Guilty As Charged: Cicero's Deceit In Attacking Epicurean Pleasure

Subtitle: How Cicero’s Deceit in Attacking Epicurean Pleasure Is Impeached By Cicero’s Own Testimony

“Cicero was a crafty old trial lawyer and he deliberately argued to make points, because he was pleading before a reading audience, which functions like a jury, and his shrewd legal mind had long discerned the vulnerability of Epicureanism before this style of attack… I do not believe he could have misrepresented the truth so successfully had he not understood it completely.” — Norman DeWitt, review of Mary N. Porter Packer’s Cicero’s Presentation of Epicurean Ethics, American Journal of Philology, 1939

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Introduction: The Charge Against the Charger

The ancient world produced no more sophisticated, more eloquent, or more persistent critic of Epicurean philosophy than Marcus Tullius Cicero. His De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum — On the Ends of Good and Evil — remains the single most important ancient source for understanding the Epicurean ethical system in dialogue with its Stoic and Academic rivals, precisely because Cicero was intelligent enough to understand what he was arguing against and skilled enough to present it in a form that a Roman reading audience would engage with seriously. Torquatus, his Epicurean spokesman in Books I and II of that work, remains one of the clearest and most powerful ancient presentations of Epicurean ethics. For this, generations of scholars have been grateful to Cicero.

But Cicero was not writing a treatise. He was arguing a case. And Norman DeWitt, reviewing Mary N. Porter Packer’s 1938 dissertation Cicero’s Presentation of Epicurean Ethics, identified with surgical precision the distinction that matters:

“Every debater has the choice of arguing to reveal the truth in its entirety or of arguing to make points. The former method is adapted to the Supreme Court, the latter to a trial by jury. Cicero was a crafty old trial lawyer and he deliberately argued to make points, because he was pleading before a reading audience, which functions like a jury.”

Packer’s study had concluded that Cicero failed to understand Epicureanism as a unified philosophy but was not deliberately unfair. DeWitt took sharp exception to the acquittal: Cicero understood Epicureanism perfectly — which was precisely why his misrepresentation of it was so effective. He could only have deceived so successfully if he knew exactly where the pressure points were and where the truth could be safely distorted without the distortion being obvious.

This article examines one of Cicero’s most damaging specific charges against Epicurus — the charge that Epicurus denied that intellectual pursuits such as the study of literature, history, and philosophy are pleasurable in themselves — and shows how that charge is refuted not only by Epicurus’s own surviving texts but by Cicero’s own other writings. The evidence that convicts Cicero of arguing to make points rather than to reveal truth is the evidence Cicero himself supplied. DeWitt’s verdict of deliberate deceit, in this case, is confirmed by the very witness who should have been able to defeat it.

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Part One: The Scene at Cumae and the Charge Before Torquatus Speaks

The Setting of On Ends Books I and II

On Ends is written as a dialogue set at Cicero’s villa at Cumae. Cicero and his companions encounter Lucius Manlius Torquatus — a historical Roman of distinguished family who was indeed an Epicurean — and the conversation that follows is the fullest presentation of Epicurean ethics available in the Latin tradition. The dialogue is not a neutral academic exercise. Cicero controls the structure, the framing, the objections, and the final judgment. Torquatus is given a substantial speech — a significant part of Book I — to present the Epicurean position, and Cicero then takes the whole of Book II to demolish it. The deck is stacked from the beginning.

What makes this relevant for the present article is the specific charge Cicero presses against Epicurus near the end of Book I, after Torquatus has given his main speech presenting the Epicurean position. Having heard Torquatus’s defense of Epicurean ethics in full, Cicero turns directly to Torquatus and Triarius — the two Epicureans in the dialogue — and makes what is perhaps the most rhetorically effective single charge in the entire work. The placement is deliberate: it comes after Torquatus has spoken but before Cicero’s full response in Book II, so it lands in the audience’s mind as a summarizing judgment on what they have just heard. This is Cicero at his most skillful as an advocate — and, as we shall see, at his most deceptive.

