Episode 282 - TD13 - Is A Trifling Pain A Greater Evil Than The Worst Infamy?
Date: 05/22/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4462-episode-282-td13-is-a-trifling-pain-a-greater-evil-than-the-worst-infamy/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 282 continues the reading of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Book Two, covering sections 10–13. The episode opens with an extended discussion of what Epicurus means when he calls pain an “evil”: the Greek kakon and Latin malum carry no supernatural or Abrahamic connotation of absolute moral depravity but are simply synonyms for “undesirable” or “bad.” Joshua introduces the Euthyphro dilemma — Plato’s question of whether the gods love the pious because it is pious, or whether it is pious because the gods love it — as context for Epicurus’s view that the gods are not the source of moral knowledge. The Stoics are criticized for “quibbling” by claiming pain is not an evil at all, which Cassius notes is exactly the kind of empty word-definition game Cicero himself calls out. Cicero’s text in section 12 then poses the challenge: if Epicurus says a trifling pain is worse than the greatest infamy, he brings infamy upon himself by saying so. Joshua uses the example of Marcus Regulus — the Roman general who returned voluntarily to Carthaginian captivity and death — as Cicero’s ideal of a man for whom infamy outweighs any physical suffering. Cassius responds with two historical counter-examples: Cicero’s own execution of Roman citizens during the Catilinarian conspiracy and Cassius Longinus’s assassination of Julius Caesar, arguing that “infamy” is never absolute but always contextual and dependent on how history judges the outcome. Joshua closes by reading Cicero’s letter to Cassius Longinus (January 45 BC) — touching on the Epicurean theory of simulacra and Cicero’s teasing of Longinus for abandoning the Epicurean school — and Longinus’s reply affirming that Epicurus himself taught that a life of pleasure is impossible without virtue and justice.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 282 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 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 the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we’re back again in our series covering Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations from an Epicurean viewpoint. We’re in section two of that work, which discusses the question: is pain an evil, or is pain the greatest evil? — a framework in which Epicurus is reputed to have identified pain as both an evil and the greatest evil, and Cicero is attacking that perspective using Epicurus and other philosophical arguments as well.
The student who introduced the question started out by asking whether pain was the greatest evil, but Cicero backed him down to “I’m not going to allege it’s the greatest evil,” the student said, “but I do think it’s an evil.” And at that point Cicero launched into an argument in which he pointed out that Hercules — one of the greatest heroes of most of the people in ancient Greece and Rome — when facing his trials, endured a lot of pain himself, recognized it as pain, recognized it as sharp and undesirable, and using that as an illustration, any person of common sense is going to hold that pain is undesirable, is unpleasant, and will recognize it as such. The first point that Cicero made there being that Epicurus is ridiculous because Epicurus held that at the same time pain is evil, but also — according to Cicero — Epicurus said that it is sweet to be tortured in the bull of Phalaris.
And of course what Cicero is doing there is misrepresenting Epicurus’s position about the happy man. Because Epicurus’s point — the same point that applied to Epicurus’s own last day when he himself was in great pain from kidney disease — is that whether you have a severe physical affliction from disease or torture or some other source, you may still consider yourself to be happy, where happiness is an assessment of your overall condition in life in which you’re considering both the good things that have happened to you as well as the bad, and you’re considering the pleasant things to be more important to you than the bad ones. Happiness being an assessment of a condition that’s not dependent upon your physical pain or pleasure at a particular moment. Cicero trots out that argument in an attempt to discredit Epicurus to the student.
And as we proceed today, Cicero is going to go further along similar lines. But as we brought up in our thread discussing this podcast after we recorded it last week, we probably should drop back for a moment and spend some time clarifying that when Cicero presents this as an issue of whether pain is evil, we should stop and think about what the word “evil” is intended to convey — what Cicero was using it to mean, what we would consider it to mean, and thereby clarify how Epicurus also would see this question. Because clearly Cicero has recorded, and there are other Epicurean texts along the same lines, in which words that we would translate as “evil” are used by the Epicureans to discuss pain. We say that in the context, of course, that Epicurean philosophy does not admit the existence of any kind of supernatural or outside-of-nature entities. So while many of us today combine the word “evil” with some kind of supernatural force, that would not have been the way that Epicurus was looking at pain as being an evil. So before we go further today, let’s take up that for just a moment and think about the way that Epicurus would tell us to consider evil. We certainly know that it’s undesirable, but is there anything more than being undesirable that we should understand when we discuss pain as being evil?
