Episode 212 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 19 - Can "Pleasure" Be Defended In The Public Square?

Date: 01/30/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3673-episode-212-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-19-can-pleasure-be-defended-in-the-pu/

Summary

Continuing De Finibus Book Two, sections 22–23. Cicero’s central challenge this episode: “Torquatus, you cannot go before the Senate or a public assembly and declare that you do everything for the sake of pleasure — you would be disgraced. So why are you willing to say this to me in private?” The episode treats this as a genuine practical problem to be solved rather than a reason to retreat from Epicurean philosophy.

Key discussion: Cassius reads letters exchanged between Cassius Longinus and Cicero from 45 BC — Cassius Longinus, the Epicurean general fighting on the side of the Senate, writes publicly about how the world loves integrity and clemency and cites Epicurus directly: “To live a life of pleasure is impossible without living a life of virtue and justice.” This is presented as a model for how to defend pleasure in a public context: give the full Epicurean definition, not just the slogan.

Joshua uses Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2 (Hal rejecting Falstaff) and the concept of the “Overton Window” to explore the cultural barriers against public Epicurean discourse. Cassius uses Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead as a negative example of how not to defend self-interest in public. DeWitt’s observation is cited: “It called for no courage to stand before the assembly as Demosthenes did and say ‘we have sacrificed to Zeus the Savior’ — but it did call for courage to declare that pleasure had been ordained by nature as the consummation of life.” The episode closes with Cassius noting that lorem ipsum, the familiar dummy text used in typography, is a corrupted version of Torquatus’s presentation of Epicurean ethics from this very text.

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 212 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most 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 in Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends, and we are roughly around pages 59–60 starting around what is section 22 or so. Last week we devoted most of the episode to a discussion of this argument that Cicero was raising based on something that Cleanthes the Stoic had said. As an aside before I go further, it’s very interesting to me how there are many allusions that Cicero brings up in these arguments and citations to people like Cleanthes or Chrysippus — these sort of mocking challenges or riddles such as Chrysippus’s hand, or the host who is pouring wine versus the guest who is drinking the wine, and the men who are neither being tortured nor in exquisite pleasure but are somewhere in between. He’s preserving for us these images that are very deep and have a lot of implications about how to really understand both Cicero’s position and Epicurus’s position.

We ended last week with the discussion of how Cicero was suggesting that Epicurus was presenting a pretense of justice in the place of the true and indubitable absolute justice. And Cicero continues on by going back to the well of referring to Torquatus’s own family. And so Cicero says this: “I take delight, although I cannot pervert you as you call it, I take delight, I repeat, both in your family and your name, and I declare that before my eyes there rises a vision of that most excellent man and very true friend of mine, Aulus Torquatus, whose great and conspicuous zeal for me at that crisis which is familiar to everyone must be well known to both of you. Though I myself, while anxious to be and to be considered thankful, should not think such services deserving of gratitude were it not plain to me that he was my friend for my sake and not for his own. Unless by his own sake you hint at the fact that to do what is right brings advantage to all. And if you mean this, I’ve won the victory, for what I desire and am struggling for is that duty should be duty’s own reward. That philosopher of yours, Epicurus, will not have it so, but requires pleasure from everything as a kind of fee.”

And then: “But I return to our old Torquatus. If it was for the sake of pleasure that he fought his combat with the Gaul on the banks of the Anio, and if from the spoils of the foe he invested himself at once with the necklace and the title from any other motive than the feeling that such exploits befit him a man, then I don’t regard him as brave. Further, if honor, if loyalty, if chastity, if award, temperance — if all of these are to be governed by dread of retribution or of disgrace, and are not to sustain themselves by their own inherent purity — what kind of adultery or impurity or passion won’t take its heedless and headlong course?”

And then comes the new image today. Cicero says: “Why, Torquatus, what a state of things does this seem — that you, with your name, abilities, and distinctions, cannot venture to confess before a public meeting your actions, your thoughts, your aims, your objects, or what that thing is from love of which you desire to carry your undertakings to completion? What would you be willing to take on condition that when once you have entered on your office and risen before the assembly, you’ll say something about your own ancestry and yourself after the custom of your forefathers — well then, what would you take to declare that during your term of office you will do everything with a view to pleasure, and that you’ve never done anything in your life except with a view to pleasure? You say, do you suppose me to be such a madman as to speak before ignorant men in that fashion? But make the same statements in court, or if you are afraid of the crowd, make them in the Senate. You will never do it. Why not, unless it be that such speech is disgraceful? Do you suppose then that I and Triarius are fit persons to listen to your disgraceful talk?”

Joshua:

Okay, so here’s a new image today of Cicero challenging Torquatus. You cannot go in front of an assembly, you can’t go in front of the Senate, you can’t go in front of a court and openly admit that pleasure is the guide of life and that everything you’re going to say and everything you’re going to do is for the sake of pleasure. You would be disgraced if you did that. You’d be ashamed of yourself if you did that. You can’t do that. So why are you willing to come in front of me, Cicero, and my buddy Triarius, and say these same ridiculous things that you would be ashamed to say in the Senate?

So, Cassius, when I think about this question, I’ve been coming back time and again to Lucian of Samosata on Alexander the Oracle-Monger, because it kind of gives a portrayal of how Epicureans — not sitting alone in their garden and discussing with each other, but out in the world — fared. And in some ways it was very good, and in others there were problems. And one of those problems was that in Asia Minor at this time, on the shore of the Black Sea, you have these Greek cities. And there’s this religious fervor spreading through the region, centered around one person, this guy named Alexander, who claimed to be the prophet for a god. And of course the Epicureans, who believed that gods were natural beings who did not intervene in the affairs of mankind, would regard the whole idea of prophecy as unfounded. And in the context of this ongoing struggle between the religious kind of fanaticism on one hand, where Alexander has the whole population worked up into a frenzy, and the Epicurean response, which is criticism — there was a story related by Lucian. The Epicureans were criticizing the oracle, and the oracle’s response was to basically command the crowd to stone one particular Epicurean. Lucian says: “However, when they set to work, a distinguished Pontic called Demostritus, who was staying there, rescued him by interposing his own body. The man had the narrowest possible escape from being stoned to death, as he richly deserved to be. What business had he to be the only sane man in a crowd of madmen, and needlessly make himself the butt of Paphlagonian infatuation?”

And my next quote comes from a 19th century English poet named Horace Smith, a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He wrote, in defense of the principle of free thought: “I would therefore leave everything unshackled. What is true will stand, and what is false ought to fall, whatever the consequences. Ought we not to feel ashamed that Lucretius could publish his book in the teeth of an established religion while martyrs are groaning in perpetual imprisonment for expressing a conscientious dissent from Christianity?”

