The Full Cup Model: Pleasure, Purity, and the Limit That Answers Plato

“I know not how to conceive the good, apart from the pleasures of taste, of sex, of sound, and the pleasures of beautiful form.” — Epicurus, in Diogenes Laertius, Book X

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Introduction

Epicurus declared pleasure to be the beginning and end of the happy life. He said it plainly, repeatedly, and without apology. He said it in letters, in treatises, and in the doctrines he intended his school to memorize. His ancient critics — Stoics, Platonists, and Academic Skeptics — heard him and understood him perfectly well, which is precisely why they attacked him with such fury. They did not attack him for teaching tranquility or asceticism. They attacked him for teaching pleasure.

Yet a persistent tradition of modern commentary has transformed this vigorous, life-affirming philosophy into something that looks remarkably like what Epicurus’s enemies claimed he should have taught. In this transformation, the Epicurean goal becomes not pleasure but “tranquility” — not a life filled with the richest and most varied pleasures that reason can secure, but a life of minimal stimulation, reduced desire, and passive freedom from disturbance. The Epicurean wise man, in this reading, seeks not to fill his life with good things but to quiet himself into a state where nothing much is felt at all. One modern commentator, characterizing this majority position with unwitting precision, called it a “zero state” — a condition in which the absence of pain is the highest achievement, and anything further is mere decoration.

This is not merely a matter of overcaution. Epicurus himself gave the direct rebuttal to a pain-avoidance-above-all reading of his own doctrine:

“It is better to endure particular pains which produce greater satisfactions that we may enjoy. It is well to abstain from particular pleasures which produce more severe pains so that we may not suffer them.” — Epicurus, Bailey Fragment 62

That is a net-pleasure calculation, not a zero-state rule. A philosophy whose highest good was simply the avoidance of pain would never counsel enduring pain for the sake of a greater pleasure gained. This article argues that the zero-state reading is wrong by the standard of the Epicurean texts themselves, and that this becomes clear once we understand the specific argument Epicurus was actually answering. Epicurus was not describing the good life in a vacuum. He was answering a specific and powerful argument — developed most fully by Plato and inherited by the Stoics — that pleasure cannot be the highest good because it has no limit. The Epicurean doctrines that have been most misread — the “limit of pleasure,” the terms ataraxia and aponia, the statement of Principal Doctrine 3 — are not the whole of Epicurean ethics but the targeted philosophical response to that argument. Once we understand the argument being answered, we understand both what these doctrines mean and what they do not mean.

The model that results is what I will call the Full Cup Model. Its central image comes from Lucretius, who described a life in which pleasures are squandered not because they were pursued too eagerly but because, like water poured into a leaky vessel, they were never properly secured. The goal — the Epicurean answer to Plato — is a life in which the vessel is sound and the cup is full: filled with real, vivid, active pleasures, of both mind and body, with as much pain removed as reason and circumstance allow. A full cup cannot be made fuller. But it is full, not empty.

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Part One: Plato’s Challenge

The Principal Doctrines as a Series of Responses

Before examining Plato’s specific argument about the limits of pleasure, it helps to step back and observe a broader pattern in Epicurus’s own most authoritative list of teachings. The Principal Doctrines were composed to be memorized, and the first three of them are not a random selection from across the Epicurean system. They form a systematic series of responses to the three most powerful arguments used in the ancient world — and still used today — to frighten people away from pleasure as the goal of life.

Principal Doctrine 1 declares that a blessed and immortal being has no trouble itself and creates none for others, and therefore has no use for anger, favor, or any concern with human conduct. This is a direct response to the oldest and most effective instrument of moral control: the claim that the gods reward their friends and punish their enemies, and that we had therefore better subject our behavior — including our pursuit of pleasure — to whatever the gods and their representatives on earth demand. The argument says: abandon pleasure as your guide, submit to divine command, or face retribution. Epicurus answers: no being that is truly blessed concerns itself with human affairs at all. The threat is empty.

Principal Doctrine 2 declares that death is nothing to us, for when we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we no longer exist. This responds to the second great instrument of control: the fear of what comes after death. This argument says: death may mean judgment or suffering, and you had better live rightly — which means, not pursuing your own pleasure — or face that prospect. Epicurus answers: death is the complete end of sensation, and where there is no sensation there is neither good nor evil. The terror of death, and with it every claim to authority that rests on threatening us with what follows it, is groundless.

Principal Doctrines 3 then addresses the third great challenge to pleasure as the goal of life: the philosophical argument that pleasure cannot be the highest good because it has no limit. This is the argument Plato developed most fully, the argument the Stoics inherited and pressed, and the argument that has given rise to the most persistent misreading of Epicurean ethics. It says: pleasure is indefinitely extendable, never complete, and therefore can never constitute the highest good — so we should discard it as the standard of life in favor of something that can be achieved and completed, namely virtue. Principal Doctrine 3 answers this directly: the magnitude of pleasure does reach a limit, and that limit is reached when all pain has been removed. Later on, Principal Doctrine 18 further establishes that once pain is removed, pleasure cannot be increased in magnitude — only varied in content — so the completeness of the highest good is secured.

This pattern is essential for reading PD3 correctly. The doctrine is not an isolated technical statement about pain and pleasure. It is the third in a deliberate sequence of responses to arguments that all point the same direction: toward abandoning pleasure as the guide of life in favor of submission to external authority, whether divine command, fear of death, or philosophical argument about limits. Epicurus was not retreating when he wrote PD3. He was advancing directly into the strongest philosophical challenge his opponents had mounted, and defeating it on their own terms. The full cup — the completed, limited, fully achieved pleasurable life — is his answer to Plato, just as the nothing-to-fear gods and the nothing-to-fear death are his answers to the first two challenges.

With that pattern established, we can now examine the Platonic argument itself in full.

Plato’s Argument in the Philebus

To understand what Epicurus was doing, we must understand what he was responding to. The philosophical challenge to pleasure as the highest good was stated most clearly by Plato in the Philebus.

