Episode 264 - "Bread and Water!!?? Debunking The Myth of Epicurean Asceticism"
Date: 01/17/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4226-episode-264-bread-and-water-debunking-the-myth-of-epicurean-asceticism/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”A special episode featuring co-host Don presenting a talk — “Bread and Water: Debunking the Myth of Epicurean Asceticism” — originally delivered at the first EpicureanFriends.com live stream on January 19, 2025. Don argues that calling Epicurus an “ascetic” fundamentally distorts his philosophy, and that the bread-and-water passage from the Letter to Menoeceus must be understood in its historical context. He establishes what the ancient Greeks actually ate: cereal grains (primarily barley) supplied up to 70% of calories; maza (roasted barley porridge/cake) was the everyday staple; wheat bread (artos) was a relative luxury; meat was reserved for festivals; and wine, fruits, nuts, olive oil, legumes, and vegetables were ordinary components of the Greek diet. He then traces the sources that describe Epicurus’s actual meals across six centuries — Seneca (Letters to Lucilius), Plutarch (That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible), Diogenes Laertius (citing Diocles’s Epitome), Porphyry (On Abstinence from Eating Animals), Lactantius (Divine Institutes), and Emperor Julian’s letter To the Uneducated Cynics — and shows that the Epicurean table included barley porridge, lentil soup (phake), spring water, a small cup of light wine, goat cheese, wheat bread, fruits, and nuts. The famous request for cheese (“send me a little pot of cheese that when I like I may fare sumptuously”) is examined linguistically: the word translated “sumptuously” can also mean “extravagantly,” the same root used when Epicurus distinguishes the goal of Epicurean philosophy from the pleasures of the “profligate” (asotoi). Don aligns with Emily Austin’s categorization in Living for Pleasure — necessary, extravagant, and corrosive desires — and argues that Epicurus did not forbid extravagant desires, only excessive attachment to them. The episode concludes with Seneca’s reference to Epicurus testing himself on certis diebus (stated/fixed days) of minimal eating — not as self-denial, but as knowledge of what suffices, eliminating anxiety about food scarcity.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 264 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 we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we have a special episode in which our podcast co-host Don will give a talk entitled “Bread and Water: Debunking the Myth of Epicurean Asceticism.” This talk was given on January the 19th, 2025, as part of our first EpicureanFriends.com live stream. We’ll post a link to the slideshow presentation in the show notes to this episode, but you can view it anytime at EpicureanFriends.com by clicking on the Featured Videos link at the top of our website. At the same location, we also have a link to Don’s other video entitled “Where Was the Garden of Epicurus? Isolated or Near the Center of Things?” In that talk, just as in this new bread-and-water program, Don debunks myths that have grown up around Epicurean philosophy in which Epicurus has mistakenly been labeled as an ascetic or as an isolationist. Don does great work on these episodes and we’re proud to have him as part of our podcast family. Next week we’ll be back with a regular Lucretius Today episode. Until then, enjoy Don on the topic “Bread and Water: Debunking the Myth of Epicurean Asceticism.”
Don: Words have meaning, and one word that often gets attached to Epicurus is “ascetic.” Doing a Google search for “Epicurus ascetic” quickly provides numerous examples, including phrases like “it is too often forgotten that Epicurus himself was an unimpeachable ascetic,” or “Epicurus’s position was to establish an ascetic detachment from material conditions,” or “Epicurus’s hedonism has strong Stoic or ascetic tendencies,” and finally “despite his hedonism, Epicurus advocates a surprisingly ascetic way of life.” These are examples from only the first few sets of results in that Google search. So did Epicurus advocate for an ascetic way of life or not? My contention is that he did not. Using that term “ascetic” distorts what Epicurus taught and attempts to shove his philosophy into a box in which it does not fit. This presentation will attempt to provide a more accurate picture of the way of life that Epicureanism offers and to encourage people to leave behind the label of “ascetic.”
To begin, we need to define what we mean when we say someone is an ascetic. The Oxford English Dictionary defines an ascetic as “one who is extremely rigorous in the practice of self-denial, whether by seclusion or by abstinence from creature comforts.” The official Merriam-Webster website provides a more expansive explanation: “Ascetic comes from a Greek adjective meaning ‘laborious,’ and its earliest meaning in English implies the labor involved in abstention from pleasure, comfort, and self-indulgence as a spiritual discipline. These days, ‘ascetic’ is also used to describe anyone or anything demonstrating marked restraint, plainness, or simplicity, even when no appeals to the divine or spiritual are attached, making it not unlike another adjective with connections to ancient Greece — ‘Spartan.’”
