Episode 281 - TD12 - Is Pain The Greatest Evil - Or Even An Evil At All?
Date: 05/15/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4454-episode-281-td12-is-pain-the-greatest-evil-or-even-an-evil-at-all/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 281 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucious 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 text 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 this study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we continue our series covering Cicero’s, tus, and disputations from an epicurean viewpoint. This series addresses five of the greatest questions in human life with Cicero speaking for the majority and Epicurus the main opponent. Today we begin part two is pain and evil, starting with section five where the question is posed. As usual with each of the sections here, Cicero starts out with some general comments about philosophy, but we’re going to jump today into the discussion of pain. One reason being that as you may hear from my voice, I have got a call today so we may be a little shorter than usual as well. We have now finished the discussion of death and we’re now going to be discussing pain, starting out with the idea that pain might be the greatest evil possible, but settling in once Cicero focuses the conversation into the question of whether pain should be considered to be an evil at all. And so we’ll get started today in the middle of section five with Cicero speaking.
Joshua: It is not every mind which has been properly cultivated that produces fruit and to go on with the comparison as a field, although it may be naturally fruitful, cannot produce a crop without dressing. So neither can the mind without education. Such is the weakness of either without the other, whereas philosophy is the culture of the mind. This it is which plucks up vices by the root, prepares the mind for the receiving of seeds, commits them to it or as I may say, sows them in the hopes that when come to maturity, they may produce a plentiful harvest. Let us proceed then as we begun say, if you please what shall be the subject of our disputation,
Speaker 3: I look on pain to be the greatest of all evils.
Joshua: What even greater than infamy.
Speaker 3: I dare not indeed assert that and I blush to think I am so soon driven from my ground.
Joshua: You would’ve had greater reason for blushing had you persevered in it for what is so unbecoming, what can appear worse to you than disgrace, wickedness, immorality to avoid which what pain is there, which we ought not, I will not say to avoid shirking of our own accord, to encounter and undergo and even to court.
Speaker 3: I am entirely of that opinion, but not withstanding that pain is not the greatest of evil, yet surely it is an evil.
Joshua: Do you perceive then how much of the terror of pain you have given up? On a small hint,
Speaker 3: I see that plainly, but I should be glad to give up more of it.
Joshua: I will endeavor to make you do so, but it is a great undertaking and I must have a disposition on your part which is not inclined to offer any obstacles
Speaker 3: You shall have such for as I have behaved yesterday. So now I will follow reason wherever she leads
Joshua: First, then I will speak of the weakness of many philosophers and those two of various sects, the head of whom both in authority and antiquity was Aris the pupil of Socrates who hesitated not to say that pain was the greatest of all evils and after him Epicurus easily gave into this effeminate and innervated doctrine after him mists, the Rodan said that to be without pain was the chief good, so great and evil, did pain appear to him to be the rest with the exceptions of Zeno, Aristo and piro were pretty much of the same opinion that you were of just now, that it was indeed an evil, but that there were many worse when then nature herself and a certain generous feeling of virtue at once prevents you from persisting in the assertion that pain is the chief evil and when you were driven from such an opinion when disgrace was contrasted with pain, shall philosophy, the preceptors of life clinging to this idea for so many ages, what duty of life, what praise, what reputation would be of such consequence that a man should be desirous of gaining it at the expense of submitting to bodily pain when he has persuaded himself that pain is the greatest evil on the other side, what disgrace, what ignominy would he not submit to that he might avoid pain when persuaded that it was the greatest of evils? Besides what person, if it be only true that pain is the greatest of evils is not miserable, not only when he actually feels pain, but also whenever he is aware that it may befall him and who is there whom pain may not befall so that it is clear that there is absolutely no one who can possibly be happy met. Doris indeed thinks that man perfectly happy, whose body is free from all disorders and who has an assurance that it will always continue, but who is there who can be assured of that?