Plato’s challenge runs as follows. If we are to identify the highest good — the thing that makes a life complete and that cannot itself be increased — it must be something that has a definite limit. A thing that can always be increased further is by definition incomplete. Virtue, in Plato’s framework, has a definite limit: it is either present or absent, and once fully present it cannot be made more so. But pleasure, Plato argues, has no such limit. Pleasures admit of “more and less” — they can always be greater or smaller in quantity and intensity, and there is no natural stopping point.

SOCRATES: Have pleasure and pain a limit, or do they belong to the class which admits of more and less?

PHILEBUS: They belong to the class which admits of more, Socrates; for pleasure would not be perfectly good if she were not infinite in quantity and degree.

SOCRATES: Nor would pain, Philebus, be perfectly evil. — Plato, Philebus

But Plato turns this feature into a fatal objection. Precisely because pleasure is infinite, indefinitely extendable, and always capable of increase, it cannot be the highest good. The highest good must be something that can be achieved, that has a natural completion, and about which one can say: this is it, this is the goal, and I have reached it. Pleasure, being unlimited, can never be fully reached. Chasing it is like pouring water into a vessel with no bottom.

Plato makes the same argument again, at greater length, through his discussion of purity. The truest and best of any quality, he argues, is not that which is greatest in quantity but that which is most unadulterated — most free from admixture with its opposite:

SOCRATES: And now, having fairly separated the pure pleasures and those which may be rightly termed impure, let us further add to our description of them, that the pleasures which are in excess have no measure, but that those which are not in excess have measure.

SOCRATES: When you speak of purity and clearness, or of excess, abundance, greatness and sufficiency, in what relation do these terms stand to truth? … I should wish to test pleasure and knowledge in every possible way, in order that if there be a pure and impure element in either of them, I may present the pure element for judgment.

SOCRATES: Suppose that we first of all take whiteness. How can there be purity in whiteness, and what purity? Is that purest which is greatest or most in quantity, or that which is most unadulterated and freest from any admixture of other colours?

PROTARCHUS: Clearly that which is most unadulterated.

SOCRATES: True, Protarchus; and so the purest white, and not the greatest or largest in quantity, is to be deemed truest and most beautiful?

PROTARCHUS: Right. — Plato, Philebus

Apply this principle to pleasure, substituting “pleasure” for “whiteness” and “pain” for “other colours,” and Plato’s implication for pleasure becomes immediate: the truest pleasure is not the greatest in quantity but the most unmixed, the most free from any admixture of pain. This purity argument is important because it gives Epicurus a framework for his answer, as we shall see.

The same anti-Epicurean argument, restated as a direct sneer, recurs centuries later in Lactantius, who took the “absence of pain” reading of Epicurus at face value and mocked it as a philosophy fit only for the sick:

“To think that the highest good is the absence of pain is surely not characteristic of the Peripatetics or Stoics but of the bedridden philosophers. For who would not understand that this is the point discussed by the sick and those placed in some state of pain? What is so ridiculous as to consider that which a physician can give, as the highest good.” — Lactantius, Divine Institutes III.8.10

Lactantius was wrong in his caricature, but the caricature itself is instructive: it is exactly the “zero-state,” absence-of-pain-as-trivial-good reading that this article argues is a misunderstanding of Epicurus’s actual position — taken to its most contemptuous conclusion by a critic with every motive to make Epicurus look small.

Seneca’s Version of the Same Argument

The Stoic philosopher Seneca, writing two and a half centuries after Epicurus, restates the Platonic argument in compressed and memorable form. Seneca is a Stoic whose interpretation of Epicurean philosophy cannot be trusted as a guide to what Epicurus meant. Seneca consistently frames Epicurean material through a Stoic lens that distorts it However his restatement of the anti-pleasure argument is very clear and represents exactly the kind of challenge Epicurus was addressing. Seneca first states the general principle, applying it to nature’s own limits on desire:

“If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich. Nature’s wants are slight; the demands of opinion are boundless… Natural desires are limited; but those which spring from false opinion can have no stopping point. The false has no limits.” — Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Book I, Letter XVI

He then presses the argument directly against Epicurus’s own reported formula for the highest good:

“We find mentioned in the works of Epicurus two goods, of which his Supreme Good, or blessedness, is composed, namely, a body free from pain and a soul free from disturbance. These goods, if they are complete, do not increase; for how can that which is complete increase? The body is, let us suppose, free from pain; what increase can there be to this absence of pain? The soul is composed and calm; what increase can there be to this tranquility? Just as fair weather, purified into the purest brilliancy, does not admit of a still greater degree of clearness, so too, when a man takes care of his body and of his soul, weaving the texture of his good from both, his condition is perfect, and he has found the consummation of his prayers, if there is no commotion in his soul or pain in his body. Whatever delights fall to his lot over and above these two things do not increase his Supreme Good; they merely season it, so to speak, and add spice to it. For the absolute good of man’s nature is satisfied with peace in the body and peace in the soul… What can be added to that which is perfect? Nothing — otherwise that was not perfect to which something has been added… The ability to increase is proof that a thing is still imperfect.” (emphasis added) — Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 66.45-47

“The ability to increase is proof that a thing is imperfect.” This is the Platonic argument, restated in Stoic terms and pointed directly at Epicurus’s own alleged two-goods formula. If pleasure can always be increased — if no given level of pleasure constitutes the full and complete highest good — then pleasure is by definition always imperfect, always a means rather than an end, always a step on a staircase that has no top. The Stoics held that virtue, being complete and incapable of increase once fully present, passes this test and is therefore the highest good. Pleasure fails it, and Seneca is happy to take Epicurus’s two-perspectives-on-the-same thing formula as use it to establish completeness while dismissing everything else — taste, sight, sound, companionship, all the pleasures Epicurus said he could not do without — as mere “seasoning.”

This is the argument Epicurus had to answer. And the doctrine that has been so systematically misread is precisely his answer to it.

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Part Two: The Epicurean Answer — The Full Cup

Principal Doctrine 3: What It Actually Says

“The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain.” — Epicurus, Principal Doctrine 3

This is the statement that, more than any other, has been misread as defining the Epicurean goal as the mere absence of pain — the “zero state.” On the zero-state reading, PD3 says: the most you can hope for is that pain is gone; pleasure is just what you call that condition; and any vivid, active, positive experience beyond that baseline is irrelevant or secondary and probably damaging.