An ascetic, then, is someone who practices self-denial, rigorously abstains from pleasure, comfort, and self-indulgence, and lives a Spartan existence. However, Merriam-Webster’s watered-down connotation of an ascetic as exhibiting “restraint, plainness, or simplicity” seems too broad as to be almost meaningless to me — and I would suspect to many others. The words “ascetic” and “Spartan” convey self-denial, abstemiousness, and purposefully denying oneself comfort and pleasure. That’s the meaning we’ll be exploring in this presentation. And as we’ll see, Epicurus may have exercised restraint, but it was far from living a life of self-denial.
So where does the whole idea that “Epicurus was an ascetic” come from? Well, the Oxford English Dictionary mentions the ascetic characteristic of self-denial by seclusion, and there is a very durable myth that Epicurus’s Garden was in a secluded location and that Epicureans lived cut off from society. I debunked this myth previously with a paper posted last year to EpicureanFriends.com entitled “Where Was the Garden of Epicurus?” If you’re interested in having that aspect of Epicurus’s supposed asceticism debunked, I recommend taking a look at that paper and the accompanying impromptu presentation I gave in an online 20th celebration.
This presentation is going to look at the ascetic characteristic of self-denial in eating — particularly the myth that Epicurus allowed himself only the most meager of meals. So how did this myth get established? Most people start and end with Epicurus’s own words from his letter to his student Menoeceus: “Bread and water give the highest pleasure when someone in need partakes of them.” And this indeed seems to be where many people stop, including scholars. Epicurus’s diet equals bread plus water. That’s it.
One huge problem with this formulation is that we modern readers often see bread and water as being the stereotypical punishment fed to those arrested for various crimes. In fact, the US Navy used three days of bread-and-water confinement for various low-level infractions until 2019. When someone reads consistently that Epicurus only lived on bread and water, they see it as Epicurus basically demanding that he and his students punish themselves. And how could that be an attractive way to live one’s life?
Let’s take a closer look at what “bread and water” means in the culture in which Epicurus actually lived. Epicurus is not obligated to align with our preconceived notions of the punitive connotations of bread and water. So let’s explore what the ancient Greeks were eating before we try to stereotype Epicurus’s so-called “ascetic” diet.
Let’s start with bread. It has been estimated that cereal grains — primarily wheat and barley — provided up to 70% of the caloric intake of the ancient Greeks. In fact, Homer’s Odysseus says he “far excels everyone else in the whole world of those who still eat bread upon the face of the earth.” “Still eats bread” refers to the fact that they’re still alive — the ones that are still eating their bread. Homer uses the word siton, referring to food made either of wheat or barley.
Barley, however, was much more plentiful than wheat, making the raised loaves of wheat bread more of a luxury item. Barley is one of the oldest grains known in antiquity and was drought-tolerant, making it especially suited to Greece. The barley was often roasted to make maza, which could be ground to meal and kneaded with water or milk or oil, and since the grain was already cooked, it didn’t need any additional baking and could be eaten wet or dry — making these barley cakes or maza very convenient and not requiring any great skill or clay ovens to make. Unlike the raised loaves of wheat bread, maza could also be made into a porridge. It’s barley that Telemachus takes with him on his ship when he sets out to find information about his father Odysseus. It’s maza that Hesiod extols in Works and Days when describing the good life. At this time he writes: “At long last, let there be a shady place upon a rock, wine of Biblis, barley cake soaked in milk — the milk of goats that are reaching their end of lactation — and the meat of a cow fed in the woods, one that has not yet calved, and of firstborn kid goats. That is the time to drink bright-colored wine, sitting in the shade, having one’s fill with food, turning one’s face towards the cooling Zephyr.”
So bread was the staple of the ancient Greek diet, with maza being very common. In fact, a sixth-century BCE law of Solon required Athenian brides to bring a barley roaster with them to their new household. Meat, especially roasted meat, was only eaten during elaborate feasts or at festivals, the sacrificial animals being roasted on the altar with the meat being shared with the celebrants. Fish — either salted or fresh — appears to have been seen as more of a delicacy.
Fruits eaten by the ancient Greeks included grapes, figs, apples, pears, and dates, with wild-harvested nuts also being consumed, and these latter would have included almonds and walnuts and hazelnuts and chestnuts. Vegetables were popular — they included cabbages, asparagus, carrots, radishes, and celery along with onions, garlic, and olives eaten in large quantities. The primary source of fat was olive oil, as butter was seen as a barbaric food — so no butter on the bread for the Greeks.
So that gives us a look at what common — and some elite — ancient Greeks were eating. I want to emphasize again that the estimate is that 70% of calories were coming from grains in the form of breads and porridges.
Turning back to Epicurus’s letter, what kind of bread was Epicurus mentioning when he writes “Bread and water give the highest pleasure when someone in need partakes of them”? The word translated “bread” there is in fact maza — the most convenient and common cake or porridge made from roasted barley. And barley seems to have been the favored grain in the Garden according to a number of sources across the centuries.