Joshua: Well, it’s certainly the case that Epicurus himself uses words in Greek that we translate as “evil” and “good.” The word in Greek for evil is kakon or kakos, and the word for good is agathon or tagathon. And we also see that Lucretius and Cicero use words in Latin that have the same meaning as they do in Greek, and the words in Latin are malum for evil or bad, and bonum for good — as in summum bonum, the highest good. So if you look at the word kakon or kakos in Greek, there are a number of definitions that fit. For example, you could translate it as “bad” or “worthless” or “useless,” or you could translate it as “unhappy,” or you could translate it as “evil.” And we do often find that it’s translated in Epicurean texts as “evil.” And of course we’ve been dealing with this for a long time because we went through the first two books of Cicero’s De Finibus, De Bonorum et Malorum — on the ends of good and evil. So we’ve been skirting around the edges of this issue for a long time on the podcast.
I think this might be the first time we’ve brought up the question explicitly. And I think as with most words and most concepts — particularly emotive concepts like good and evil, concepts that people have been commenting on since before written records existed — with these words, we are treading on dangerous ground. Because we can compare the word “evil” to other words that I don’t think are applicable in Epicureanism — words like “sin,” for example, which to me denotes the existence of a being against which one has sinned. And certainly in cultures like ancient Greece, the culture that Epicurus was living in, many of these characteristics were personified in mythology. And so the very first thing to understand about good and evil in Epicureanism is obvious, but it’s worth stating: there is no personification of good, there is no personification of evil.
This idea of two powerful beings that are in conflict with each other and that we are the turf on which they fight — that is totally foreign to his way of thinking. It’s not just the case that nature was not created by any gods. It’s also the case that no god is the source of moral knowledge in Epicurean philosophy. He does hold up the gods dwelling in the intermundia as symbols of the blessed life: they are blessed, they are incorruptible, they maintain themselves somehow by controlling the flow of atoms. And because of their ability to do that, they are exemplary in the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of the blessed life. But that is not to say that if one of these gods gives a command, it is moral for us to follow that command. I think that’s the difference we have to make there: yes, Epicurus did suggest that having a symbol — something you can look at, something that is emblematic of the goal that you yourself are striving for, which is the blessed life, which is pleasure — it does not follow that this is an authority figure that can dictate morality to you. Do you see where I’m going with this, Cassius?
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua. And before you go further, I think you’ve raised an extremely useful point. And while I’m no expert on Greek and Roman mythology, it seems to me that there’s a major distinction between the way those of us through the Abrahamic tradition view God as the symbol of all that is good and the devil as the symbol of all that is bad. It seems like there’s a major difference between that and the way the Romans and the Greeks — putting aside Epicurus in particular, but the Romans and the Greeks in general — were looking at their gods. Because while I would presume that maybe Mars might have had a greater number of associations with negative things than Venus did, I don’t think that Mars was ever viewed as totally depraved and totally evil without any redeeming characteristics whatsoever. And the same would go on the positive side probably for Venus, or any of the other gods — Zeus, Hera, Athena, all the different gods.
It seems to me that they all had a combination of some good and some bad characteristics and were not held up as the personification of evil in the way that Abrahamic religion teaches that the devil should be thought of as the personification of evil. And I think that’s going to come through in some of our other discussion today as we go forward — it’s important for us to recognize that “evil” can have for us today this connotation of total absolute negativity, depravity, and supernatural or metaphysical badness. It’s not just very painful, not just very bad; it’s got this metaphysical darkness associated with the word “evil” that goes above and beyond any degree of pain. And I think that difference in perspective is really important: Epicurus does not come at things — whether good or evil — in the same way. He’s not investing “good” or “evil” with a supernatural aura that goes beyond pleasure and pain. He is identifying pleasure as desirable and synonymous with the good, and pain the opposite, but they’re not invested with supernatural characteristics that go beyond the feelings that nature reveals to us. There’s no force of evil, there’s no force of good that Epicurus is appealing to, aside from what nature gives us through pain and pleasure. Would you agree with that?
Joshua: Yeah, I think I would agree with that completely. We don’t, for example, as some others do, look to nature — either nature outside of us or human nature — as being a gauge by which we measure whether we have sinned or done something right: “it’s unnatural, therefore it’s wrong, therefore it’s evil.” That to me would be a wrong way to look at it. And as you say, the Stoics might have had their view of the logos going through nature, going through all things, something to align oneself with, something to strive for — but the idea that there’s this evil current running through everything and that that is the standard by which we judge evil — these are human words and human concepts, and they should be understood in those terms.