Cassius: Okay, thank you Joshua and Callini for reading that Cicero has now set up for us a very deep question for discussion which we’ll be taking up over the next several weeks. And before we get too far into the argument, there’s a couple of preliminary things that we probably should be sure to note. The first of which is that Cicero has quickly shifted the topic from the question of whether pain is the greatest evil to whether pain is an evil at all. I think it’s worthwhile to point out that the student has started off with the question of whether it is the greatest of evil or not and what Cicero has immediately done in response to that suggestion was shame appeal to emotion to convince the student that obviously you must admit that disgrace is a worse thing than pain. And as we’ve seen in own ends and in presentations from Cicero in the past, the thrust of Cicero’s arguments against Aus and against Epicurus often hinge on intimidation to attempt to smear the very idea that pain could be a problem at all or that pain could be the worst problem because from this perspective that Cicero and many of the other people around him come from, it is in fact virtue that is the number one goal and the number one thing that everything is oriented around Cicero not being a stoic himself but being very stoic friendly in this kind of a discussion wherever it is suggested that pleasure and pain might be more important than good or evil virtue or lack of virtue. Cicero starts out by focusing his attack on Aris as the originator of the hedonist type of philosophy, but he also mentions as in the same class, not only Epicurus but MOUs the Rhodan. Now we’ve discussed MOUs in the past, but for this purpose it’s interesting to remember that MOUs did not hold pleasure to be the chief. Good. He held absence of pain to be the chief good. He held that to be different from pleasure and he did not hold pleasure to be something desirable at all. We won’t go back at tremendous depth into the difference between MOUs and Epicurus, but this is a very interesting contrast that can help people understand the problem with this absence of pain construction and how it can be misunderstood because MOUs was advocating absence of pain as a concept different from pleasure. Joshua, will you have something on MOUs that might help us out?
Joshua: Yes, there is a short Wikipedia page. The sources are mostly Cicero and DIY leadership for what’s included here. It says that he was a member of the peripatetic school and an opponent of our CEU who was founder of academic skepticism, but that Cicero questions his right to the title of peripatetic. Cicero thinks he is not appropriate as a peripatetic if he’s going to hold the opinion that the highest good consists in freedom from pain and trouble and that indeed appears to have been his view. It says here Hy is frequently mentioned by Cicero who tells us that he held the highest good to consistent freedom from pain and trouble and denied that pleasure was to be sought for its own sake. So that’s what Cicero is setting up here. We have AIP who is focused more so on sensory pleasures than Epicurus is perhaps than we have Epicurus who thinks that pleasure is the chief good and pain, the chief evil, and then we have MOUs of Rhodes who is not really willing to go to either position. He thinks that freedom from pain and trouble is the highest good, but it does not follow in his view from that that pleasure is to be considered a main component of that. He’s not taking the view that we should pursue pleasure for its own sake necessarily.
Cassius: Yeah, Cicero uses MOUs in several places as a hatchet against Epic’s position claiming that M’s position is more logically consistent than Epicurus is, but be that as it may. One other thing that I think we’ll need to keep in mind as we proceed is in relating this back to the way that Epicurus looks at things. We know as we’ve discussed many times that Epicurus says that there are only two feelings, pleasure and pain, but in regard to how Epicurus could come to the idea that pain is the greatest evil, I think we should keep in mind. Section 1 24 of the letter to Monarchists where Epicure said quote, become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us for all good and evil consist in sensation, but death is the deprivation of sensation. Now we frequently talk about death being the deprivation of sensation and that’s why our consciousness comes to an end. But here in the letter he’s linking it also to the concepts of good and evil and saying that all good and evil comes to us through sensation. Now to me, I think that leads pretty directly to the conclusion that if all good and evil come to us through sensation and there are only two types of sensation, it’s pretty easy to relate, pleasure being good and pain being evil and not only in a relative sense in terms of some pleasures and pains are more intense than others are, but in an absolute sense, I think you can say from this that the greatest of all evil is pain because there are only two options and pain is the bad option among the two, pleasure is good, pain is evil, and those get equated. It looks like in Epicurean philosophy, this would explain why Cicero is attacking Epicurus by attempting to shame him when Epicurus description of the greatest evil being pain is deriving directly from his understanding of the nature of the universe that there are only two feelings, there are only two things that are good and evil and that good and evil equate to each other in a way that makes it reasonable to say that pain is not only and evil but the greatest evil. Now we can look at that as we go forward and consider whether that may be true or whether it may need to be modified. But part of what’s going on here I’m convinced, is that as usual, Epicurus is speaking philosophically about ultimate questions of good and evil pain and pleasure, and Cicero is attempting to confuse the issue by suggesting that there are so many variables that it’s improper to summarize pain as evil and pleasure as good Cicero’s tactic in dealing with that argument is to ignore that it’s a logical position and take the position well. Don’t you think that disgrace is greater than pain? Well, disgrace is a pain from Epicurus point of view. I think that’s part of the way you reconcile this. When Cicero wants to talk about disgrace being held up to ridicule and so forth are so terrible, well those are painful and they fall within Epicurus view of pain. So Epicurus could quite easily conclude that being disgraced in his community and among his friends for doing something terrible could be the greatest bad thing that could happen to him. But Epicurus would consider that to be pain. He wouldn’t consider it to be disgrace, divorced from the fact that there are only two feelings, pleasure and pain. He would classify that within pain.