Seneca, writing a little over 300 years after Epicurus’s death, uses the word polenta — which was used to translate the Greek maza in the form of barley porridge into Latin — when he wrote in his Letters to Lucilius about Epicurus’s garden: “The caretaker of that abode, a friendly host, will be ready for you. He will welcome you with barley meal and serve you water also in abundance.”
Around 100 CE, just a little later than Seneca, Plutarch throws this little curve when he writes in his essay entitled “That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible” what appears to be an additional mention of the diet of the Garden. So Plutarch is complaining — as he does — that Epicurus’s definition of pleasure makes no sense, and he writes: “For the pleasures of the body, our nature requires costly provision, and the most pleasant enjoyment is not to be found in barley cake and lentil soup, but the appetite of the sensuous demands succulent meats and sauces and wine and perfumes.” The barley cake is our familiar maza. The other dish mentioned out of the blue is phake — a lentil soup. So maybe we can add lentil soup to the menu of the Garden, since Plutarch is using both maza and phake to say that pleasure-seekers’ desires can’t possibly be satisfied by barley porridge and lentil soup.
Around a century after Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius composed his seminal work The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, to which we owe the preservation of Epicurus’s letters. In addition to those letters, Diogenes Laertius says that Epicurus himself mentions that he was content with plain bread and water, and in that bread-and-water phrase, Diogenes Laertius uses the word sitos — which means grain, food, common bread, and carries the connotation of frugal, simple, plain, and inexpensive. Artos, on the other hand, refers to a raised cake or loaf specifically made of wheat — the better stuff, not the quick-and-easy maza. So maybe the Epicureans did eat some of the good stuff every once in a while too. The important thing is they’re still eating bread as a major component of their diet, just like everyone else.
Porphyry, writing in the third century CE in his On Abstinence from Eating Animals, writes: “For most of the Epicureans, starting with their leader, appear to be satisfied with barley bread and fruit, and they have filled treatises with arguments that nature needs little and that its requirements are adequately met by simple available food.” Here again we find maza, but now we’ve added fruit to the Epicurean table. So what kind of fruit? Well, the word used is akrodrua — fruits produced in the upper boughs of trees — and there have been various interpretations of this word, including pomegranates, wild nuts, almonds, and possibly apples, pears, and even edible acorns.
Lactantius, in his Divine Institutes written around the late third or early fourth century CE, includes: “One who is too stingy learns from Epicurus that life can be endured on water and barley.” And again we have the Latin polenta referring to the barley porridge there.
The last source I’ll mention — written 600 years after Epicurus died — is a letter entitled “To the Uneducated Cynics” by the Roman emperor Julian, who’s often referred to as “the Apostate” by Christians, and we find in this letter: “Epicurus says that if he has bread enough to spare, he is not inferior to the gods on the score of happiness.” That word translated as “bread” there is once again maza.
Before we go further, I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the whole “water” in the “bread and water” phrase. “Bread and water” — either in Greek or in Latin — is often seen in the sources talking about Epicurus. But water was readily available. The Garden was a garden after all — actually probably more of an orchard or a small farm — and so it likely had a spring or a steady source of clean drinking water in it. However, Diogenes Laertius does write: “Diocles, in the third book of his Epitome, says they were content with a small cup of light wine and all the rest of their drink was water.” Let’s dissect that just a little bit. The “small light wine” refers to oinos — which I take to be simply analogous to “small beer,” which is a term that would just refer to the fact that it would be a young wine with a lower alcohol content. So it could very well be referring to freshly pressed grapes with little time to ferment, and the “small cup” translates an ancient Greek measurement that was right around a half pint. So really not a lot different from all the other inhabitants of ancient Greece.
The reason for that in-depth look at barley bread, maza, polenta, and a quick look at wine is to show that bread and water featured in Epicurus’s declaration not because it was punitive, not because he was denying himself, but because that was the regular daily meal of the average ancient Greek. There’s nothing special about it. One’s hunger need not be satisfied with fancy food or a feast or delicacies. Epicurus is telling us to pay attention to our regular meal right in front of us. As long as it satisfies our hunger and quenches our thirst, our everyday meal — which can be as simple as nourishing, hearty barley porridge and cool spring water — that meal is worth paying attention to, and it can satisfy our hunger and thirst as well as any costly or hard-to-prepare feast.
Now, you may remember that Epicurus also made a request in another letter for some cheese, which people seem to imply with some sort of secret guilty pleasure that Epicurus allowed himself. He said, “Send me a little pot of cheese that when I like I may fare sumptuously.” And the cheese there, by the way, is tyros — a sheep or goat cheese.
