Commentary On The Doctrines of Epicurus
Preface
Section titled “Preface”This document brings together two of the most important primary sources in Classical Epicurean philosophy — the Principal Doctrines and the Vatican Sayings — along with a systematic commentary on how each has been misread by later interpreters.
The Principal Doctrines (Kyriai Doxai) are a collection of forty authoritative propositions transmitted by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (Book X). They represent the closest thing to a formal doctrinal summary that survives from Epicurus himself, covering the nature of the gods, death, pleasure, pain, justice, and the proper conduct of life. The Vatican Sayings are a collection of approximately eighty aphorisms from Epicurus and his associates, rediscovered in a Vatican manuscript in 1888. Less formally structured than the Principal Doctrines, they preserve some of Epicurus’ most direct and personal expressions on friendship, desire, self-sufficiency, old age, and the pursuit of happiness. Both collections were translated into English by Cyril Bailey in Epicurus: The Extant Remains (Oxford, 1926), and the Bailey translations are the primary basis for the translations that follows.
For each doctrine and saying, this document identifies the dominant modern misreading, names the adulterating tradition responsible for it — whether Stoic, Platonic, religious, Humanist, or Academic Skeptical — and then restates the correct Epicurean interpretation grounded in what Epicurus and his school actually wrote and taught. The purpose is not merely critical: it is constructive. Two thousand years of philosophical cross-contamination have left most popular and academic presentations of Epicureanism shaped more by his rivals than by Epicurus himself. Stoics have turned his counsel of pleasure into a counsel of endurance; Platonists have turned his naturalism into a covert spiritualism; religious interpreters have treated his rejection of divine providence as a moral deficiency to be excused or minimized; Humanists have drafted him into causes he would not have recognized. The result is that the genuine Epicurean position — bold, empiricist yet rational, life-affirming, and rigorously anti-supernatural — is rarely encountered in its undiluted form.
The commentary is arranged in two parts. Part One covers the forty Principal Doctrines in order. Part Two covers the Vatican Sayings, with cross-references to the Principal Doctrines where the texts overlap. Readers who are new to Epicurean philosophy may wish to read the doctrines and sayings straight through first before returning to the commentary; those already familiar with the texts may find it more useful to read commentary and text together, doctrine by doctrine.
All commentary in this document has been compiled and edited by Cassius Amicus. It is subject to regular revision and improvement, and you should always check this page for the latest version. Comments and suggestions may be submitted by email but are best received as part of the discussion thread for this document at EpicureanFriends.com.
Part One: The Principal Doctrines
Section titled “Part One: The Principal Doctrines”The forty Principal Doctrines of Epicurus are among the most important texts in the history of philosophy — and among the most consistently misread. Over two thousand years, a steady stream of interpreters working from Stoic, Platonic, religious, skeptical, and Humanist assumptions have read foreign frameworks into these doctrines, turning Epicurus into a pale version of his rivals or, worse, into an ascetic, a recluse, or a moral relativist. The result is that most people who encounter Epicurean philosophy today are meeting a distorted reconstruction rather than the genuine article.
This page examines each of the forty doctrines in the Bailey translation, identifies the primary adulterating tradition responsible for the dominant misreading, states the common misinterpretation plainly, and then gives the correct Epicurean interpretation from the perspective of what Epicurus actually wrote and what his philosophy was actually designed to accomplish.
The Bailey translations used here are from Cyril Bailey, Epicurus: The Extant Remains (Oxford, 1926).
Bailey: “The blessed and immortal nature knows no trouble itself nor causes trouble to any other, so that it is never constrained by anger or favour. For all such things exist only in the weak.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus was simply an atheist who dismissed the gods as irrelevant, or this doctrine is an outdated theological curiosity with no practical bearing on modern life.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This doctrine does urgent practical work: it removes the greatest single source of human fear and anxiety — the belief that powerful divine beings are watching, judging, and punishing or rewarding us. Epicurus did not dismiss the gods; he described their true nature in order to free us from the fear of divine retribution that poisons happiness at its root. The target is not theology in the abstract but the specific mind virus of supernatural fear that every religion of reward and punishment exploits.
Bailey: “Death is nothing to us: for that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Stoicism / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: This is a counsel of brave resignation — Stoic-flavored acceptance that death is inevitable and must be faced with courage. Others assimilate it to Buddhist non-attachment or “mindful acceptance.”
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is not about courage or acceptance at all. It is a logical argument that dissolves the fear of death by exposing its hidden false premise — that death will be experienced as something bad. Once you see that the dissolved person has no sensation, there is no subject left to suffer. The fear was always irrational, not merely something to be endured bravely. The Stoic reading substitutes endurance for understanding; the religious reading substitutes afterlife hope for the same understanding. Epicurus offers something more valuable than either: the fear simply ceases to have any rational foundation, and true courage to face adverity emerges when we realize that there can be nothing terrible in life for those who understand that there is nothing terrible in death.
Bailey: “The limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful. Wherever pleasure is present, as long as it is there, there is neither pain of body nor of mind, nor of both at once.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is teaching asceticism — the most one can hope for is the mere absence of pain, a thin and modest reward. The doctrine sets a low ceiling on what pleasure can be.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This doctrine does the opposite of imposing restriction. Once pain and want are removed, pleasure can be experienced in full — there is no deficit, no higher rung to climb, no transcendent state to achieve. The doctrine does not describe a ceiling; it announces that complete pleasure is available to anyone who removes what stands in its way. The ascetic misreading — shared by Stoic, religious, and some Humanist interpreters who are uncomfortable with Epicurus’s frank commitment to pleasure — turns a liberating teaching into a program of self-denial.
Bailey: “Pain does not last continuously in the flesh, but the acutest pain is there for a very short time, and even that which just exceeds the pleasure in the flesh does not continue for many days at once. But chronic illnesses permit a predominance of pleasure over pain in the flesh.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: Wishful thinking, obviously false for anyone with serious chronic pain. This is one of Epicurus’ weakest and least convincing doctrines.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus is providing an empirical, naturalistic account of how pain actually behaves — as the foundation for a confident rather than fearful orientation toward bodily suffering. The doctrine does not deny that pain is real or that chronic illness is serious; it calibrates the rational response. The mind virus it targets — shared by Stoic endurance culture and religious suffering-as-virtue frameworks — is the assumption that pain, once present, is total and permanent, which turns manageable suffering into despair. Confidence based on honest observation of nature is Epicurus’ answer to both the Stoic’s grim endurance and the religious believer’s appeal to redemptive suffering.
Bailey: “It is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and well and justly, nor again to live a life of prudence, virtue, and justice without living pleasantly.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus was secretly a Stoic or Kantian — he really believed virtue was intrinsically valuable, and this doctrine proves it. Virtue is sufficient for happiness on his view, and pleasure is incidental.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus is saying that virtue and pleasant living are inseparable in practice — not that virtue produces happiness independently of pleasure. Virtue is a means, not an end. There is no path to genuine pleasure that bypasses prudence and justice. This makes pleasure the criterion by which virtue is justified, not the other way around. The Stoic and Humanist misreading treats virtue as the goal and pleasure as the byproduct — the exact opposite of what Epicurus says.
Bailey: “To secure protection from men anything is a natural good, by which you may be able to attain this end.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus endorses ruthless self-interest, or this minor doctrine is simply a pragmatic observation with no larger philosophical significance.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This doctrine establishes the positive Epicurean justification for social engagement, political prudence, and the cultivation of friendships and alliances — not as external civic duty imposed from above, but as what nature itself directs us toward for the sake of security and ultimately happiness. The misread strips out the phrase “by which you may be able to attain this end,” which makes the naturalistic and instrumental basis explicit. Epicurean social life is grounded in nature, not in abstract obligations imported from Stoic cosmopolitanism or Humanist civic idealism.
Bailey: “Some men wished to become famous and conspicuous, thinking that they would thus win for themselves safety from other men. Wherefore if the life of such men is safe, they have obtained the good which nature craves; but if it is not safe, they do not possess that for which they strove at first by the instinct of nature.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: Either a blanket condemnation of fame-seeking that contradicts PD 6, or Epicurus hypocritically endorsing a pursuit he elsewhere dismisses.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus is applying a consistent standard: the instinct behind the pursuit of fame is natural — it is the desire for security. The question is whether fame actually delivers security in a given case. This is a practical tool for evaluating a common life path against the standard of nature, not a universal prohibition or endorsement. Neither the Stoic’s civic duty nor the Humanist’s self-actualization narrative is the measure; nature’s requirement — security as the foundation of pleasure — is the only relevant criterion.
Bailey: “No pleasure is a bad thing in itself: but the means which produce some pleasures bring with them disturbances many times greater than the pleasures.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism / Skepticism
Common Misinterpretation: The first clause proves Epicurus approved of unlimited indulgence. “No pleasure is bad in itself” is taken as a license for hedonistic excess.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The second clause is the entire practical content of the doctrine, and it is consistently dropped by those who misuse the first. Pleasures must be evaluated by what they cost in disturbance, anxiety, and consequent pain. The standard is pleasure net of consequences — more demanding than either naive hedonism or the ascetic’s blanket prohibition. Every tradition that has accused Epicurus of encouraging indulgence has done so by amputating this doctrine at the semicolon.
Bailey: “If every pleasure could be intensified so that it lasted and influenced the whole organism or the most essential parts of our nature, pleasures would never differ from one another.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: A puzzling abstraction with no clear practical application, usually passed over in silence.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus is establishing that differences we experience among pleasures arise from how they vary across time and across the parts of our nature they engage — not from differences in ultimate value or from a hierarchy of “higher” and “lower” pleasures. This directly refutes the Platonic ranking that elevates intellectual pleasures above bodily ones as intrinsically superior, and it equally refutes the hedonistic maximizer’s obsession with intensity. All pleasure, as pleasure, is good; what matters is the whole life considered.
Bailey: “If the things that produce the pleasures of profligate men really freed them from fears of the mind — the fears, namely, that concern the heavenly bodies, death, and pain — we should never find fault with such men, since they would then be filling themselves with pleasures from every source and never have pain of body or mind, which is the evil.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: Either Epicurus secretly approves of debauchery, or he is embarrassedly excusing profligates while really condemning them — a hypocritical hedge.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus is identifying fear — of death, of divine retribution, of unending pain — as the actual cause of unhappy excess, not pleasure itself. The profligate man’s problem is not that he pursues pleasure but that he pursues it frantically because he has never addressed his underlying fears. Remove the fears and the frenzy dissolves. The religious tradition condemns the pleasures; Epicurus identifies the fears behind the frenzy and cures those instead.
