Two Epicurean Generals Whose Names Will Echo Longer Than Caesar - Torquatus And Velleius, Defenders of Epicurus
How Two Roman Generals Preserved the True Epicurus — While the Scholars Lost Him
I. The Problem No One Admits
Section titled “I. The Problem No One Admits”Ask almost anyone to describe Epicurean philosophy and you will receive some version of the same answer: a gentle creed of modest pleasures, quiet gardens, good wine, close friends, and above all else, the avoidance of trouble. The Epicurean, in the popular imagination, is a recluse — a man who has retreated from the storms of public life to savor the small satisfactions of private existence. He prefers bread and water to a tyrant’s banquet. He seeks ataraxia, that famously obscure Greek term usually rendered as tranquility, serenity, or the untroubled calm of still water. He has made his peace with the world by making his exit from it.
This portrait is almost entirely wrong.
It is not merely incomplete or overstated — it is a systematic inversion of how Epicurus lived and what Epicurus actually taught, constructed piecemeal over two millennia by philosophers, theologians, and popularizers who either misunderstood the texts, deliberately distorted them, or worked from the hostile caricatures of enemies rather than the authentic words of the tradition itself. The passive, retreating Epicurean — the ancient equivalent of a man who just wants to be left alone to watch sunsets — is a philosophical ghost story, a specter conjured by those who needed Epicurus to be small so that their own systems could appear large by comparison.
How do we know this? We know it, in part, because Cicero preserved two extraordinary figures for us.
Their names are Lucius Manlius Torquatus and Gaius Velleius. They were Romans of the highest social rank, men of military experience and public distinction — precisely the kind of men, in other words, who should never have been Epicureans if the popular portrait of that philosophy were accurate. And yet they were Epicureans of the most serious kind: men who had read the texts, absorbed the arguments, trained under authentic teachers, and were prepared to argue for Epicurus at length, with precision and without apology, against the most formidable philosophical opponent of the age.
Cicero gave them a stage. And whether he intended it or not — and there is good reason to think he did not — what they said on that stage has survived as the clearest and most authoritative account of Classical Epicurean philosophy that the ancient world has left us.
II. Two Soldiers, One Philosophy
Section titled “II. Two Soldiers, One Philosophy”Before we enter the debate, we must understand who these men were, because their identities are inseparable from the argument they were making.
Lucius Manlius Torquatus was the scion of one of Rome’s most storied military families. His ancestor Titus Manlius Torquatus had earned the cognomen Torquatus — “the neck-ringed one” — in the fourth century BC by killing a giant Gallic warrior in single combat and seizing his golden torque as a trophy of battle. That same Titus Manlius had later, as dictator, executed his own son for winning a battle without orders, because Roman military discipline demanded it. The name Torquatus thus carried two interwoven legends: extraordinary personal courage on the battlefield, and an iron willingness to place duty above every natural attachment, even the love of a father for his son.
Lucius Manlius Torquatus, who appears as Cicero’s interlocutor in De Finibus (On Ends) around 50 BC, carried this inheritance with full awareness. He was no student philosopher debating in comfortable obscurity; he was a praetor, a man of affairs, and a figure of genuine public standing. His adoption of Epicurean philosophy was not a youthful flirtation or a private consolation — it was a considered intellectual commitment that he was willing to defend publicly, in dialogue with Rome’s greatest orator and philosopher, citing chapter and verse from the Epicurean texts he had studied.
Gaius Velleius was a senator of similar standing. He appears in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), likely written around 45 BC, identified explicitly as a prominent Epicurean. Like Torquatus, he was not a man on the margins of Roman society. He was at its center, which is precisely what makes his voice so significant: when a Roman senator of this rank stands up and argues, with evident passion and scholarly command, that Epicurus was right about the gods, we are not dealing with a philosophical curiosity. We are dealing with a man who had examined the options and made a serious choice.
These two figures matter beyond their individual biographies for a reason that is easy to miss if we approach them only as characters in a philosophical dialogue. Cicero did not invent their arguments. He was too scrupulous a philosopher, and too fair in his polemical methods, to put absurdities into the mouths of men who were his contemporaries and whom he respected as intellectual opponents. When Torquatus speaks in Book One of On Ends, he is speaking from authentic Epicurean textbooks — the same texts that circulated among the Epicurean communities of Rome and the Mediterranean world in the first century BC. When Velleius declaims in Book One of On the Nature of the Gods, he is voicing positions that had been worked out in detail by Epicurus himself, by Metrodorus, by Hermarchus, by Lucretius, and by the long chain of Epicurean teachers who had elaborated the school’s physics and theology over three centuries.