Joshua: Yeah, I totally agree. And the way the student in this dialogue just falls on the floor at Cicero’s feet immediately is kind of hilarious to me. Tus and Disputations is not his best dialogue. He is not fleshing out the argument here, and I know that because he says himself that what he needs from the student is a disposition on the student’s part, not inclined to offer any obstacles, don’t try to set up problems for what I’m saying, just let me talk. And so we shouldn’t expect, I don’t think a intelligent and considered response to what Cicero is saying within this text, but I think you’re absolutely right, Cass is what you are saying is the intelligent and considered response, which is that infa disgrace and wickedness and immorality that for these things to be exposed and to be laid at our feet, that does produce a feeling of pain and that’s why we don’t do it. I’m going to read from Thomas Moore’s Utopia and from John Locke’s letter concerning toleration because they’re both kind of irritating on this point, not specifically to do with pleasure, but they’re specifically talking about your belief system, what motivates you and so on. And pleasure certainly falls under that. So Thomas Moore in his utopia says this and he has already acknowledged by the way, Thomas Moore has already acknowledged that the utopians define virtue to be living according to nature. So they imagine that nature prompts all people on to seek after pleasure as the end of all they do. So he’s using Epicureanism here explicitly as a guide for writing this story. But where he ends up is here, he says this, the king of utopia made a solemn and severe law against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature as to think that our souls died with our bodies or that the world was governed by chance without a wise overruling providence, or they all formerly believed that there was a state of rewards and punishments to the good and bad after this life and they now look on those that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted. Men since they degrade so noble of being is the soul and reckon it no better than a beast. Thus they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society or to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth. Since a man of such principles must needs as often as he daress do it, despise all their laws and customs, there is no doubt to be made that a man who is afraid of nothing but the law and apprehends nothing after death will not scruple to break through all the laws of his country either by fraud or by force when by this means he may satisfy his appetites. Now, you would have to change the words a little bit in order for it to be perfectly relevant to what we’re talking about when he says there is no doubt to be made that a man who is afraid of nothing but the law and apprehends nothing after death will not scruple to break through all the laws of his country. I think what Cicero is saying is that someone who thinks that there is nothing more to fear than pain and apprehends nothing after death will not scribble to break through all the loss of his country. So Cicero is seeing the same problem that Thomas Moore is seeing here for slightly different reasons. And then John Locke in his letter concerning toleration, he says lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants and oaths which are the bond of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God though, but even in thought dissolves all and he continues. He says besides also those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretense of religion where upon to challenge the privilege of a toleration. This is kind of like the argument that Cicero was making in the section that we didn’t discuss about the nature of philosophy and about whether someone should be called a philosopher when they live a life that is discreditable. And I don’t know if Cicero would’ve put Epicurus into that category because Cicero, as we’ve read through his works many times has been prepared to compliment the character of Epicurus but not the beliefs, not the philosophical views. So when we come back to this most basic issue, which is that pleasure is the good and that pain is the evil we see that all of the stuff he’s talking about here and all of the stuff that Thomas Moore and John Locke are talking about comes down to a question of pain and it should be taken seriously on that ground, but it should not be assumed by people like Cicero that just because you think that pain is the greatest evil that you are necessarily going to behave immorally from his point of view.