So our Epicurean table has been set with an abundance of barley bread or barley porridge, as much spring water as you like, maybe a little low-alcohol wine every once in a while, some goat cheese, some wheat bread, lentil stew, fruits and nuts — and it doesn’t sound too bad to me.
And I find it somewhat amusing that that word that Epicurus uses in his request for cheese — translated as “sumptuously” — also has the connotation of “lavishly” or “extravagantly” according to Liddell and Scott, and can be coupled with asotoi, which is the word that’s often translated as “profligate” and was used by Epicurus when he says that “whenever we say repeatedly that pleasure is the goal, we do not say the pleasure of those who are profligate.” This seems significant, since Epicurus is literally saying that he enjoys cheese every once in a while and uses the word that actually means “extravagantly” — which sounds to me like a natural but unnecessary desire. Is Epicurus saying we can enjoy those desires too, and not just the natural and necessary desires? Oh my — how can that be? I thought he said we can only partake of the natural and necessary. I’m clutching my pearls!
So I think that’s exactly what this and other passages imply. Part of the ascetic myth associated with Epicurus is that people say he taught that his students could only follow the natural and necessary desires. Now, for a very quick refresher: Epicurus categorized desires — not pleasures — into four broad categories. According to Principal Doctrine 29: “Among desires, some are natural and necessary, some are natural and unnecessary, and some are unnatural and unnecessary, arising from groundless opinion.”
The prevailing position among scholars and popularizers of Epicurean philosophy has been to filter this through a Stoic lens and say that Epicurus only fulfilled the natural and necessary. I contend this is fundamentally wrong. From my perspective, Dr. Emily Austin got this exactly right in her book Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life, published in 2023. Her terms — “necessary desires,” “extravagant desires,” “corrosive desires” — really hit the mark, I think. Now I’m not going to belabor this point and I recommend you read her book, but her contention and mine is that Epicurus did not condemn or deny or disallow extravagant desires. Epicurus says that “those who least need extravagance enjoy it most” — that doesn’t strike me as a prohibition. He said he couldn’t conceive of the good without the joys of taste, of sex, of hearing, and without the pleasing motions caused by the sight of beautiful forms.
Now, did Epicurus and the Epicureans follow a simple, plain, frugal lifestyle? Yeah, from all descriptions they appear to have lived a simple, plain, frugal lifestyle — not unlike other average ancient Greeks of the time. Not Spartan, not ascetic, not a life of self-denial. Simple, plain, frugal. Frugal doesn’t mean self-denial. Some words and phrases along these lines that are often associated with the school in various writings throughout the centuries: they lived a simple, plain way of life; they had simple, inexpensive, frugal tastes. Philodemus describes his apartments in the lavish estate of Piso as a simple cottage. And they are said to have led a life that was easily paid for and simply inexpensive and frugal. To me, this doesn’t sound like self-denial or cynicism. It sounds like common sense. It sounds like Epicurus is reminding people to live within their means.
Translating this into a modern sense: can a modern Epicurean go out to dinner once in a while to a fancy restaurant? Of course — as long as you’re not neglecting or overextending your budget. Can you drink that quality IPA or fancy wine offered you at a dinner party? Sure — just don’t drink to excess and make a fool out of yourself.
One passage from Seneca that gets overlooked, in my opinion, is: “Even Epicurus, the teacher of pleasure, used to observe stated intervals during which he satisfied his hunger in sparingly fashioned ways. He wished to see whether he thereby fell short of full and complete happiness, and if so, by what amount he fell short, and whether this amount was worth purchasing at the price of great effort. At any rate, he makes such a statement in the well-known letter to Polyaenus in the archonship of Charinus. Indeed, he boasts that he himself lived on less than a penny, but that Metrodorus, whose progress was not yet so great, needed a whole penny.”
This passage could have a whole presentation on it, including looking at what ancient Greek or Roman currency is being translated as “penny” and “half-penny” there. But the phrase I want to emphasize in closing is “stated intervals” — in Seneca’s Latin, certis diebus, “certain days.” From this, it would appear that Epicurus tested himself on certain days to see how much food would really satisfy his hunger. We so often mindlessly eat our meals — scrolling our phones, talking with others, snacking on that basket of chips and salsa that we don’t even know how much we’re eating — and then we end the meal rubbing our bellies and groaning. Epicurus knew how much would satisfy him if the need arose. And so he didn’t have any anxiety or fear around the availability of food and drink.
That does not mean he denied himself pleasure. That does not mean he felt guilty for indulging in wine and cheese. That does not mean he went around hungry and living a Spartan existence. That does not mean he lived like an ascetic. Epicurus calls us to a life of common sense, to taking responsibility for our actions, and to living life to its fullest through the use of prudent choices. So go ahead, live a little — and enjoy those extravagant pleasures when you can. Trust me: Epicurus would smile on you.
Thank you.