In short: Torquatus and Velleius are not just interesting characters. They are windows. Through them, we see Epicurean philosophy as it was actually understood and argued for at the height of the ancient world, by men who had access to everything — every text, every teacher, every tradition — that the school possessed.
That version of the philosophy is startlingly different from the tame, passive, half-apologetic Epicureanism we are usually sold today.
III. Torquatus, Virtue, and the Courage to Name Pleasure
Section titled “III. Torquatus, Virtue, and the Courage to Name Pleasure”There is a certain drama in the opening of De Finibus that modern readers can easily miss. Cicero has feigned reluctance to discuss philosophy in Latin rather than Greek. Torquatus brushes this aside and tells him to stop stalling. The tone he strikes is not the gentle murmur of a man who prefers to stay out of arguments — it is the confident, even combative voice of someone who knows his ground and has no intention of retreating from it.
He begins with the ancestry he carries and the point he intends to make.
When Cicero raises an eyebrow at the idea that pleasure could be the highest good — how, Cicero implies, can the scion of such a family of warriors and disciplinarians hold such a doctrine? — Torquatus answers the challenge head-on. He does not retreat to a more comfortable formulation. He says, in essence: my ancestors acted exactly as Epicurean philosophy predicts and prescribes. The great Titus Manlius, who killed the Gaul and took his torque, who executed his own son for undisciplined valor — far from contradicting Epicurean philosophy, he exemplifies it.
This is a remarkable argument and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as sophistry. Torquatus’s point is that courage in battle, endurance of hardship, even the terrifying sternness of a father who puts military duty above paternal love — all of these flow naturally from a correct understanding of what pleasure actually is and how it is to be pursued. Epicurean philosophy does not say that every momentary tickle of sensation should be chased. It says that pleasure is the goal of life — and that a man of wisdom understands that some apparent pleasures lead to greater pains, while some apparent pains lead to greater pleasures. The soldier who faces battle is trading immediate discomfort and danger for the greater goods of honor, security, friendship, and the kind of deep self-approval that comes from having done what needed to be done.
The virtue of Torquatus’s ancestor was not in spite of Epicurean philosophy. It was, Torquatus insists, precisely what Epicurean philosophy would have predicted and endorsed.
But Torquatus’s most important contribution to the preservation of Epicurean philosophy is not this defense of military virtue. It is something subtler, and philosophically more fundamental: his precise account of what Epicurus meant when he said that pleasure is the highest good.
The Epicureans divided all feeling — all conscious experience — into exactly two categories: pleasure and pain. There was no third thing. When you are conscious of feeling anything at all, you are feeling either one or the other. Pleasure is good; pain is bad; everything that can be said about the moral life follows from this.
The difficulty arises — and it is here that centuries of confusion have accumulated — with the specific kind of pleasure Epicurus identified as the highest. Epicurus used the phrase aponia (absence of bodily pain) and ataraxia (absence of mental disturbance) to describe the pinnacle of the pleasurable life. And subsequent readers, up to and including many modern scholars, have made the catastrophic interpretive error of treating these as something other than pleasure — as if “absence of pain” described a neutral, blank, anesthetic state that was somehow higher than pleasure and categorically different from it.
Torquatus corrects this error with admirable directness. He makes plain that for Epicurus, there is no third state between pleasure and pain. When pain is absent — when you are free from bodily hurt and mental anxiety — that state is not neutral. It is not a featureless void. It is pleasure. It is the very same thing as pleasure, described from a different angle. To say “I am in no pain” and to say “I am experiencing pleasure” are, in the Epicurean framework, not two statements about different things. They are two names for one reality.
This is not a trivial point dressed up in philosophical language. It is, once understood, a complete reorientation of how we read the entire Epicurean system. The person who has achieved freedom from pain has not settled for some lesser, desiccated substitute for the pleasures of feast and festival and love. He has achieved the summit — the state in which pleasure is complete and stable, not subject to the fluctuations that attend any pleasure pursued in the wrong way or without philosophical understanding.
Torquatus puts it plainly: the removal of all pain is the limit of the greatest pleasure. And pleasure, when stable and complete, admits only of variation in kind, not of increase in degree. Once you have reached the summit — the full absence of pain — you can add variety, color, richness to your experience; but you cannot add more pleasure in the sense of surpassing that summit. The summit is the summit.