Cassius: Those are very good points. Joshua, before we move to section seven, there’s one more thing I’d like to point out at the end of section six that we read previously. Much of the paragraph was devoted to disparaging the idea that pain is evil because it’s disreputable to think so. But at the end of the paragraph, RO has included something different as all of these paragraphs contained references that we don’t always pick up the first time through, but that contain very interesting leads. The last thing he says was, besides what person, if it be only true that pain is the greatest of evils is not miserable, not only when he actually feels pain, but also whenever he’s aware that it may befall him and who is there whom pain may not befall so that it is clear that there is absolutely no one who can be possibly happy. Bera. Doris indeed thinks that a man can be perfectly happy, whose body is free from all disorders and who has an assurance that it will always continue, but who is there who can be assured of that? So there’s another aspect, there’s another question embedded here in the issue of pain and that is how it relates to the happy life because if you consider pain to be evil, then from Cicero’s point of view, from a stoic point of view, you’re not going to be able to get rid of evil in your life because no man can fully escape pain. And so in their logic in which they want men to be totally virtuous, they can’t allow pain to be an evil because then it would be impossible for them to be totally virtuous because it is impossible for them to be totally without pain. And so that’s an important distinction here too. Everybody’s got an agenda here in what they’re arguing. Epicurus is arguing that pleasure is the highest good because he’s going to nature as his goal and he’s not going to supernatural gods or ideal forms. Cicero is arguing that pain can’t even be considered to be an evil because if he admits it’s evil, then his guide of life, which is supernatural guidance or ideal forms can’t be reconciled with that because there’s no way to escape pain in life. Everybody knows that. So Cicero has to dismiss pain as evil not only because it’s disreputable, but because it messes up the logic of this platonic viewpoint that he has about the best way to live your life. Let’s go on to section seven at this point. I’ll note that there is a long poem about Hercules in here which will probably collapse into a shorter version rather than risk boring our listeners with the details of Hercules as travels. But go ahead with section seven.
Joshua: I noticed at the end of section six he quotes Metro Doris here, which I think is funny because elsewhere Cicero says that nobody reads the Epicureans apart from the Epicureans, but clearly he’s expecting his audience to know who metro Doris is and what he says. So I think that’s very interesting. But that leads us into section seven, and Cicero says this, but Epicurus indeed says such things that it should seem that his design was only to make people laugh for he affirms somewhere that if a wise man were to be burned or put to the torture, you expect perhaps that he is going to say he would bear it, he would support himself under it with resolution, he would not yield to it, and that by Hercules would be very commendable and worthy of that very Hercules whom I have just invoked. But even this will not satisfy Epicures that robust and hardy man know his wise man, even if he were in Polaris’s Bull would say, how sweet this is? How little do I regard it? What sweet is it not sufficient if it is not disagreeable? But those very men who deny pain to be an evil are not in the habit of saying that it is agreeable to anyone to be tormented. They rather say that it is cruel or hard to bear, afflicting unnatural, but still not an evil. While this man who says that it is the only evil and the very worst of all evils yet thinks that a wise man would pronounce it sweet, I do not require you to speak of pain in the same words which Epicurus uses a man as you know, devoted to pleasure. He may make no difference if he pleases between Polaris’s bull and his own bed, but I cannot allow the wise man to be so indifferent about pain. If he bears it with courage, it is sufficient that he should rejoice in it. I do not expect for pain is beyond all questions, sharp, bitter against nature, hard to submit to and to bear. And then Cicero goes on to quote this poem which is telling the story of Hercules and how even Hercules, even how the strongest and most muscle bound and most powerful of all the Greek heroes was himself brought low in some cases because of pain. And in the course of this long poem, Cicero interrupts to point out that Hercules himself, who was subdued by pain at the very time when he was on the point of attaining immortality by death, Cicero says, what words does soles here put in his mouth? And those words are these what tortures I endure? No words can tell far greater these than those which erst beel from the dire terror of thy consort JoVE. And it goes on and on, but basically he’s in pain. There’s a lot of pain going on. So he gives us this long poem and he ends the passage he’s quoting with this stanza. He says, this Sy arm did overcome with ease that dragon, the guardian of the golden fleece. My many conquests let some others trace. It’s mine to say I never knew disgrace. So we can see why Cicero is interested in this passage. He starts out by telling us what horrible pain he’s in, what terrible pain he’s had to endure in the course of his labors. And he ends it by saying, in spite of all the pain that I endured, let it be said that I never once knew disgrace. Now, I don’t think that’s strictly true because Hercules was guilty of a blood crime and had to have that crime atoned for, but Cicero ends with this. He says, can we then despise pain when we see Hercules himself giving vent to his expression of agony with such impatience and we who are not strong, who are not great heroes of the past, who are not demigods or sons of Zeus? Can we despise pain or pretend that pain isn’t a problem when we see Hercules the strongest and bravest and best of all the heroes when we see him giving vent to his expression of agony with such impatience? It would be silly of us, I think is what Cicero is saying to pretend that pain doesn’t hurt because clearly we see here it’s hurting him.