This reading misses what PD3 was designed to do. Read in the context of Plato’s challenge, PD3 is not defining what pleasure is. It is establishing that pleasure has a limit — precisely the limit that Plato said it lacked. Epicurus is saying that contrary to what Plato argued, pleasure is not an infinite and therefore incomplete thing. It does have a natural stopping point. That stopping point is reached when all pain has been removed and what remains is pleasure in its pure, unmixed state. At that point, pleasure is complete — it cannot be increased in magnitude because it has no remaining admixture of pain to displace. The vessel is full.

This answers Plato’s and Seneca’s challenge directly: is the ability to increase proof that a thing is imperfect? Yes, allows Epicurus, and pleasure at its fullest cannot be increased in the relevant sense, because what would increase it would be the displacement of more pain. And when all pain is gone, there is no more pain to displace. The cup that is full cannot be made fuller. Pleasure that is pure cannot be made purer.

But notice what this argument does not say. It does not say that the contents of the full cup are minimal, passive, or trivial. It does not say that what fills the cup is merely a nothingness - which is the way normal people then or now who are unfamiliar with the two-feeling doctrine would read “absence of pain.” It says only that the measure of fullness — the limit — is the point where pain is gone. The question of what fills the cup up to that limit is a separate question entirely, and the answer Epicurus gives to that question is vivid, specific, and unmistakably hedonistic.

Principal Doctrine 18 and the Comparison of Time

Principal Doctrine 18 makes the same point in a complementary way:

“The pleasure in the flesh is not increased, when once the pain due to want is removed, but is only varied.”

Once the limit is reached — once the pain of want is gone — pleasure does not increase in magnitude, but it is varied. The content of a full life changes and shifts and encompasses new experiences. The pleasures of taste, hearing, sight, companionship, memory, and anticipation all contribute to filling the cup; once the cup is full, these pleasures do not make it fuller in the sense of overflowing, but they vary and enrich what fills it. This is a crucial distinction. The zero-state reading takes “is only varied” as a dismissal of active pleasures. It is the opposite: it is the acknowledgment that active pleasures are the content of the full life, even if their variety does not change the fundamental measure of fullness.

The inagery that Lucretius develops makes the same point:

“Away from this time forth with thy tears, rascal; a truce to thy complaining: thou decayest after full enjoyment of all the prizes of life… or ever thou thoughtest, death has taken his stand at thy pillow, before thou canst take thy departure sated and filled with good things.” — Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Book III

And again:

“Then to be ever feeding the thankless nature of the mind, and never to fill it full and sate it with good things, as the seasons of the year do for us, when they come round and bring their fruits and varied delights, though after all we are never filled with the enjoyments of life, this methinks is to do what is told of the maidens in the flower of their age, to keep pouring water into a perforated vessel which in spite of all can never be filled full.” — Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Book III

The image here is not of a life that has found a still, empty, painless rest. It is of a life that has been filled — filled with the prizes and prizes of living, the fruits and delights of the seasons. The failure Lucretius describes is not the failure of pursuing too many pleasures; it is the failure of never securing them properly, of pursuing them in a way that allows them to drain away rather than accumulating in a sound vessel. The goal is fullness, not emptiness. The goal is being sated and filled with good things.

Lucretius uses the same vocabulary of fullness, growth, and unbridled natural vigor to describe nature’s own abundance in Book V — language worth noting because it is the same imagery, applied to the natural world, that his leaky-vessel passages apply to a well-lived human life:

“In the beginning the earth gave forth all kinds of herbage and verdant sheen about the hills and over all the plains; the flowery meadows glittered with the bright green hue, and next in order to the different trees was given a strong and emulous desire of growing up into the air with full unbridled powers.” — Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Book V

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Part Three: What Fills the Cup

Epicurus on the Content of Pleasure

Having established that the limit of pleasure is reached when pain is removed, we must ask: what fills the cup up to that limit? On this question, Epicurus was explicit, and his own words leave no room for the zero-state reading. From the opening quotation of this article and from multiple independent ancient sources, Epicurus stated his meaning without ambiguity:

“I know not how to conceive the good, apart from the pleasures of taste, of sex, of sound, and the pleasures of beautiful form.” — Epicurus, in Diogenes Laertius, Book X

Cicero, in Tusculan Disputations, quotes the same passage directly:

“For my part I find no meaning which I can attach to what is termed good, if I take away from it the pleasures obtained by taste, if I take away the pleasures which come from listening to music, if I take away too the charm derived by the eyes from the sight of figures in movement, or other pleasures by any of the senses in the whole man. Nor indeed is it possible to make such a statement as this — that it is joy of the mind which is alone to be reckoned as a good; for I understand by a mind in a state of joy, that it is so, when it has the hope of all the pleasures I have named — that is to say the hope that nature will be free to enjoy them without any blending of pain.” — Cicero, Tusculan Disputations III.18.41

This passage is decisive. Epicurus is not merely tolerating bodily and active pleasures as acceptable means to a higher state of calm. He is saying that he cannot even conceive of the good if he abstracts away from these pleasures. They are not secondary decoration. They are what the good is made of. Cicero confirms in the same discussion that Epicurus did not merely mention this once in passing:

“For he has not only used the term pleasure, but stated clearly what he meant by it. ‘Taste,’ he says, ‘and embraces and spectacles and music and the shapes of objects fitted to give a pleasant impression to the eyes.’” — Cicero, Tusculan Disputations III.20.46

And notice the precise definition Epicurus adds in the fuller passage above: joy of the mind is real when the mind has the hope that nature will be free to enjoy those pleasures without any blending of pain. This is the full cup in miniature. The pleasures of taste, hearing, sight, and the full range of embodied experience are the content. The “without any blending of pain” is the limit, the purity condition, the measure of fullness. Together they give us the Epicurean picture of the best life: filled with vivid, varied pleasures of all kinds, enjoyed in a condition as free from pain as reason and circumstance can achieve.