This is Epicurus as his school actually taught him: not a philosopher of anaesthetic withdrawal, but a philosopher who located the highest human good in a rich, active, fully conscious state of well-being that could withstand the shocks of fortune precisely because it was grounded not in the nervous pursuit of pleasures that depend on external luck, but in a trained, philosophically educated capacity to live well under any circumstances. Including, as Torquatus’s own family tree attested, on the battlefield.
IV. “What Was God Doing Before He Made the World?” — Velleius Demolishes Intelligent Design
Section titled “IV. “What Was God Doing Before He Made the World?” — Velleius Demolishes Intelligent Design”If Torquatus is the great defender of Epicurean ethics, Velleius is the great defender of Epicurean theology — and his weapon of choice is not a gentle pastoral argument but a sustained, relentless, almost prosecutorial assault on every alternative view of the divine that the ancient world had produced.
Velleius speaks first in De Natura Deorum, and the position he occupies in the dialogue is significant. He is the offensive speaker. Before anyone can ask him to defend the Epicurean view of the gods, he demolishes every competing view with a methodical ferocity that is difficult to read as anything but passion. This is not the tone of a man offering philosophy as private consolation. This is the tone of a man who has looked at the alternatives and found them not merely mistaken but intellectually dishonest — unworthy of serious minds.
His central target is what we would today call intelligent design: the argument that the order and structure of the world require an intelligent creator who designed it with purpose and intention. This argument was ancient long before Cicero’s time. It appears in Plato, who in the Timaeus portrayed the cosmos as the handicraft of a divine craftsman, the Demiurge, who looked to eternal Forms as his models and fashioned the world as their imperfect copy. It appears in Aristotle, in the guise of an unmoved mover whose pure thought imparted motion to the heavens. It reaches its fullest ancient development in Stoicism, which held that the cosmos is itself a divine, rational organism, pervaded by a creative fire or logos that gives everything its form and purpose.
Velleius does not merely disagree with these positions. He dismantles them as incoherent.
Against Plato’s demiurge, he poses the question that devastates creation-myths of every kind: what was the god doing before he made the world? If the god is eternal, and the world was created at some point in time, then there was an eternity of time before the creation during which the god did nothing. Why did he wait? What stirred him into action after an infinite interval of inactivity? Was he bored? Did he have a plan that suddenly crystallized after endless eons without one? No satisfying answer is available. The god either existed in an eternal state of purposeless stasis — which is not a picture of perfection — or his decision to create was prompted by some external cause, which means he is not the first and ultimate explanation of things after all.
Against Aristotle’s unmoved mover, Velleius raises similarly acute difficulties. A god who is pure intellect contemplating only himself, divorced from any relationship with the world he supposedly moves, is no god in any sense that ordinary human understanding can connect with the divine. He is an abstraction, a philosophical convenience dressed in theological language.
Against the Stoics, Velleius is if anything more scathing. The Stoic god is the world itself — a divine reason that pervades matter and gives it form, that is simultaneously the craftsman and the material, the fire that burns through everything. But this means the Stoic god is not immune to change, dissolution, and suffering. A god who is identical with the material world must share the fates of that world. He burns, he freezes, he rots, he is rebuilt. This is not blessedness. This is simply nature under a pious pseudonym.
What, then, does Epicurus offer in place of these constructions?
Velleius explains that the Epicurean case for divinity does not begin with an argument. It begins with a fact of human consciousness. Every human mind, in every culture, forms a preconception — a prolepsis — of the divine. This is not the result of education, tradition, or philosophical argument. It arises naturally, before argument is possible, from the very structure of how minds work. The content of this preconception is consistent across all peoples and all ages: divine beings are blessed, immortal, and free from every kind of trouble or disturbance.
Now here is the key move. Epicurus does not derive the gods’ nature from the world. He derives it from that universal preconception — and then he asks what kind of beings would actually fit that preconception. What would blessed, immortal, undisturbed existence actually require?
It would require, first and foremost, that such beings have absolutely nothing to do with the management of the world. Management is trouble. Creation is labor. Maintenance is exhausting. Any being who was genuinely in a state of perfect blessedness — in the fullest Epicurean sense, meaning free from all pain, all anxiety, all frustration — would not be running a universe. The universe, with all its conflict and suffering and chaos, is precisely the kind of thing that would disturb a blessed being’s serenity if that being were entangled with it.