The Charge: Epicurus Cannot Claim That Intellectual Pursuits Are Pleasurable

The charge appears near the end of Book I, after Torquatus has given his main speech presenting the Epicurean position. Cicero turns to address Torquatus and his fellow Epicurean Triarius directly, and what follows is one of the most revealing passages in the entire work. It is worth reading carefully in the Yonge translation because the argument Cicero is making is more sophisticated — and more deceptive — than a simple dismissal of intellectual pleasures:

“What pleasure do you, O Torquatus, what pleasure does this Triarius derive from literature, and history, and the knowledge of events, and the reading of poets, and his wonderful recollection of such numbers of verses? And do not say to me, Why all these things are a pleasure to me. So, too, were those noble actions to the Torquati. Epicurus never asserts this in this manner; nor would you, O Triarius, nor any man who had any wisdom, or who had ever imbibed those principles… For if it were once granted, even although there were no reference whatever to the body, that these things were naturally and intrinsically pleasant; then virtue and knowledge would be intrinsically desirable. And this is the last thing which he would choose to admit.” — Cicero, On Ends Book I (Yonge translation)

Read quickly, this looks like the charge that Epicurus denied the pleasurableness of intellectual activity. But read carefully, it is something more subtle and more dishonest. Cicero is not merely saying that Epicurus failed to appreciate literature and poetry. He is constructing what lawyers call a dilemma: a trap with two horns, both of which damage the opponent.

The first horn: if Epicurus admitted that intellectual pursuits like literature, history, and poetry are pleasurable in themselves — not because of any bodily benefit, not because they remove some pain of want, but simply as the mental activities they are — then he would have to admit that non-bodily things can be intrinsically pleasant. And if non-bodily things can be intrinsically pleasant, then virtue and knowledge could also be intrinsically desirable — precisely the Stoic and Platonic conclusion that Epicurus spent his career arguing against.

The second horn: if Epicurus denied that intellectual pursuits are pleasurable in themselves, then his philosophy is exposed as the position of a man who cannot account for the very pleasures that the Roman educated class most valued — the pleasures of literature, poetry, history, and philosophical reflection. He is either a hypocrite (since his followers visibly enjoy these things) or a philosophical barbarian.

This is trial-lawyer argumentation of the highest quality. The implicit message to Cicero’s Roman reading audience — men who had spent their lives being formed by precisely the literary and cultural education Cicero is describing — is unmistakable: Epicurus cannot give you an account of your own pleasures that does not either embarrass his philosophy or concede the Stoic and Platonic ground. Either way, Epicureanism loses.

What makes the charge deceptive is the false dilemma on which it rests. Cicero is assuming that if intellectual activities are pleasurable, they must be pleasurable in some special non-Epicurean sense that would make virtue and knowledge “intrinsically desirable” in the Platonic or Stoic meaning. But this is precisely what Epicurus does not need to grant. Intellectual activities are pleasurable in exactly the same sense that all pleasures are pleasurable: they are experiences of the living creature that feel good rather than bad. There is nothing in the Epicurean account of pleasure that requires pleasure to be bodily stimulation only — and Torquatus’s subsequent responses make exactly this point.

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Part Two: The Witness Cicero Did Not Mean to Call — The Tusculan Disputations

Cicero’s Student Catches the Contradiction

Before turning to how Torquatus answers the charge in On Ends itself, we must note a remarkable episode that occurs in Tusculan Disputations — a later work of Cicero’s that reveals, in the clearest possible terms, that Cicero knew he was not being fully straight with his readers.