Cassius:

So when I think about what these two examples of Epicureans in the public square say — Cicero’s challenge is: if you can’t say it in the Senate, you shouldn’t say it at all. And the response is: it doesn’t matter if virtue sounds great. That doesn’t mean it’s the end. His whole test of virtue is that if anything virtuous is beautiful of its own accord, then we should say that virtue is the good. But you have to have some standard for how you come up with this, and for Epicurus, part of that standard of identifying the telos was looking to the young of all creatures.

And around line 73 on page 61 is where Cicero is taunting Torquatus with this question: “What would you be willing to take to declare that during your term of office you’ll do everything with a view to pleasure, and that you’ve never done anything in life except with the view to pleasure?” And Cicero’s taunting: “You say, do you suppose me to be such a madman as to speak before ignorant men in that fashion? But make the same statements in court, or if you are afraid of the crowd, make them in the Senate. You will never do it. And if you can’t do it in public, if you can’t do it in the Senate, then who are you to be talking to me and my buddy Triarius in private?”

Joshua:

You know, Cicero, it doesn’t matter if virtue sounds great. That doesn’t mean it’s the end. And in a sense Cicero is right — if you broadcast to the world that pleasure is the goal of your philosophy, people are going to think less of you. In fact, there’s been a very recent book published within the last few years by a senator from Missouri in which he takes Epicureanism to task and blames it for a lot of the problems that he perceives to exist in society today. So it’s true that if you stood on the Senate floor to say everything I’m going to do is solely for the purpose of pleasure, people will turn you into a laughingstock. And so it’s a very difficult question as to how we should respond to that.

But you’ve said a lot there, Cassius. Let me point out that if you simply accept the definitions of pleasure that Cicero is insisting to work with, you can’t defend it effectively because the definition that Cicero is using is too narrow — he’s got his finger on one side, slanting it against you by using a definition of pleasure that is incomplete in the perspective of Epicurus.

You raised Lucian of Samosata. One of these days we’re going to have to also go into the death of Peregrinus, which is a similar essay by Lucian, also attacking a purveyor of supernatural religion, in this case a Christian. But staying with Alexander — as we generally do — it’s certainly going to be true that it’s crazy to go into certain situations and give a presentation on pleasure and say that pleasure is the goal of life. You don’t want to walk into your neighborhood fundamentalist convention and think that you’re going to get a good reception.

But Epicurus is well known for having said that he would prefer to speak in oracles that nobody understood but say the right thing, than to just simply go along with the whims of the multitude. And when Lucian is talking about the confrontation of the Epicureans against Alexander the Oracle-Monger, another part of the essay says this: “It was an occasion for a Democritus — nay, for an Epicurus or a Metrodorus perhaps — a man whose intelligence was steeled against such assaults by skepticism and insight, and one who, if he could not detect the precise imposture, would at any rate have been perfectly certain that although this escaped him, the whole thing was a lie and an impossibility.”

So there’s good examples that Lucian is giving of how the Epicureans would in fact have stood up on the right occasions against what Alexander was doing — and that, in fact, the Epicureans would be the leaders in this type of confrontation.

Cassius:

It’s ironic also that Cicero is writing this a number of years before the situation so deteriorated that he was killed by Antony’s men. At that point, he was having to rely on other people to carry on the fight for what he thought was the virtuous side of the Roman Civil War. And the irony is that he was at that point having to look to Cassius Longinus — an Epicurean — to be the leader of what he thought was the side fighting for virtue.

And in the letters we have Cicero admitting that maybe his estimation of Epicureanism was wrong. From a letter from Cicero to Cassius written in Rome in 45 BC, he says: “And yet to whom am I talking? To you, Cassius, the most gallant gentleman in the world, who ever since you set foot in the forum have done nothing but what bears every mark of the most impressive distinction. Why, in that very school you have selected — and he’s referring to the Epicurean school — I apprehend there is more vitality than I should have supposed, if only because it has your approval.”

So you have Cicero having to record for history that maybe his own estimation of Epicurean philosophy was too harsh. And in that same correspondence, to go to the next point of giving a potential example of what you would say if you’re in the public sphere attempting to talk about motivation in life from the Epicurean perspective — we have Cassius’s letter to Cicero from 45 BC. Cassius saying:

“I am glad that our friend Pansa was sped on his way by universal goodwill. And that not only on my own account, but also most assuredly on that of all our friends. For I hope that men generally will come to understand how much all the world hates cruelty, and how much it loves integrity and clemency, and that the blessings most eagerly sought and coveted by the bad ultimately find their way to the good. For it is hard to convince men that the good is to be chosen for its own sake, but that pleasure and tranquility of mind is acquired by virtue, justice, and the good is both true and demonstrable. Why, Epicurus himself lays it down that to live a life of pleasure is impossible without living a life of virtue and justice. Consequently, Pansa, who follows pleasure, keeps his hold on virtue, and those also whom you call pleasure-lovers are lovers of what is good and lovers of justice and cultivate and keep all the virtues.”

So that’s potentially an example right there of Cassius Longinus — who at that particular point was leading the armies of the Senate — giving a model for the proper way to describe Epicurean philosophy to a public audience. You give a complete and full definition of the word pleasure and link it properly to virtue and those good things that come from acting virtuously in the form of pleasure.

Joshua:

I’m gonna take this in a slightly different direction, Cassius. You mentioned at the beginning of this that there might be something from Shakespeare that we could talk about. It did occur to me that in Henry IV Part 2, Act 5, Scene 5 — when Hal has been crowned King Henry V — there’s this powerful scene in which he rejects his old friend Falstaff. And if you know the name of Falstaff, you’ll know that he is a gourmand, a glutton, a drunk, a coward. While the king was a young man, he really enjoyed consorting with company like this — people who were basically incapable of acting with any kind of duty or virtue. And part of the king’s process of now growing up and taking the throne is that he has to reject that part of his youth.

So Falstaff says to him: “My king, my Jove, I speak to thee my heart.” And the king says: “I know thee not, old man — fall to thy prayers. How ill white hairs become a fool and jester. I have long dreamt of such a kind of man — so surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane. But being awakened, I do despise my dream. Make less thy body hence and more thy grace. Leave gormandizing. Know the grave doth gape for thee thrice wider than for other men. Presume not that I am the thing I was. For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, that I have turned away my former self.”

And what he says essentially is: I will allow you competence of life so that lack of means enforce you not to evils, and as we hear you do reform yourselves, we will according to your strengths and qualities give you advancement.

So you can kind of see Cicero’s argument here as: you like King Henry the Fifth — you cannot stand in the Senate and continue your old ways. You have to change, you have to accept the new state religion of duty and virtue, and this has to compel you in all of your actions. If it doesn’t, then you shouldn’t be in that place and you shouldn’t even be talking to me right now.