Bailey: “If we were not troubled by our suspicions of the phenomena of the sky and about death, fearing that it concerns us, and also by our failure to grasp the limits of pains and desires, we should have no need of natural science.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Humanism / Skepticism
Common Misinterpretation: An interesting historical relic, now superseded by modern science, which has made Epicurean natural philosophy obsolete and this doctrine irrelevant.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus explains why natural science matters for living well: it dissolves the specific fears — cosmic anxiety, fear of death, fear of unlimited pain and desire — that are the primary enemies of happiness. Modern science has advanced enormously but has not eliminated those fears in most people. The Epicurean application of natural philosophy to fear specifically remains as urgent as it was in the fourth century BC. The doctrine is not about accumulating scientific knowledge for its own sake — a Humanist or Skeptical concern — but about using an understanding of nature as the cure for existential dread.
Bailey: “A man cannot dispel his fear about the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the universe but suspects the truth of some mythical story. So that without natural science it is not possible to attain our pleasures unalloyed.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: An attack on religion that is either divisively anti-faith or makes philosophy dependent on scientific expertise beyond ordinary people’s reach.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: As long as a person believes the universe is governed by beings who may intervene with punishment or reward, complete pleeasure is impossible. Natural philosophy — not scientific credentials, but the basic understanding that the universe operates by nature and not by divine will — is the prerequisite for pleasure that is genuinely unalloyed. This is accessible to any person willing to examine the evidence honestly. The Platonic hidden-world assumption and the religious providential-god assumption are the two specific targets; both produce the same practical result: a life lived in fear of forces beyond one’s understanding.
Bailey: “There is no profit in securing protection in relation to men, if things above and things beneath the earth and indeed all in the boundless universe remain matters of suspicion.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: An obscure doctrine with no clear modern application; largely ignored in popular presentations of Epicurean philosophy.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This doctrine makes explicit what the surrounding doctrines imply: social security and philosophical understanding are not separate departments. The most comfortable material and social position in the world will not produce happiness if cosmic fear remains. Humanist frameworks that treat happiness as a purely social and material problem — achievable through good institutions, fair treatment, and personal relationships alone — miss this entirely. Epicurus insists that the foundational questions of natural philosophy cannot be sidestepped without cost to the quality of every pleasure.
Bailey: “The most unmixed source of protection from men, which is secured to some extent by a certain force of expulsion, is in fact the immunity which results from a quiet life and the retirement from the world.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: This is the defining Epicurean social teaching: withdraw from public life, retreat to the garden, avoid politics and ambition entirely. The Epicurean ideal is a private, apolitical existence.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This doctrine identifies one reliable method of achieving security — not the only one, and not a universal prescription. Read with PD 6, 7, and 13, it is one option in a practical framework whose standard is always security as the foundation of pleasure. Elevating this single doctrine into Epicurus’s total social philosophy has produced the caricature of the passive, retreating Epicurean — a distortion eagerly promoted by Stoic and civic Humanist rivals who needed Epicurus to be politically irrelevant.
Bailey: “The wealth demanded by nature is both limited and easily procured; that demanded by idle imaginings stretches on to infinity.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: An ascetic teaching: Epicurus says be content with little, suppress your desires, treat simplicity as a virtue in itself.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The doctrine announces that the finish line is closer than you think. Nature’s requirements are modest and achievable; only the additions supplied by vain imagination are unlimited and exhausting. This is liberation, not restriction: once you identify what nature actually requires, the path to happiness is easy and already within reach. The mind virus it cures — embedded in Stoic virtue-for-its-own-sake, religious otherworldliness, and the Humanist culture of achievement and recognition — is the belief that “enough” is always just out of reach.
Bailey: “In but few things chance hinders a wise man, but the greatest and most important matters reason has ordained and throughout the duration of life does and will ordain.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Skepticism
Common Misinterpretation: Stoic-style amor fati — the wise Epicurean passively accepts fortune and endures what fate delivers.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus is making a strong, optimistic claim about the power of philosophical living — the opposite of Stoic resignation to fate. The most important things — understanding, friendship, the management of pleasure and pain, freedom from fear — lie substantially within the reach of reason and are not at fortune’s mercy. The Skeptic’s doubt about the reliability of reason and the Stoic’s acceptance of external circumstance both undermine this confidence; Epicurus affirms it as the foundation of a genuinely happy life.
Bailey: “The just man is most free from trouble, the unjust most full of trouble.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: A moralistic claim that virtue is cosmically rewarded — the kind of statement a Stoic philosopher or religious preacher might make to enforce conventional morality.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus is making a psychological and empirical observation: the just man, having no secret wrongs to conceal, lives with a clear mind. The unjust man carries a permanent burden of anxiety. There is no cosmic reward-and-punishment scheme here — only an accurate description of what injustice actually does to the person who commits it, connecting directly to PD 34 and 35. The Stoic and religious readings import a moral cosmology that Epicurus explicitly rejected; his point is naturalistic and psychological throughout.
Bailey: “The pleasure in the flesh is not increased, when once the pain due to want is removed, but is only varied: and the limit for the mind in enjoyment is begotten by the reasoned understanding of these very pleasures and of the emotions akin to them, which used to cause the greatest fear to the mind.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: Bodily pleasures are inherently limited and inferior; Epicurus is directing us away from the body toward the higher pleasures of the mind — confirming the Platonic and religious suspicion of the flesh.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The body, once relieved of want, is already satisfied; “more” is variation, not increase. The mind’s role is to understand this and thereby dissolve the anxious craving for more that was itself the source of fear. Body and mind together are already complete — this is not a ranking of pleasures but an explanation of how the whole system of pleasure and fear achieves resolution. The Platonic elevation of mind over body and the religious suspicion of the flesh both read into this doctrine an asceticism that is entirely absent from it.
Bailey: “Infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time, if one measures by reason the limits of pleasure.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A clever argument against the desire for immortality — interesting philosophically but a minor point compared to the great questions of life and death.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is one of the most revolutionary and consistently overlooked doctrines in the collection. It directly refutes the mind virus at the root of Platonic and religious dissatisfaction with mortal life: the belief that finite existence is inherently deficient and that life is not worth living unless it lasts forever. Epicurus is saying with logical precision that a finite life of pleasure contains everything an infinite one would. The whole architecture of Platonic otherworldliness and religious promises of eternal life rests on the assumption that this doctrine destroys.
Bailey: “The flesh perceives the limits of pleasure as unlimited and unlimited time is required to supply it. But the mind, having attained a reasoned understanding of the ultimate good of the flesh and its limits and having dissipated the fears concerning the time to come, supplies us with the complete life, and we have no further need of infinite time: but neither does the mind shun pleasure, nor, when circumstances begin to bring about the departure from life, does it approach its end as though it fell short in any way of the best life.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Supernatural Religion / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: “Epicurus says enough is enough” — modest contentment with a finite life, a philosophical shrug in the face of mortality.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The doctrine makes a claim about genuine completeness, not modest resignation. The wise man approaching death does not feel that the best life is still lacking anything. The Platonic mind virus — that a finite life is inherently incomplete, that we are always still reaching for something more — is precisely what this doctrine refutes. Stoic endurance and religious hope for an afterlife are both responses to the same false premise: that mortal life falls short. Epicurus dissolves the premise rather than offering a coping strategy for it.
Bailey: “He who has learned the limits of life knows that that which removes the pain due to want and makes the whole of life complete is easy to obtain; so that there is no need of actions which involve competition.”
Adulterating Tradition: Humanism / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is telling people not to compete or strive — a prescription for passivity and anti-ambition.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The doctrine is not a prohibition of competition but a liberation from unnecessary competition. Once you understand what actually makes life complete — and how accessible it is — obsessive competitive pursuit of more becomes unnecessary, not forbidden. The because is everything: the freedom from competition flows from philosophical understanding, not from a rule against striving. The Humanist drive for achievement and the Stoic drive for virtue-through-effort both assume a kind of insufficiency that Epicurus is here dissolving.
Bailey: “We must consider both the real purpose and all the evidence of direct perception, to which we always refer the conclusions of opinion; otherwise, all will be full of doubt and confusion.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Skepticism
Common Misinterpretation: A dry methodological note — the kind of procedural reminder philosophers add to arguments to sound rigorous, with no practical bearing on how to live.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This doctrine establishes the entire Epicurean epistemological framework: sensation is the non-negotiable foundation to which all reasoning must return. Clever arguments that contradict what the senses plainly show us must be rejected regardless of their logical form. This is the cornerstone of a philosophy that explicitly rejects both Platonic rationalism — mind trumps senses — and Academic Skepticism — nothing can be known with confidence. The practical stakes are enormous: without this foundation, every judgment about how to live is unmoored.
Bailey: “If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Skepticism
Common Misinterpretation: A minor technical point in ancient epistemology debates, irrelevant to practical Epicurean ethics and living.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is a direct and devastating refutation of both Platonic rationalism and Academic Skepticism. You cannot coherently reject all sensation, because even the judgment that some sensations are false must rest on other sensations as the standard. The mind is not more trustworthy than the senses — this is one of the deepest mind viruses in Western philosophy, one that Plato installed at the foundation of the tradition and that Descartes later reinforced. Epicurus targets it with logical precision: fight all sensation and you have destroyed the only standard by which any claim, including your own skeptical one, can be evaluated.
Bailey: “If you reject any single sensation and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion as to the appearance awaiting confirmation and that which is actually given by the sensation and the feelings and the indicative image, you will confuse all other sensations as well with the same groundless opinion and so you will reject every standard of judgment.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Skepticism
Common Misinterpretation: Technical Epicurean epistemology of interest only to specialists, with no practical bearing on how to live or how to understand the main doctrines.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: If you begin selectively overriding sensory evidence with opinion — even in apparently small cases — you have undermined your only reliable standard for everything. Epicurean epistemology is not one philosophical option among others; the alternatives lead necessarily to total cognitive collapse. Every system that invites you to distrust your senses in favor of reason, revelation, or abstract principle — Platonism, Academic Skepticism, supernatural religion — begins precisely with this move. Epicurus identifies it as the epistemological root of all the subsequent errors.