The Tusculan Disputations are set as a dialogue between Cicero and a young student, written in approximately 45 BC, shortly after On Ends. In the course of that dialogue, the student raises what amounts to an accusation of internal contradiction: Cicero, in On Ends, had argued sharply that the Stoics, Academics, and Peripatetics were genuinely different from the Epicureans on the question of what constitutes the highest good — that these were real philosophical differences, not merely verbal disputes about terminology. But in the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero was now treating the Stoics, Academics, and Peripatetics as essentially saying the same thing as each other, with only verbal differences in the way they expressed their positions.

The student’s point is not merely about philosophical taxonomy. It strikes at the credibility of Cicero’s entire strategy in On Ends: if the anti-Epicurean schools are actually all saying the same thing and merely using different words for it, then the elaborate rhetorical machinery of On Ends — which treats their positions as genuinely distinct and each as representing a serious challenge to Epicureanism — was itself a kind of advocacy that organized the material for rhetorical effect rather than philosophical truth.

Cicero’s response to this challenge in the Tusculan Disputations is notably hedged. He does not simply deny the inconsistency; he acknowledges that there is something to the student’s observation and attempts to explain the different purposes of the two works. This is itself telling. The crafty old trial lawyer knows he has been caught arguing inconsistent positions to different juries in different courts, and his response is not the denial of an innocent man but the explanation of someone who understands the system he has been working.

What the Contradiction Reveals

What does this episode tell us about the specific charge against Epicurus — the denial that intellectual pursuits are pleasurable? It tells us that Cicero was willing and able to present the same material in quite different ways depending on the rhetorical purpose of the work at hand. In On Ends, where the purpose was to prosecute Epicureanism before a Roman jury, the charge that Epicurus dismissed intellectual pleasures was useful and was deployed. In other contexts, where Cicero was not prosecuting Epicurus, the picture is quite different.

Indeed, in the Tusculan Disputations itself, Cicero repeatedly acknowledges that philosophical study — the love of wisdom for what it provides the mind — is one of the greatest sources of satisfaction available to a human being. This is not an Epicurean sentiment that Cicero is endorsing; it is a point on which Cicero himself agrees with the Epicurean position far more than his argument in On Ends would suggest. The charge that Epicurus denied the pleasurableness of intellectual pursuits was, in the Tusculan Disputations context, not a charge that Cicero was pressing. When he was not arguing to make points against Epicureanism, the point did not seem important enough to press.

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Part Three: Torquatus Answers — On Ends Books I and II

Absence of Pain Means the Same as Pleasure

Torquatus’s response to Cicero’s framing in On Ends Book I develops the central Epicurean position on pleasure in a way that directly addresses the charge about intellectual pursuits, even when it is not explicitly targeting that charge. The key move is the one that is developed at length in the companion articles on The Norm Is Pleasure Too and The Full Cup Model on the EpicurusToday.com site: the identification of absence of pain with pleasure itself.

Cicero had implied that Epicurus’s reduction of pleasure to the removal of pain made the pleasures of intellectual pursuits philosophically invisible — that a framework built on the removal of physical want could not account for the satisfaction of engaging with a great poem, mastering a philosophical argument, or understanding the history of Rome. Torquatus’s response is that this implication completely misunderstands the Epicurean framework.

Epicurus does not reduce pleasure to physical relief. He extends pleasure to cover the entire field of experience that is not painful. The mind in a state of philosophical understanding, engaged with great ideas, free from confusion and fear, is not in pain. It is therefore in pleasure — not as a secondary or derivative condition, but as a primary and genuine example of what pleasure is. The person absorbed in philosophical study who has no awareness of physical want or mental distress is in pleasure. The Epicurean framework does not exclude this; it explains it.

Torquatus makes the point about intellectual pleasures with great directness in On Ends Book I, section 55:

“By this time so much at least is plain, that the intensest pleasure or the intensest annoyance felt in the mind exerts more influence on the happiness or wretchedness of life than either feeling, when present for an equal space of time in the body.”