Cassius:

Yes, that’s his answer to Torquatus. And we’ve been talking on the forum about to what extent Shakespeare might embody Epicurean viewpoints. If Shakespeare is endorsing that position from that particular king, then that would be pretty good evidence to me that Shakespeare is not much of an Epicurean, because that sounds like an excellent illustration of the position that Cicero is taking — that pleasure and the public life, and responsibility towards other people, are inconsistent with the pursuit of pleasure.

So an Epicurean to pursue his philosophy and understanding and be confident about it is going to have to formulate the way that he would respond to those kinds of criticisms. And at least at the moment, I’m not sure I can do any better than to cite what Cassius Longinus was saying back in that letter to Cicero — when he specifically, in the midst of this war for the future of the Roman Republic, was citing Epicurean philosophy as the basis for what he was doing. And saying again: “I hope that men will generally come to understand how much all the world hates cruelty, and how much it loves integrity and clemency.” And: “Pleasure and tranquility of mind is acquired by virtue, justice, and the good — and is both true and demonstrable.”

Joshua:

Let me pick up here, Cassius, with something you mentioned. Cicero says around line 73: “I’ve won the victory, for what I desire and am struggling for is that duty should be duty’s own reward.” As the classic formulation — virtue is its own reward. To look for a reward, to look for the pleasurable results that come from being virtuous, strips virtue and duty of its dignity and its honor according to Cicero. If you look at it that way, according to Epicurus, you’ve basically placed the cart before the horse.

What Cicero is offering here I see as an aesthetic opinion that he wants virtue to be appreciated for being virtue. And that’s fine, Cicero. You can hold that opinion. But to say that staking out the claim for pleasure doesn’t at all mean that that precludes Epicurus or Torquatus from behaving virtuously when there is a demand for that — life is a lot more complicated than what Cicero is allowing here.

Cassius:

Let me cite the very opening of section 23 as an example that Cicero understands what the real issue is. He starts 23 by saying: “But let us grant this — that the very name Pleasure has no prestige, and we perhaps do not understand it. For you Epicureans say over and over again that we do not understand what kind of pleasure you mean. Surely this is a hard and abstruse subject. When you speak of atoms and spaces between universes which do not and cannot exist, then we understand, but can we not understand pleasure, which every sparrow knows so well?”

So this shows that Cicero really knows what’s going on here. The issue is not that the men of the Senate are hardwired by nature to be horrified if you bring up pleasure. The issue is they don’t understand the scope of pleasure from the perspective that Epicurus is trying to explain it. What has to be done in presenting Epicurean pleasure in public is to be able to explain where Epicurus is coming from — that pleasure is not limited to these immediate bodily stimulations that Cicero loves to caricature as sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

And wrapping this back up into what we talk about for our modern Epicurean presentations — I don’t think you can stop with sloganeering about pleasure as the absence of pain and then walk away and smile as if everybody’s going to understand you. I think it’s totally insufficient. You have to explain these things more fully.

Joshua:

You mentioned the Overton Window, Cassius. Let me explain that for those who aren’t familiar: the Overton Window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. You can slide the window so that things that were previously “unthinkable” or “radical” become “acceptable” and then “popular” and then “policy.” And while that’s normally used in straight politics, I think it’s an obvious application for Epicurean discourse — that while Cicero may be right that you cannot even begin to have a discussion about Epicurean philosophy in certain public places, the goal ought to be to explain things in such a way that this kind of discourse comes within the ability to discuss in more and more public places.

Cassius:

Now, one negative example that came to my mind: some people might be aware there is a 1940s movie starring Gary Cooper called The Fountainhead, in which Ayn Rand wrote the script about an architect who in the climactic scene has to go in front of a courtroom and explain something he has done. And he ends up arguing about self-interest and attempting to explain what he means by self-interest. And I think ultimately that book and that presentation are a failure because self-interest in Randian terms is not the same thing as pleasure in Epicurean terms — and in being much more narrow and improperly focused, it undermines the argument. But I can see an analogy between Gary Cooper standing in front of the courtroom in that movie versus the challenge that Cicero is giving here.

You’ve got to logically, clearly, and articulately explain that pleasure in Epicurean terms is not just this immediate bodily stimulative sensation that Cicero wants to limit the definition to. And the way through all of this problem is to again be clear about the definition of pleasure as Epicurus is advocating it.

Joshua:

Yeah, it just occurred to me that I should look for that quote from Norman DeWitt’s book — it’s from chapter 10, “The New Virtues.” He says: “It called for no courage to stand before the assembly as Demosthenes did and report ‘We have sacrificed to Zeus the Savior and to Athena and to Victory and these sacrifices have been auspicious and salutary for you.’ It did call for courage to flout popular belief and declare that the gods are immune to anger and gratitude and have no part in human affairs. It called for no courage to exalt virtue — even hypocrites would applaud. It did call for courage to declare that pleasure had been ordained by nature as the consummation of life. Even those who so believed might prefer to be reticent, and Cicero would certainly prefer them to be reticent.”

Cassius:

Thanks for finding that — that’s directly on point. And I think what I would just say in conclusion here is that we’ve more or less finished section 22, which ends on page 61, and we’re going into section 23 which starts on page 61 next week. There really is some good material coming up. I know a lot of this has been a bit of a struggle, which is part of the reason we’re relying on so many quotations and passages from other texts to help us through it. But there’s some really good stuff coming up. There’s a passage coming up when Cicero basically quotes Epicurus’s will and then says it’s a fine document but you couldn’t have written it if you truly believe that pleasure is the good. So there’s a lot more to come.

And thinking of Cicero as a trial lawyer — we’ve been listening to an hour-long presentation where he’s been in the middle of his argument. But in the coming pages, in the coming episodes, we’re coming to his wind-up concluding summation. And I think we’re going to see Cicero get a lot more intense than he’s been already in carrying out this theme of the disgracefulness of pleasure.

By the way, one more thing worth mentioning before we close: we always talk about Torquatus’s presentation in Book One of On Ends as being one of the best presentations of Epicurean ethics available. And one reminder of the legacy of that presentation: lorem ipsum, the familiar dummy text used in typography and design when you want to show a font without having actual words, is a corrupted version of Book One of Cicero’s On Ends — right from the section where Torquatus is discussing Epicurean ethics. As Wikipedia notes, it’s a corrupted version of De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, with words altered and added to make it nonsensical. So of all the things that could have been chosen to be used as dummy text over the centuries, a section of this book was preserved in that kind of a way.

So thanks for your time this week. Please drop by the forum if you have any comments or questions about this or any of our episodes. We appreciate your time today, and we’ll be back next week. Thanks again for listening.