Bailey: “If on each occasion instead of referring your actions to the end of nature, you turn to some other nearer standard when you are making a choice or an avoidance, your actions will not be consistent with your principles.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Buddhism / Humanism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: The “end of nature” is tranquility (ataraxia) — Epicurus is fundamentally a philosopher of calm detachment, comparable to the Stoics or Buddhists. Pleasure is a means; freedom from disturbance is the real goal.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The end of nature is pleasure — which Epicurus states explicitly and repeatedly throughout his writings. This single substitution — tranquility for pleasure as the goal — is the most damaging misreading in the entire tradition, and it has been actively promoted by Stoic, Buddhist, Humanist, and religious interpreters who find pleasure as the declared goal of life embarrassing or subversive. If the goal is tranquility, the Epicurean looks like a Stoic or Buddhist — minimizing desire, seeking detachment, valuing equanimity above enjoyment. If the goal is pleasure — which is what Epicurus said — the picture is active, positive, and fully engaged with the world. Every action and avoidance must be referred to pleasure as the standard; substituting any other standard corrupts the whole system from its foundation.
Bailey: “Of desires, all that do not lead to a sense of pain, if they are not satisfied, are not necessary, but involve a craving which is easily dispelled, when the object is hard to procure or they seem likely to produce harm.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is teaching desire reduction — identify your unnecessary desires and suppress them, as an ascetic or Stoic would suppress attachments to externals.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The doctrine provides a practical decision tool, not a moral prohibition. Desires that cause no pain when unmet, and whose objects are hard to obtain or likely to produce harm, are simply not worth the cost — not because pleasure is suspect, but because the cost exceeds the benefit. Non-necessary desires are not condemned; they require careful evaluation before pursuit. The entire analytical framework serves pleasure by helping us spend effort where the real returns are. The Stoic and religious misreadings both import the assumption that desire itself is the problem; for Epicurus, desire is natural and good — only poor management of it leads to trouble.
Bailey: “Of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: This proves Epicurus was “not really a selfish hedonist after all” — friendship’s importance shows he secretly valued altruism over self-interest, and readers should look past his hedonism to the more respectable philosophy underneath.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Friendship is the greatest good because it is the greatest source of stable and enduring pleasure — not because it contradicts or redeems the Epicurean commitment to pleasure. For Epicurus, genuine care for others and the pursuit of one’s own happiness are not in conflict; they are mutually reinforcing. The misreading — enthusiastically promoted by Humanist and religious interpreters who want to rescue Epicurus from “hedonism” — smuggles in a framework that sets self-interest and care for others in opposition, a conflict Epicurus saw no reason to accept. Friendship is the crowning expression of Epicurean philosophy, not a concession away from it.
Bailey: “The same conviction which has given us confidence that there is nothing terrible that lasts forever or even for long, has also seen the protection of friendship most fully completed in the limited evils of this life.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: An obscure and puzzling connection between physics and friendship; usually passed over without comment even by sympathetic readers.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This doctrine makes explicit the direct link between natural philosophy and the flourishing of friendship. It is because the Epicurean has understood — through the study of nature — that no evil is eternal, that he can commit fully to friendship without the dread of permanent loss hovering over every relationship. Natural philosophy and ethics are not separate departments of Epicurean thought; they are organically connected. The Platonic and religious assumptions that evil may be eternal, and that death is a real and permanent loss to the dead, are precisely what make deep friendship so fragile for those who hold them.
Bailey: “Among desires some are natural (and necessary, some natural) but not necessary, and others neither natural nor necessary, but due to idle imagination.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: This classification ranks desires on a ladder of approval, with necessary desires permitted, natural-but-not-necessary desires borderline, and all others to be suppressed. Epicurus is prescribing systematic desire reduction.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is an analytical tool for evaluating the cost-benefit of particular pursuits, not a moral ranking or a program of self-denial. Necessary desires must be met; natural-but-not-necessary desires may be pursued freely when they lead to more pleasure than pain; only the third category — driven by idle imagination — reliably leads to trouble because its objects are inherently unlimited and therefore impossible to obtain. The framework serves pleasure by providing clarity about where effort is well spent. The ascetic misreading — promoted across Stoic, religious, and some Humanist lines — turns a practical diagnostic into a prescription for the very self-denial Epicurus was opposing.
Bailey: “Wherever in the case of desires which are physical, but do not lead to a sense of pain, if they are not fulfilled, the effort is intense, such pleasures are due to idle fancy, and it is not owing to their own nature that they fail to be dispelled, but owing to the empty imaginings of the man.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Supernatural Religion / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus distrusted the body and thought most physical desires were illusory or dangerous — confirming the Platonic and religious suspicion of bodily appetite.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus is making a diagnostic point about the cause of intense, hard-to-satisfy physical cravings: they are driven by the mind’s empty imaginings, not by genuine bodily need. The body’s natural requirements are relatively simple; it is the mind’s fantasies — conditioned by culture, status anxiety, and the vain desires of idle imagination — that turn them into obsessions. The cure is philosophical understanding of where the intensity is actually coming from, not the bodily suppression that Platonism and religion recommend.
Bailey: “The justice which arises from nature is a pledge of mutual advantage to restrain men from harming one another and save them from being harmed.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Crude contractarianism — cynical proof that Epicurus had no real ethics, only enlightened self-interest dressed in philosophical language.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus is being accurate, not cynical. Justice grounded in actual mutual human advantage is more binding and more honest than justice grounded in divine command or Platonic Form — because it is rooted in something that actually exists and that all parties have genuine reason to care about. The misread assumes that only cosmic or transcendent grounding can make ethics real — an assumption shared by Platonism, supernatural religion, and some strands of Humanism. Epicurus rejects that assumption, and with it the need for any external authority to make justice binding.
Bailey: “For all living things which have not been able to make compacts not to harm one another or be harmed, nothing ever is either just or unjust; and likewise too for all tribes of men which have been unable or unwilling to make compacts not to harm one another or be harmed.”
Adulterating Tradition: Humanism / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus had no concern for animals, future generations, or the natural world — justice applies only among beings capable of formal contracts, making everything else morally irrelevant.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The doctrine defines the domain of the concept of justice — which requires reciprocal agreement as its basis — not the full scope of Epicurean concern for other living things. Determining where the specific concept of justice applies is not the same as declaring that everything outside that domain is of no account. The Humanist and Stoic readings import modern concerns about ecological and universal ethics into a doctrine that is simply being precise about the meaning of one concept.
Bailey: “Justice never is anything in itself, but in the dealings of men with one another in any place whatever and at any time it is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Moral relativism or nihilism — Epicurus says justice has no real existence, which means there are no genuine ethical standards and anything can be justified.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is an explicit rejection of Platonic essentialism about justice — justice is not a Form, a cosmic principle, or a divine decree existing independently of human life. But that does not make it arbitrary or unreal. A compact in human life is profoundly real and binding. Epicurus is doing away with the metaphysical inflation of justice while preserving and fully grounding its actual importance. Anti-Platonism about ethics is not ethical relativism; it is the removal of a false foundation that was never needed.
Bailey: “Injustice is not an evil in itself, but only in consequence of the fear which attaches to the apprehension of being unable to escape those appointed to punish such actions.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: “Epicurus says the only reason not to do wrong is fear of getting caught” — a permission slip for careful wrongdoing, and proof that Epicurean ethics has no genuine moral content.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Read with PD 17 and 35, this is a sophisticated psychological analysis: the wrongdoer lives with permanent, rational anxiety because he can never be certain of escaping detection. The “fear of punishment” is not an external deterrent added to otherwise neutral actions; it is an internal condition that corrodes the unjust person’s entire life. The doctrine explains why injustice is self-destructive from within, not merely risky from without. The Stoic’s intrinsic wrongness of injustice and the religious sinner’s fear of divine judgment are both replaced by something more real, naturalistic, and more psychologically precise.
Bailey: “It is not possible for one who acts in secret contravention of the terms of the compact not to harm or be harmed, to be confident that he will escape detection, even if at present he escapes a thousand times. For up to the time of death it cannot be certain that he will indeed escape.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A weak and unconvincing deterrent argument — Epicurus says you might eventually get caught, far less compelling than the Stoic’s intrinsic wrongness of injustice or the religious threat of divine judgment.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The anxiety of the secret wrongdoer is permanent and rationally ineliminable — death is the only termination of the uncertainty, and not even a thousand successful evasions dissolves the underlying dread. This completes the analysis of PD 34: injustice is a permanent psychological burden that destroys the peace of mind it often set out to secure. The naturalistic account of why justice matters is not weaker than Stoic or religious alternatives; it is stronger because it is more honest and more accurate about what actually happens inside a person who acts unjustly.
Bailey: “In its general aspect justice is the same for all, for it is a kind of mutual advantage in the dealings of men with one another: but with reference to the individual peculiarities of a country or any other circumstances the same thing does not turn out to be just for all.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Moral relativism — Epicurus says justice varies by circumstance, therefore there is no universal standard and ethical claims are merely expressions of local convention.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The basis of justice — mutual advantage — is universal and the same for all people everywhere. The specific applications vary with circumstances. This is not relativism; it is the reasonable recognition that the same universal principle yields different concrete rules under different conditions. Context-sensitivity grounded in a universal principle is the opposite of abandoning standards, and it requires no Stoic cosmic reason or divine law to give it universal force.
Bailey: “Among actions which are sanctioned as just by law, that which is proved on examination to be of advantage in the requirements of men’s dealings with one another has the guarantee of justice, whether it is the same for all or not. And if a man makes a law and it does not turn out to lead to advantage in men’s dealings with each other, then it no longer has the essential nature of justice.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Humanism / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: Legal positivism — whatever the law says is just, making Epicurus a rubber stamp for existing authority; or alternatively, legal nihilism — Epicurus undermines the authority of law entirely.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Laws are just only when — and only so long as — they serve genuine mutual human advantage. A law that fails this test lacks the essential nature of justice regardless of its formal status. Far from being permissive, this standard is more demanding than divine-command or positivist theories of law. It provides a principled criterion — grounded in actual human life, requiring no divine sanction or Stoic cosmic order — against which any law can be evaluated and found wanting.
Bailey: “Where, provided the circumstances have not been altered, actions which were considered just, have been shown not to accord with the general concept in actual practice, then they were not just actions. But where, when circumstances have changed, the same actions which were sanctioned as just no longer lead to advantage, there they were just at the time when they were of advantage for the dealings of fellow-citizens with one another; but subsequently they are no longer just, when no longer of advantage.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: Further proof of moral relativism — what was just yesterday may not be just today, confirming that Epicurus had no real ethical principles, only situational convenience.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Justice is not relativized to preference or culture; it tracks the real, changing conditions of mutual human advantage. When those conditions change, the just action changes — not because justice is arbitrary, but because it is grounded in something real that itself changes. Responsiveness to reality is not the abandonment of principle; it is the application of principle to circumstances as they actually are. The Platonic Forms and divine commandments that Epicurus rejects here do not change — but they also have no connection to actual human life, which is why they fail as foundations for a living ethics.