Mental pleasure is not merely equal to bodily pleasure in the Epicurean accounting; it is in certain respects more powerful, because the mind can extend its pleasures through memory and anticipation in ways the body cannot. The pleasure of understanding a philosophical argument is not less real than the pleasure of eating a good meal; it is often more durable and more deeply satisfying. A framework that centers on pleasure as the highest good has no reason to exclude mental pleasures — and Torquatus’s speech makes clear that Epicurus never did.

The Wise Man Is Continually Happy

The passage from On Ends Book I, section 62, where Torquatus describes the life of the Epicurean wise man, is among the most important in the entire work for understanding what Epicurus actually taught about intellectual pleasures:

“For he remembers the past with thankfulness, and the present is so much his own that he is aware of its importance and its agreeableness, nor is he in dependence on the future, but awaits it while enjoying the present; he is also very far removed from those defects of character which I quoted a little time ago, and when he compares the fool’s life with his own, he feels great pleasure. And pains, if any befall him, have never power enough to prevent the wise man from finding more reasons for joy than for vexation.”

What is the wise man doing here that constitutes pleasure? He is remembering — engaging the mind with the past. He is aware of the importance and agreeableness of the present — a mental activity of perception and appreciation. He is comparing his life with the fool’s — an act of philosophical reflection. He is finding reasons for joy — an intellectual exercise. These are all activities of the mind, and they are all identified by Torquatus as sources of the pleasure that constitutes the wise man’s continuous happiness. Cicero’s charge that Epicurus denied the pleasurableness of mental activity is directly contradicted by the speech Cicero himself wrote for Torquatus.

Cicero’s Persistent Objection in Book Two

In Book II, when Cicero takes over and subjects Torquatus’s position to sustained criticism, his objection about intellectual pleasures recurs but in a revealing form. Cicero’s challenge now is not that mental pleasures don’t exist but that they cannot be grounded in the Epicurean framework because that framework cannot explain why the pleasures of learning and wisdom are valuable independent of their connection to bodily comfort and ease. This is a philosophically different and more interesting objection than the original charge — but notice what it concedes. By Book II, Cicero is no longer arguing that Epicurus denied that intellectual pursuits are pleasurable. He is arguing that Epicurus cannot adequately account for why they are pleasurable. The original charge has quietly been abandoned.

This retreat is itself revealing. Having set up the charge before Torquatus could respond, Cicero found that the response was more than adequate to dismiss it — because the charge was, as DeWitt would later note, an instance of arguing to make points rather than to reveal truth. Once Torquatus had spoken, the point could no longer be maintained in its original form, and Cicero shifted to a more defensible but also more concessive version.

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Part Four: What Epicurus Actually Said

The Pleasure Of Philosophy As Essential To Happiness

The charge that Epicurus denied the pleasurableness of intellectual pursuits is not merely refuted by what Torquatus says in response to it. It is refuted by what Epicurus himself wrote, in texts that Cicero had read and that he either chose to omit or to misrepresent in his framing.

The Letter to Menoeceus opens with one of the most direct statements in all of ancient philosophy about the relationship between philosophical study and pleasure:

“Let no one when young delay to study philosophy, nor when he is old grow weary of his study. For no one can come too early or too late to secure the health of his soul. And the man who says that the age for philosophy has either not yet come or has gone by is like the man who says that the age for happiness is not yet come to him, or has passed away.” — Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

Philosophical study is here identified as the path to the health of the soul, and its pursuit at every stage of life is identified as the equivalent of the pursuit of happiness itself. This is not the statement of a philosopher who considered intellectual activity an optional extra or a poor substitute for genuine pleasure. It is the statement of a philosopher who regarded the love of wisdom as among the most direct routes to the pleasured life.

The same Letter contains the famous exhortation: “Practice philosophy day and night, by yourself and with a companion who is like-minded; and you will never be troubled, whether awake or asleep.” The study and practice of philosophy — the intellectual activity of understanding, of working through ideas, of building the philosophical framework that frees the mind from irrational fear — is presented here not as a means to pleasure but as itself the activity that constitutes the most stable and reliable form of pleasured living.