And I don’t think Epicurus was the only one to do this. In fact, there is a dialogue of Plato called the Euthyphro, in which Socrates is arguing with this young man. Euthyphro is said to have brought charges against his own father for leaving a paid laborer — I’m reading from Wikipedia — to die in a ditch after the laborer had killed another worker during a fight. And so Euthyphro was going to the court to denounce his father to the justice system on the charge of impiety. And Socrates, who has his own trial and death impending, is talking to this man and says: “Well, if you’re willing to denounce your own father on the charge of impiety, you must have a really good understanding of impiety.” And so they have this argument, and this gives rise to the dilemma. And the dilemma can be stated very simply: is that which is pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? In other words, are the gods thought to be arbitrarily deciding what is pious and we just have to go along with them? Or is piety something more fundamental — something that even the gods themselves cannot change or affect, and that the gods are mere messengers of what is pious?
So are the pronouncements of the gods arbitrary, or are they merely messengers of something that is outside of them and exists in nature? And this is kind of updated to take account not just of piety, but also of things like morality, and you can apply it to Christianity, and it’s been done so, and many Christian apologists have attempted to give responses to it. But I think it’s a real problem. Because what you could say, considering the God of Christianity, is: is morality loved by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is loved by God? And there again you have the same problem. Is God a mere messenger to us of something that exists above and beyond him, or are his pronouncements totally arbitrary? And we would have very good reasons for asking whether we should accept or believe things on those terms.
And so these ideas are all throughout Greece at the time, and Socrates is giving particularly good voice, I think, to one aspect of the problem. But Epicurus is going even further than this by saying that the gods are not our source of moral knowledge. We shouldn’t look to the gods for that. There are good reasons to consider the gods and to think of them as an emblem of the blessed life or the good life. But if one of the gods came down from the intermundia and told you to sacrifice your firstborn as a burnt offering, I don’t think Epicurus would say, “Well, you should do that because he said you should” — the gods in Epicureanism live blessedly, but they are not infallible moral arbiters in disputes between humans. We should not understand things in those terms. As usual, I find it very difficult to explain the Euthyphro dilemma.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua. But listen, I think you’ve done a very good job in bringing this up here. And before we go further into the text, let me hammer this one more time because I think it’s so useful. The question of whether the good is loved by the gods because it is good, or whether it is good because it is loved by the gods, is emblematic of the huge difference of perspective between Epicurus and the rest of the philosophical and religious world. Any attempt to link what is desirable and undesirable with some kind of alleged supernatural force is devastating to identifying that it is nature that is our standard — and not some kind of supernatural mythology. But that’s exactly the way that Abrahamic religion presents things to us today: in terms of good versus evil, in terms of piety versus sin, in terms of deciding what we should do with our lives based on what we think some supernatural God wants us to do versus what we should do based on the feelings that nature has given to us directly.
So this is a huge, huge overlay issue: whether we evaluate things supernaturally, attempt to find some kind of metaphysical overlay to the feelings that nature has given us, or whether we look directly to nature and realize that this is natural and there’s nothing overlaying it and behind it to which we need to look beyond our senses and our ability to understand nature. Now, I think what goes along with that — especially when you’ve used the word “sin” — is another problem that we have from Abrahamic religion, and many of us will recognize it in the verse “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” There is this contention in the religious community that a single sin is sufficient to eternally separate you from the perfect — that there is no balance of right and wrong, there is no balance of pleasure and pain as Epicurus might look at it and then look to the net result. There’s this contention that the very nature of the supernatural, of God, finds evil and sin so abhorrent that any deviation from submission to the will of God is totally despicable and makes you no better than a worm — as Martin Luther might have used the analogy. That framework is equally repugnant to the way that Epicurus is evaluating the way to live your life.
Epicurus was telling us explicitly that sometimes we will consider the bad to be good, the good to be bad. Sometimes we’ll consider it right to pursue pain, to endure pain, in order to produce a better result in terms of pleasure and pain in total. So there is no supernatural metaphysical overlay of right and wrong, sin versus piety, behind the way that Epicurus is telling us to evaluate the way we live our lives. He’s telling us to look directly to what nature has given us — pain and pleasure — and derive all of our conclusions about how to spend our time based on pain and pleasure, and not useless speculation about absolute ideal forms or supernatural beings that do not exist.
Joshua: There is one more objection to Epicurus’s idea that pain should be considered an evil, and I do see this today — and it has nothing to do with religion or Platonism or anything else — and that is the claim that I sometimes see in places like Reddit: how can pain be considered an evil if it’s so useful and so important for human society? Pain is a signal from nature telling us to pull your hand off a hot stove, or whatever, and how can something so useful and so important in preventing injury and death be considered an evil? I think this is probably the biggest objection I see to Epicurus’s view that pain should be regarded as an evil today. Obviously people from other traditions in other centuries have their own problems with what Epicurus is saying, but this one I think ranks pretty high among the questions that people who are new to Epicureanism tend to bring up.
