Episode 318 - In The End It Is Pleasure - Not Virtue - That Gives Meaning To The Happy Life
Welcome to Episode 318 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.
We are closing in on the end of those portions of Tusculan Disputations that are most relevant to Epicurean philosophy today, so we’ll pick up this week with Section 34 of Part 5.
Cicero spends the final sections trying to chip away at pleasure being the goal of life by discussing how luxury, honor, and riches are not required for happiness. He does so generically without direct mention of Epicurus, but we’ll discuss his examples and how his argument actually proves Epicurus’ point that pleasure is the goal: those who overindulge obtain do not in sum obtain pleasure, but in fact more pain than pleasure.
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 318 brings the Tusculan Disputations series to a close, covering TD Sections 34–42 (the final sections of Book Five). Cassius opens by summarizing the sections skipped: Cicero spends Sections 34–36 piling up anecdotes from history to show that luxury in food and drink, and the absence of power or fame, do not prevent a wise man from being happy — a conclusion largely consistent with Epicurus, though Cicero uses it to advance his pro-virtue agenda rather than Epicurus’s pro-pleasure one. Section 36 ends with the case of someone banished from his country (Albucius, who Cicero notes would not have been banished had he followed Epicurus’s advice to live peaceably). Cassius notes Cicero’s implicit sleight of hand: while overtly arguing that luxury is not needed for happiness, Cicero is really trying to argue that pleasure itself is not needed.
Joshua reads TD Section 38, in which Cicero argues through the case of blindness: Epicurus says the wise man always abounds with pleasures because the mind, not the eyes, is ultimately what is entertained. Cicero cites Antipater the Stoic’s remark to women lamenting his blindness (“Do you think the night can furnish no pleasure?”), old Appius, who served the republic despite blindness, and others who remained effective despite loss of sight. Cassius connects this to DeWitt’s observation that ancient philosophers enjoyed a game of subtracting bodily faculties one by one and asking when life stops being worth living — a sorites-style argument — and criticizes Cicero’s implicit direction: the Epicurean point is not that you can subtract pleasures indefinitely and remain happy, but that the pleasures you do have are what give value to life.
Joshua then reads TD Sections 40–42 (the conclusion of the book). In Section 41, Cicero explicitly names Epicurus and Metrodorus: even those who hold that virtue has no power of itself can maintain the wise man is always happy; Carneades acts as honorary arbitrator between Peripatetics and Stoics (who differed only in name). Section 42 is Cicero’s brief closing, dedicating the five books to Brutus and noting that philosophy is his best comfort against affliction. The episode closes with substantial discussion of David Sedley’s article “The Inferential Basis of Epicurean Ethics,” which argues that Torquatus’s presentation in De Finibus Book 1 actually makes Epicurus’s logical reasoning clearer than Epicurus’s own letters and Principal Doctrines (which are lists of conclusions). Cassius plans to next take up Philodemus’s On Methods of Inference (On Signs), possibly preceded by Cicero’s Academica to set up the background on Epicurean canonics.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 318 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. We’re still in Part Five of Tusculan Disputations, closing in on the end. Last week we dealt extensively with Section 33, in which Cicero went into Epicurus’s division of the natural and necessary desires. Cicero had closed Section 33 by saying that Epicurus held that a wise man enjoys continual pleasures by uniting the expectation of future pleasure to the recollection of what he has already tasted. And similar notions are applied by them to high living, and the magnificence and expensiveness of entertainments are deprecated because nature is satisfied at a small expense.
As Cicero proceeds into Sections 34 and 35, he gives additional anecdotes from other people without going into anything that Epicurus himself said. And I think the thrust of the anecdotes that Cicero gives is basically to pile on additional instances of people who understood that great pleasure can indeed come from very simple food and drink and other experiences when you are not acclimated to requiring the luxuries that can lead you into trouble because you expect them over and over. Bread and water give great pleasure when you’re hungry, and appetite is the best sauce. Those are fairly non-controversial, and Cicero is able to basically glide into them without missing a beat. He continues in the same vein in Section 35, doing exactly the same thing — talking about how the life of happiness does not require luxury in eating and drinking and other accommodations. He cites Aristotle for basically endorsing the same position. So again, Cicero at this point is into his name-dropping phase. He’s got his position staked out: you don’t have to have luxury in order to have a happy life, and he’s going to add every citation he can come up with.