Epicurus himself, as reported by Diogenes Laertius, described the nature of pleasure available through philosophy in terms that make the charge of dismissing intellectual pleasures look not merely wrong but absurd:

“Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.” — Epicurus, Principal Doctrine 27

But Epicurus goes further than philosophical recommendation. In the opening of the Letter to Herodotus — his systematic summary of the physical doctrines he most wanted to preserve — he speaks in the first person about where his own happiness comes from:

“Wherefore since the method I have described is valuable to all those who are accustomed to the investigation of nature, I who urge upon others the constant occupation in the investigation of nature, and find my own peace chiefly in a life so occupied, have composed for you another epitome on these lines, summing up the first principles of the whole doctrine.” — Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, section 37 (Bailey translation)

“Find my own peace chiefly in a life so occupied.” This is Epicurus in the first person, identifying the investigation of nature as the chief source of his own peace — which is a pleasure essential to his own happiness. Not as a theory about what should produce happiness, not as advice he dispenses while personally finding his satisfactions elsewhere, but as a direct statement about where he himself finds what matters most. Later in the same letter he makes the same point as a doctrinal claim for everyone:

“Further, we must hold that to arrive at accurate knowledge of the cause of things of most moment is the business of natural science, and that happiness depends on this (viz. on the knowledge of celestial and atmospheric phenomena), and upon knowing what the heavenly bodies really are, and any kindred facts contributing to exact knowledge in this respect.” — Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, section 78 (Bailey translation)

Happiness depends on the study of nature. Together these two passages from the same letter give us the complete picture: Epicurus teaches the investigation of nature because he personally finds his own pleasure of peace chiefly in it, and because he holds that happiness depends on it for everyone who pursues it. The man accused of denying that intellectual pursuits produce genuine pleasure identified the investigation of nature as both the chief source of his own happiness and a general condition for happiness as such. There is no reading of these passages that is compatible with Cicero’s charge.

The Study of Nature as Pleasure

Epicurus’s enthusiasm for the study of nature — what the ancients called natural philosophy and we would call natural science — was not merely a theoretical commitment. It was explicitly identified in the Epicurean tradition as one of the highest and most genuine pleasures available to a human being. Understanding how the universe actually works, freeing the mind from the false terror of supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, grasping the real causes of things — these were not neutral activities or philosophical duties. They were pleasures.

As Lucretius opens De Rerum Natura:

“This terror then and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and the law of nature; the wont of whose face shall thus mould our rule of life: nothing was ever by divine power produced from nothing.” — Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Book I

The study of nature — the investigation that reveals the truth about the universe — is here presented not as an obligation imposed on reluctant students but as the light that dispels the darkness of fear. The person who has understood the nature of things has achieved something that is both true and liberating, and the liberation is itself a part of the highest pleasure. Vatican Saying 41 confirms this directly:

“We must laugh and philosophize at the same time, and manage our household affairs, and employ our other faculties, and never cease proclaiming the words of true philosophy.”

Laughing and philosophizing together — the image is of intellectual engagement as something inherently enjoyable, something done alongside the other pleasures of life, not instead of them or in preparation for them.

Epicurus on Literature and Culture

The specific charge about literature and poetry — that Epicurus dismissed the pleasures of reading and cultural formation — also fails on examination of the texts. Diogenes Laertius reports that while Epicurus did criticize certain excesses of traditional Greek education as contributing to unnecessary anxiety rather than genuine learning, his criticism was targeted rather than wholesale. He was not dismissing the pleasure of reading; he was arguing that education should be measured by its contribution to the happy life, not pursued as a status display or a form of social competition.