Cassius: Joshua, as we’ve been discussing it this morning, it’s clear that Epicurus is not investing the word “evil” with the same type of blackness and sin that Abrahamic religion and other religious or philosophical positions do. Epicurus is content to describe pain as evil just as he is content to describe pleasure as good, but he’s never taking that extra step of investing the word with the same kind of supernatural overlay that the other religions and philosophies are doing. Now, we could go on probably at great length discussing that further, but I would say that’s probably the key to the response to what you’ve just brought up: again, “evil” and “good” are useful words, just like “god” is a useful word, just like pleasure and pain are useful words, but words require explanation, definition, and examples of what you’re referring to.
And as we will see as we go forward here, yes, Cicero is going to turn to discussing the poets and the way that they portray evil. He’s going to turn to virtue and how the Stoics and others think virtue is intrinsically good and evil is intrinsically abhorrent to the good. But those are not the same kinds of terms in which Epicurus is framing his philosophy. A Stoic or a religious person is never going to be content with choosing an evil course of action — but Epicurus has explicitly told us that we will engage in and conduct activities that are at times painful to us. So right there you can see a bright line that the virtue-idealism religious world is not willing to acknowledge, but that Epicurus is willing to acknowledge: that even though pain is viewable as the greatest evil, “evil” is not something to be totally and always avoided, when it can be employed in the way you’re describing to lead to an overall more pleasurable result.
How many different ways do we argue this all the time? One of them being this question of “Oh, I wish I had never been born” or “I want total absence of pain in my life.” Some people will say that, and I think both of those would be condemned by Epicurus — as long as they don’t understand the framework in which you’re talking — in that pain, yes, you do wish to reduce to a minimum in practical terms in your life, but because we live in a practical reality, we must at times embrace pain in order to avoid worse pain or to attain a greater pleasure. So the paradigm of good versus evil, light versus darkness, and depravity versus blessedness is not the way that Epicurus is approaching the realities of nature. So I think that would be the core from which a much broader and deeper response could be constructed.
Joshua: I think those are good points, Cassius, and the only thing that I would add before we go into the text today is we have to keep in mind the separation between the feeling and the thing that causes the feeling. I see Cicero trip up on this, and I think this is a real stumbling block for people. For example: childbirth is painful, pain is evil, therefore childbirth is evil. No — we don’t think like that. You separate the activity that produces pain from the feeling of pain itself, and the feeling of pain Epicurus says is evil. It does not follow that the thing that produces the pain is evil.
Cassius: Joshua, I think that’s exactly right, and it hits back directly at both Plato and Aristotle — when you hear Aristotle saying that an orange is an orange because it has an essence of orange within it, or in Plato’s view it sort of reflects the ideal form that exists in some kind of other dimension, they’re trying to come up with some kind of absolute intrinsicness to something that, as you’ve just said, does not exist. Ice cream, cake, all the different things that we think of as pleasurable — if taken to excess or repeated too often, they can become painful. The painful can become pleasurable, the pleasurable can become painful, based on the context, because there is no intrinsic supernatural essence or ideal form aspect to things as Plato and Aristotle and the rest had suggested. So this is where Epicurus, I think, is revolutionarily correct in the way he’s telling us to get out from under the superstition of religion and false philosophy, and recognize that nature acts naturally without any kind of intrinsic divine intention — that there’s nothing always good or always bad.
Okay, now I think we can move on into the text today. At the very end of section 10, after going through the poetry describing the labors of Hercules, Cicero is going to bring his student back into the discussion. There’s going to be another couple of questions, and we’re going to start talking about how the poets portray the kind of thing we’ve been talking about — that rather than looking at things from a natural, clear-eyed perspective, the poets invest all of these things with supernatural connotations and implications that don’t exist. Cicero is going to talk about that, and how the Stoics and others buy into that kind of fantasy as we proceed. So I’ll ask you, Joshua, to bring us back to the end of section 10.
Joshua: As you mentioned earlier, Cicero has misrepresented what Epicurus said about the wise man on the rack, saying that Epicurus thinks this is sweet — and then he has gone on about the labors of Hercules to say that even the greatest of the Greek heroes felt pain and was subdued by it. So how can a man — Epicurus — claim that if he were on the rack he would find the pain sweet? Well, Epicurus doesn’t say that it’s sweet. He says that a wise man on the rack can still be happy, and those are two very different things. But at the end of section 10, Cicero says this:
And therefore it scarcely seems possible to avoid calling a man who is suffering miserable. And if he is miserable, then pain is an evil.
Kalosyni: Hitherto you are on my side. I will see to that by and by. And in the meanwhile, when are those verses? I do not remember them.
Joshua: I will inform you, for you were in the right to ask. Do you see that I have much leisure?
Kalosyni: What then?