Torquatus, Cicero’s Epicurean spokesman in On Ends, states the positive picture directly:

“Let us imagine a man living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures alike of body and of mind, undisturbed either by the presence or by the prospect of pain: what possible state of existence could we describe as being more excellent or more desirable? One so situated must possess in the first place a strength of mind that is proof against all fear of death or of pain; he will know that death means complete unconsciousness, and that pain is generally light if long and short if strong, so that its intensity is compensated by brief duration and its continuance by diminishing severity. Let such a man moreover have no dread of any supernatural power; let him never suffer the pleasures of the past to fade away, but constantly renew their enjoyment in recollection, and his lot will be one which will not admit of further improvement.” — Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends

“Numerous and vivid pleasures alike of body and of mind.” This is what the full cup looks like from inside. It is not tranquil nothingness. It is a life rich with the kind of experiences that make living worthwhile. Cicero elsewhere confirms, in his own hostile voice, that this is exactly what Epicurus meant and insisted on:

“‘Does not Epicurus recognize pleasure in your sense?’ ‘Not always,’ said I, ‘now and then, I admit, he recognizes it only too fully, for he solemnly avows that he cannot even understand what good there can be or where it can be found, apart from that which is derived from food and drink, the delight of the ears, and the grosser forms of gratification.’” — Cicero, On Ends II.3.7

“In a number of passages where he is commending that real pleasure which all of us call by the same name, he goes so far as to say that he cannot even imagine any Good that is not connected with pleasure of the kind intended by Aristippus.” — Cicero, On Ends II.7.20

“But fancy his failing to see how strong a proof it is that the sort of pleasure, without which he declares he has no idea at all what Good means, [is] the pleasure of the palate, of the ears — the kinetic sort of pleasure… he extols it so much that he tells us he is incapable even of imagining what other good there can be.” — Cicero, On Ends II.10.29 and I.10.30

“Nor did he forgo those other indulgences in the absence of which Epicurus declares that he cannot understand what good is.” — Cicero, On Ends II.20.64

“According to your school, it is right to try to get money even at some risk; for money procures many very delightful pleasures.” — Cicero, On Ends II.17.55

Cicero was not a friendly witness. He wrote all of this as criticism, trying to embarrass the Epicureans with their own commitment to ordinary sensory pleasure. That a hostile critic, closely familiar with Epicurean texts now lost to us, repeatedly and independently confirms the same positive-pleasure reading is strong evidence that this is what the school was known and criticized for saying.

Diogenes of Oinoanda, whose great stone inscription in Lycia preserved Epicurean philosophy for all passersby, announced the purpose of his entire undertaking in terms that leave no ambiguity:

“Having already reached the sunset of my life, being almost on the verge of departure from the world on account of old age, I wanted, before being overtaken by death, to compose a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure.”

An anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure. This is not the vocabulary of passive tranquility or minimal-desire asceticism. It is the vocabulary of a life well and fully lived. Diogenes elsewhere describes the practical result of Epicurean philosophy in the same terms of active reduction of pain, not mere avoidance of engagement:

“These medicines we have put fully to the test; for we have dispelled the fears that grip us without justification, and, as for pains, those that are groundless we have completely excised, while those that are natural we have reduced to an absolute minimum, making their magnitude minute.” — Diogenes of Oinoanda

Nor should the ascetic reading survive contact with the biographical record. Epicurus’s own last will and testament, preserved by Diogenes Laertius, lists substantial property and provides for household staff — the record of a man who did not confine himself to a bare “necessaries only” existence, even as he taught that such a life was sufficient if fortune required it.

Ataraxia and Aponia: What These Terms Actually Mean

Ataraxia (freedom from mental disturbance) and aponia (freedom from bodily pain) are the Greek terms most often cited as evidence for the zero-state reading. If these are the Epicurean highest goods, the argument goes, then Epicurus was indeed counseling a life of minimal sensation and passive calm.

But this reading treats the negative description as if it exhausted the positive content. “Freedom from mental disturbance” is a description of the mental state of a person who has secured his pleasures, established firm friendships, freed himself from irrational fears about gods and death, and lives in confident possession of a rich and varied life. It is the mental condition of the fully pleasured person — not a replacement for pleasure, not a separate higher state, but the name for what the mind is like when pleasure fills it without the contamination of anxiety, fear, and unfulfilled craving.

To describe the goal of Epicurean ethics as ataraxia is like describing the goal of a feast as “not being hungry.” The description is not wrong — the well-fed person is indeed not hungry — but it captures only the negative condition, not the positive content that produced it. The feast was real. The food was real. The pleasure of eating was real. “Not being hungry” is what that reality looks like from the other side.

Epicurus himself made this connection explicit, and Diogenes Laertius preserves the full context of the statement, including Epicurus’s explicit break from the Cyrenaics on precisely this point:

“He [Epicurus] differs from the Cyrenaics with regard to pleasure. They do not include under the term the pleasure which is a state of rest, but only that which consists in motion. Epicurus admits both; also pleasure of mind as well as of body, as he states in his work On Choice and Avoidance*… The words of Epicurus in his work* On Choice are: ‘Peace of mind and freedom from pain are pleasures which imply a state of rest; joy and delight are seen to consist in motion and activity.’” — Epicurus, in Diogenes Laertius, Book X

Both are pleasures. Peace of mind and freedom from pain are real pleasures — they are not merely the absence of bad things but the presence of something good. Joy and delight in motion and activity are equally real pleasures. Epicurus “admits both,” Diogenes tells us explicitly, contrasting this with the Cyrenaics who admitted only kinetic pleasure. The Epicurean life makes room for the full range of both.

Metrodorus, Epicurus’s closest colleague, is quoted in the same Diogenes Laertius passage making the identical point in his own words: “Thus Pleasure being conceived both as that species which consists in motion and that which is a state of rest.” And Vatican Saying 14 confirms which of the two is actually being urged on the reader in that particular counsel against procrastination — it is joy (chairon), an active pleasure, not merely a settled state of rest, that Epicurus tells us not to postpone.

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Part Four: Clearing Away the Confusions

The Kinetic/Katastematic Distinction

The technical distinction between “kinetic” (active, moving) pleasure and “katastematic” (stable, resting) pleasure has generated more confusion in Epicurean scholarship than almost any other topic, and most of that confusion is readily avoidable.