Bailey: “The man who has best ordered the element of disquiet arising from external circumstances has made those things that he could akin to himself and the rest at least not alien: but with all to which he could not do even this he has refrained from mixing, and has expelled from his life all which it was of advantage to treat thus.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: Stoic-style indifference — accept what you cannot change, endure what you must, withdraw inward to the realm of will and virtue where external circumstances cannot touch you.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The Epicurean wise man does not passively accept circumstances; he actively orders them — cultivating what can be incorporated into his life and deliberately expelling what cannot. This is not resignation; it is the intentional management of one’s environment and relationships in the service of pleasure and the removal of disquiet. The active and selective character of the doctrine — ordering, making akin, expelling — is entirely unlike Stoic indifference, which retreats inward and accepts the external. Epicurus stays engaged with the world and reshapes what he can.
Bailey: “As many as possess the power to obtain complete immunity from their neighbors, these also live most pleasantly with one another, since they have the most certain pledge of security, and after they have enjoyed the fullest intimacy, they do not lament the previous departure of a dead friend, as though he were to be pitied.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: The final clause — not lamenting a dead friend as though he were to be pitied — shows Epicurus was cold and emotionally detached, confirming the picture of the garden recluse who has withdrawn from genuine human feeling.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is the culmination of the entire philosophical system applied to the most intimate human experience. A community of people who have achieved security through philosophy, who have lived in the fullest friendship, and who face loss without being shattered — not because they did not care, but because they understood. The Epicurean does not mourn the dead friend as though he were to be pitied because he knows, from PD 2 and the whole of Epicurean natural philosophy, that the dissolved person has nothing to suffer. Love and philosophy are not in conflict; together they produce the only genuinely complete human life. The Stoic endures loss through self-command; the religious believer hopes for reunion beyond death; the Epicurean grieves without despair because understanding has already done its work.
All Bailey translations are from Cyril Bailey, “Epicurus: The Extant Remains” (Oxford, 1926). The interpretations on this page reflect the editorial perspective of EpicurusToday.com, with particular attention to adulterations introduced through Stoicism, Academic Skepticism, Platonism, Supernatural Religion, and Humanism. For the broader context of these misreadings, see the Mind Viruses and Epicurean Paradigm Shift articles.
Part Two: The Vatican Sayings
Section titled “Part Two: The Vatican Sayings”The Vatican Sayings are a collection of approximately eighty aphorisms from Epicurus and his close associates, discovered in a Vatican manuscript in 1888 and translated by Cyril Bailey in Epicurus: The Extant Remains (Oxford, 1926). They are less widely known than the forty Principal Doctrines but contain some of Epicurus’ most direct and personal expressions of his philosophy — on friendship, pleasure, death, old age, self-sufficiency, and the practical management of desire.
Like the Principal Doctrines, they have been consistently misread through Stoic, Platonic, religious, Humanist, and Skeptical lenses. Several sayings duplicate or closely parallel the Principal Doctrines; in those cases a cross-reference is provided rather than a full repeated analysis.
A note on attribution: Bailey and subsequent scholars have identified that a small number of sayings in the collection come from Epicurus’ associates (principally Metrodorus) rather than from Epicurus himself. Those cases are noted where relevant.
Editorial note: Bailey’s translations of the Vatican Sayings are verified less frequently in modern scholarship than his translations of the Principal Doctrines. All Bailey translations below should be carefully verified against Bailey’s 1926 text.
The Bailey translations used here are from Cyril Bailey, Epicurus: The Extant Remains (Oxford, 1926).
Bailey: “The blessed and immortal nature knows no trouble itself nor causes trouble to any other, so that it is never constrained by anger or favour. For all such things exist only in the weak.”
Note: This saying is identical to Principal Doctrine 1. See the Corrections To Modern Misreadings of the Principal Doctrines entry for PD 1 for full analysis.
Bailey: “Every pain is easily disregarded; for that which is intense is brief in duration, and that which endures long in the flesh is but slight.”
Note: This saying closely parallels Principal Doctrine 4. See that entry for full analysis. The key misreading in both cases is dismissing this as wishful thinking rather than recognizing it as an empirical observation designed to ground a confident rather than fearful orientation toward bodily pain.
Bailey: “It is hard for an evil-doer to escape detection, but to obtain security for escaping is impossible.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A weak deterrent — Epicurus is warning wrongdoers that they will probably get caught, which is far less compelling than the Stoic’s claim that injustice is intrinsically wrong or the religious threat of divine judgment.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This saying extends the analysis of Principal Doctrines 34 and 35 in its most compact form. The point is not merely that detection is likely but that certainty of escape is impossible — and that this impossibility is a permanent psychological condition, not a remote statistical risk. The unjust man cannot rest, because he cannot achieve the security that is the precondition of happiness. This is more honest and more accurate than either the Stoic’s appeal to virtue’s intrinsic nobility or the religious believer’s appeal to divine judgment — both of which locate the sanction of justice outside the natural consequences of the act itself.
Bailey: “Necessity is an evil, but there is no necessity to live under the control of necessity.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A Stoic-flavored call to accept fate — Epicurus is counseling inner freedom in the face of external constraints, in the manner of Epictetus. Or alternatively, it is read as a trivial wordplay with no philosophical depth.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This saying is an assertion of real, practical freedom — not the Stoic’s inward acceptance of external fate but the Epicurean’s active reorganization of life to minimize genuine necessities. Epicurus is saying that the constraints of necessity are real and are evil (contra the Stoic who denies externals are evils at all), but that philosophy equips us to live in a way that reduces our exposure to them. The saying targets both the fatalist who accepts all constraints as given and the anxious overreacher who multiplies necessities by multiplying desires.
Bailey: “Remember that thou art mortal and hast a limited time to live, and hast devoted thyself to discussions on nature for all time and for eternity, and hast gazed upon ‘things that are now and are to come and have been.’”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Platonism / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: A memento mori in the religious or Stoic tradition — Epicurus is reminding us of death to humble us, or to encourage us to make the most of limited time in a spirit of urgency or piety.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The point is the opposite of religious humbling. Epicurus is affirming that through the study of nature a mortal person has already grasped the whole of things — past, present, and future — in the way that only understanding makes possible. Mortality is not a limitation to be mourned but the very condition in which a finite life has achieved something genuinely complete. This connects directly to Principal Doctrines 19 and 20: infinite time adds nothing that natural philosophy and understanding have not already provided.
Bailey: “For most men rest is stagnation and activity is madness.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus endorses a middle path of moderate activity — neither idle nor frantic — in the manner of Aristotle’s golden mean or a Humanist work-life balance.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is a sharp diagnosis of a common failure mode, not a prescription for moderation. Most people oscillate between two forms of unhappiness: the torpor of rest without purpose and the frenzy of activity driven by vain desire and fear rather than genuine enjoyment. The Epicurean alternative is not a midpoint on that spectrum but a different orientation entirely — purposeful engagement grounded in pleasure and understanding rather than restlessness or compulsion. The saying targets the Humanist assumption that the problem of a well-lived life is finding the right amount of productivity.
Bailey: “We are born once and cannot be born twice, but for all time must be no more. But thou, who art not master of to-morrow, postponest thy happiness: life is wasted in procrastination and each one of us dies without allowing himself leisure.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Stoicism / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: A piece of motivational wisdom — don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today; enjoy life while you can. Sometimes read as a Stoic carpe diem in the manner of Horace.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This saying is doing far more precise philosophical work than motivational advice. The key phrase is “not master of to-morrow” — the person who postpones happiness is acting as though future time will provide what present time cannot, which is exactly the mind virus that Principal Doctrines 19 and 20 target. The problem is not laziness but the philosophical error of locating happiness in a future that may never arrive rather than in the present that is already available. Supernatural religion compounds this by postponing happiness to an afterlife; Platonism postpones it to a higher realm of being. Epicurus says happiness is here, now, or it is nowhere.
Bailey: “We value our characters as something peculiar to ourselves, whether they be good and we be esteemed by men, or not; so too we must value the characters of those around us, if they be well-disposed to us.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is teaching a form of self-respect and respect for others based on character — in the Stoic manner of valuing virtue regardless of external opinion.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying is not about valuing character for its own sake in the Stoic manner but about the reciprocal basis of genuine friendship and good relations. We claim our own characters as genuinely ours — they are part of what makes us who we are — and we must extend the same recognition to those who are well-disposed toward us. This is the naturalistic foundation of the Epicurean community: mutual recognition of character within bonds of real affection and shared philosophy, not the Stoic’s abstract respect for virtue in isolation from personal attachment.
Bailey: “No one chooses a thing seeing that it is evil; but being lured by it as good in comparison with a greater evil he is caught.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A moral psychology observation borrowed from Plato’s Protagoras — no one does wrong willingly; evil-doing is a form of ignorance. Therefore the cure is knowledge (Platonic) or grace (religious).
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus reaches a conclusion similar on the surface to Plato’s claim but for entirely different reasons and with entirely different implications. The lure is not abstract ignorance of the Good but the practical comparison of apparent goods and evils in the moment of choice. The person who chooses wrongly is not lacking access to Platonic Forms or divine grace; he is making a bad calculation about what actually produces more pleasure than pain. The cure is not intellectual access to a higher truth but practical philosophical training in evaluating real consequences — exactly what Epicurean philosophy provides.
Bailey: “It is not the young man who should be thought happy, but an old man who has lived a good life. For the young man at the height of his powers is unstable and is carried this way and that by fortune, like a headlong current. But the old man has come to anchor in old age as though in port, and the good things for which before he hardly hoped he has brought into the harbour of a happy reminiscence.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is counseling acceptance of aging and finding consolation in memory — a Stoic or religious resignation to decline, or a Humanist celebration of wisdom in old age.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This saying makes a precise point that cuts against every framework that locates happiness in peak physical powers, worldly achievement, or youthful vitality. The old man who has lived well is more happy, not consoled despite being less happy — because he has accumulated understanding, stable friendships, and a store of genuine pleasures that fortune can no longer easily disturb. The harbour metaphor is active and triumphant, not resigned. What the young man at the mercy of fortune cannot yet possess, the philosophically trained old man has fully secured. This is the practical reward of Epicurean living made visible.