Transcript

Cassius: Welcome to Episode 212 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most 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 in Book 2 of Cicero’s On Ends, and we are roughly around page 59-60, starting around section 22 in the Roman numerals. Last week we devoted most of the episode to a discussion of this argument that Cicero was raising based on something that Cleanthes the Stoic had said. And as an aside before I go further — it’s very interesting to me how there are many allusions that Cicero brings up in these arguments, citations to people like Cleanthes or Chrysippus, and these sort of mocking challenges or riddles, such as Chrysippus’s hand, or the host who is pouring wine versus the guest that is drinking wine, and the men who are neither being tortured nor in exquisite pleasure but are somewhere in between. He’s preserving for us these images that are very deep and have a lot of implications about how to really understand both Cicero’s position and Epicurus’ position.

Last week the image that we were talking about was where Cleanthes had suggested that we should imagine a picture of pleasure in the center of a painting, on the throne, with the virtues as basically the handmaidens or the slaves of pleasure attending pleasure rather than the other way around — with pleasure being secondary to virtue as Cicero and Cleanthes and the Stoics believe. And he was contrasting that image to images that Torquatus had presented earlier on of men who are surrounded by pleasures of all kinds and who are strong in mind and body and don’t have any fear of pain or hell or torture after death or any of those things. So with last week’s image being Cleanthes’ suggestion that you should consider how revolting it would be to view a painting with pleasure on the throne and with the virtues in a subservient position, this week is going to go on to another image that I think is going to be particularly interesting to talk about.

We ended last week with the discussion of how Cicero was suggesting that Epicurus was presenting a pretense of justice in the place of the true and indubitable absolute justice. And Cicero continues on by going back to the well of referring to Torquatus’ own family. And so Cicero says this: “I take delight — although I cannot pervert you, as you call it — I take delight, I repeat, both in your family and your name, and I declare that before my eyes there rises a vision of that most excellent man and very true friend of mine, Aulus Torquatus, whose great and conspicuous zeal for me at that crisis which is familiar to everyone must be well known to both of you. Though I myself, while anxious to be and to be considered thankful, should not think such services deserving of gratitude were it not plain to me that he was my friend for my sake and not for his own. Unless by his own sake you hint at the fact that to do what is right brings advantage to all. And if you mean this, I’ve won the victory, for what I desire and am struggling for is that duty should be duty’s own reward. That philosopher of yours, Epicurus, will not have it so, but requires pleasure from everything as a kind of fee.”

“But I return to our old Torquatus. If it was for the sake of pleasure that he fought his combat with the Gaul on the banks of the Anio, and if from the spoils of the foe he invested himself at once with the necklace and the title, from any other motive than the feeling that such exploits beseem a man, then I don’t regard him as brave. Further, if honor, if loyalty, if chastity, if restraint, if temperance — if all of these are to be governed by dread of retribution or of disgrace, and are not to sustain themselves by their own inherent purity, what kind of adultery or impurity or passion won’t take its heedless and headlong course, if either concealment is promised to it, or freedom from punishment, or immunity? Why, Torquatus, what a state of things does this seem — that you, with your name, abilities, and distinctions, cannot venture to confess before a public meeting your actions, your thoughts, your aims, your objects, or what that thing is from love of which you desire to carry your undertakings to completion?”

And then he goes on: “Find, what is it that you judge to be the best thing in life? What would you be willing to take on condition that when once you have entered on your office and risen before the assembly — and you know that you must announce what rules you intend to follow in your administration of the law, and perhaps, too, if you think it good to do so, you’ll say something about your own ancestry and yourself, after the custom of your forefathers — well, then, what would you take to declare that during your term of office you will do everything with a view to pleasure, and that you’ve never done anything in your life except with a view to pleasure? You say, do you suppose me to be such a madman as to speak before ignorant men in that fashion? But make the same statements in court, or if you are afraid of the crowd, make them in the Senate. You will never do it. Why not? Unless it be that such speech is disgraceful? Do you suppose then that I and Triarius are fit persons to listen to your disgraceful talk?”

Okay, so here’s a new image today — Cicero challenging Torquatus. You cannot go in front of an assembly. You can’t go in front of the Senate. You can’t go in front of a court and openly admit that pleasure is the guide of life and that everything you’re going to say and everything you’re going to do is for the sake of pleasure. You would be disgraced if you did that. You’d be ashamed of yourself if you did that. You can’t do that. So why are you willing to come in front of me, Cicero, and my buddy Triarius, and say these same things that you would be ashamed to say in the Senate?

Okay, so now having heard Cicero’s argument, it would be tempting to say, well, you don’t want to be a public person in the first place, so therefore there’s no need to worry about this question. I think that would be the wrong direction to take.

Joshua: So Cassius, when I think about this question, I’ve been coming back time and again to this text by Lucian of Samosata, Alexander the Oracle Monger, because it kind of gives a portrayal of how Epicureans — not sitting alone in their garden discussing with each other, but how they fared out in the world. And in some ways it was very good, and in others there were problems. One of those problems was that in Asia Minor at this time, on the shore of the Black Sea, you have these Greek cities. And there’s this religious fervor that is spreading through the region, centered around one person, this guy named Alexander, who claimed to be the prophet for a god. And the Epicureans, to the extent that they believed in gods, believed they were natural beings who did not intervene in the affairs of mankind. And so the whole idea of prophecy would then be unfounded from that point of view.

And in the context of this ongoing struggle between the religious fanaticism on the one hand — where Alexander has got the whole population worked up into a frenzy — and the Epicurean response to that, which is criticism, there was a story related by Lucian of Samosata. The Epicureans were criticizing the oracle, and the oracle’s response was to basically command the crowd to stone one particular Epicurean. And Lucian says: “However, when they set to work, a distinguished Pontic named Demostratus, who was staying there, rescued him by interposing his own body. The man had the narrowest possible escape from being stoned to death, as he richly deserved to be. What business had he to be the only sane man in a crowd of madmen, and needlessly make himself the butt of Paphlagonian infatuation?”

And my next quote comes from a 19th century English poet named Horace Smith, who was a very close friend of a much more famous poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley — who was himself kicked out of, I think it was Balliol College, Oxford, for writing a tract on atheism, but that’s beside the point. Horace Smith wrote in one of his letters, in defense of the principle of free thought: “I would therefore leave everything unshackled. What is true will stand, and what is false ought to fall, whatever the consequences. Ought we not to feel ashamed that Lucretius could publish his book in the teeth of an established religion while martyrs are groaning in perpetual imprisonment for expressing a conscientious dissent from Christianity?”

What I mean to convey by selecting these two examples of Epicureans and people like them in the public square is that, you know, Cicero — it doesn’t matter if virtue sounds great. That doesn’t mean that it’s the end. His whole test of virtue was that if anything virtuous is beautiful of its own accord or admired of its own accord and not by regard to anything else, then we should say that virtue is the good. But you have to have some standard for how you come up with this stuff. And for Epicurus, part of that standard of identifying the telos was looking to the young of all creatures. Cicero has already dealt with that objection. Now we’re getting into Cicero’s response: no, no, no, you don’t look to the young of all creatures. You look to virtuous actions that are praiseworthy in their own right and not for some other reason. In fact, he says here that the ancestor of our Torquatus, if he did what he did for pleasure and not for a sense of virtue or duty, then it wouldn’t have been praiseworthy.