Joshua: I imagine when you were at Athens, you attended frequently at the schools of the philosophers.
Kalosyni: Yes, and with great pleasure.
Joshua: You observed then that though none of them at the time were very eloquent, yet they used to mix verses with their harangues.
Kalosyni: Yes, and particularly Cleanthes, the Stoic, used to employ a great many.
Joshua: You say right. But they were quoted without any appropriateness or elegance. But our friend Philo used to give a few select lines, well-adapted; and in imitation of him, ever since I took a fancy to this kind of literary declamation, I have been very fond of quoting our poets, and where I cannot be supplied from them, I translate from the Greek, and the Latin language may not want any kind of ornament in this kind of disputation.
But do you not see how much harm is done by poets? They introduce the bravest men lamenting over their misfortunes, they soften our minds, and they are beside so entertaining that we do not only read them but get them by heart. Thus the influence of the poets is added to our want of discipline at home and our tender and delicate manner of living, so that between them they have deprived virtue of all its vigor and energy. Plato therefore was right in banishing them from his commonwealth where he required the best morals and the best form of government. But we, who have all our learning from Greece, read and learn these works of theirs from childhood, and look on this as a liberal and learned education.
Cassius: Joshua, it strikes me as ironic that Cicero is criticizing the poets here for investing these arguments with emotion and what he calls softness and entertaining aspects, when it seems to me that’s exactly what Cicero is doing himself by constantly referring to the exploits of the great men of the past. He’s not telling us to look to nature or understand these things for ourselves as much as he’s telling us to look to these pretty pictures of pious men doing things in the past. But be that as it may, he’s going to continue in section 12.
Joshua: But why are we angry with the poets? We may find some philosophers — those masters of virtue — who have taught that pain was the greatest of evils. But you, young man, when you said but just now that it appeared so to you, upon being asked by me what appeared greater than infamy, gave up that opinion at a word. Suppose I ask Epicurus the same question: he will answer that a trifling degree of pain is a greater evil than the greatest infamy, for there is no evil in infamy itself unless attended with pain. What pain then attends Epicurus when he says this very thing — that pain is the greatest evil — and yet nothing can be a greater disgrace to a philosopher than to talk thus?
Therefore, you allowed enough when you admitted that infamy appeared to you to be a greater evil than pain. And if you abide by this admission, you will see how far pain should be resisted, and that our inquiry should be not so much whether pain be an evil as how the mind may be fortified for resisting it. The Stoics infer from some petty quibbling arguments that it is no evil, as if the dispute was about a word and not about the thing itself. Why do you impose upon me, Zeno? For when you deny what appears very dreadful to me to be an evil, I am deceived and at a loss to know why that which appears to me to be a most miserable thing should be no evil. The answer is that nothing is an evil but what is base and vicious — you return to your trifling. For you do not remove what made me uneasy. I know that pain is not vice; you need not inform me of that. But show me that it makes no difference to me whether I am in pain or not. It has never anything to do, say you, with a happy life, for that depends upon virtue alone. But yet pain is to be avoided. If I ask why, it is disagreeable, against nature, hard to bear, woeful and afflicting — here are many words to express that by so many different forms, which we call by the single word “evil.”
Cassius: Joshua, I almost hate to jump in at this moment, because this is going to be so helpful in our understanding as Cicero proceeds here. But just in case some of our listeners are confused: this is an example of how Cicero did not consider himself to be completely a Stoic. Cicero’s heart is in Academic Skepticism, and although we did not go through it in the latter sections of De Finibus, Cicero included in De Finibus a scathing denunciation of Stoicism based on much the same kind of argument that we are seeing here — because it was obvious in the ancient world, as it should be obvious today, that the Stoics are a bunch of quibbling, nitpicking word-definition-game players in the way they look at their idea of virtue and what they set up to be the ultimate good. Cicero is willing to go with them because they do end up exalting virtue, and Cicero wants his citizens of Rome to be virtuous — and so he has many good things to say about the Stoics. But here we see that he’s more than willing to point out the inadequacies of Stoic reasoning and how ridiculous they are in taking something that clearly is undesirable — pain — and saying that it makes no difference to you whether you are in pain or not. That’s the kind of thing that everybody who gets interested in Stoicism needs to understand: that kind of gamesmanship is at the heart of the stupidity of Stoicism.
Now we’re going to be going further into that, but everybody needs to understand that’s what’s going on here. Cicero has turned the focus of his guns for just a moment away from Epicurus and points out that the Stoics are the ones who are the petty quibblers about the nature of the word “evil” and the way we should regard it. And as you read at the very beginning of section 13 — and we’ll go forward into that in just a minute — you can use many different words to explain things, and as Cicero says, “here are many words to express that by so many different forms, which we call by the single word of evil” — and says you’re defining pain rather than removing it when you say it’s disagreeable.