And of course these citations standing alone are consistent with what Epicurus’s position would be. I do think there’s a danger here, though, in that Cicero is implying not only that luxury is not necessary for happiness, but — since Cicero equates pleasure with bodily stimulation and luxury — Cicero, I think, is also implying that his argument should be interpreted to mean that pleasure is not necessary for the happy life. But at the moment he’s focusing on these luxury items as opposed to pleasure. And he continues on into Section 36, where he changes the focus from the luxury of food and drink and accommodations to issues of power and fame. He says that lack of power and lack of fame do not prevent the wise man from being happy — again, a position that is largely in accord with Epicurus’s conclusions, but with very little mention of Epicurus, because he’s going to other examples from Greek and Roman history to support the argument. Towards the end of Section 36, the example Cicero turns to is someone who is banished from his country — something that should not prevent the wise man from being happy, even though it is an example of something terrible that can happen to you, especially from the point of view of a Greco-Roman such as Cicero.
He returns to Epicurus by first mentioning the position taken by someone that “wherever I am happy is my country,” and then he cites Socrates specifically for saying that when he was asked where he belonged, Socrates replied “the world” — for he looked upon himself as a citizen and inhabitant of the whole world. And it’s in that context that he comes back to Epicurus, mentioning someone named Albucius — asking did he not follow his philosophical studies with the greatest satisfaction at Athens, although he was banished, which however would not have happened to him if he had obeyed the laws of Epicurus and lived peaceably in the Republic? Was Epicurus happier living in his own country than Metrodorus, who lived at Athens? Or did Plato’s happiness exceed that of Archytas, or Polemo, or Speusippus? There are several things going on here — one being Epicurus’s advice to live peaceably within the republic, and then a reference to Epicurus’s life in Athens as opposed to Metrodorus, who was not originally from Athens but was from another location. Joshua, can you help us with that?
Joshua:
Exactly, Cassius. So he quotes this classic view — “I’m not only a citizen of Greece but a citizen of the world,” a cosmopolitan — and cites that as being the view of Socrates. And then he goes down this list of people who were banished or moved themselves somewhere else, and he asks: were they any happier in their new position than they were in their old? The point that Cicero is trying to reach here is that the location of your body on the surface of the earth is not going to make or break your happiness. You can be happy without being where you want to be. And so he makes this reference to Epicurus. He says that Albucius was banished and would not have been if he had followed the laws of Epicurus — presumably about political engagement — and lived peaceably in the republic.
And then Cicero goes on to say: in what way was Epicurus happier living in his own country than Metrodorus, who lived at Athens? Epicurus was born on the island of Samos. Samos was a colony of the city-state of Athens, and he was an Athenian citizen enrolled in the deme Gargettus with all of the citizenship rights that pertain to that. So when he moved himself back to Athens when he was perhaps thirty, you could say he was moving back to his homeland in a way, although he had only seen the place once before for two years. Metrodorus, meanwhile, was from Lampsacus on the coast of Asia Minor. And the point that Cicero is making here is: do we have any reason to suppose that Epicurus was any happier than Metrodorus for being in his home city? In other words, did Metrodorus have any reason to be upset or unhappy because he was not in his home city?
And for Cicero, whose whole point in this fifth book of Tusculan Disputations is that virtue alone is sufficient for a happy life — it doesn’t matter where you are, it doesn’t matter how famous you are, it doesn’t matter what kind of table you keep. None of these things are going to determine your happiness, for someone like Cicero. And so all of these anecdotes that he’s giving here are in service of that point of view. We’ve skipped a lot of anecdotes here. Cicero tends to dwell on a theme and just pile on as many citations to history as he can.