So this is all kind of complicated, but we have to grapple with this problem — in a sense, Cicero is right. If you broadcast to the world that pleasure is the goal of your philosophy, people are going to think less of you. In point of fact, there’s been a very recent book published within the last few years by a senator from Missouri in which he takes Epicureanism to task and blames it for a lot of the problems that he perceives to exist in society today. So it’s true that if you stood on the Senate floor, your inaugural address as president or prime minister — whatever it was — saying “everything I’m going to do in my administration is solely for the purpose of pleasure,” people will turn you into a laughingstock. And so it’s a very difficult question as to how we should respond to that.

Cassius: You’ve said a lot there. Let me go back on several pieces of what you mentioned there, Joshua, because I think you’ve done a good job of describing exactly what the problem is. We were joking before we started that I can hear some people saying, “Well, you shouldn’t be in the public square in the first place. So therefore, this whole argument makes no sense because an Epicurean is never going to do anything except stay in his garden and read his books and talk to a couple of friends and eat figs and cheese.” And I think that would be exactly the wrong way to approach this, because it’s a really serious subject.

And in fact, Cicero ends up at the end of what I read before bringing it back home by saying: the reason I’m saying this is you can’t say this in front of the Senate — why do you think you can say it in front of me, your friend? So it’s a very challenging question to come down and say, can you defend pleasure eloquently, persuasively? And one of the things you’ve mentioned is that if you simply accept the definitions of pleasure that Cicero is insisting on working with, you can’t defend it effectively, because the definition that Cicero is using is too narrow and he is slanting the scales against you. He’s got his finger on one side, slanting it against you by using a definition of pleasure that is incomplete from Epicurus’ perspective.

Now, you’ve raised Lucian of Samosata, who we talk about all the time. One of these days, we’re going to have to expand our citations and also go into The Death of Peregrinus, which is a similar essay by Lucian, also attacking a purveyor of supernatural religion — in that case, a Christian. But staying with Alexander, as we generally do, because we have such a good dialogue there talking specifically about Epicurus, it’s certainly going to be true that it’s crazy to go into certain situations in public and give a presentation on pleasure and say that pleasure is the goal of life. You don’t want to walk into your neighborhood church or your neighborhood fundamentalist convention and think that you’re going to get a good reception. So you have to use intelligence in deciding who and where and how to speak.

But Epicurus is well known for having said that he would prefer to speak in oracles that nobody understood but say the right thing, rather than to just simply go along with the whims of the multitude. I think that’s a very important quote that would apply to this situation.

And when Lucian is talking about the confrontation of the Epicureans against Alexander the oracle-monger, another part of the essay says this: “At this point, my dear Celsus, we may, if we will be candid, make some allowance for these Paphlagonians and Pontics. The poor uneducated fatheads might well be taken in when they handled the serpent — a privilege which was conceded to all who chose to do so — and saw in that dim light its head with the mouth that opened and shut. It was an occasion for a Democritus, nay, for an Epicurus or a Metrodorus perhaps — a man whose intelligence was steeled against such assaults by skepticism and insight, and one who, if he could not detect the precise imposture, would at any rate have been perfectly certain that, although this escaped him, the whole thing was a lie and an impossibility.”

So there are good examples of how the Epicureans would, in fact, stand up on the right occasions and in the right situations against what Alexander was doing, and that in fact the Epicureans would be the leaders in this type of confrontation as opposed to the Stoics or the Christians or others who were willing to go along with it. You certainly have to choose the right occasion for what you’re going to say, but you are going to stand up and be confident and be open in the right circumstance about your position.

It’s ironic to me, also, as we think about what Cicero is saying here — obviously he’s writing this a number of years before the situation so deteriorated that he was killed by Antony’s men. He had an exchange of letters between himself and Cassius Longinus which is preserved in the record. At that point Cicero had been pushed aside from the heart of the political confrontation against Antony and Octavian and he was having to rely on other people to carry on the fight for what he thought was the virtuous side of the Roman Civil War. And the irony is that he was at that point having to look to Cassius Longinus — an Epicurean — to be the leader of what he thought was the side that was fighting hard for virtue.

And in the letters we have Cicero admitting that maybe his estimation of Epicureanism was wrong. From a letter from Cicero to Cassius written in Rome in 45 BC, he says: “And yet to whom am I talking? To you, Cassius, the most gallant gentleman in the world, who ever since you set foot in the forum have done nothing but what bears every mark of the most impressive distinction. Why, in that very school you have selected” — and he’s referring to the Epicurean school — “why in that very school you have selected, I apprehend there is more vitality than I should have supposed, if only because it has your approval.”

So you have Cicero even having to record for history that maybe his own estimation of Epicurean philosophy was too harsh. And in that same correspondence, to give a potential example of what you would say if you’re in the public sphere and attempting to talk about motivation in life from the Epicurean perspective, we have Cassius Longinus’s letter to Cicero, also from 45 BC. Cassius says: “I hope you are well. I assure you that on this tour of mine there is nothing that gives me more pleasure than to write to you, for I seem to be talking and joking with you face to face.” And here’s the part that’s relevant to today: “I’m glad that our friend Pansa” — who is another general fighting on the side of the Senate — “I’m glad that our friend Pansa was sped on his way by universal goodwill when he left the city in military uniform. And that not only on my own account, but also most assuredly on that of all our friends. For I hope that men generally will come to understand how much all the world hates cruelty, and how much it loves integrity and clemency, and that the blessings most eagerly sought and coveted by the bad ultimately find their way to the good. For it is hard to convince men that the good is to be chosen for its own sake, but that pleasure and tranquility of mind is acquired by virtue, justice, and the good — this is both true and demonstrable. Why, Epicurus himself, from whom all the Catiuses and Amafiniuses in the world, incompetent translators as they are, derive their origin, lays it down that to live a life of pleasure is impossible without living a life of virtue and justice. Consequently, Pansa, who follows pleasure, keeps his hold on virtue, and those also whom you call pleasure lovers are lovers of what is good and lovers of justice, and cultivate and keep all the virtues.”

So that’s potentially an example right there of Cassius Longinus giving an interpretation of the proper way to describe Epicurean philosophy to a public audience. You give a complete and full definition of the word pleasure and link it properly to virtue and those good things that come from acting virtuously in the form of pleasure. You don’t have to go to this mental exercise of thinking that virtue is its own reward. You think about the results of what you’re doing and that those results are pleasurable, which is the ultimate motivation for everything you’re doing. And Cassius, at that particular point when writing this letter, was leading the armies of the Senate — certainly in a public position — and certainly felt like he could publicly stand up and discuss his viewpoints. So what Cicero is suggesting here is certainly possible, but it has to be done properly and with intelligence.