The Epicurean gods, therefore, live in what Lucretius describes as the intermundia — the vast tranquil spaces between the infinite worlds that constitute the cosmos. They are real beings. They are what the human mind has always, in its deepest intuitions, recognized as truly divine. They are not, however, creators, managers, judges, or punishers of human beings. They take no interest in human affairs because an interest in human affairs would be a kind of imperfection — a sign that their blessedness was incomplete, that they had needs or purposes that required the machinery of the world to satisfy.
This view of the gods, Velleius argues, is not atheism. It is not the secret atheism that ancient critics accused Epicurus of harboring. It is, rather, the only theologically consistent account of divinity available — the only account that does not require us to believe in a god who is secretly troubled, limited, or defective. The Platonist god who frets over his creation, the Stoic god who is the creation and therefore suffers with it, the creator-god who existed in purposeless idleness for an eternity before inexplicably deciding to make a world — all of these are, in Velleius’s telling, less genuinely divine than the Epicurean gods who exist in perfect, undisturbed, eternal blessedness.
Behind this argument lies a broader point about the intellectual method that produces good philosophy versus bad philosophy. Velleius is insisting that our picture of the divine must begin with reality — with what is actually observable and what can actually be inferred from observation — rather than with comfortable stories that violate basic logic. The question “what was god doing before creation?” is not a cheap rhetorical trick. It is a demand for logical accountability of the kind that Epicurus introduced into philosophical theology and that his successors, Torquatus and Velleius among them, carried forward with what we can only call military discipline.
V. The Roman Senate’s Epicurean Wing
Section titled “V. The Roman Senate’s Epicurean Wing”It would be a mistake to treat Torquatus and Velleius as isolated curiosities — two philosophers who happened to have military family backgrounds but who otherwise existed apart from the world of Roman action. The evidence suggests, rather, that serious Epicureanism among Rome’s governing class was far more widespread than the history books typically acknowledge.
The philosophical schools competed intensely for the allegiances of Rome’s educated elite during the late Republic, and Epicureanism held its own in that competition. The Stoics were formidable rivals and eventually won the ideological contest — Stoicism became the default philosophy of the Roman imperial ruling class, the creed of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca — but in the crucial decades of the late Republic, the Epicureans were a genuine force. Philodemus of Gadara, the great Epicurean philosopher and poet, operated at Herculaneum under the patronage of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. The villa at Herculaneum that bore his library — the Villa of the Papyri, whose charred scrolls we are still recovering and reading today — was a salon of Epicurean intellectual life frequented by major figures of the age.
Torquatus and Velleius were not, therefore, aberrations. They were part of a serious and sophisticated movement — one that happened to produce some of the Republic’s most capable soldiers and statesmen alongside its philosophers and poets.
What Cicero did, by choosing them as his interlocutors in De Finibus and De Natura Deorum, was something more complex than simple philosophical dialogue. He was acknowledging — however reluctantly, and with whatever ulterior argumentative motives — that Epicureanism was a position serious enough to be represented by serious men. He was also, perhaps without fully realizing it, preserving for posterity the most sustained and coherent presentation of Classical Epicurean philosophy that has survived from the ancient world.
Julius Caesar’s name, needless to say, echoes through the ages. But Caesar left behind no philosophical exposition of Epicurean ethics. He left no account of what Epicurus really meant when he said that pleasure is the highest good, or how the Epicurean gods relate to the question of intelligent design. He left wars and monuments and biographies and political transformations. Torquatus and Velleius — through Cicero’s pen — left something that has proven, across two thousand years, at least as durable: a clear-eyed, philosophically rigorous, intellectually courageous defense of the truth about how to live.
VI. A Third General: Cassius Longinus and the Letter That Changed Everything
Section titled “VI. A Third General: Cassius Longinus and the Letter That Changed Everything”There is a third Roman military figure who, while not the main subject of this article, casts a long shadow over everything that Torquatus and Velleius represent. His name was Gaius Cassius Longinus — the same Cassius whose name is inseparably linked with the Ides of March, the man who organized the conspiracy that ended Julius Caesar’s life, the general who later died at Philippi.
Cassius was a proudly self-proclaimed Epicurean.
This is documented beyond any reasonable doubt in his own surviving letters to Cicero, written in the last years of the Republic. These letters are remarkable documents — frank, intellectually confident, sometimes playful, always revealing. They show us a man who had not merely adopted Epicurean philosophy as a social fashion or a private consolation, but who had genuinely absorbed it, thought it through, and could argue for it with the same clarity he brought to military strategy.
