua: Yes, I think what you’re talking about is in Section 8, around line 23. Here’s the section. Cicero says: “we shall find profligates who in the first place are so destitute of superstition as to dine off the patina, and next are so thoroughly without fear of death that they have on their lips the lines of Ennius: ‘For me six months suffice of life; the seventh to death I vow.’” Now, what might that mean? So I’ve looked up the word for patina — it’s a plate, but a plate made of fine metals like silver or gold, and it most especially refers to the plate on which the bread is placed in the Eucharist. The use of the word superstition in this text is probably inexact — he probably means something like devoid of any religious sense, so that they are so lost in their profligacy that they will even use these solemn religious plates and artifacts for their dinner even though it’s clearly not meant for that. That, I think, is Cicero’s meaning.
Cassius: Yeah, and what about “six months suffice of life; the seventh to death I vow”? I suggested earlier that that might be related to “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow I die.” Is that the way you see it, Joshua, or any different slant on that?
Joshua: No, I think that’s exactly what it means — that the profligates are so caught up in momentary pleasures, they don’t care what damage it does to their health or their family finances. They’re going to do what they’re going to do until they come to a point where they can’t do it anymore, and then they’re done.
Now, interestingly, the phrase carpe diem — which is kind of at the heart of what’s being said here, I think — comes to us from Horace. I’m sure there are Greek antecedents to the meaning of that phrase, but it means, essentially — we’ve all heard the common translation, which is “seize the day.” If you’ve ever seen Dead Poets Society with Robin Williams, there’s a really great moment centered on that phrase, “seize the day, make your lives extraordinary,” and so forth. But it seems to me that he’s not using it in the way that Cicero is referring to the profligates here. Don has said many times that carpe diem should really be more properly translated as something like “pluck the ripe fruit” — enjoy things as they come, enjoy the fruits of the season. You’re not going to go so hard for so long that you make a spectacular end of yourself. That’s not the approach in Epicureanism. And Horace, to some extent, appears to have been perhaps a lax Epicurean.
Cassius: Yeah, Callistheni, this section looks to me like it’s a very good one to compare different translations and try to really focus in on the Latin to get a more clear understanding of what Cicero is saying here. In some of this, he may actually be giving an accurate description of an Epicurean position, or he may be exaggerating it to appear negative without being totally wrong. Because he says that there are profligates who are so destitute of superstition — which might mean they’re so over the fear of religion that they’re willing to dine off the sacred plates — and that they’re so thoroughly without fear of death that they take the position, “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Especially that last phrase: if you look at it from one direction, “for tomorrow we die” — taken figuratively, that’s kind of true. The question is if you take it literally, that you’re literally dying tomorrow, that’s not true unless you’re under some special circumstance. So it’s probable to me that in both of those examples, Cicero is citing ideas within Epicurean philosophy that are true depending on the way you look at them, and he’s just attempting to string them together with other accusations to put the Epicureans in a bad light. But within what he’s saying, there’s still a grain of truth that we can productively understand — just as he’s quoting Principal Doctrine 10 and Principal Doctrines 3 and 4 about pain and so forth. As usual with Cicero, you have to be careful about the way you read him, but there’s a lot of information in there if you read it closely.
Okay, Martin, do you have any thoughts for today?
Martin: No, sorry, not today.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin. Callistheni, any closing thoughts?
Callistheni: Well, I have to say I’m beginning to dislike Cicero more and more, because I think he’s just twisting things around — he’s like trying to figure out in what way he can make Epicureans look bad.
Cassius: Yeah, I agree with that, with the caution that he’s doing us a really big favor by having preserved all this in the first place. He clearly has an anti-Epicurean agenda and his conclusions are meant to take Epicurean philosophy in a very negative way, but buried within his arguments are instances and examples that we probably would not have otherwise. And so if you read him carefully — it’s not the kind of thing I would suggest people use as their first introduction to Epicurean philosophy. I doubt it would be a good idea for anybody to start out reading On Ends Book Two as their first introduction to Epicurean philosophy. But once you’ve got a grounding in where Epicurus is coming from, and you can begin to put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s responding to these complaints, I’m thinking to myself that this is a very good way to deepen your understanding of Epicurean philosophy so that you can understand why these arguments are wrong. Because if you understand why they’re wrong and how he’s taking Epicurus out of context, you really do get some valuable information about how we got to where we are in different aspects of Epicurean philosophy. Joshua?
Joshua: So Callistheni, earlier in the episode you mentioned this passage in Lucretius, and I read part of it — but I kind of skipped out on the best part, and I’m just going to read that best part now. To me, this is like a mint after a really garlicky meal of Cicero. This is from the opening of Book Two. He’s talking about something we’ve mentioned many times: standing on a height, looking over the ocean while ships are wrecking, standing over a plain and watching people in battle, knowing that you yourself are safe from it. After that, he says:
“Oh wretched, oh wretched minds of men, oh hearts in darkness — under what shadows and among what dangers your lives are spent, such as they are! But look, your nature snarls, yaps, barks for nothing, really, except that pain be absent from the body and mind enjoy delight, with fear dispelled, anxiety gone. We do not need so much for bodily comfort — only loss of pain, I grant you. Luxuries are very pleasant, but nature does not really care if houses lack golden statues in the halls, young men holding out fiery torches in their hands to light the all-night revels.”
This is the Rolfe Humphries translation, which is why we’re getting words like snarl and yap and bark and so forth. But the point is very, very clear here — that nature demands very little from us. By nature, I mean our own nature demands very little from us. And the pleasure that we get on top of that is a variation of a kind, but it’s not really an increase. Once you satisfy those most basic needs, once you have conquered the fear of death and conquered the fear of the gods, you are living the happiest kind of life that’s possible for a human being to live.
Cassius: Okay, that’s probably a good place for us to conclude the episode today. We will come back and go into Section 9 of Book Two — we’ll take up Cicero’s criticisms of the natural and necessary desire division — and we’ll proceed on in Book Two. As always, we invite you to drop by the forum and discuss with us what we’ve said today. Thank you for your time today. We’ll be back next week. Bye.