Cassius:
We are going to be moving in now to Section 38, and we are in fact closing in on the end of Tusculan Disputations — there are only a couple of sections left and we will be through with the book. Before we go into 38, let me repeat the point I made at the beginning. What Cicero is doing here in wrapping up Tusculan Disputations is dealing in what we’ve discussed many times here about this sorites paradox. Cicero is going through a list of the things that people normally hold in life to be pleasurable — such as food, drink, luxury, living in your own country, having power, reputation — and he is saying you don’t need each one, one after another. You can subtract and still be happy, and we’re going to want to keep that in mind as we get to the end here, because the premise that Cicero is following is one that I do not think Epicurus would agree with.
You can take these individual pleasures and do without them absolutely and still be happy. But from the Epicurean perspective, it is these pleasures — not in luxurious or overindulgent amounts, but as in Cicero’s anecdotes, even if you’re just recognized by a woman carrying water in the street — that is a form of pleasurable reputation. The different things that can happen to you are still valuable, not because you’ve given up all these other things in life that cause you more trouble, but because the different things that can happen to you are pleasurable. It’s not asceticism for the sake of asceticism that’s important — it is in fact pleasure that gives value to life. So we’re going to go next into Section 38, and I’m going to ask you to read it, Joshua, because there’s a good bit of discussion of Epicurus in the beginning of it. That’s going to be the context in which we’re now moving to discuss other things that we can be deprived of — such as blindness — and still be happy. It’s still sort of in the line of arguing that nature does not require an awful lot in order to be happy. But when Cicero says nature doesn’t require much, the implicit direction Cicero is going in is: all you need is virtue. When Epicurus says nature doesn’t require much, Epicurus is still focused on pleasure in order to find a happy life.
Joshua:
“Besides the emotions of the mind, all griefs and anxieties are assuaged by forgetting them and turning our thoughts to pleasure. Therefore it was not without reason that Epicurus presumed to say that a wise man abounds with good things, because he may always have his pleasures; from which it follows, as he thinks, that that point is gained which is the subject of our present inquiry — that a wise man is always happy. What, even though he should be deprived of the senses of seeing and hearing? Yes, for he holds those things very cheap. For in the first place, what are the pleasures of which we are deprived by that dreadful thing, blindness? For though they allow other pleasures to be confined to the senses, yet the things which are perceived by the sight do not depend wholly on the pleasures the eyes receive, as is the case when we taste, smell, touch, or hear; for in respect of all these senses the organs themselves are the seat of pleasure. But it is not so with the eyes, for it is the mind which is entertained by what we see. But the mind may be entertained in many ways even though we could not see at all. I’m speaking of a learned and wise man, with whom to think is to live. But thinking in the case of a wise man does not altogether require the use of his eyes in his investigations. For if night does not strip him of his happiness, why should blindness, which resembles night, have that effect? For the reply of Antipater the Stoic to some women who bewailed his being blind — though it is a little too obscene, it’s not without its significance — ‘What do you mean?’ sayeth he, ‘do you think the night can furnish no pleasure?’ And we find by his magistrates and his actions that old Appius too, who was blind for many years, was not prevented from doing whatever was required of him with respect either to the republic or his own affairs. It is said that [Gnaeus Drusus’s] house was crowded with clients, when those whose business it was could not see how to conduct themselves — they applied to a blind guide.”
Cassius:
Joshua, as you read this section it reminds me of some comments made by DeWitt, that it seems like some of the ancients actually liked to indulge almost as a game — to start talking about how many of your limbs, how many of your parts of your body could you slice off and still be happy? If you lose a foot or a leg, or two feet or two legs, or a hand or both hands, or you’re blind, or you’re deaf, or you can’t smell — how many of your senses, how many of your aspects of your body can you lose and still have life be worth living? And this of course echoes what I was saying before you read that last paragraph about the sorites aspect of this. When Cicero talks about the man for whom to think is to live — yes, we can agree with many aspects of how life can be worthwhile even under significant disadvantages.
But Cicero is driving this argument in a direction that Epicurus would not have approved of, because just as you never get an answer to the question of which grain of sand can you remove from a heap and still have a heap, all of the aspects of life that we find desirable are desirable. And while it definitely can be helpful to think about what it is you really need, it’s not the point of life to live in the most minimal way you possibly can. If there’s a problem that causes more pain than pleasure, then absolutely there are all sorts of things that you can do without. But to drive over and over and over the idea that “well, I can be happy even if I’m just a brain in a vat because for me to think is to live” — that may appeal to some people, but that’s not a productive way of looking at human life.