Again, we’ll hold that for just a minute until we go into the whole argument. But this is the way many of these issues have to be unwound. There is a disagreement about the meaning of words. You cannot just look at the word “evil” or “good” or “pleasure” or “pain” and accept superficially that you know how it is being used by the philosopher who is discussing it. In this case, Cicero is standing up for the common sense observation that pain is not very desirable, it’s not something that you want to go through, but it is real to you and you can’t just define pain out of existence as the Stoics would like to do. Although Cicero will not admit it, what you have to do is approach pain the way that Epicurus approaches it, and realize that in life there are two types of feelings — pleasure and pain — and that the two interact with each other, and we live our lives by intelligently making our decisions based on whether the consequences of our actions will bring us pain or pleasure. We don’t live our lives based on supernatural myth-building — that certain actions are intrinsically evil or certain actions are intrinsically pious. We recognize that the feeling given to us by nature is the standard, and not our supernatural or idealistic abstractions.
And before we go further, Joshua, let’s talk about what Cicero said about pain and infamy and how they compare.
Joshua: Right. Because at the beginning of this dialogue, the interlocutor had said that pain is the greatest evil, and then Cicero said, “Greater even than infamy?” And the interlocutor said, “I’m surprised to find myself so easily moved from my position.” But Cicero is now posing the same question to Epicurus. He says: “But you, young man, when you said but just now that it appeared so to you that pain was the greatest evil — upon being asked by me what appeared greater than infamy — gave up the opinion that pain was the greatest evil at a word. Suppose I ask Epicurus the same question: he will answer that a trifling degree of pain is a greater evil than the greatest infamy, for there is no evil in infamy itself unless attended with pain. What pain then attends Epicurus when he says this very thing that pain is the greatest evil, and yet nothing can be a greater disgrace to a philosopher than to talk thus? Therefore you, the interlocutor, allowed enough when you admitted that infamy appeared to you to be a greater evil than pain.”
So this is the problem. And of course Cicero — whose favorite pastime is to hold up illustrious Greeks and Romans of a heroic past as symbols of moral excellence — holds up people who would scorn infamy but brush off pain as if it had been nothing or caused them no trouble. People like Marcus Regulus, who in the Punic Wars was captured by the Carthaginians, and then requested of the Carthaginians to be sent back to Rome to negotiate a peace or prisoner exchange, but promised that he would return to captivity once that was done. And he was as good as his word — he did go back into captivity in Carthage, and I believe was executed. And for Cicero, that’s the best man who ever lived. This is the symbol of virtue and moral excellence: someone for whom pain, even torture, even death, was not to be feared; someone for whom the only things to be feared were cowardice and moral degradation and infamy.
So by holding up Marcus Regulus and others like him as the great heroes we should strive to be, he sees Epicurus saying that the feelings are pleasure and pain, and there is no good but pleasure and there is no evil but pain. And he says, “Well, what about infamy? What about cowardice? What about dishonesty?” — all of these things that we think of as vices. “Do you not think that these things are more evil than pain?”
And then he makes an interesting point. Cicero says Epicurus will answer that a trifling degree of pain is a greater evil than the greatest infamy, but there is no evil in infamy itself unless attended with pain. What pain then attends Epicurus when he says this very thing? One of the most popular ways to attempt to debunk or rebut Epicureanism throughout the ages has been to claim — as Plutarch did — that Epicurus makes a pleasant life impossible, or to claim — as Erasmus of Rotterdam did — that only Christians are true Epicureans: that Epicurus has set out goals that are worthwhile to pursue, but he has given some method that cannot lead to those goals. Cicero, I think, is saying here that when you consider infamy to be no evil and you consider even the smallest degree of pain to be a great evil — well, as Cicero knows and as Epicurus certainly knew, pain cannot be fully escaped in this life. We are all going to experience pain. There are very, very rare medical conditions of people who cannot feel physical pain, but for most of us pain is unavoidable to an extent. We can reduce its impact, we can set pleasure over against the pain and overwhelm it, but the idea that we can totally eradicate all pain from our lives — that’s a hopeless endeavor. We can do the best we can do, and that’s what we can do.
But for Cicero, tapping into that view that Epicurus makes the pleasant life impossible, I think what Cicero is saying here is: when Epicurus considers even the smallest and most trifling pain to be a great evil, since we can’t get away from pain, Epicurus is causing himself even more pain by considering these things in those terms — and in the process also bringing down infamy upon himself, which causes him even greater pain, if only he would realize it. That’s Cicero’s approach. Cassius, I know you probably have a lot to say about “there is no good but pleasure and there is no evil but pain.” I know we’ve talked about this a lot and we’ve been talking about it recently as well. It’s clear to me that someone like Cicero is not going to get what Epicurus is saying, and part of the reason is he doesn’t want to understand what Epicurus is saying, right?