And just to make sure there’s no lack of clarity in what Cicero is arguing, I’ll repeat around line 73: “I’ve won the victory, for what I desire and am struggling for is that duty should be duty’s own reward.” As the classic formulation — virtue is its own reward. To look for a reward, to look for the pleasurable results that come from being virtuous, strips virtue and duty of its dignity and its honor according to Cicero. If you look at it that way, according to Epicurus, you’ve basically lost total control of the issue and you’ve placed the cart before the horse. As Diogenes of Oinoanda discussed on his wall when he said that he would be shouting to all Greeks and non-Greeks that pleasure is the goal of life and not virtue, and that you place the cart before the horse if you put virtue where pleasure should be.

Joshua: Yeah, what Cicero is offering here, I kind of see it as an aesthetic opinion — he wants virtue to be appreciated for being virtue, and that’s fine, Cicero. You can hold that opinion. I don’t mind. But to say, as Cicero has said elsewhere, that Epicurus in staking out the claim for pleasure — and even the claims of the body as being not just important but the telos, the good — it doesn’t at all mean that that precludes Epicurus or Torquatus or Torquatus’s ancestors from behaving virtuously when there is a demand for that, from behaving with justice when justice is what is appropriate in the circumstances. Life is a lot more complicated than what Cicero is allowing here.

Those were very good sources. I read those when you posted them to the forum. I don’t know that I knew that these letters existed at all, so that’s very interesting to be exposed to that aspect of it. And of course, Cicero is surrounded by these Epicureans, and in spite of his apparent contempt for the philosophy, finds a lot of things to admire in people who call themselves Epicureans. Cicero would say that insofar as you behave appropriately in the political sphere, insofar as you are a virtuous and just and moral and dutiful and upright person, you have to abandon your advocacy of pleasure. But there’s no reason that both of those things can’t be true or can’t be useful. Virtue is useful and appropriate. It’s just not the good or the telos, it’s not the end or the goal. And you cannot find a justification for believing that by looking to nature, which is what Epicurus held as the standard.

Cassius: Right, you have to be able to articulate and explain Epicurus’ position. And if, in fact, people are not going in front of the public and giving a discussion of pleasure and the proper role that pleasure holds in life, it’s not the fault of pleasure — it’s the fault of those people who fail to understand the philosophical issues and the importance of these things that are involved.

You know, again, around line 75 on page 61 is where Cicero is taunting Torquatus with this question. He says: “What would you be willing to take on condition that when you’ve entered your office and risen before the assembly, what would you take to declare that during your term of office you’ll do everything with a view to pleasure, and that you’ve never done anything in life except with a view to pleasure?” “If I suggested that to you,” Cicero says, “Torquatus, you’d say in response to me, ‘Do you suppose me to be such a madman as to speak before ignorant men in that fashion?’” And Cicero is taunting him: “You can’t make those statements in court or make them in the Senate. You’ll never do it, and you won’t do it because it’s disgraceful. And if you can’t do it in public, if you can’t do it in the Senate, then who are you to be talking to me and my buddy Triarius in private and trying to tell us that pleasure is what you’re doing everything for, because it’s just disgraceful.”

Joshua: Yeah, the part you just quoted there, Cassius, echoes an earlier argument of Cicero’s when he was describing this guy and his habits when he was eating dinner or whatever — and what Cicero says is: can pleasure be the end of human life when you cannot even say that pleasure is the goal of eating a meal? So that’s kind of the argument there: you can’t say this stuff in the Senate, if you can’t say this stuff in the forum, then what are you doing telling it to me in private? He said earlier in the book that certain aspects of Epicurus’ philosophy were not fit for philosophers. They were fit material for the censors, that people have to rein this stuff in.

And in fact, I’ll go back to Alexander the Oracle Monger from Lucian, who burned Epicurus’s works in the public square and then threw the ashes into the sea. So there is an inherent, a censorious instinct involved here.

And I can quote from one more letter here. This is a letter from the British novelist Sir Walter Scott. In the letter he says: “My principal companion in this solitude is John Dryden.” John Dryden had done a number of translations from Latin poets into heroic couplets. He said: “After all, there are some passages in his translations from Ovid and Juvenal that will hardly bear reprinting, unless I would have the Bishop of London and the whole corps of Methodists about my ears. I wish you would look at the passages I mean. One is from the fourth book of Lucretius, and the other is from Ovid’s instructions to his mistress.” So even just talking about this stuff in a private letter in the 19th century, Sir Walter Scott thought it was a little bit dangerous. So you can kind of see Cicero’s project here as attempting to put a damper on Epicureanism and its expression in society.

Cassius: You sure can. We’ve started a big topic today already, and so I think we’ll spend the rest of the episode on this one, and we will reserve until next week going far into section 23. But let me cite the very opening section of 23 as an example that Cicero understands what the real issue is here — because he starts section 23 by saying: “But let us grant this, that the very name Pleasure has no prestige, and we perhaps do not understand it. For you philosophers” — referring to the Epicureans — “for you Epicureans say over and over again that we do not understand what kind of pleasure you mean,” Cicero says sarcastically. “Surely this is a hard and abstruse subject. When you speak of atoms and spaces between universes which do not and cannot exist, then we understand, but can we not understand pleasure, which every sparrow knows so well?” And then after that Cicero goes once again back into the discussion of the different types of pleasure — the stimulative pleasures versus those which are not immediately stimulative. And so we’ll defer that conversation further into next week.

But this to me shows that Cicero really knows what’s going on here. The issue is not that the men of the Senate or the men of the military or the courtroom are hardwired by nature to be horrified if you bring up pleasure. They’re not hardwired by nature that way. They don’t understand the scope of pleasure from the perspective that Epicurus is trying to explain it. What has to be done in presenting Epicurean pleasure or Epicurean arguments in public is to be able to explain where Epicurus is coming from — that pleasure is not limited to these immediate bodily stimulations that Cicero loves to caricature. That’s the implication of everything that Cicero is saying, that pleasure is a gross bodily function that has nothing to do with the finer things in life. Epicurus totally rejects that narrow version of pleasure, but Cicero refuses to entertain that as a legitimate discussion.