Cassius: Yeah, Cicero is saying it would be silly of us. And even more than that, he’s saying it’s silly of Epicurus to take the position that Epicurus did. Now, I think there’s a lot for us to get out of this section here, and this is a really good illustration in my mind of the value of going through Cicero’s works on ends, Tuscan disputations and reading not only the positive parts about Epicurus, but also the negative, the criticism parts because I think we can pull an awful lot of understanding here from the beginning of section seven where Cicero attempts to describe what Epic’s position is about torture. Now we have thankfully additional information about this from Di who tells us that Epicure says that the wise man is still happy while even on the rack, but he also says, di does that epicure held that the wise man will cry out while on the rack Now. So we have two pieces of information from Di Eu who is a neutral, if not even positive source about Epicurus, which we can use to take Cicero’s criticism apart because what Cicero is saying in section seven is that Epicurus is absolutely ridiculous to say that not only am I not in pain on the rack, it is sweet to be on the rack. Now that is not what epicure says according to Dogen, his lyrics epicure says that the wise man remains happy. And we’ve discussed this previously from where Norman Dewitt goes into this as well. Judging yourself to be happy in terms of your total life does not mean that every moment of your life is going to be wonderful and sweet enjoyment. Being in a bull is not to epicurious going to be any more of a sweet enjoyment than it is for anyone else. Cicero is distorting what Epicurus says, ignoring the philosophical implications of Epicurus position in order to ridicule Epicurus. So Cicero goes on and on. It’s not sufficient according to Epicurus to say that it’s disagreeable. We need to just go ahead and say that being roasted alive in the bowl is pleasant and say quote how sweet it is, how little do I regard it? And Cicero thinks that that is the height of hypocrisy because Epicurus has also taken the position that pain is not only an evil but the greatest evil. So how in the world can he be roasted inside a bull and say that this is not an evil? And the motivation behind this kind of an argument by Cicero, the reason he’s going through it is he’s trying to make epicurious look inconsistent and ridiculous to normal people, all of whom have heard the stories of Hercules and who understand that Hercules was the mightiest man who ever existed and did all these great works before he became a God himself. But that even Hercules, who is the person that these men most want to emulate? Even Hercules experienced tremendous pain. As Cicero says here, from Cicero’s point of view, it’s sufficient if you bear pain with courage, not that you have to rejoice in it because pain is beyond all question according to Cicero, sharp, bitter against nature, hard to submit to and hard to bear. Cicero is looking at his ordinary Romans and saying, if Hercules understands that pain is hard to bear and will cry out, why would you go listen to this philosopher Epicurus who says that when he’s under torture, he’s experiencing pleasure, he’s going to cry out. It is sweet. And to someone who doesn’t understand Epic’s position, that’s a pretty compelling argument that Epicurus doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about. And you’re going to dismiss Epicurus philosophy if you don’t understand the background and if you don’t understand Cicero’s hostility and his willingness to distort and misrepresent epicurus his position, I’m going to turn it back over to Joshua, but I think again, the heart of the misrepresentation and the heart of understanding it and getting rid of it is that Epicurus is talking philosophically about pleasure being good and pain being bad. But that does not mean that happiness and pleasure are exactly the same thing and a happy person is going to experience in his life a mixture of pleasures and pains, but the pleasures in the happy person’s life are going to predominate over the pains. Cicero can’t have it that way from his point of view because from his point of view where virtue is the only good, you have to totally eliminate evil from your life in order to be a virtuous person. So he can’t say, well, the virtuous person is occasionally going to experience some evil. He has his own logical analysis that he’s attempting to force everything in where Epicurus also has a logical analysis, but Epicurus is based on nature and classifying good and evil according to pleasure and pain. Cicero’s analysis is based on abstract calls to supernatural virtue, to ideal forms, and he’s the one who therefore can’t allow that evil can ever intrude upon the good man’s life. Epicurus understands that pain does intrude upon the good man’s life, but that does not prevent you from living a happy life.