The distinction is real but limited in its significance. It is a way of classifying pleasures by type — active experience versus settled condition — not a hierarchy that ranks one above the other. Epicurus acknowledged both types as genuine pleasures. The problem arises when interpreters read “katastematic” as code for “the highest” or “the only truly Epicurean” form of pleasure, and then treat the entire positive content of the Epicurean life — taste, hearing, sight, companionship, joy, delight — as at best a tolerated means to the katastematic state.

This reading cannot be sustained against the texts. Epicurus says he cannot conceive of the good without the pleasures of taste, hearing, and sight. He says joy and delight in motion and activity are pleasures. His school was attacked by the Stoics not for counseling passive calm but for celebrating the pleasures of the flesh. The kinetic/katastematic distinction, to the extent Epicurus himself used it, was a tool of philosophical classification in dialogue with Platonic categories — not the organizing principle of Epicurean life.

For practical purposes, the distinction matters mainly as a warning against two opposite errors. The first error is thinking that Epicurean ethics is simply unlimited sensory indulgence with no regard for consequences — the vulgar hedonism charge. The second error, which concerns us more here, is thinking that Epicurean ethics is essentially passive minimalism — the zero-state charge. The full cup model avoids both: it insists on pleasure as real and vivid content, and on reason as the tool for filling the cup as fully as possible while keeping it sound.

The Natural and Necessary Classification

Similarly, the classification of desires into natural-and-necessary, natural-but-not-necessary, and neither-natural-nor-necessary has been misread as a license for asceticism. On this misreading, the good Epicurean limits himself to the first category and treats everything beyond as problematic excess.

This misreading is directly contradicted by the purpose of the classification, which is analytical rather than prescriptive. The classification is a tool for understanding which desires are easily and cheaply satisfied and which lead into anxious, compulsive pursuit that generates more pain than pleasure. It identifies the floor of happiness — what is sufficient to secure the foundation — not the ceiling of what may be pursued.

Epicurus valued friendship as the greatest pleasure available to human beings, and friendship far exceeds the merely natural-and-necessary. He hosted dinners, enjoyed wine, enjoyed intellectual conversation. He wrote to friends and colleagues across the Greek world. The point of noting that bread and water suffice in an emergency is not that bread and water define the Epicurean ideal, but that the foundation of happiness is secure and accessible even when fortune is unkind. From that secure foundation, the full cup can be pursued.

Diogenes of Oinoanda states the correct relationship plainly:

“I say both now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues, which are inopportunely messed about by these people (being transferred from the place of the means to that of the end), are in no way an end, but the means to the end.” — Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 32

The virtues — including the practical reasoning that classifies desires and helps us choose wisely among pleasures — are means to pleasure, not ends in themselves. And pleasure, not minimalism, is the end.

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Part Five: The Ancient Witnesses

The ancient sources that touched on Epicurean philosophy, friend and foe alike, understood Epicurus to be teaching active, vivid pleasure as the goal of life. The following passages, drawn from across the ancient world and spanning several centuries, constitute a consistent record of what Epicurus actually meant. Many of them are hostile: they are quoting Epicurus’s own commitment to ordinary sensory pleasure precisely in order to attack it. That hostility is itself evidence — no one bothers attacking a philosopher for teaching what everyone already agrees is respectable.

Athenaeus, Deipnosophists XII, 546E: “Not only Aristippus and his followers, but also Epicurus and his welcomed kinetic pleasure — I will mention what follows, to avoid speaking of the ‘storms’ [of passion] and the ‘delicacies’ which Epicurus often cites, and the ‘stimuli’ which he mentions in his On the End-Goal. For he says: ‘For I at least do not even know what I should conceive the good to be, if I eliminate the pleasures of taste, and eliminate the pleasures of sex, and eliminate the pleasures of listening, and eliminate the pleasant motions caused in our vision by a visible form.’”

Athenaeus, Deipnosophists XII, 546F: “And Epicurus says, ‘The principle and the root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach; even wisdom and culture must be referred to this.’”

Lucian, The Double Indictment 21 (Epicurus portrayed as speaking): “[One who] ran away to Pleasure of his own free will, cutting the meshes of [Stoic] logic as if they were bonds, because he had the spirit of a human being, not of a dolt, and thought pain painful, as indeed it is, and pleasure pleasant.” A few lines later, in the same dialogue, the Stoa puts the question directly and Epicurus does not equivocate: “Stoa: Do you consider pain bad? Epicurus: Yes. Stoa: And pleasure good? Epicurus: Certainly so!”

Cicero, In Defense of Publius Sestius 10.23: “[Publius Clodius] praised those most who are said to be above all others the teachers and eulogists of pleasure [the Epicureans]… He added that these same men were quite right in saying that the wise do everything for their own interests; that no sane man should engage in public affairs; that nothing was preferable to a life of tranquility crammed full of pleasures.” The Latin, which can be verified independently, is unambiguous: nihil esse praestabilius otiosa vita, plena et conferta voluptatibus — a life full and crammed (plena et conferta) with pleasures.

Cicero, On Ends II.27.88: “Isn’t pleasure more desirable the longer it lasts? On what ground then does Epicurus speak of a deity (for so he always does) as happy and immortal? Take away his everlasting life, and Jove is no happier than Epicurus. Each of them enjoys the Chief Good, that is to say, pleasure. Wherein then is he inferior to a god, except that a god lives forever?”

Cicero, Against Lucius Calpurnius Piso 27.66: “It is his habit in all his discussions to attach higher value to the pleasures of the belly than to the delights of the eye and the ear.”

Zeno of Sidon, by way of Cicero, Tusculan Disputations III.17.38: “Blessed is he who has the enjoyment of present pleasure and the assurance that he would have enjoyment either throughout life or for a great part of life without the intervention of pain, or should pain come, that it would be short-lived if extreme, but if prolonged it would still allow more that was pleasant than evil.”

Varro, by way of Saint Augustine, City of God XIX.1: “There are four things that men naturally seek… pleasure, which is an agreeable activity of physical perception, or repose, the state in which the individual suffers no bodily discomfort, or both of these (which Epicurus calls by the single name of pleasure)…” Both active pleasure and rest from pain are included under the single Epicurean term — not as rivals but as aspects of the same whole.

Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Soul II.19: “The Epicureans held that what is first congenial to us, without qualification, is pleasure. But they say that as we get older, this pleasure articulates itself in many ways.” Pleasure first and articulated into its full variety through a well-lived life.