The exchange between Cicero and Cassius on the subject of Epicureanism is one of the most fascinating in the entire corpus of Latin letters. Cicero was a persistent, sometimes affectionate, sometimes mocking skeptic of Cassius’s philosophical commitments. In one letter (Fam. 15.16), he teases Cassius about “spectres” — the Epicurean doctrine that mental images are generated by physical films emitted from objects — and suggests, with some theatrical indignation, that the great warrior has been seduced away from Virtue into the arms of Pleasure.
Cassius’s reply (Fam. 15.19) is everything a defender of Epicurus could wish for. He cuts through the mockery with philosophical precision. He points out that Epicurus himself had always insisted that it is impossible to live a life of genuine pleasure without living a life of virtue and justice. The Epicurean is not abandoning virtue when he names pleasure as the goal — he is grounding virtue correctly, in its actual relationship to human well-being, rather than floating it in the thin air of Platonic abstraction. Virtue matters because it works. It produces the conditions under which pleasure is possible and sustainable. A man who lives unjustly is a man living in constant anxiety about discovery and punishment — which is precisely not the Epicurean life. The virtuous life and the pleasurable life are not two lives pointing in different directions. They converge.
But it is Cicero’s response to Cassius that has the greatest philosophical resonance. In the same letter where he teases Cassius about Epicureanism, Cicero catches himself mid-argument and says something extraordinary. Having just delivered what reads like a standard-issue philosophical dismissal of the pleasure-philosophy, he suddenly pauses and addresses Cassius directly: “And yet to whom am I talking? To you, the most gallant gentleman in the world, who, ever since you set foot in the forum, have done nothing but what bears every mark of the most impressive distinction.” And then — the concession that reverberates: “Why, in that very school you have selected I apprehend there is more vitality than I should have supposed, if only because it has your approval.”
This is Cicero — the greatest philosophical and rhetorical mind of Rome, the man who had constructed the most sophisticated critique of Epicureanism in the Latin language — admitting that Epicureanism has proven itself, in the person of Cassius Longinus, to have more power and more reality than he had given it credit for. The philosophy that he had spent years arguing was merely the creed of the comfortable, the doctrine of pleasure-seekers who had confused the good with the agreeable, had produced this: a man of absolute integrity, supreme courage, and decisive political action. A man who organized the most dramatic act of republican resistance in Roman history. A man whose conduct was, by any measure, as distinguished as the conduct of Torquatus’s legendary ancestors.
Why does this matter for our understanding of Torquatus and Velleius? Because it confirms, from an unexpected and hostile witness, the thesis that they had been arguing all along. It was not a coincidence that Epicureanism produced such men. It was not a contradiction. Cicero, in his letter to Cassius, was forced by the evidence of a single life to concede what Torquatus had argued philosophically a few years earlier: that Epicurean philosophy, correctly understood, is entirely consistent with — and may even be the most solid foundation for — exactly the kind of courage, virtue, and active engagement with the world that Rome’s most demanding traditions required.
The weak, passive, anesthetic Epicurean of the popular imagination would never have been confused with Cassius Longinus. The strong, disciplined, philosophically grounded Epicurean that Torquatus and Velleius described — that man could lead armies, face tyrants, and die with his philosophical convictions intact.
VII. What the Soldiers Knew That the Scholars Forgot
Section titled “VII. What the Soldiers Knew That the Scholars Forgot”We are left with a question that is both historical and urgently contemporary: how did the version of Epicureanism that Torquatus defended — confident, active, philosophically rigorous, entirely at home with courage and public virtue — get replaced by the tame, passive, comfort-seeking version that now dominates the popular understanding?
The answer is long and involves many hands. Christianity’s triumph required a neutered Epicurus — a Epicurus who could be safely caricatured as a wallowing sensualist, then discarded as a warning against the dangers of placing pleasure above God’s commands. Later philosophical traditions had their own reasons for keeping Epicurus small: the Stoics needed their greatest rival to appear merely self-indulgent; the Platonists needed him to appear philosophically shallow; the moralists needed him to appear dangerous to social order. Each tradition contributed its brushstroke to a portrait that served everyone’s needs except the truth.
What Torquatus knew — and what Velleius knew — and what Cassius Longinus demonstrated in his own extraordinary life — is that Epicurean philosophy was never a philosophy of retreat. It was a philosophy of orientation. It told you what was real, what mattered, and what you were actually trying to achieve when you chose one course of action over another. That clarity — that unsparing, sensation-grounded, logically disciplined clarity — was not the enemy of courage and public virtue. It was their finest intellectual support.