Bailey: “Remove sight, association, and contact, and the passion of love is at an end.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A cynical reduction of romantic love to mere physical proximity — Epicurus is dismissing love as nothing more than stimulation and habit, confirming the materialist’s inability to account for genuine human emotion. Or alternatively, he is counseling suppression of passion in the manner of an ascetic.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is a precise naturalistic analysis of how passionate love is sustained — and therefore how to end one that is causing harm. Love of this kind is not sustained by something metaphysical or transcendent (contra Plato’s Symposium, where love is the soul’s ascent toward the eternal) but by the ongoing stimuli of sight, proximity, and contact. The practical implication is not cynicism but manageability: a passion that is disrupting one’s life and causing greater pain than pleasure — the test of VS 51 and PD 8 — can be brought to an end by removing what feeds it. This does not condemn love; it identifies love’s natural mechanism and places it within the person’s practical control. The Platonic reading, which locates love in the soul’s participation in eternal beauty, makes it both exalted and unmanageable; Epicurus makes it both real and governable.
Bailey: “Forgetting the good that has been, he has become old this very day.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A conventional observation about the importance of gratitude and memory for maintaining a youthful spirit — compatible with any philosophy that counsels appreciation of life’s blessings or Stoic present-moment awareness.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This saying applies the therapeutic practice of VS 55 directly to aging. Psychological aging — the real aging that matters — is not primarily a physical process but the forgetting of genuine goods already possessed. The person who has lost access to the real pleasures of his past through inattention or ingratitude has aged in the sense that counts, regardless of his physical years. The counterpart is VS 17’s old man who has brought the goods of his life “into the harbour of a happy reminiscence” — he is genuinely rich and genuinely at peace. This is not a sentimental counsel to “stay young at heart” but a precise statement about where the resources for happiness in later life actually come from: not from new acquisitions or continued physical powers, but from the real and permanently possessed store of genuine pleasures that philosophical living accumulates.
Bailey: “We must not violate nature, but obey her; and we shall obey her if we fulfil the necessary desires and also the physical, if they bring no harm to us, and sternly reject the harmful.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: “Obeying nature” is read in the Stoic sense of living according to reason as the highest natural faculty, or in the religious sense of accepting a divinely ordered natural law. Either way, Epicurus sounds like he is prescribing self-denial under a higher authority.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Obeying nature here means following what the body and mind genuinely require for pleasure — satisfying necessary and harmless desires, and rejecting only what harms us. The authority is not reason as a Stoic cosmic faculty or divine law but the actual felt experience of pleasure and pain that nature provides as our guide. This is not self-denial but accurate self-management: the standard is pleasure and the avoidance of harm, not duty or virtue for its own sake.
Bailey: “All friendship is desirable in itself, though it starts from the need of help.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: The second clause is used to dismiss Epicurean friendship as ultimately selfish — it begins in need, which proves that Epicurus could not really value friendship for its own sake. The first clause is then treated as an afterthought or a contradiction.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying is making a developmental observation, not a reductive one. Friendships begin in the practical soil of mutual need — this is honest and naturalistic — and then grow into something that is genuinely valued for its own sake. This is no more “merely selfish” than the observation that children begin by needing food and then develop the capacity for full human flourishing. The Stoic and Humanist misreading imports the assumption that anything that begins in self-interest is tainted throughout; Epicurus sees no such contradiction because for him the movement from need to genuine affection is entirely natural and admirable.
Bailey: “Poverty, when measured by the natural purpose of life, is great wealth, but unlimited wealth is great poverty.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Ascetic praise of poverty — Epicurus is saying that having little is virtuous and that the wealthy are to be pitied, in the manner of Diogenes the Cynic or a religious believer holding the world in contempt.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The criterion is not poverty as such but nature’s actual standard for a complete life. When measured against that standard, a person with few possessions but genuine pleasures, security, and friendship is rich in every way that matters. The person with unlimited wealth who still lacks the understanding to enjoy it, who is driven by vain desire for more, and who cannot be secure, is poor in every way that matters. This is not praise of poverty or condemnation of wealth but a clarification of the standard: nature, not social convention or religious virtue, is the measure. A wealthy Epicurean who enjoys his wealth in the right way is not condemned by this saying.
Bailey: “You must understand that whether the discourse be long or short it tends to the same end.”
Adulterating Tradition: Humanism / Skepticism
Common Misinterpretation: A pragmatic note about rhetorical flexibility — Epicurus is being tolerant of different communication styles, confirming a Humanist appreciation for diverse forms of intellectual expression.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying is a statement about purpose, not style. Whether a discourse is a long treatise or a short aphorism, the end is always the same: the elimination of the fears and false beliefs that make people miserable and the delivery of the understanding that produces genuine pleasure. This connects directly to VS 29’s rejection of elaborate discourse designed for popular praise, and to Epicurus’ own practice of writing both the long letters preserved in Diogenes Laertius and the compact Principal Doctrines. The “same end” is the philosophical cure — and that end is never intellectual performance, literary achievement, or Humanist cultivation for its own sake. The Skeptical tradition, which uses long argument to dissolve all certainty, and the Humanist tradition, which values eloquence as an end, both miss what Epicurus is saying: length is irrelevant; only the therapeutic result matters.
Bailey: “In all other occupations the fruit comes painfully after completion, but in philosophy pleasure accompanies knowledge; for enjoyment does not follow comprehension, but comprehension and enjoyment are simultaneous.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Stoicism / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus sounds like Plato here — knowledge is the highest pleasure, confirming that the life of the mind is superior to bodily experience. Or this is read as Epicurus endorsing the Humanist ideal of intellectual cultivation as the best life.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The point is not that intellectual pleasure is highest but that philosophical understanding is unusual among human activities in being pleasurable as it happens, not only after completion. Most productive work involves present labor for future reward; philosophy delivers pleasure in the very act of understanding. This is an argument for starting to philosophize — the entry cost is low and the reward is immediate — not an argument that philosophy ranks above bodily pleasures in some Platonic hierarchy. Epicurus is advertising the accessibility of philosophical pleasure, not elevating it above all other goods.
Bailey: “We must not approve either those who are always ready for friendship, or those who hang back, but for friendship’s sake we must even run risks.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is simply recommending a middle course between social over-eagerness and excessive caution — a prudent social moderation in the Aristotelian manner.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The final clause — “for friendship’s sake we must even run risks” — is the entire point and is exactly what the moderation reading misses. Epicurus is not recommending careful calibration but willingness to commit. Friendship is so central to the complete life that hesitancy born of self-protective caution is itself a failure. The person who “hangs back” is protecting himself from exposure at the cost of the greatest good. Real friendship requires a genuine stake — and Epicurus explicitly endorses accepting that risk.
Bailey: “In investigating nature I would prefer to speak in oracles and in a way agreeable to all mankind, even though it be understood by none, rather than to adopt popular views and so win the praise which is lavished by the many.”
Adulterating Tradition: Humanism / Skepticism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is being arrogant — he places his own esoteric wisdom above popular understanding, confirming the image of the philosopher who retreats from the world. Or alternatively, he is displaying a Humanist skepticism toward mass opinion.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying reflects Epicurus’ deep conviction that the truth about nature — though difficult and unfamiliar — is what actually sets people free from fear and misery, and that popular frameworks (whether religious, Platonic, or merely conventional) are the source of the mind viruses that poison human life. The oracle image is not arrogance but a statement of priority: healing truth over comfortable agreement. Epicurus wrote his philosophy for everyone — the famous Diogenes of Oinoanda inscription broadcast it to all who passed — but he would not corrupt the medicine to make it more palatable.
Bailey: “Against all else it is possible to provide security, but as against death all of us mortals alike dwell in an unfortified city.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Platonism / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: A fatalistic admission that death defeats us all — Epicurus is counseling brave acceptance of mortality in the Stoic manner, or this is taken as a concession that ultimately grounds the need for religious hope.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying is not a counsel of resignation but a clear-eyed observation that serves the argument of Principal Doctrine 2. Because we all dwell equally in this unfortified city, the attempt to secure oneself against death through religion, social status, or any external means is futile. The only rational response is the one Epicurus always provides: understand that death is nothing to us, that the dissolved person has no sensation, and that the fear of death — not death itself — is the enemy. The unfortified city is a call to philosophy, not to hope or endurance.
Bailey: “The veneration of the wise man is a great blessing to those who venerate him.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is promoting deference to authority in the manner of religious veneration — a contradiction of his empirical, anti-authoritarian epistemology.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The blessing is practical and naturalistic. The person who genuinely venerates a wise man — not in the manner of a disciple submitting to a guru but in the manner of someone who truly studies and models a life well-lived — has access to a living demonstration of what philosophy makes possible. Epicurus himself lived this way and was described by his students in the warmest terms. The saying is not about authority but about the real benefit of having a philosophical exemplar in one’s community. The Stoic misread imports the idea of veneration-as-duty; the correct reading is veneration-as-practical-benefit.
Bailey: “The flesh cries out to be saved from hunger, thirst, and cold. A man who has these things, and who has confidence that he will continue to have them, can rival even Zeus in happiness.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is setting a remarkably low bar — mere food, drink, and warmth are sufficient for happiness. This either confirms the ascetic reading (happiness requires almost nothing) or is dismissed as naive by anyone who has experienced the complexity of human desire.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying is one of the most radical in the collection precisely because it is not ascetic but liberating. The bar is not set low as a counsel of deprivation but as a demonstration of how close the foundation of happiness actually is. What the flesh genuinely requires is modest and achievable; the problem is that most people never secure even this because they are pursuing vain additions to it rather than consolidating the real foundation. The phrase “confidence that he will continue to have them” is the crucial addition: security in the basics, not the basics alone, is what rivals Zeus. This is Principal Doctrine 15 in its most vivid form.
Bailey: “It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confidence of their help.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: A cynical reduction of friendship to utility — what we really want from friends is the feeling of security they provide, not the friends themselves. This appears to confirm the critique that Epicurean friendship is ultimately selfish.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This saying is a precise psychological observation about how friendship actually produces its greatest benefit, not a reduction of friendship to mere utility. The confidence that a friend would help if needed is a constant and ongoing source of pleasure and security — it operates continuously, not only in emergencies. A person who knows he has genuine friends is less fearful, more at ease, and more capable of enjoying his life than someone who lacks that knowledge. This is why Epicurus calls friendship the greatest of all the goods wisdom provides. The “confidence of help” is not a substitute for the friend; it is what makes the friendship a living source of happiness rather than a merely theoretical good.
Bailey: “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: A piece of contentment advice — appreciate what you have, don’t be greedy. Often treated as interchangeable with Stoic acceptance of one’s lot or religious gratitude for blessings received.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This saying is a practical application of the Epicurean analysis of vain desire, not a counsel of grateful passivity. The point is not merely that gratitude is virtuous but that the failure to recognize present goods as genuine — because we are always focused on what we lack — is a cognitive error with real costs. What we now have was once hoped for and is therefore genuinely good; treating it as insufficient because something more is imaginable is not ambition but the engine of permanent dissatisfaction. The remedy is not Stoic indifference to all possessions but accurate recognition of real pleasures already possessed.