This is a different claim, and an importantly different one. The charge that Epicurus denied that reading gives pleasure is false. The true Epicurean position is that reading, like all activities, should be evaluated by whether it genuinely contributes to a life in which pleasure predominates over pain. Education that produces pretension, competitive anxiety, and the desperate pursuit of intellectual status does not contribute to the happy life. Education that genuinely delights the mind and helps one understand the world and oneself better does. This is not a dismissal of intellectual pleasures; it is an application of the canonical standard to their pursuit.

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Part Five: The Verdict — Guilty As DeWitt Charged

The Evidence Cicero Could Not Suppress

The case against Cicero’s charge rests, in the end, not primarily on the arguments of modern scholars or even on the texts of Epicurus himself — though both are decisive. It rests on the evidence that Cicero himself could not suppress.

In On Ends Book I, Cicero has Torquatus present the Epicurean position in terms that directly contradict the charge Cicero has just made. The wise man’s happiness is constituted substantially by mental activities — memory, reflection, comparison, philosophical understanding, the awareness of the agreeableness of the present. These are all intellectual pleasures. The Epicurean position, as Torquatus presents it in Cicero’s own dialogue, is that mental pleasures are among the most powerful and durable sources of happiness available to a human being.

In On Ends Book II, Cicero himself retreats from the original charge. No longer claiming that Epicurus denied the pleasurableness of intellectual activity, he shifts to the more modest claim that the Epicurean framework cannot adequately explain why such activity is pleasurable. But this retreat concedes the original point: Epicurus did not deny that intellectual pursuits are pleasurable.

In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero is caught by his own student in a contradiction that reveals his willingness to present the same material in different forms depending on the rhetorical need of the moment.

And throughout Epicurus’s own surviving texts — the letters, the Principal Doctrines, the Vatican Sayings, the fragments — philosophy is presented not as a chore or a means to a pleasure that will arrive later, but as itself among the most immediate and reliable routes to the happy life.

The Scopes Trial Analogy

Norman DeWitt’s comparison of Cicero to William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial is, in light of all this, exactly right — and perhaps more generous to Cicero than the evidence warrants. Bryan at the Scopes trial was making bad arguments in defense of a position that was genuinely wrong on the scientific evidence, and the record suggests he did not fully understand what he was arguing against. Cicero, by contrast, understood Epicureanism thoroughly. He had read the texts. He had attended Epicurean lectures. He had written a dialogue in which Torquatus presents the Epicurean position with precision and power. He knew that the charge about intellectual pleasures was false by the standard of the very texts he was arguing against.

DeWitt’s verdict bears repeating in full: “I do not believe he could have misrepresented the truth so successfully had he not understood it completely.” This is the charge against which Cicero has no defense, precisely because his own writings supply the evidence against him. The man who argued to make points knew which points would make an impression on his jury-like reading audience and which parts of the truth could be safely omitted. The charge that Epicurus dismissed intellectual pleasures made an impression. The passages in which Epicurus celebrated philosophical study as the path to happiness and urged its practice at every age were inconvenient for that impression and were therefore not prominently featured.

A Different Standard of Deceit

It is worth noting that the deceit involved here is not the crude sort that simply invents things that were never said. Cicero was too sophisticated for that, and the texts of Epicurus were too available for him to risk outright fabrication. The deceit is the more respectable and more dangerous sort that a skilled trial lawyer practices: selecting, arranging, and framing true statements in ways that create false impressions, while omitting or marginalizing the material that would correct those impressions.

The charge that Epicurus dismissed intellectual pleasures rests on real passages in Epicurus’s work — his statements about the easy availability of natural goods, his criticisms of certain forms of traditional education, his famous statement that he cannot conceive of good apart from the pleasures of sense. Cicero uses these real passages to construct a false impression by omitting the equally real passages in which Epicurus celebrates philosophical study, urges the practice of philosophy at every age, and describes the wise man’s mental pleasures as among the most powerful sources of continuous happiness.