So again, I don’t mean to be too critical of this line of thought from Cicero here, because in each step along the line you can get something valuable out of it. But as Cicero continues on, when he says he’s speaking of a learned and wise man with whom to think is to live — while we can agree that thinking is pleasurable, thinking is not the fullness of life. Humans are both minds and bodies, and the best life is going to involve the happiest use of both aspects of life. And to carry on with the point I just made: Section 39 is basically all devoted to blindness and anecdotes involving issues that confront those who are blind, referencing Homer of course, who very famously was blind. And then of course from blindness, we proceed into Section 40 to address deafness. But there is a mention of Epicurus at the beginning of 40, and towards the end of 40 there’s another mention of pleasure in a way that evokes Epicurus in the beginning of 41. So Joshua, why don’t you read for us the part that begins to apply to Epicurus again towards the middle, and then read us out through the end of Part Five?
Joshua:
In the middle of Section 40 here, Cicero has just come off his discussion of blindness and deafness and he kind of summarizes it this way. He says: “But suppose all these misfortunes were to meet in one person; suppose him blind and deaf; let him be afflicted with the sharpest pains of body — which in the first place generally of themselves make an end of him — still, should they continue so long and the pain be so exquisite that we should be unable to assign any reason for our being so afflicted, still why, good gods, should we be under any difficulty? For there is a retreat at hand, and death is that retreat, a shelter where we shall forever be insensible.” Theodorus [the Atheist] said to Lysimachus, who threatened him with death: “It is a great matter indeed for you to have acquired the power of a cantharide, when Perseus was powerless not to be led in triumph.” “That is a matter which you have in your own power,” said Lysimachus. “I said many things about death in our first day’s disputation when death was the subject, and not a little the next day when I treated of pain; which things, if you recollect, there can be no danger of your looking upon death as undesirable, or at least it will not be dreadful. That custom which is common among the Greeks, that their banquets should — in my opinion — be observed in life: ‘Drink, say they, or leave the company’; and rightly enough, for a guest should either enjoy the pleasure of drinking with others, or else not stay till he meets with affronts from those that are in liquor. Thus, those injuries of fortune which you cannot bear, you should flee from.”
And in Section 41 it continues: “This is the very same which is said by Epicurus and by Metrodorus. Now if those philosophers whose opinion it is that virtue has no power of itself, and who say that the conduct which we on our side denominate honorable and laudable is really nothing and is only an empty name — if even they can nevertheless maintain that a wise man is always happy, what think you may be done by the Socratic and Platonic philosophers? Some of these allow such superiority to the goods of the mind as quite to eclipse what concerns the body and all external circumstances. But others do not admit these to be goods; they make everything depend on the mind. Whose disputes Carneades used to determine as a sort of honorary arbitrator; for as what seemed goods to the Peripatetics were allowed to be advantages by the Stoics, and as the Peripatetics allowed no more than the Stoics to riches, good health, and other things of that sort, when these things were considered according to their reality and not by mere names — his opinion, Carneades’s opinion, was that there was no ground for disagreeing. Therefore, let the philosophers of other schools see how they can establish this point also. It is very agreeable to me that they make some professions worthy of being uttered by the mouth of a philosopher, with regard to a wise man always having the means of living happily.”
And then we come to Section 42, which is the final paragraph of Tusculan Disputations. We’ve come to the end of the book and Cicero says: “But as we are to depart in the morning, let us remember these five days’ discussions. Though indeed I think I shall commit them to writing, for how can I better employ the leisure which I have — of whatever kind it is, and whatever it is owing to — and I will send these five books also to my friend Brutus, by whom I was not only incited to write on philosophy but I may say provoked. And by doing so, it is not easy to say what service I may be of to others; at all events in my own various and acute afflictions which surround me on all sides, I cannot find any better comfort for myself.”