Bailey: “Nature is weak toward evil, not toward good: because it is saved by pleasures but destroyed by pains.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is saying that human nature is naturally inclined toward vice and weakness — a pessimistic anthropology compatible with religious doctrines of fallen human nature or the Stoic view that nature requires reason to correct its animal inclinations.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying is making the opposite point with equal force. Nature is saved by pleasures — pleasure is the natural condition of a life going well, the body’s and mind’s signal of health and satisfaction. Pain is what destroys nature. This is not pessimism about human nature; it is an affirmation that our natural orientation toward pleasure is correct and that the philosophical task is not to overcome nature but to understand it well enough to follow it accurately. The traditions that treat human nature as requiring correction — whether through reason, revelation, or virtue — are the ones this saying directly opposes.
Bailey: “He is a little man in all respects who has many good reasons for quitting life.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: A condemnation of suicide that aligns with religious or conventional moral prohibitions on taking one’s own life.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus was not categorically opposed to voluntary departure from life in extreme circumstances — he acknowledged it could be rational. The saying is targeting something more specific: the person who accumulates reasons to quit life as a habit of mind, who frames everything as a burden, who treats the present as an obstacle rather than a source of genuine good. Such a person is philosophically diminished — “little in all respects” — not because he sins against life but because he has failed to understand and use what life actually offers. The Stoic “open door” doctrine — Seneca’s and Epictetus’ teaching that the wise man retains voluntary departure as a permanent rational option, and that this availability is itself a source of freedom — can be misapplied to this saying, as though Epicurus were setting a criterion for when the door should legitimately be opened. But that is not what the saying is doing. Epicurus is not calibrating the threshold for rational exit; he is diagnosing the fearful, complaint-ridden orientation that has never learned to live well enough to make the question urgent in the first place.
Bailey: “He is no friend who is continually asking for help, nor he who never associates help with friendship. For the one traffics in kindly feeling for a practical return and the other cuts off hope of good in the future.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: A social etiquette point — don’t be a burden on friends, but also don’t be too proud to accept help. Epicurus is describing good social manners in the manner of Aristotle’s discussion of friendship.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying is defining the nature of Epicurean friendship by its failures on both sides. The one who only asks for help reduces friendship to transaction; the one who never allows help to enter the picture severs the bond of genuine mutual care that makes friendship what it is. Both failures destroy what VS 34 identifies as friendship’s greatest practical gift: the confidence of help that underpins security and pleasure. Epicurean friendship is neither transactional nor abstractly altruistic; it is a genuine community of mutual care in which the willingness to give and receive help is part of the fabric of the relationship.
Bailey: “He who says that all things come to pass by necessity cannot criticize one who denies that all things come to pass by necessity: for he admits that this too happens of necessity.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A clever logical paradox with no practical significance — a philosophical game rather than a serious argument.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is a precise and devastating refutation of hard determinism — the view that all events, including human choices, are necessitated. If the strict determinist is right, then even his own assertion of determinism and the response of anyone who disagrees are both necessitated; neither can be genuinely evaluated as correct or incorrect. The argument matters practically because hard determinism — whether in its Stoic form (fate and providence) or religious form (divine predetermination) — undermines the basis for rational choice and philosophical self-improvement. Epicurus defended the swerve in atomic motion precisely to preserve the real possibility of free choice; this saying shows why that matters for how we reason about our lives.
Bailey: “We must laugh and philosophize at the same time and do our household duties and employ our other faculties, and never cease proclaiming the sayings of the true philosophy.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Platonism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is recommending a moderate balance of philosophy with ordinary life — the philosopher does not abandon the world but integrates wisdom into daily routine, as a Stoic practitioner might.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The opening word is the key: laugh. Epicurean philosophy is not solemn, burdensome, or heroic in the Stoic sense. The laughter is not incidental decoration on a serious program of philosophical practice — it is the natural expression of a person who has actually understood and is actually living well. Household duties are not obstacles to philosophy to be endured stoically; they are part of the fabric of a pleasant life. The call to “never cease proclaiming” reflects Epicurus’ missionary conviction — shared by Diogenes of Oinoanda — that the true philosophy heals and that its healing should be shared. This is a picture of Epicurean community in its daily reality, not a prescription for philosophical heroism.
Bailey: “The greatest blessing is created and enjoyed at the same moment.” (DeWitt renders this as: “The same span of time embraces both the beginning and the end of the greatest good.”)
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Platonism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A vague celebration of present-moment awareness — Epicurus anticipates Buddhist mindfulness or Stoic focus on the present, counseling us to be fully present in each moment as the secret to happiness.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying makes a precise point about the nature of life’s greatest good - pleasure. Unlike idealistic notions of virtue or unlimited desires which are impossible to obtain, pleasure is simultaneously constituted and experienced in all life experiences which are not painful. There is no gap between having pleasure and enjoying it, no preliminary labor that precedes possession. DeWitt’s rendering sharpens the point: the complete life of pleasure has no separation between its beginning and its end — it is whole in each experience of pleasure itself. This is the direct refutation of the frameworks — Stoic, Platonic, religious — that defer the complete life to a future achievement, a higher state, or an afterlife. The greatest good is available now, in its own exercise, in the experience of pleasure.
Bailey: “The love of money, if unjustly gained, is impious, and, if justly, shameful; for it is unseemly to be merely parsimonious even with justice on one’s side.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus condemns wealth accumulation — confirming the ascetic reading that Epicureans should avoid money and material prosperity as corrupting.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus is not condemning wealth but condemning the love of money — the orientation that treats money as an end rather than a means. Unjust acquisition is impious because it violates the compact of justice (Principal Doctrines 31–33) and generates the permanent anxiety of the wrongdoer. Just but parsimonious accumulation is shameful because it treats money as intrinsically valuable — hoarding what could be used for genuine pleasure, friendship, and the benefit of one’s community. This is consistent with VS 67: the Epicurean with means distributes freely and wins the goodwill of neighbors. The target spoken against is the love of money, not money itself.
Bailey: “The wise man when he has accommodated himself to straits knows better how to give than to receive: so great is the treasure of contentment which he has discovered.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Stoicism / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is praising self-denial and the virtue of giving — a religious or Humanist ethics of generosity that contradicts the “selfish hedonist” caricature.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The point is not that giving is virtuous in itself but that the genuinely content person — who has discovered that the treasure of understanding and self-sufficiency is real — is freed from the anxious need to accumulate. He can give because he has found, through philosophy, that he lacks nothing essential. The generous giving flows from actual philosophical achievement, not from duty or religious virtue. This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence against both the hedonist caricature and the ascetic misreading: the Epicurean who has understood his own sufficiency is neither grasping nor self-denying but genuinely and practically free.
Bailey: “The study of nature does not make men productive of boasting or bragging nor apt to display that culture which is the object of rivalry with the many, but high-spirited and self-sufficient, taking pride in the good things of their own minds and not of their circumstances.”
Adulterating Tradition: Humanism / Stoicism / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: Natural philosophy in Epicurus is merely instrumental — a tool for eliminating fear — and produces modest, retiring personalities. The Humanist reads “taking pride in the good things of their own minds” as confirming the primacy of intellectual culture; the Stoic reads “self-sufficient” as confirming the Stoic ideal of inner independence.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying distinguishes Epicurean natural philosophy from the competitive display culture of Sophists, Academics, and the rhetorically ambitious. The Epicurean who has studied nature is high-spirited — the Greek term (megalopsychos or equivalent) implies genuine pride and strength of character, not the retiring modesty of the ascetic or the detachment of the Stoic sage. The pride is in actual mental goods — understanding, freedom from fear, genuine philosophical achievement — not in the social performance of culture that the many compete to display. This is not self-effacement but real confident joy in genuine possession.
Bailey: “Our bad habits, like evil men who have long done us great harm, let us utterly drive from us.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A moral exhortation to self-improvement that sounds like Stoic self-discipline or religious penitence — Epicurus is prescribing the active suppression of vice.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The vivid image of “evil men who have long done us great harm” is not a moral condemnation of habit but a practical recognition of how habits actually operate: as external-seeming forces that have colonized our responses without our fully noticing. The Epicurean response is not Stoic self-discipline (overriding inclination through reason-as-will) or religious repentance (guilt and reform through grace) but a clear-eyed recognition of what these habits are costing in terms of pleasure and peace of mind, followed by active expulsion. The motivation is always pleasure and the removal of harm, never duty or virtue for its own sake.
Bailey: “A man cannot dispel his fear about the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the universe but suspects the truth of some mythical story. So that without natural science it is not possible to attain our pleasures unalloyed.”
Note: This saying is identical to Principal Doctrine 12. See that entry for full analysis.
Bailey: “Pain does not last continuously in the flesh, but the acutest pain is there for a very short time, and even that which just exceeds the pleasure in the flesh does not continue for many days at once. But chronic illnesses permit a predominance of pleasure over pain in the flesh.”
Note: This saying closely parallels Principal Doctrine 4. See that entry for full analysis.
Bailey: “I understand from thee that thy natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual love. Follow thy inclination, if only it do not violate the laws or good customs and do not distress any of thy neighbours or do harm to thy body or squander thy pittance.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is grudgingly permitting sexual activity within tight constraints — another example of his fundamental asceticism and suspicion of bodily pleasure.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This saying — addressed to a specific individual — is a direct application of the Epicurean analytical framework to a real person’s real situation, not a general policy on sexuality. The conditions attached are not moral prohibitions but a practical cost-benefit checklist derived from Principal Doctrine 8: no pleasure is bad in itself, but the means of obtaining pleasures must be evaluated for their consequences. The four conditions (no violation of law or custom, no distress to neighbors, no bodily harm, no squandering of means) are all consequences that would produce greater pain than the pleasure gained. There is no suggestion that sexual love is suspicious or spiritually dangerous; the question is purely whether the specific pursuit in this person’s case is worth the cost.
Bailey: “Friendship goes dancing round the world proclaiming to us all to awake to the praises of a happy life.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: A pretty sentiment about friendship, taken as evidence of Epicurus’ warmth and humanity — often quoted in isolation as a reassuring counterweight to the “cold hedonist” caricature without integrating it into the full Epicurean picture.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying is not decorative. The image of friendship dancing and proclaiming ties together three fundamental Epicurean commitments: the conviction that happiness is real and available (VS 33, VS 41), the primacy of friendship as the greatest good wisdom produces (PD 27), and the missionary impulse to spread the true philosophy (VS 29, VS 41). Friendship is not a private comfort for the Epicurean community; it is itself an announcement to the world that the happy life is possible and that people should wake up to it. The dancing is the joy of the person who has actually found what most people are looking for.