Plutarch, That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible 3, 1088C: “Epicurus has imposed a limit on pleasures that applies to all of them alike: the removal of all pain. For he believes that our nature adds to pleasure only up to the point where pain is abolished and does not allow it any further increase in magnitude (although the pleasure, when the state of painlessness is reached, admits of certain unessential variations). But to proceed to this point, accompanied by desire, is our stint of pleasure, and the journey is indeed short and quick.” Plutarch here is stating PD3 and PD18 in his own words, as an ancient reader who understood the doctrine perfectly well — and then goes on to attack it as trivial, which is precisely the objection this article addresses.

Plutarch, same work, 4, 1089A: Describing what he takes to be the Epicurean position — “the superiority of the Sage lies above all in this: vividly remembering and keeping intact in himself the sights and feelings and movements associated with pleasure” — a description of an active, memory-rich engagement with pleasure, not a passive emptiness.

Plutarch, same work, 4, 1089D: “It is this, I believe, that has driven them… to take refuge in the ‘painlessness’ and the ‘stable condition of the flesh,’ supposing that the pleasurable life is found in thinking of this state as about to occur in people or as being achieved; for the ‘stable and settled condition of the flesh,’ and the ‘trustworthy expectation’ of this condition contain, they say, the highest and the most assured delight for men who are able to reflect.”

Plutarch, same work, 5, 1090B: Noting the fragility of the future — “the future, like the weather, is always uncertain” — as a problem Plutarch presses against the Epicurean reliance on a stable, expected condition of pleasure.

Plutarch, same work, 7, 1091A: “Not only is the basis that they assume for the pleasurable life untrustworthy and insecure, it is quite trivial and paltry as well, inasmuch as their ‘thing delighted’ — their good — is an escape from ills… Epicurus too makes a similar statement to the effect that the good is a thing that arises out of your very escape from evil and from your memory and reflection and gratitude that this has happened to you. His words are these: ‘That which produces a jubilation unsurpassed is the nature of good, if you apply your mind rightly and then stand firm and do not stroll about, prating meaninglessly about the good.’”

Plutarch, same work, 16, 1098D, quoting Metrodorus’s Letter to His Brother Timocrates: “We are not called to save the nation or get crowned by it for wisdom; what is called for, my dear Timocrates, is to eat and to drink wine, gratifying the belly without harming it… It made me both happy and confident to have learned from Epicurus how to gratify the belly properly… The belly, Timocrates, my man of wisdom, is the region that contains the highest end.”

Plutarch, same work, 17, 1098D: “Indeed these people, you might say, describing a circle with the belly as center and radius, circumscribe within it the whole area of pleasure.”

Cf. Plutarch, Against Colotes 30, 1125A: “It is the men who look with contempt on all these things as old wives’ tales, and think that our good is to be found in the belly and the other passages by which pleasure makes her entry.” And 2, 1108C: “…by those who keep shouting that the good is to be found in the belly.”

Plutarch, On Peace of Mind 2, 465F: “Not even Epicurus believes that men who are eager for honor and glory should lead an inactive life, but that they should fulfill their natures by engaging in politics and entering public life, on the ground that, because of their natural dispositions, they are more likely to be disturbed and harmed by inactivity if they do not obtain what they desire.” Even public, active engagement with the world — not withdrawal — is the Epicurean counsel for those whose own nature calls for it.

Antiochus of Ascalon, by way of Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies II.21, 178.43: “Of those that are ruled by pleasure are the Cyrenaics and Epicurus; for these expressly said that to live pleasantly was the chief end, and that pleasure was the only perfect good. Epicurus also says that the removal of pain is pleasure.” And 178.46: “Epicurus also says that the removal of pain is pleasure; and says that that is to be preferred, which first attracts from itself to itself, being, that is, wholly in motion” — an ancient testimony that Epicurus valued kinetic, actively-attracting pleasure in its own right, not merely as a path to rest.

Alciphron, Letters III.55.8 (Autocletus to Hetoemaristus, “Gatecrasher” to “Prompt-to-Breakfast”): “Zenocrates the Epicurean took the harp-girls in his arms, gazing upon them from half-closed eyes with a languishing and melting look, and saying that this was ‘tranquility of the flesh’ and ‘the full intensity of pleasure.’” Whatever one makes of the anecdote’s reliability, it shows that even a mocking outsider’s caricature of an Epicurean took for granted that “tranquility” and “full intensity of pleasure” were being spoken of as the same thing, not as rivals.

Porphyry, On Abstinence I.53: “Epicurus rightly surmised that we should beware of food which we want to enjoy and which we pursue, but find disagreeable once we get it… For this reason we should guard against excess even of simple things, and in all cases we must examine what happens as a result of enjoyment or possession, how big a thing it is, and whether it relieves any trouble of body or soul.” Prudent management of active pleasures, not their rejection.

Saint Augustine, Against the Academicians III.7.16 (quoting an imagined Cicero): “If Zeno or Chrysippus were asked who the wise man is, he’ll reply that the wise man is the one whom he himself has described. In return, Epicurus… will maintain instead that the wise man is the one most skilled at catching pleasures… Epicurus, like Bacchus, has called together a drunken mob from his Gardens to aid him against this onslaught!… Elevating the name of pleasure as agreeableness and calm, with popular support, Epicurus passionately insists that without pleasure nobody could seem happy.”

Saint Augustine, Confessions VI.16: “I argued in those days with my friends Alypius and Nebridius concerning the limits of good and evil. Determining, in my judgment, that Epicurus should have won the garland, had I not verily believed that there remained a life for the soul after the body was dead… And so I put the question: suppose we were to be immortal, and were to live in perpetual enjoyment of bodily pleasures, and that without fear of losing — why should we not then be fully happy?” Even Augustine, no friend of Epicureanism, concedes that a life of active bodily pleasure was the Epicurean promise, and that its only defect (in his eyes) was mortality, not emptiness.