Joshua: Yeah, I think you’ve said all that very well, particularly this repeated problem on the part of Cicero where he continues to misrepresent what Epicurus says about the brazen bull, the bull of Polaris. Epicurus nowhere says that it would be sweet to be roasted alive. What he does say though is that even on the rack, the wise man can be happy even when he’s being put to torture, the wise man can be happy. It’s not that the pain doesn’t exist, it’s not that the pain isn’t terrible, it’s that like he says in his last will over and above the pain I set all of the pleasures, all of the good things, the memories of the time I’ve spent with my friends. I set that over and against the pain. And that’s how you get through it. Not because the pain is sweet, because it isn’t, but because being in pain does not mean that we have to be miserable. We can still be happy even if we’re in pain. And Cicero continues to misrepresent epicurus on this and it’s very infuriating. And because I’m very infuriated by it, I have to talk now about what Lucretius says about Hercules, which is where Cicero has gone in this lucretius in the prom to book five says, who can avail by might of mind to build a poem worthy to match the majesty of truth and these discoveries or who has such skill in speech that he can fashion praises to match his desserts, who has left us such prizes conceived and sought out by his own mind, no mortal man alive as I conceive for could I raise my verse to reach the dignity of things he knew he was a God, my noble MEUs, a God he was who first found out the rule of life, which is now called true wisdom or the true philosophy. And then he goes on to say this, he says, but if you think that the deeds of Hercules excel this, you will be carried still further adrift from true reasoning. For what harm to us now were the great gaping jaws of the old naan lion and the bristling bore of Arcadia. Or what could the bull of Crete do or the curse of larna the hydro with its palisade of poisonous snakes. What’s the triple breasted mite of threefold garon? How could those birds have done us such great hurt who dwelt in the stem, fian fend or the horses of DTEs, the th ration breathing fire from their nostrils near the coasts of the bises and is Mara or the guardian of the glowing golden apples of his disparities? The dragon fierce with fiery glands with his vast body twined around the tree trunk. And he goes on and on about this and he says, all of these portable monsters who were destroyed in the old stories, he says, if they had not been vanquished, what hurt could they have done if they were alive today? And he says, not a bit of it, he says The earth, even now, teams in such abundance with wild beasts and is filled with trembling terrors throughout the forests and mighty mountains and deep woods, but for the most part, we have the power to shun those spots. So lucious here in Book five is setting up a comparison between Epicurus and Hercules, and he’s coming down on the side that the labor’s Hercules, while they may have been impressive, haven’t really done much to save us because it would’ve been very easy for us to avoid those horrible places where those horrible monsters lived. They didn’t live in the towns, right? If you don’t go to the lake where the Lar and Hydra lives, you’re never going to see it, right? You’re never going to see it and it’s never going to be a threat to you. But when you contrast that to what Epicurus has saved us from as he does here in the next section, he says this, but unless the heart is cleansed, what battles and perils must we then enter into despite our will? What sharp payings of passion then render the troubled man and what fears beside what of pride guiltiness and want Inness, what havoc they work, what of luxury and sloth. He then who has subdued all these and driven them from the mind by speech, not arms, shall this man not rightly be found worthy to rank among the gods? And the man he’s talking about, of course, is Epicurious. He says, above all, since it was his want to speak, many sayings in good and God-like words about the immortal gods themselves and in his discourse to reveal the whole nature of things. So I think that makes a great counterpoint to what Cicero is saying here. What Cicero is saying is very sneering and very belittling. He says even this, the idea that the wise man would endure pain, he says, even this will not satisfy Epicurus that robust and hardy man. Of course, what he’s saying subtextual here is Epicurus is neither robust nor hardy. He is frail and weak, and if Hercules is subdued with pain, certainly Epicurus would be subdued with pain. And he’s talking way too big a game when he pretends that he wouldn’t be miserable if he was on the rack, if he was suffering torture, and that it’s ridiculous for him to do so and that he’s a ridiculous man and that his philosophy is ridiculous and that we can all just laugh at him for the rest of time because he’s the silliest man that ever lived. You get on my nerves C row when you misrepresent this stuff, and he does it in every text we read, and he keeps coming back to the same points. Epicurus never says that it would be sweet to be tortured. He says that the wise man if tortured would still be happy, and that’s a big difference.