Cassius: Absolutely right, Joshua. And yes, I’ve got a lot to say about what you just said. This is extremely revealing in separating Cicero’s perspective from Epicurus’s perspective. Because the way I read what you have just been going through, Cicero is saying that Epicurus has brought down such great infamy on himself by taking the position that pain is worse than infamy. I think Epicurus would laugh in Cicero’s face. Cicero is insisting that there is this absolutely evil subject known as infamy, which is always going to be tremendously worse than any amount of pain could be — and that is a framework of analysis that Epicurus just totally rejects, because there is no such thing as an absolute infamy floating in the air that you should recoil in horror at the idea that somebody has said pain is worse than infamy. This goes back to the illustration that Cicero has brought up previously about the painting of the virtues being the handmaidens of pleasure and how we should recoil in horror that virtue should be subservient to pleasure.
And again, the irony here: Cicero has just been criticizing the poets for confusing people about proper morality, but that’s exactly what Cicero is doing here. And that is the core of the issue that you brought up initially, where Cicero was talking to a student about why it was proper for him to say that infamy was worse than pain. Cicero is so close to understanding the problem because he says that Epicurus held that there’s no evil in infamy unless attended with pain. That’s the point, Cicero. There is no absolute evil in life, and even pain — which we identify as that which is undesirable — may still at times have to be undergone in order to obtain the ultimate good, which is pleasure and happiness, all the while realizing that pleasure and happiness are feelings which are contextual and do not have any permanent absolute eternal sameness to them in the way that he is trying to imply. So close.
He sees that the Stoics are wrong in trying to say that pain should be disregarded, and yet Cicero is insisting that what really is important — the reason pain should not be disregarded — is not that it’s unpleasant, but that it would be embarrassing for us to admit that pain is a problem for us. I want to use an example here directed towards this issue of infamy that Cicero is talking about — an example that Cicero himself was directly involved in — actually two examples now that I say it that way. In Cicero’s own experience, in the Catilinarian conspiracy, Cicero had a number of Roman citizens executed against the law of Rome because Cicero thought that it was necessary to do so in order to save the Roman Republic. A second example: Cassius Longinus assassinated Julius Caesar in the middle of a very confusing set of circumstances in which Caesar had been Cassius’s friend in the past.
The common thread between both of those two situations is this: neither action — by Cicero in executing the Roman citizens, nor by Cassius in assassinating Caesar — was intrinsically from the beginning of time, of necessity, associated with goodness or evil. Cicero saw his action as worthy of the greatest praise in saving the Roman Republic, but that’s not the way it worked out for Cicero, because in the end Julius Caesar’s legacy prevailed and Cicero ended up being held to a certain degree of infamy for having violated the laws of Rome. In the case of Cassius, had Cassius and Brutus won the battle of Philippi and defeated Antony and Octavian, then it is highly likely that history would have judged Cassius and Brutus to have been the saviors of the Roman Republic who had brought the greatest credit upon themselves. But that’s not how it ended, because they lost the battle of Philippi.
And so for generations thereafter, Brutus and Cassius have been held up to the infamy of supposedly betraying their friend Julius Caesar. The point of these two examples is that Cicero is wrong in implying that there is some infamy floating in the air — that you know a particular action is invested by the gods with infamy, or that another set of actions is invested by the gods with blessedness and piety. That’s not the way the world works. The world is contextual, and nature ends up being the standard by which we judge whether something is held up to great praise or great blame. Praise and blame, good and evil, are all contextual and have to be evaluated according to the feelings that nature gives to us. And if you think — as Cicero is suggesting to his student — that there is an absolute form of infamy, you’re just wrong, because the mechanism behind it does not exist. There are no supernatural gods, there is no necessity, there are no absolute ideal forms, there are no essences. You have to judge what is infamous, you have to judge what is evil, according to the context of the pain and the pleasure that comes from the action you’re discussing.
So to wrap this up, I think something along those lines would be the way that an Epicurean might respond to these arguments from Cicero. It’s not possible to unwind these questions without getting to what you really mean by the words that you’re talking about. And in this case, what is “evil” is not something that is “base and vicious” as Cicero might say — intrinsically, you don’t know in advance of the action how every action is going to turn out, and that in itself is an illustration of why Epicurus is correct and why Epicurus does not invest in writing lists of commandments of things to do or commandments of things not to do. Because as Epicurus said in the Letter to Menoeceus around section 129: “Since pleasure is the first good and natural to us, for this very reason we do not choose every pleasure, but sometimes we pass over many pleasures when greater discomfort occurs to us as the result of them. And similarly, we think many pains better than pleasures since a greater pleasure comes to us when we have endured pain for a long time.” It’s not a matter of assigning supernatural labels to actions or to words, as Cicero wishes to do. It’s a matter of evaluating the actual feelings that result. Because as Epicurus continues at section 130: “For the good, on certain occasions we treat as bad, and conversely the bad as good.”