Lactantius, Divine Institutes III.7.7: “Epicurus thinks that the highest good is in the pleasure of the mind. Aristippus holds that it is in the pleasure of the body.” And III.17.38 (paraphrasing Epicurus): “Let us serve pleasure, then, in whatever way we can, for in a short time we will be nothing whatsoever. Let us suffer no day, therefore, no point of time to flow by for us without pleasure, lest, since we ourselves are at sometime to perish, the very fact that we live may perish.”

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 92.6 (arguing, hostilely, against a purely bodily reading of pleasure): “A pleasant physical sensation affects this life of ours; why therefore, do you hesitate to say that all is well with a man just because all is well with his appetite? And do you rate… among men, the person whose Supreme Good is a matter of flavors and colors and sounds?” — again confirming, even as he mocks it, that this is the position Seneca understood Epicureans to hold.

These are not the descriptions of a philosophy of passive tranquility. They are consistent, across hostile and sympathetic sources alike, in their identification of Epicurean philosophy with vigorous, varied, active pleasure as the content of the best life.

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Part Six: Modern Scholarly Support

The full cup reading is not a modern invention by me. It has real support in the scholarly literature, including from writers whose analysis independently converges on the same conclusion: Epicurus did not teach a minimal, passive, pain-avoidance-only ethic.

Raphael Woolf, in his chapter “Pleasure and Desire” in the Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (2009), directly confronts and rejects the ascetic caricature:

“It would… be a poignant historical irony if the figure of the Epicurean as lover of luxury should be so far removed from actual Epicurean doctrine, if this sets as a condition of the good life that one abstain from luxury and aim to satisfy only one’s basic needs. Fortunately, it is a mistake to read Epicurus in quite this way… Luxury, according to Epicurus, is in fact to be welcomed, just so long as its possession does not detract from the maintenance or attainment of a pain and trouble free state… We are not told to confine ourselves to the occasional bout of luxury, as if our task is to fend off all those other luxurious opportunities that are likely to befall us.” — Raphael Woolf, “Pleasure and Desire,” Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, 2009

Woolf goes on to make a point directly relevant to the calculus of choice at the heart of the full cup model: “Mention of the calculus does… strengthen the thought that an Epicurean would be expected to choose luxury over simplicity (say business class over economy) so long as equanimity were not thereby compromised.”

Mathew Wenham, writing on Cicero’s role in shaping the standard interpretation, locates the origin of the zero-state reading precisely where this article locates it — in Platonic categories imported through Cicero, not in Epicurus’s own texts:

“The standard interpretation of the concept of katastematic pleasure in Epicurus has it referring to ‘static’ states from which feeling is absent. We owe the prevalence of this interpretation to Cicero’s account of Epicureanism in his De Finibus Bonorum Et Malorum*. Cicero’s account, in turn, is based on the Platonic theory of pleasure… I claim that it is not Epicurus, but the standard interpretation that generates these errors.”* — Mathew Wenham, on Cicero’s interpretation of katastematic pleasure

Boris Nikolsky’s 2001 paper “Epicurus on Pleasure” goes further, questioning whether the kinetic / katastematic classification is even authentically Epicurean in the rigid, two-tier form usually attributed to him:

“This classification, usually regarded as authentic, confronts us with a number of problems and contradictions… From the [texts that do not mention the kinetic/static distinction] there emerges a concept of pleasure as a single and not twofold notion, while such terms as ‘motion’ and ‘state’ describe not two different phenomena but only two characteristics of the same phenomenon… I argue that the idea of Epicurus’ classification of pleasures is based on a misinterpretation of Epicurus’ concept in Academic doxography, which tended to contrapose it to doctrines of other schools, above all to the Cyrenaics’ views.” — Boris Nikolsky, “Epicurus on Pleasure,” Phronesis, 2001

Gosling and Taylor, in their standard reference work The Greeks on Pleasure (1982), reach a closely related conclusion in their chapter on katastematic and kinetic pleasures:

“Epicurus was not advocating the pursuit of some passionless state which could only be called one of pleasure in order to defend a paradox. Rather he was advocating a life where pain is excluded and we are left with familiar physical pleasures. The resultant life may be simple, but it is straightforwardly pleasant.” — Gosling & Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure, 1982

Norman DeWitt, in Epicurus and His Philosophy (1954), made the same point decades earlier, and identified the same error this article identifies — reading Epicurus as if he had “emptied pleasure of all positive content”:

“A modern Platonist, ill informed on the true intent of Epicurus, has this to say: ‘What… is to be said of a philosophy that begins by regarding pleasure as the only positive good and ends by emptying pleasure of all positive content?’ This ignores the fact that this was but one of the definitions of pleasure offered by Epicurus, that he recognized kinetic as well as static pleasures. It ignores also the fact that Epicurus took personal pleasure in public festivals and encouraged his disciples to attend them and that regular banquets were a part of the ritual of the sect.” — Norman DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy, 1954

Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens (1822), a novelistic but sympathetic account of the Garden, depicts the same active, socially rich, aesthetically engaged household — music, art, conversation, shared meals — without treating the kinetic / katastematic distinction as significant enough to even mention. And Pierre Gassendi, in his seventeenth-century Life and Doctrine of Epicurus, defended the same active picture against the charge of passivity in almost the same vessel-imagery this article uses:

“We would not have the life of a wise man to be like a torrent or rapid stream, so we would not it should be like a standing dead-pool: but rather like a river gliding on silently and quietly. We therefore hold his pleasure is not unactive, but that which reason makes firm to him.” — Pierre Gassendi, Life and Doctrine of Epicurus (trans. Thomas Stanley)

None of these scholars is cited here as agreeing with every detail of the full cup model as presented in this article. But each of them, working independently and from different angles, arrives at the same core conclusion: the passive, minimal, “zero-state” Epicurus is a construction of his critics and their heirs, not a reading required by the texts themselves.

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Part Seven: Why the Zero-State Reading Persists and Why It Matters

The Distorting Filters

The zero-state reading of Epicurus did not arise from careful reading of the texts. It arose from at least three cultural filters that have operated on the interpretation of Epicurean philosophy for centuries.

The Stoic filter is the most ancient. Stoics found it useful to read Epicurus as essentially a failed Stoic — someone who wanted to call the wise man’s condition “pleasure” but who, when pressed, turned out to mean something very like the Stoic apatheia or freedom from passion. On this reading, the Epicurean sage is not fundamentally different from the Stoic sage; he just uses different vocabulary. This reading served the Stoics by domesticating their most vigorous opponent, and it has had remarkable staying power in scholarship that has absorbed Stoic assumptions without fully recognizing them as such.