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, those were excellent points Before we move past Hercules entirely. There’s one more thing I’d like to say about that and your quotations from Lucretius. We often hear people question the way that Lucretius starts his poem by talking about Venus and suggesting that Venus might be able to intervene and help him write the poem, which apparently is contradictory with the general epicurean view that Gods, to the extent they exist at all, are not involved in human affairs. The point I would raise just in passing here is that these references to Hercules as well, I think show that what Epicurus and Lucretius and the Epicurean were doing was that they were taking the people they were talking to as they found them. They didn’t walk up to the standard Greek or Roman on the street and say, forget about everything you’ve been taught your entire life about these legends of the past. What we can do is reinterpret them for you in a way that makes sense of them, and in a way that is really more creditable to them than the way that you’re being taught by the standard Platonist and stoics and so forth. We can talk about either Hercules or Venus in the right circumstances by enlisting them in an allegorical way that is consistent with a natural universe without supernatural gods. And I don’t want to go too far down that road today because it was to be too much of a tangent, but I do think it’s worthwhile noting that a lot of the problems that people have in the beginning of Lucretius come from all these references to Venus and Mars and the issues that arise when you talk about the Gods as relevant to your day-to-day activities. But Lucretius is comfortable in using all of the existing cultural information that the people around him understood and using those to illustrate in a proper manner how to look at these deeper philosophical issues. Okay, Joshua, it looks like the next several paragraphs is going off in other directions, quoting a lot of poetry. I think we can bring today’s episode to an end and plan to come back around the beginning of section 12 or maybe right near the end of section 11 because Cicero will begin to start talking about poetry in general. And at the end of section 11, he relates his discussion of the poet’s back to his issues of pleasure and pain. So that could be a marker for where we’ll begin to discuss next week. Any closing thoughts for today though? Before we go?
Joshua: I would just reiterate what we’ve said over and over again, which is when you’re dealing with people, especially hostile commentators on Epicurean philosophy, it’s important to go back to the source and find out what epicure actually said, and compare that to what he is said to have said, and see where the difference is here. Because this issue of the brazen bull is one that has come up time and again, and Cicero never stops being wrong about Epicurus opinion on this, so something surely that we need to keep in mind.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, that’s a reminder. I know in my first significant number of years in reading Epicurus, I hardly read past the letters that were contained in endogenous ISTs. And I thought I had made a great deal of progress by being able to read Lucretius all the way through. But there’s a tremendous amount of additional material that gives body to the material that we have left just through those two sources. And especially, again, Cicero is not an epicurean philosopher. He is an enemy of Epicurus, but I don’t think anybody would deny that Cicero was a smart man, and Cicero has very smartly written these arguments against Epicurus. But in the process of doing so, he is preserved for us information that we don’t have in the main fragments that are left to us from Dous and other primary sources. So the study of Epicurus involves being willing to read past the easy sections and go looking for the details that you can use to flesh out the entire philosophy. That’s what we do at the epicure and friends.com forum. We invite you to drop by there and talk to us about Epicurus. Let us know if you have any comments or questions about this or any of our other episodes. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.