Joshua: I think your comments about Brutus and Cassius and this idea of infamy are very interesting. And it’s interesting to note that in Dante’s Inferno, Cassius Longinus has the honor of being placed in the lowest and deepest circle of hell, because in that remarkable fantasy story, Satan has three mouths and in each mouth he is devouring a soul, and the souls are Judas, and Cassius, and Brutus — for treachery and betrayal.
But what does Cicero himself think about this? Well, we do have a number of letters which have been preserved between Cicero and several of his friends, and in a letter written from Rome in January of 45 BC, Cicero writes to Cassius Longinus and speaks about philosophy. He has some interesting things to say about it. Cicero writes: “I expect you must be just a little ashamed of yourself now — this is the third letter that has caught you before you have sent me a single leaf or even a line. But I am not pressing you; I shall look forward to, or rather insist upon, a longer letter. As for myself, if I always had somebody to trust with them, I should send you as many as three an hour. There it somehow happens that whenever I write anything to you, you seem to be at my very elbow — and that not by the way of visions of images, as your new friends term them, who believe that even mental visions are conjured up by what Catius called ‘spectres.’ But let me remind you that Catius the Insubrian — an Epicurean who died lately — gives the name of ‘spectres’ to what the great Epicurus himself, and long before that Democritus, called ‘images.’ They’re talking about these images that flow through the air. Cicero continues: but even supposing that the eye can be struck by these spectres because they run up against it quite of their own accord, how the mind can be so struck is more than I can see. It will be your duty to explain to me when you arrive here safe and sound — whether the spectre of you is at my command to come up as soon as the whim has taken me to think about you, and not only about you, who always occupy my innermost heart, but suppose I begin thinking about the isle of Britain, will the image of that wing its way to my consciousness? But of this later on; I’m only sounding you now to see in what spirit you take it. For if you are angry and annoyed, I shall have more to say and shall insist upon your being reinstated in that school of philosophy out of which you have been ousted by violence and an armed force — in this formula, the words ‘within this year’ are not usually added. So even if it is now two or three years since, bewitched by the blandishments of pleasure, you sent a notice of divorce to virtue, I am free to act as I like.” And yet — to whom am I talking? To you, 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, I apprehend, there is more vitality than I should have supposed — if only because it has your approval. How did the whole subject occur to you? You will say, “Because I had nothing else to write about — politics I can write nothing, for I do not care to write what I feel.”
It’s always interesting to see Cicero communicating with the Epicureans of his day, because he holds them all seemingly in high opinion and is quite happy to notice that the things that he values — virtue, defense of the republic, whatever is really important to him — it’s not like the Epicureans of his day are ignoring these things. It’s not like, just because the goal is to pursue pleasure, it follows that we should throw absolutely everything else by the wayside. And Cassius Longinus certainly did not. And so when we read his philosophical texts, I think it’s important to keep in mind these letters between Cicero and Cassius. Right after this, Cassius wrote a letter to Cicero also in January of 45 BC, which I won’t read except to read one or two sentences.
He says this: “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 — that is both true and demonstrable. Why, Epicurus himself, from whom all the Catii and Amafiniuses in the world — incompetent translators of terms 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.”
This is being written by a man on campaign who was raising armies with the view in mind of ultimately meeting and engaging Mark Antony and Octavian — as you said, Cassius — in what would come to be known as the battle of Philippi. And when we’re dealing with real people in real situations, it’s clear that Cicero is able to contain himself — but he doesn’t seem to be able to do it when he’s just talking about philosophy, because he doesn’t mention in this text that we’re reading right now the Epicureans he knows and how they actually live. His argument is not with Epicureanism; it’s with the image that he has in his own mind of Epicureanism. And if he would look at the Epicureans that are around him, he would see that that’s the case. Anyway, that’s my long response to what you’ve just said there.
Cassius: Well said, Joshua. When we come back next week, we’ll go further into section 13 and we’ll stay with this question, and I think it will help us understand even more deeply the difference between Epicurus and these other philosophers that Cicero represents. When we come back next week, we’ll go further. In the meantime, if you have any comments or questions about anything we’ve discussed today, or anything you’d like to talk about regarding Epicurus, please drop by the EpicureanFriends.com forum and let us know. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.