The Roman soldier who stood in the battle-line knowing what he valued, why he valued it, and what the loss of it would actually mean — who understood that the freedom from fear was not a passive state but an achievement earned through understanding — was not less prepared for battle than the Stoic soldier who had convinced himself that external events were matters of indifference. He may well have been more prepared. He had a reason that was grounded in his actual nature as a sensing, feeling, living being, rather than in an abstract philosophical principle whose connection to lived experience required constant rhetorical maintenance.
Torquatus’s ancestor fought the Gallic giant for the same reason that any brave man has ever done a difficult thing: because the outcome mattered, because honor mattered, because the kind of man he was — the kind of life he was living — demanded it. Epicurean philosophy gives that kind of motivation its most honest account. It does not dress it up in the language of pure rational duty, or claim that the brave man feels nothing while he acts. It says: this man valued something. He acted to protect and express what he valued. And his action was, in the deepest Epicurean sense, pleasurable — not because it was comfortable, but because it was fully consistent with who he was and what he chose to be.
VIII. An Unfinished Echo
Section titled “VIII. An Unfinished Echo”History has a sense of irony that philosophy sometimes lacks. Julius Caesar — the man who was killed partly by Cassius Longinus, the Epicurean general — is remembered by every schoolchild in the world. His name became a title: Kaiser, Czar. His Gallic Wars are still read in Latin classrooms. His assassination is still staged.
But who, outside of scholars and dedicated students of ancient philosophy, knows what Lucius Manlius Torquatus argued about the nature of pleasure on a particular afternoon in De Finibus Book One? Who has heard of Gaius Velleius, the Roman senator who took apart the intelligent design argument with such surgical precision in De Natura Deorum that Cicero, who disagreed with everything he said, could not simply dismiss him? Who reads the letter in which Cicero admitted, against all his polemical instincts, that Epicurean philosophy had more life in it than he had supposed, because it had produced Cassius?
The answer, for now, is: not many. But this is not a fact about the importance of what those men said. It is a fact about the success of the forces that suppressed it. The texts survived — improbably, through the copying work of monks who probably did not realize what they were preserving, through the explosive rediscovery of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in 1417, through the slow, patient scholarship of centuries. The arguments are still there. Torquatus’s clarification of what Epicurus meant by absence of pain is still the clearest statement of that doctrine in the ancient record. Velleius’s attack on intelligent design still reads, in places, as if it were written last week. Cassius’s letter defending Epicurean virtue still carries the urgency of a man who has thought the matter through and will not be talked out of it by anyone, even Cicero.
What the ancient world knew — and what these three Roman soldiers, in their different ways, embodied and articulated — was a version of Epicurus that our age has largely lost. Not the Epicurus of garden parties and mild pleasures and philosophical semi-retirement, but the Epicurus who stands at the beginning of a straight line running through Torquatus and Velleius and Cassius Longinus: the philosopher of facing reality without flinching, of grounding the good life not in fantasies of divine reward or Platonic abstraction or Stoic emotional suppression, but in what every living being — from the moment of its first breath — already knows.
Their names will echo as long as that argument needs to be made.
This article has been prepared by Cassius Amicus with the generous assistance and participation of others, including the overlords of Artificial Intelligence. Cassius Amicus is solely responsible for its content. For further information see EpicureanFriends.com, EpicurusToday.com, and the Lucretius Today Podcast.
References and Further Reading:
Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On Ends), Books I and II — Torquatus’s defense of Epicurean ethics and Cicero’s response. Side-by-side translation at EpicureanFriends.com.
Cicero, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), Book I — Velleius’s defense of Epicurean theology against all rival views. Side-by-side translation at EpicureanFriends.com.
Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares (Letters to Friends), Book XV, especially letters 15.16 (Cicero to Cassius on Epicureanism) and 15.19 (Cassius to Cicero in reply). Available with commentary at EpicureanFriends.com.
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus — the primary source for Epicurean ethics, including the doctrine of pleasure and the nature of the goal of life.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) — the fullest surviving exposition of Epicurean physics, including the nature of the gods and the intermundia.
For the Classical Epicurean position on pleasure, pain, and the meaning of “absence of pain,” see the resources at EpicurusToday.com, particularly “Two Names, One Reality: Why ‘Absence of Pain’ and ‘Pleasure’ Are Interchangeable Terms in Epicurean Philosophy.”