Bailey: “We must envy no one: for the good do not deserve envy and the bad, the more they prosper, the more they injure themselves.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A moral counsel against envy on the grounds that envy is a vice — compatible with Stoic or religious condemnation of envy as one of the deadly sins.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurus is not condemning envy as a moral failing but dissolving its psychological basis by accurate analysis. There is no rational reason to envy the good because their goodness is genuinely admirable, not threatening. There is no rational reason to envy the bad because their prosperity increases their actual harm to themselves — they are running faster toward destruction, not toward happiness. This connects directly to PD 17 and VS 7: the unjust and vain prosper only in the superficial sense, while their inner lives deteriorate. Envy dissolves when you see clearly what the envied person’s situation actually is.
Bailey: “We must not pretend to study philosophy, but study it in reality: for it is not the appearance of health that we need, but real health.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is warning against superficial learning and recommending genuine intellectual engagement — a Humanist or Platonic call to authentic intellectual culture rather than mere social performance.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The medical analogy is the key — and it is Epicurus’ own characteristic framing. Philosophy is a medicine for the soul; what is needed is real health, not the appearance of it. This means that the point of philosophical study is not intellectual achievement, social credibility, or cultural formation (the Humanist and Platonic readings) but the actual elimination of the fears and vain desires that make people miserable. A person who studies philosophy but remains frightened of death, enslaved to vain desire, and anxious about divine judgment has the appearance of philosophy without the health it is meant to produce.
Bailey: “We must heal our misfortunes by the grateful recollection of what has been and by the recognition that it is impossible to make undone what has been done.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A Stoic-flavored acceptance of the past — what is done cannot be undone, so accept it and move on. Or a religious counsel of gratitude for blessings even in adversity.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The word heal is characteristically Epicurean and precisely chosen. The recollection of past pleasures is not passive acceptance or religious gratitude but an active therapeutic practice — using the actual goods of experience already possessed to counterbalance present difficulty. This connects to Principal Doctrine 18’s discussion of the mind’s role in managing pleasure and pain across time. The recognition that the past cannot be undone is not Stoic fatalism but a practical argument against wasting present energy on regret: the past good is real and permanently possessed; dwelling on its loss rather than its reality is a philosophical error with a practical cure.
Bailey: The wise man feels no more pain, when being tortured himself than when his friend is tortured.
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is celebrating the Stoic-style sage’s indifference to physical pain — the wise man has so thoroughly mastered his reactions that even torture leaves him essentially unaffected. Or alternatively, it is read as a sentimental expression of empathy, showing that Epicurus was “really” an altruist who valued others above himself.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Neither the Stoic nor the sentimental reading is correct. This saying is about what genuine Epicurean friendship actually produces in a person who has fully achieved it. The wise man’s care for his friend has become so real and deep — through long shared life, shared philosophy, and genuine mutual commitment — that the friend’s suffering is as present to him as his own. This is not self-abnegating altruism (the religious/Humanist misread) or Stoic indifference to one’s own pain (the Stoic misread), but the fruit of the friendship that VS 52 celebrates and PD 27 calls the greatest good. The boundary between self and genuine friend has become, through real intimacy and shared understanding, genuinely permeable. This is the highest expression of what Epicurean friendship is — not an abstract ideal but a lived reality whose depth transforms the person who achieves it.
Bailey: On occasion a man will die for his friend, for if he betrays his friend, his whole life will be confounded by distrust and completely upset.
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: The first clause is used to argue that Epicurus endorsed noble self-sacrifice for others — contradicting the “selfish hedonist” caricature and proving he was really an altruist. The second clause is then used against him: it reduces the willingness to die to mere guilt-avoidance, making the apparent generosity of the first clause look like self-interest in disguise.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Both misreadings miss what is actually being said. The willingness to die for a friend is not noble self-abnegation — it is the honest recognition that the person who has genuinely achieved Epicurean friendship understands that betraying it would destroy the very thing that makes his life worth living. The “distrust” that would “confound the whole life” is not an external punishment or a guilty conscience imposed from outside — it is the internal dissolution of the security, confidence, and genuine pleasure that friendship provides and that are the actual foundation of happiness. The person who betrays a friend to save himself has not preserved his life; he has emptied it of what made it worth having. This is entirely consistent with VS 34, VS 39, and PD 27: genuine friendship is not a sentiment layered on top of self-interest but a real good that, once fully achieved, is inseparable from the self that possesses it.
Bailey: We must free ourselves from the prison of public education and politics.
Adulterating Tradition: Humanism / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is being anti-intellectual and anti-civic — retreating from public engagement and formal education, confirming the garden-recluse caricature. The saying is used as proof that Epicureans were disengaged, culturally hostile, and politically irresponsible.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: “Public education” here does not mean literacy, learning, or philosophy — it refers to the competitive rhetorical and cultural formation that trains people into vain desires, status anxiety, and the hunger for popular approval. This is the system VS 45 identifies as producing “boasting and bragging” and rivalry for cultural display, and that VS 29 rejects in favor of truth over praise. “Politics” refers not to any justified civic engagement — which PD 6 and 7 explicitly allow when it produces genuine security — but to the pursuit of political power as an end in itself, which requires precisely the “servility to mobs or monarchs” condemned in VS 67. The “prison” metaphor is key: these are not mere pastimes to be moderated but institutional frameworks that actively install the mind viruses — the love of fame, the need for approval, the equation of status with happiness — that destroy the capacity for genuine pleasure. Freeing oneself from them is not withdrawal from the world but the removal of the chains that prevent full engagement with what actually matters.
Bailey: “Some men wished to become famous and conspicuous, thinking that they would thus win for themselves safety from other men. Wherefore if the life of such men is safe, they have obtained the good which nature craves; but if it is not safe, they do not possess that for which they strove at first by the instinct of nature.”
Note: This saying is identical to Principal Doctrine 7. See that entry for full analysis.
Bailey: Every man passes out of life as though he had just been born.
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: A consoling egalitarianism — death is the great leveler, and we all face it with the same helplessness as a newborn. Compatible with Stoic equanimity before death or religious memento mori that humbles the proud.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying is not a consolation but a warning, and its sting is directed at a specific kind of failure. No matter how many years a person has lived, if he has spent them accumulating vain goods, deferring genuine pleasure to a future that never arrived, and pursuing the empty ambitions that VS 58 and VS 45 identify as prisons — he arrives at death with nothing genuinely possessed. He is exactly where he was at birth: empty-handed, having never drawn on the actual resources that were always available to him. This connects directly to VS 14’s warning that “life is wasted in procrastination,” to PD 19 and 20’s insistence that the complete life requires no infinite time and is fully achievable within a finite span, and to VS 17’s portrait of the old man who has brought genuine goods “into the harbour of a happy reminiscence.” Dying as though just born is not a universal condition to be accepted — it is a failure that Epicurean philosophy specifically exists to prevent.
Bailey: “Most beautiful too is the sight of those near and dear to us, when our original kinship makes us of one mind; for such sight stirs us to this end.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: A sentimental observation about the beauty of family and social bonds — compatible with any warm-hearted philosophy and contributing nothing specifically Epicurean.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The phrase “original kinship makes us of one mind” does philosophical work that the sentimental reading misses entirely. The sight of those dear to us who share genuine philosophical understanding — who have arrived at the same orientation toward life through the same study — is beautiful in a specific way: it is the visible confirmation of the community that Epicurean philosophy makes possible. This is not generic family warmth but the particular beauty of the Epicurean garden community: people united by shared understanding and genuine friendship who see in each other what the philosophy has produced. The “stirring to this end” means that seeing it inspires others toward the same.
Bailey: “There is also a limit in simple living, and he who fails to heed it is in as bad a case as the man who gives way to excess.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: Almost entirely ignored, since it cuts against both the ascetic misreading of Epicurus (those who would prefer no limit on simplicity) and the hedonist misreading (those who would prefer no limit on excess). When noticed, it is assimilated to Aristotle’s golden mean.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is one of the most important correctives in the entire VS collection for the ascetic misreading. Epicurus is saying explicitly that excessive simplicity — treating self-denial as a virtue, restricting pleasures beyond what nature and prudence require — is as much a failure as excess. The standard is always nature and the real production of pleasure; falling short of what nature actually requires is as much an error as exceeding it. This saying proves conclusively that Epicurean “simple living” is not an ascetic program but a practical calibration whose goal is maximum genuine pleasure, not minimum consumption.
Bailey: “Let us show our feeling for our lost friends not by lamentation but by meditation.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: Cold philosophical detachment — Epicurus is counseling suppression of grief in the manner of a Stoic who denies that loss is a real evil, or this is taken as evidence of the emotional shallowness of Epicurean friendship.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The word meditation (or recollection, depending on the translator) points to VS 55: the active recollection of the genuine pleasures of friendship already possessed and permanently real. This is not suppression of feeling but redirection of it toward what is actually available — the real and indestructible record of the friendship as it was lived — rather than toward lamentation over what is gone. Read with VS 40 of the Principal Doctrines, where Epicureans in community “do not lament the previous departure of a dead friend, as though he were to be pitied,” this is not coldness but the fruit of understanding: grief without despair because what was real remains real in memory and understanding.
Bailey: “A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs, yet it possesses all things in unfailing abundance; and if by chance it obtains many possessions, it is easy to distribute them so as to win the gratitude of neighbours.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus is praising poverty and condemning wealth accumulation — another ascetic proof text. Or alternatively, the last clause is isolated to argue Epicurus endorsed charitable redistribution in the Humanist sense.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The key phrase is “servility to mobs or monarchs” — the Epicurean avoids the accumulation of great wealth not because wealth is evil but because the process of acquiring it typically requires forms of dependence and compromise that destroy freedom and the security that is the actual foundation of happiness. The free life “possesses all things in unfailing abundance” because it has correctly identified what it actually needs and secured those things — it is not impoverished but genuinely sufficient. If wealth comes without servility, it is distributed freely, which wins the goodwill of neighbors and thereby enhances the security and pleasure that are the actual goals.