Cassius:
All right, Joshua, thank you for reading to the end of the chapter and to the end of the book. It is probably worth celebration that we have come to the conclusion of a very long series of episodes — approximately a year we’ve spent going through it. And I do think it’s been time well spent, because we have gotten a lot of detail out of discussing what Cicero had to say about Epicurus and about the arguments that Epicurus was addressing, that we would not have gotten otherwise. And the same is true, I’d say, here in the final paragraphs you’ve just read for us. Because interestingly enough, Cicero seems to come back more to his skeptical position here, and while he’s bounced around about his assessment of whether the Stoics really disagreed with the Aristotelians or not — in the end here in this final paragraph, he cites Carneades, who is more of a skeptic like Cicero himself, as taking the position that in the end they’re basically saying the same things between those two schools.
And Cicero says he’s happy with any philosopher who is able to say things that are worthy of coming from a wise man’s mouth about living happily. Cicero is closing on much the same argument he’s used throughout Tusculan Disputations: that he doesn’t agree with Epicurus about pleasure, he thinks that Epicurus says things that aren’t worthy of a philosopher, but Epicurus seems to Cicero to come to some of the same conclusions that he himself does. And if even Epicurus — even someone whose opinion it is that virtue has no power of itself, even someone who says that the conduct which we hold to be honorable and praiseworthy is really nothing but an empty name — if even somebody as depraved as Epicurus can come to a similar conclusion, then how much more can the Socratic and Platonic philosophers do in explaining the desirability of pursuing virtue as the basis of happiness?
In saying that the Stoics and the Aristotelians arrive at the same point, he reminds us of what their dispute was about: some say that the goods of the mind are so much more important that they transcend the goods of the body; the Stoics on the other hand say that the things of the body and external circumstances are not even good at all. And that’s where Carneades and the skeptics will come in and say: it doesn’t matter — both of you are arriving at the same place, which is that the goods of the mind and virtue are those that are really important. And in that thought, Cicero brings us back at the end to his conclusion: the philosophers of the schools can debate these points among themselves just so long as they say things that are worthy of being uttered by the mouth of a philosopher. So Joshua, we’ve reached the end of the book, and so we probably should devote the remainder of the episode to summarizing the lessons we get from these final chapters and from the book as a whole.
Joshua:
That’s right. We have spent a long time on Cicero in various works. It’s always rewarding. It’s not always easy to do because he does raise real challenges — challenges which might not occur to someone who is approaching Epicurus with a friendly eye toward his philosophy. You need a critic; you need someone to ask the hard questions. And Cicero has been very good about that, to help us think through some of the potential problems and pitfalls and to think through what were the objections made by the other schools in classical antiquity, and how did the Epicureans of the ancient world respond to them, and how should we respond to them today?
Cassius:
Joshua, let me jump in just a moment before you continue. What you’ve just said is exactly an argument that has attracted my attention in a new article I’ve been reading over the last several days. Dr. David Sedley wrote an article some twenty-five years ago entitled “The Inferential Basis of Epicurean Ethics,” and one of the points he raises there is exactly what you just brought out — which is that we find in Cicero, in many cases, the proofs and the logical arguments of Epicurus in support of his position that we don’t really find in the letters of Epicurus himself so much. For example, as Dr. Sedley says, the Principal Doctrines — and especially the Letter to Menoeceus — they are lists of conclusions. Especially the Principal Doctrines, the Vatican Sayings, and then the things included within the Letter to Menoeceus: they are excellent summaries of the conclusions that Epicurus reaches and the advice he gives about how best to live a happy life, but they’re not necessarily the logical argument that he followed step by step along the way to reach those conclusions.
And that’s a point Dr. Sedley brings out: we have in Torquatus, in Book One of On Ends, the section that we talk about all the time where Torquatus lays out from the beginning how Epicurus held pleasure to be the good. Dr. Sedley points out that presentation by Cicero is actually much more helpful in understanding Epicurus’s thought process at arriving at his conclusions than is the Letter to Menoeceus itself. So what you’ve just said I think is a really important reason why the study of Cicero — especially On Ends, followed by Tusculan Disputations, and also On the Nature of the Gods, because that gives us the argument on divinity — is so valuable. Cicero, as irritating as he can be, has preserved for us vital information about how to interpret and understand Epicurus.