This is the method of the effective advocate, not the method of the honest judge. And DeWitt was right that only someone who understood the case completely could manage the selective presentation so effectively. Cicero’s success as an anti-Epicurean debater is a perverse tribute to his knowledge of Epicurus. He knew which doors to close and which to leave open. He knew how to give Torquatus enough of the Epicurean case to seem fair while arranging the dialogue so that the most damaging impressions were created before Torquatus could address them and conceded quietly after he had.

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Conclusion: What the Case Establishes

The charge that Epicurus denied the pleasurableness of intellectual pursuits was false. It was false by the standard of Epicurus’s own surviving texts. It was false by the standard of what Torquatus says in Cicero’s own dialogue. It was effectively conceded by Cicero himself in the shift between his Book I framing and his Book II argument. And it was exposed as part of a broader pattern of selective advocacy by the Tusculan Disputations episode in which Cicero’s own student caught him in a contradiction between his rhetorical performances in different works.

What this establishes is not that Cicero was incompetent or ignorant. It establishes that he was, as DeWitt said, a crafty trial lawyer pleading before a jury. The jury was the Roman reading public, composed of educated men who identified closely with their literary and cultural formation and who would find the charge that a philosophy dismissed such formation instinctively repugnant. Cicero knew his jury. He knew his case. He knew his opponent’s texts. And he argued accordingly.

The appropriate verdict is the one DeWitt delivered: guilty as charged. Not guilty of ignorance — Cicero was far too well-read for that defense. Guilty of pleading to win rather than to illuminate, and of being so effective at it that centuries of readers have accepted the false impression his advocacy created without examining the evidence on which it rested. That evidence — including, most damagingly, the evidence Cicero himself could not suppress in the very work he was using to prosecute his case — tells a different story.

The study of philosophy, of nature, of literature, and of the world was, for Epicurus, among the greatest pleasures available to a human being. He said so clearly, repeatedly, and in terms that Cicero had read. The charge that he said otherwise is the charge of a man who understood his opponent well enough to know exactly where the pressure points were — and who pressed them regardless of what the truth required.

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Key Texts Referenced

• Cicero, On Ends (De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum) Books I and II, especially:
  • Book I, near the end (Yonge translation, p. 106): Cicero’s charge after Torquatus’s speech, on literature, history, and poetry, with the dilemma argument: “Epicurus never asserts this in this manner… if it were once granted that these things were naturally and intrinsically pleasant, then virtue and knowledge would be intrinsically desirable”
  • Book I, section 55 (Torquatus on the superiority of mental pleasure)
  • Book I, section 62 (the wise man’s continuous happiness through mental activity)
  • Book II, sections 9—11 (Cicero’s retreat to the more modest objection)
  • Book II, section 16 (Torquatus on all who are free from pain being in pleasure)
• Cicero, Tusculan Disputations (the student’s challenge about internal contradiction)
• Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, section 37 (Bailey translation): Epicurus’s personal statement that he finds his own peace chiefly in the investigation of nature
• Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, section 78 (Bailey translation): “happiness depends on this” — the study of natural science
• Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus (philosophy as the path to the health of the soul; practice at every age)
• Epicurus, Principal Doctrine 27 (friendship as the greatest good provided by wisdom)
• Epicurus, Vatican Saying 41 (laughing and philosophizing together)
• Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Book I, opening (the study of nature as liberating pleasure)
• Norman DeWitt, review of Mary N. Porter Packer, Cicero’s Presentation of Epicurean Ethics (Columbia University Press, 1938), in American Journal of Philology, 1939
• Mary N. Porter Packer, Cicero’s Presentation of Epicurean Ethics (Columbia University Press, 1938)
• Norman DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 1954)
• Companion articles: “The Full Cup Model,” “The Norm Is Pleasure Too,” EpicurusToday.com

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This article has been prepared through ClaudeAI under the direction and editorial supervision of Cassius Amicus. It draws on the primary Epicurean texts and the commentaries referenced above. This article was first published on EpicurusToday.com on April 29, 2026. For discussion, see the EpicureanFriends.com forum.