And so that’s where a discussion of pleasure and Epicurean philosophy in public is going to have to turn. It’s going to have to start from the very beginning, explaining what Epicurus is referring to when he’s talking about pleasure — that it’s not this disgraceful version that Cicero is attempting to portray it to be. But it does seem to me that in order to do it effectively, you’re going to have to start with this discussion of what does pleasure mean and how there are only two feelings, pleasure and pain, and that if you’re not experiencing pain, you’re experiencing pleasure. Just as Torquatus has done earlier in this discussion, you do not admit that there’s a third position between pleasure and pain. You don’t admit that Chrysippus’s hand is not experiencing pleasure because Chrysippus’s hand is in its normal healthy condition — it is, in fact, experiencing pleasure. And you don’t admit that the host who is pouring wine for the guest is not experiencing pleasure, because the host, in being a host in easily imaginable situations where you’re happy to be giving a party, is yourself in pleasure even if you’re not experiencing the same physical stimulation that the guest who is drinking the wine is experiencing. You have to confront these examples and these arguments and head them off at the pass.

In thinking about this episode for today, one negative example that came to my mind: some people might be aware there is a 1940s movie starring Gary Cooper called The Fountainhead, in which Ayn Rand had written a book about an architect who goes in front of a courtroom and at the end of the story has to give a presentation and explanation of something he has done. And of course in The Fountainhead and Ayn Rand terms, he ends up arguing about self-interest and attempting to explain what he means by self-interest. And I think ultimately that book and that presentation are a failure, because self-interest in Randian terms is not the same thing as pleasure in Epicurean terms, and being much more narrow and improperly focused undermines the argument. But I can see an analogy between Gary Cooper standing in front of the courtroom in that movie versus the challenge that Cicero is giving here — that Torquatus or some Epicurean might be in a position of going in front of a jury. As they were often doing, apparently in Rome — one of Cicero’s recorded courtroom speeches is against Piso, who was an Epicurean. And it’s interesting to think about how, in fact, you do have to logically, clearly, and articulately explain that pleasure in Epicurean terms is not just this immediate bodily stimulative sensation that the Ciceros of the world want you to limit the definition to.

Joshua: I’m gonna take this in a slightly different direction, Cassius. You mentioned at the beginning of this that there might be something from, for example, the plays of Shakespeare that we could talk about. And it did occur to me that in Henry IV Part II, one of his historical plays, in the fifth scene of Act V, the new king — he’s been known as Prince Hal, and now he’s been crowned King Henry V — there’s this powerful scene in which he rejects his old friend Falstaff. And if you know the name Falstaff, you’ll know that he is a gourmand, a glutton, a drunk, a coward, and so forth. And while the king was a young man, he really enjoyed consorting with company like this. He found it very entertaining to be surrounded by the lower classes in particular, but particularly people like Falstaff — people who were basically incapable of acting with any kind of a sense of duty or virtue. And so part of the king’s process of now growing up, taking the throne, and so forth, is that he has to reject that part of his youth. So Falstaff says to him, “My king, my Jove, I speak to thee my heart.” And the king says:

“I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers. How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! I have long dreamed of such a kind of man, So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane; But, being awakened, I do despise my dream. Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace; Leave gormanidizing. Know the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men. Reply not to me with a fool-born jest. Presume not that I am the thing I was, For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turned away my former self; So will I those that kept me company. When thou dost hear I am as I have been, Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast, The tutor and the feeder of my riots. Till then I banish thee, on pain of death, As I have done the rest of my misleaders, Not to come near our person by ten mile. For competence of life I will allow you, That lack of means enforce you not to evils; And, as we hear you do reform yourselves, We will, according to your strengths and qualities, Give you advancement.”

Basically at this point in the play — this is the second in a set of two plays, Henry IV Part One and Henry IV Part Two — we’ve had this character development of the king. And part of that process of entering onto the throne, taking care of the state, leading men in battle, fighting duels, and all this stuff is that he has to leave behind the hedonism of his youth. And he does it with a decisive speech here in the last scene of the play.

And if you were to contrast that with one of Shakespeare’s tragedies like Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo’s tragic flaw is that he is too eager in love — he was in love with a young woman named Rosaline, and then she didn’t want to have anything to do with him, so the next beautiful woman he sees, Juliet, he falls in love with her, and it ends up leading to both of their deaths — there is this real sense that if you have responsibilities, if you have to take care of institutions and populations, you have to put aside the pursuit of pleasure. Even though for King Henry the Fifth it was so much a part of his youth — it was the thing he loved most to do when he was a young man, spending time with people like Falstaff — he can’t do it anymore because he’s in a prominent position now.

I’m relating that to Cicero’s argument here: like King Henry the Fifth, you cannot stand in the Senate and continue your old ways. You have to change. You have to accept the new state religion of duty and virtue, and this has to compel you in all of your actions. And if it doesn’t, then you shouldn’t be in that place — and you shouldn’t even be talking to me right now. That’s his answer to Torquatus.

Cassius: Yes, we’ve been talking on the forum about to what extent Shakespeare might embody Epicurean viewpoints. And I don’t know the rest of that play and what happens in that situation, but if Shakespeare is endorsing that position from that particular king, then that would be pretty good evidence to me that Shakespeare is not much of an Epicurean. Because you’re exactly right — that sounds like an excellent illustration of the position that Cicero is taking, that pleasure and the public life and public responsibility — those things are inconsistent with the pursuit of pleasure. So again, don’t know much about the rest of that play and whether there’s any relevance to pursuing that analogy further or not. But for an Epicurean to pursue his philosophy and understanding and be confident about it, he’s going to have to formulate the way that he would respond to those kinds of criticisms.

And at least at the moment, I’m not sure I can do any better than to continue to cite what Cassius Longinus was saying back in that letter to Cicero, when he specifically in the midst of this war for the future of the Roman Republic was citing Epicurean philosophy as the basis for what he’s doing. And saying again: “I hope that men generally will come to understand how much all the world hates cruelty, and how much it loves integrity and clemency, and that the blessings most eagerly sought and coveted by the bad ultimately find their way to the good.” And this is the part that has to be explained: Cicero is already convinced of virtue, but Cassius Longinus’s position is that it’s hard to convince men that the good is to be chosen for its own sake — but that pleasure and tranquility of mind are acquired by virtue, justice, and the good, and that this is both true and demonstrable.

So the point being there is that the one way to talk to the multitude is going to be to point out to them how true and demonstrable it is that virtue, justice, and the good do produce pleasure and tranquility of mind. And if those are things that you’re interested in having, that’s why you’re going to be virtuous. Kind of like Diogenes of Oinoanda talking about how Epicurus established his position more firmly than the Stoics do — that is a more persuasive argument in favor of justice and goodness and virtue and wisdom than Cicero is ever able to construct, because it is immediately understandable to everybody that if they want to live a pleasurable life, that’s the course they have to follow. And then linking that directly to what Epicurus said, Cassius Longinus says: “Why, Epicurus himself lays it down that to live a life of pleasure is impossible without living a life of virtue and justice, and that consequently Pansa, who follows pleasure, keeps his hold on virtue, and that those whom you call pleasure lovers are in fact lovers of what is good and lovers of justice, and cultivate and keep all the virtues.”