Bailey: “Nothing is sufficient for him to whom what is sufficient seems little.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion / Humanism
Common Misinterpretation: A moral epigram about greed — Epicurus condemns the insatiable as a moral warning, compatible with any tradition that counsels moderation.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is a diagnostic statement, not a moral condemnation. The person for whom the sufficient seems little is not morally defective but philosophically confused — he has not understood what genuine sufficiency is and therefore cannot recognize it when he has it. This is the practical consequence of the mind virus that PD 15 targets: the belief that “enough” is always just out of reach. No amount of additional acquisition will cure this condition because the problem is not insufficiency but misidentification of the standard. The cure is philosophical understanding of nature’s actual requirements, not more wealth or more self-discipline.
Bailey: “The thankless greed of the soul makes the creature everlastingly long for varieties of dainty food.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Platonism / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus condemns luxurious eating — another proof that he was essentially an ascetic suspicious of bodily pleasure, or a moralist condemning gluttony.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The word “thankless” is the key — it names the failure not as excess but as ingratitude, the inability to recognize and be satisfied by genuine pleasures already possessed. The “greed of the soul” — not of the body — is what drives the longing for endless variety, connecting this directly to PD 29-30’s analysis of vain desire as driven by the mind’s empty imaginings rather than genuine bodily need. Simple food enjoyed with genuine pleasure is not condemned; the frenetic pursuit of variety driven by a soul that cannot recognize real satisfaction is the problem. VS 33’s vision of rivaling Zeus with basic necessities secured is the positive counterpart to this negative diagnosis.
Bailey: “Let nothing be done in your life, which will cause you fear if it becomes known to your neighbour.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: A conventional moral rule — Epicurus is counseling social respectability and conformity to community standards, as any conventional moralist would.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is not a social conformity rule but a direct application of the Epicurean analysis of injustice in PD 34 and 35. The standard is not what the neighbor will think but what you yourself would fear if the neighbor knew — the fear is the signal that the action is one that corrupts your own peace of mind and security. Living openly, without hidden actions whose exposure would cause fear, is the practical condition of the just man’s tranquility described in PD 17. This is not external constraint but internal freedom: the person who can act without fear of disclosure has achieved something that no amount of social performance can substitute for.
Bailey: “Every desire must be confronted with this question: what will happen to me, if the object of my desire is accomplished, and what if it is not?”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A Stoic-flavored practice of negative visualization — Epicurus is telling us to imagine the worst case so we can accept it with equanimity, as the Stoics recommend.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The question goes in both directions: both what happens if the desire is satisfied and what happens if it is not. This is the practical application of the desire classification in PD 26 and 29: desires that produce significant pain when unmet need to be distinguished from those that dissolve easily. The question about satisfaction — “what will happen to me if I get what I want?” — is equally important and equally non-Stoic: Epicurus is asking us to evaluate whether the satisfaction will actually produce the pleasure expected, not merely whether we can endure the disappointment. This is rational pleasure-management, not preparation for loss.
Bailey: “There is no advantage to obtaining protection from men if things above and below the earth and indeed all in the boundless universe give cause for fear.”
Note: This saying closely parallels Principal Doctrine 13. See that entry for full analysis. The core point — that social security without philosophical understanding of nature leaves cosmic fear intact — is the same in both.
Bailey: “The occurrence of certain bodily pains assists us in guarding against others like them.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: Pain has positive value — it teaches us and builds character, confirming religious doctrines of redemptive suffering or Stoic doctrines of hardship as training.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This is a precise naturalistic observation, not an endorsement of pain’s value. Certain pains function as signals that alert us to conditions that would produce greater pain if ignored — they are useful as information, not valuable as experiences. This is entirely consistent with Epicurus’ view that pain is always an evil (PD 3): the pain that guards against greater pain is instrumentally useful in the way a warning signal is useful, not intrinsically good in the way religious and Stoic frameworks claim suffering to be. The misreading that turns this into an endorsement of character-building through suffering is precisely the confusion Epicurus is not making.
Bailey: “In a philosophical discussion he who is worsted gains more in proportion as he has learned more.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Humanism / Skepticism
Common Misinterpretation: A magnanimous observation about intellectual humility — Epicurus endorses open philosophical debate in the Academic or Humanist tradition of free inquiry, where all positions are open to revision.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The saying is grounded in Epicurus’ therapeutic view of philosophy. The person who is “worsted” — whose false beliefs are refuted — gains more than the one whose true beliefs survive the test, precisely because he has had something harmful removed. This is not Academic open-endedness (where no conclusion is final) or Humanist celebration of debate for its own sake, but a statement about the medical function of philosophical argument: identifying and removing false beliefs that cause harm. The gain is real philosophical health, not merely intellectual broadening.
Bailey: “Ungrateful towards the blessings of the past is the saying, ‘Await the end of a long life.’”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Platonism / Stoicism
Common Misinterpretation: A warning against procrastination or against postponing enjoyment — motivational advice compatible with any philosophy that values carpe diem.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The target is specifically the framework that evaluates a life only by its final condition — that happiness must be assessed at the end rather than possessed throughout. This is a direct refutation of the Aristotelian and Stoic view that we cannot call a person happy until his life is complete, and of the religious view that the final judgment determines the ultimate value of a life. For Epicurus, the blessings of the past are real and possessed; to declare them worthless because the end has not yet come — or because the end was bad — is a philosophical error with real costs. A life is composed of its pleasures as they are lived; the end does not retroactively determine their value.
Bailey: “Injustice is not an evil in itself, but only in consequence of the fear which attaches to the apprehension of being unable to escape those appointed to punish such actions.”
Note: This saying is identical to Principal Doctrine 34. See that entry for full analysis.
Bailey: “The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: Epicurus endorses Stoic self-sufficiency — the inner independence of the sage who is free from all external determination. Or religious self-sufficiency as freedom from worldly attachment.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: Epicurean self-sufficiency is not the Stoic sage’s independence from all externals — it is the practical condition of having identified and secured what nature actually requires, which is genuinely achievable and genuinely liberating. The “freedom” produced is concrete: freedom from servility to mobs and monarchs (VS 67), freedom from the frenetic pursuit of vain desires (PD 15), freedom from the permanent anxiety of the person who always needs more. This is not inner independence from external reality but an accurate relationship with external reality that produces real, practical freedom in daily life.
Bailey: “The noble soul occupies itself with wisdom and friendship: of these the one is a mortal good, the other immortal.”
Adulterating Tradition: Platonism / Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: Wisdom is the “immortal good” because it partakes of the eternal — confirming Platonic dualism in which the soul through reason participates in the immortal. Or friendship is the “immortal good” because love transcends death in a quasi-religious sense.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The identification of which is mortal and which immortal is the counterintuitive reversal that requires careful reading. Wisdom is the mortal good — it belongs to a particular person living a particular finite life and ends with that life. Friendship is the immortal good — not because friends survive death, but because genuine friendship, understood and practiced rightly, is figuratively a god-like experience. Further, friendship is what continues through communities across generations and what gives Epicurean philosophy its capacity to persist and spread. Epicurus founded not only a philosophy but a community; the friendship that animates it is what has proved enduring. The Platonic reading gets the assignment exactly backwards.
Bailey: “The man who is serene causes no disturbance to himself or to his neighbour.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Buddhism
Common Misinterpretation: Serenity (ataraxia) is the Epicurean goal — this confirms that Epicurus was fundamentally a philosopher of tranquility and detachment, comparable to the Stoic sage or Buddhist practitioner.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: This saying describes a consequence of living well, not the goal of Epicurean life. The man who has achieved genuine pleasure and security — through understanding, friendship, and accurate management of desire — is naturally serene because he has no unresolved fears or vain desires driving him to disturb himself or others. Serenity is the outward expression of a life working as it should, not the aim one pursues directly. Pursuing tranquility as the goal — the Stoic and Buddhist misreading of Epicurus — produces a different and distorted program. The goal is pleasure; a serene outlook is what pleasure, correctly understood and achieved, looks like in practice.
Bailey: “The first measure of security is to watch over one’s youth and to guard against what makes havoc of all by means of pestering desires.”
Adulterating Tradition: Stoicism / Supernatural Religion
Common Misinterpretation: A conventional moral warning about protecting the young from temptation — compatible with religious guidance on guarding youth against vice or Stoic counsel on building character early.
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: “Pestering desires” — vain desires driven by idle imagination rather than genuine need — are identified as the primary threat to security from early life. The reasoning is naturalistic: the philosophical errors that make people miserable are most easily installed in youth, when the mind is most susceptible to the cultural transmission of false values (the love of fame, the fear of divine punishment, the belief that “enough” is always out of reach). Epicurean education is not moral formation in the Stoic or religious sense but philosophical inoculation against the mind viruses that destroy happiness. The earliest line of defense is philosophical understanding, not willpower or virtue training.
Bailey: “The disturbance of the soul cannot be ended nor true joy created either by the possession of the greatest wealth or by honor and respect in the eyes of the crowd or by anything else that is associated with causes of unlimited desire.”
Adulterating Tradition: Supernatural Religion / Humanism / Stoicism / Platonism
Common Misinterpretation: A renunciation of worldly goods compatible with religious otherworldliness or Stoic indifference to externals — Epicurus is confirming that material and social success cannot produce happiness, so we must look beyond them (to God, to virtue, to the soul’s inner life).
Correct Epicurean Interpretation: The closing saying of the collection makes the Epicurean diagnosis complete and its target explicit: it is not wealth and honor as such that are condemned but wealth and honor as causes of unlimited desire — the category of VS 68’s “thankless greed” and PD 15’s “wealth demanded by idle imaginings.” Where wealth and honor are obtained without the engine of vain desire driving them — as in VS 67’s free man who distributes wealth freely — they are not condemned. What the soul requires is the removal of the unlimited desires that make no acquisition sufficient. That removal is the work of natural philosophy, of accurate understanding of what nature actually requires — and it cannot be purchased, awarded, or inherited. It must be understood.
*All Bailey translations are from Cyril Bailey, “Epicurus: The Extant Remains” (Oxford, 1926). *
The interpretations on this page reflect the editorial perspective of Cassius Amicus at EpicurusToday.com, with particular attention to refuting adulterations introduced through Stoicism, Academic Skepticism, Platonism, Supernatural Religion, and Humanism. For the broader context of those misreadings, see the additional articles Mind Viruses and Corrections To Modern Misreadings of the Principal Doctrines and other materials on the EpicurusToday.com website.
While the following are in no way responsible for the content or opinions stated on this page, in composing this commentary special mention attention has been paid to the work of David Sedley (numerous articles and books), Gosling & Taylor (especially “The Greeks On Pleasure”), and Norman DeWitt (“Epicurus and His Philosophy”). For a more contemporary treatment of Epicurean Ethical issues, also see Emily Austin’s “Living For Pleasure.”