Joshua:
That’s exactly right. And as we’ve gone through these texts, I see echoes in the plays of William Shakespeare of things that I’m reading for the first time in the works of Cicero, which I’ve never studied at any serious level before this podcast. So it’s been an incredibly rewarding experience. Particularly De Finibus — that first text that we went through, On Ends — Tusculan Disputations is probably one of his weaker dialogues because the interlocutor, the person we’ve been referring to as the student, doesn’t really have much to say and except in one or two places doesn’t really argue back. You’ve already given us the example within the last five minutes or so about the student pointing out the contradictions between this book and On Ends — the contradiction between what Cicero says about the relationship between the Stoics and Peripatetics here versus what he says over there. And there are many more instances like that we could point out, and we’ve tried to do that to the extent that we could. But it is a huge mass of material and it’s great to have this source, this great big lump of classical antiquity of Greek and Roman philosophy, something we can really sink our teeth into.
And I will second the point that you’ve made and attributed to David Sedley there, which is: we would be in a very different place when it comes to the understanding of Epicurean philosophy without these works of Cicero. Cicero, in his conclusion in Section 42, says: “How can I better employ the leisure which I have — of whatever kind it is and whatever it is owing to — than to write these texts, than to study philosophy, to write dialogues, to write books about it, to write summaries and outlines of what different philosophers thought, and to really do the hard thinking on some of these questions?” And we are the beneficiaries of his labor. I’ve mentioned this many times before, but the Romans had a word — otium — to refer to a kind of healthful and productive leisure. It finds its negation in the word negotium, which is the root of English words like “negotiation” and so on. So it’s in the question of business or pleasure: we’re very much on the pleasure side here speaking of otium, but it’s not mere idleness and it’s not indolence. And those are things that Cicero is the most frequent and harshest critic of. He is spending his leisure time in the company of friends, and they are in the waning days of the Roman Republic in the shadow of the looming rise of the proscriptions of Mark Antony and Octavian and Lepidus that would ultimately lead to his death. He is taking this time away from the troubles and the wars and the political intrigues and scandals of the end of the Roman Republic to study philosophy — to study how to live and why we live the way we live — and the benefit to us, as I said, is that we are the beneficiaries of his labor in his free time here at the end of his life. Our knowledge and experience of Epicureanism is greatly enriched by it.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, I completely agree with your assessment of the significance of Cicero and the material that we’ve been able to gather from Tusculan Disputations and from On Ends. Now, don’t hold me to what I’m about to say because we may have a mid-course correction as to where we go next — but one of the things we’ve been discussing for a while is that we have not really brought a lot of attention to some of the foundational works of Philodemus. And the one that has been circling around us forever is Philodemus’s On Signs, or On Methods of Inference. And we have a very good article by Dr. Sedley that we can bring to use in devoting some attention to that, as well as a lot of explanatory material that’s in the appendix to the translation by De Lacy. But before I commit us even to doing that, we’ll have some discussions this coming week, because I have a feeling that we may not be quite finished with Cicero. In order to understand Philodemus, we need some background about the arguments about skepticism that were tearing apart the other schools, and we’ve made reference to that before as existing in Cicero’s Academica. I’m going to take a look at that and see if it would make sense for us to devote any more time to Cicero and that work as a prelude to getting into Philodemus — because this issue of the canon of truth, what truth means, what reality means, what Epicurus’s unique perspective on those questions really was, is something that surrounds much of what we talk about.
And I don’t know that there’s any better source for that than Philodemus’s On Methods of Inference, but unfortunately that work is not complete. We don’t have the beginning of it — we don’t have the background at which point Philodemus gives us the Epicurean perspective on it. And I think we can set the stage if we spend at least a little time with how Cicero introduces that to us in the Academica. There’s not as much discussion of Epicurus in the Academica as there has been in Tusculan Disputations, but I think if I recall correctly, it’s not a very long work and it sets up the arguments that Epicurus had to deal with in coming up with this canon of truth. So we’ll see where we go from here. But for today, let’s bring the episode to a conclusion. Thanks again to you, Joshua, and Kalosyni for all of your work in helping us produce this. We’ll come back soon as we continue to discuss Epicurean philosophy. In the meantime, please feel free to drop by the EpicureanFriends.com forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We will be back again soon. See you then. Bye.