So I would think that that is the proper way to approach things. I don’t know whether anybody in any Shakespearean play ever goes in that direction or not, but I would look for something like that as an example of whether somebody really is understanding and promoting Epicurean philosophy or not.

Joshua: You know, when we covered the DeWitt material in Epicurus and His Philosophy, there was a footnote I think in that book which, when you follow it up, leads back to an oration by Demosthenes. And DeWitt makes the point: it’s so easy to talk like this, because there’s nothing controversial about it, right? Demosthenes basically goes up and says, “We sacrificed to Zeus, everything was good, so you’re good there, we sacrificed all the other gods, those omens were great, you’re going to have a great time, it’s going to be a great year.” It’s so easy for a political leader to stand up and tell the people exactly what they want to hear. And so as I listen to you reading these letters of Cicero and Cassius Longinus, to see a more complex relationship in how we understand these things is actually really refreshing. Because so much of what you get is just “Well, I’m virtuous, and virtue is great, and you’re virtuous” — all of this stuff that’s so easy to say. And sometimes the thing that’s hard to say is the thing that needs to be said, and that’s nowhere more true than when we’re talking about philosophy, which is the discipline where we study how we should live our lives.

Cassius: Yes, Josh, I can’t remember the exact formulation, but how easy it is to go into the temple at Ephesus and say “Great is the goddess Diana!” And you know, Joshua, this reminds me of the way the Epicureans were challenging their opponents. I see on page 348 of DeWitt’s book that Colotes himself had worded the thesis to read: “According to the dogmas of other philosophers, it is impossible to live at all.” And DeWitt suggests that what he really meant was: “much less live happily.” So that’s apparently part of the responsive arguments of the Epicureans back then: not only do we reject your arguments, Cicero, but our argument in favor of virtuous living is stronger than yours can ever be, because we’re placing the foundation of virtue on a firm basis of pleasure and not just letting it float out in the air as a goal in itself for unexplainable reasons.

In fact, Torquatus has previously done the same thing with friendship in Book 1, where he got to the end of his discussion of why Epicurus puts friendship on a better foundation than the Stoics do, and he said: “From all these different views we may conclude that not only are the principles of friendship left unconstrained if the supreme good is made to reside in pleasure, but that without this view it is entirely impossible to discover a basis for friendship.”

So throughout all these arguments, the Epicureans are maintaining that recognizing the truth that pleasure is the goal and the motivation that nature has given to us puts all of these arguments on a much stronger foundation than the Stoics or the Platonists could do themselves. And what Torquatus said right after that is worth quoting because it goes right along with what we’re talking about as the best way to present Epicurean philosophy. Torquatus said: “Wherefore if the doctrines I have stated are more dazzling and luminous than the sun itself, if they are drafts drawn from nature’s spring, if our whole argument establishes its credit entirely by an appeal to our senses — that is to say, to witnesses who are untainted and unblemished — if speechless babies and even dumb beasts almost cry out that, with nature our governor and guide, there is no good fortune but pleasure, no adverse fortune but pain, and their verdict upon these matters is neither perverted nor tainted: are we not bound to entertain the greatest gratitude for the man who, lending his ear to this voice of nature, grasped it in so strong and serious a spirit that he guided all thoroughly sober-minded men into the track of a peaceful, quiet, restful, happy life?”

And this too: “And though you may think him ill-educated, the reason is that he held no education of any worth but such as promoted the ordered life of happiness. Was he the man to spend his time in conning poets, as I and Triarius do on your advice, Cicero, when they afford no substantial benefit, and all the enjoyment they give is childish in kind? Or was he the man to waste himself like Plato upon music, geometry, mathematics, and astronomy, which not only start from false assumptions and so cannot be true, but if they were true would not aid us one whit towards living a more agreeable — that is a better — life? Was he, I ask, the man to pursue these arts and thrust behind him the art of living, an art of such moment, so laborious, and so correspondingly rich in fruit? Epicurus, then, was not uneducated. But those persons are uninstructed who think that subjects which it is disgraceful for a boy not to have learned are to be learned through life into old age.”

A reference there: it’s disgraceful — not to be an Epicurean is to not have understood these issues that Epicurus explained hundreds of years before Cicero. You should have long ago understood and not misrepresented these things as you’ve been doing on and on in your Book On Ends.

Okay, why don’t we start to bring today to a conclusion and see if anybody has closing comments for today? Martin, anything today?

Martin: Nothing today.

Cassius: Okay, Joshua?

Joshua: I do have that quote from Norman DeWitt’s book. It’s from Chapter 10, “The New Virtues.” He says: “It called for no courage to stand before the assembly as Demosthenes did and report, ‘We have sacrificed to Zeus the Savior and to Athena and to Victory, and these sacrifices have been auspicious and salutary for you.’ It did call for courage to flout popular belief and declare that the gods are immune to anger and gratitude and have no part in human affairs. It called for no courage to exalt virtue — even hypocrites would applaud. It did call for courage to declare that pleasure had been ordained by nature as the consummation of life — even those who so believed might prefer to be reticent. And Cicero would certainly prefer them to be reticent.”

Cassius: Thanks for finding that. That’s directly on point.

Joshua: Yeah, that would have been great at the beginning of the episode. But it’s good at the end here too.

Cassius: I think what I would just say in conclusion here is that we’ve more or less finished section 22, which ends on page 61, and we’re going into section 23, which starts on page 61 next week. And there really is some good material coming up. I know a lot of this has been a bit of a struggle, which is part of the reason we’re relying on so many quotations and passages from other texts to help us through it. But there is some really good stuff coming up. So I am kind of excited to see where this goes. There’s a passage coming up when Cicero basically quotes Epicurus’s will and then says it’s a fine document but you can’t have written it if you truly believe that pleasure is the good. So there’s a lot more to come — basically that’s what I would end with.

Joshua: Yeah, I agree with you. Thinking of Cicero as a trial lawyer — we’ve been listening to an hour-long presentation where he’s been in the middle of his argument, reviewing the facts that have been discussed before and talking about the things that the jury needs to think about before it makes its decision. But in the coming pages, in the coming episodes, we’re coming to his wind-up concluding summation. And I think we’re going to see Cicero get a lot more intense than he’s been already in carrying out this theme of the disgracefulness of pleasure and the disgracefulness of the Epicurean position, and the nobility and goodness and virtuousness of the Platonic-Stoic anti-Epicurean position. So there’s a lot more good material to come.

Cassius: We’ll come back and do that next week. In the meantime, please drop by the forum if you have any questions or comments about this or any other of our episodes. We thank you for your time today. We’ll be back next week.

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Episode 213 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 20 - Only Epicureans Define Pleasure As You Do! Why Do You Lie? Next
Episode 211 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 18 - Battle Of The Images