The Judeo-Christian filter treats pleasure as philosophically suspect and looks for ways to rescue Epicurus from the implications of his own doctrine. If Epicurus really taught pleasure, he must have meant something elevated, spiritual, and far removed from the pleasures of the body. On this reading, “pleasure” becomes a code word for inner peace, and the rich positive content of Epicurean life is suppressed in favor of a picture that is theologically more comfortable. Lactantius’s mockery of Epicurus as a philosopher fit only for “the bedridden,” quoted above, is this filter operating in its earliest and least disguised form.

The Humanist filter assumes that the good person is defined by rational self-restraint and the subordination of desire to principle. Epicurus, on this reading, must have been teaching exactly that — the reduction of desire to what is natural and necessary, the cultivation of rational calm, the subordination of the passions to reason. The full, vivid, bodily pleasure that Epicurus explicitly describes becomes an embarrassment to be explained away.

All three filters operate in the direction of the zero-state reading. All three are contradicted by the texts. And all three have contributed to a picture of Epicurus that is, as the ancient Stoics and Academics attacking him recognized, exactly the wrong picture.

Why It Matters

The zero-state reading matters because it transforms Epicurean philosophy from a vigorous and positive account of what makes life worth living into a withdrawal and resignation - a counsel of minimal expectation that is, in practice, indistinguishable from the life-denial it was designed to oppose. If the goal is simply to be undisturbed — to feel as little as possible, to want as little as possible, to be satisfied with the mere absence of pain — then Epicurean philosophy offers nothing that a Stoic or a Buddhist or a Christian mystic could not equally offer, and does so less systematically than any of them.

Reframing the issue as a full cup of pleasure restores what was actually there. The goal is a life as Cicero stated — plena et conferta voluptatibus — full and crammed with pleasures. The vessel must be sound so that pleasures do not drain away; reason must be employed so that pleasures do not generate greater pains; the foundation must be secure so that the pursuit of further pleasures does not depend on circumstances beyond our control. But the goal is fullness, not emptiness. The goal is a life in which, as Torquatus put it, pleasures are “numerous and vivid alike of body and of mind.”

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Conclusion: The Answer Epicurus Gave

Plato asked: can pleasure be the highest good if it has no limit? And he answered his own question: no, it cannot.

Epicurus answered differently. Pleasure does have a limit. The limit is the fullness of a life from which pain has been displaced by the pleasures of taste, hearing, sight, companionship, intellectual activity, memory, and anticipation — all the pleasures that, as Epicurus said, he could not conceive of the good without. When those pleasures are secured in full measure, without the admixture of pain that comes from irrational fear, anxious craving, and unfulfilled natural need, the cup is full. It cannot be increased in magnitude, only varied in content. And the variation it admits is the full rich variety of a life well and actively lived.

Ataraxia and aponia are the names for what the cup is like when it is full — mental peace and bodily ease as the condition of a life filled with genuine pleasure. They are not the content of the cup. They are its condition of fullness. The content is what Epicurus said: the pleasures of taste, of hearing, of sight, of sex, of friendship, of philosophy, of memory, of the confident expectation of future good.

That is the full cup. That is the Epicurean answer to Plato. And that is the life Epicurus taught.

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Key Texts Referenced

Epicurus

• Principal Doctrines 3 and 18 (Bailey translation, via Diogenes Laertius Book X)
• Bailey Fragment 62 (net-pleasure calculation)
• Letter to Menoeceus (Diogenes Laertius 10.128—132)
• On Choice and Avoidance (preserved by Diogenes Laertius 10.136)
• Last Will and Testament (preserved by Diogenes Laertius)
• Vatican Saying 14

Epicurean and Sympathetic Sources

• Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends (De Finibus) Books I—II
• Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragments 3, 32, and 37, and the “medicines”/“anthem” fragments (Smith translation)
• Metrodorus, Letter to His Brother Timocrates (via Plutarch)
• Frances Wright, A Few Days in Athens (1822)
• Pierre Gassendi, Life and Doctrine of Epicurus (trans. Thomas Stanley)

Lucretius

• De Rerum Natura Books III and V (Bailey translation)

Plato and the Stoic/Platonic Challenge

• Plato, Philebus (on limits and purity of pleasure)
• Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Book I Letter XVI, and 66.45—47 (cited as the Stoic/Platonic challenge Epicurus was answering, not as a guide to Epicurean doctrine)
• Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 92.6

Hostile and Neutral Ancient Witnesses

• Cicero, Tusculan Disputations III.18.41, III.20.46; In Defense of Publius Sestius 10.23; On Ends II.3.7, II.7.20, I.10.30, II.10.29, II.17.55, II.20.64, II.27.88; Against Lucius Calpurnius Piso 27.66
• Athenaeus, Deipnosophists XII, 546E and 546F
• Lucian, The Double Indictment 21
• Zeno of Sidon, by way of Cicero, Tusculan Disputations III.17.38
• Varro, by way of Saint Augustine, City of God XIX.1
• Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Soul II.19
• Plutarch, That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible 3 (1088C), 4 (1089A, 1089D), 5 (1090B), 7 (1091A), 16 (1098D), 17 (1098D)
• Plutarch, Against Colotes 2 (1108C), 30 (1125A)
• Plutarch, On Peace of Mind 2 (465F)
• Antiochus of Ascalon, by way of Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies II.21 (178.43, 178.46)
• Alciphron, Letters III.55.8
• Porphyry, On Abstinence I.53
• Saint Augustine, Against the Academicians III.7.16; Confessions VI.16
• Lactantius, Divine Institutes III.7.7, III.8.10, III.17.38

Modern Scholarship

• Raphael Woolf, “Pleasure and Desire,” Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (2009)
• Mathew Wenham, on Cicero’s interpretation of katastematic pleasure in Epicurus
• Boris Nikolsky, “Epicurus on Pleasure,” Phronesis (2001)
• Gosling & Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure (1982), ch. 19
• Norman DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy (1954), ch. 12