Tracing the Plague Of "Tranquilism" In Epicurean Philosophy To Its Sources
… But, as I have said before, the majority of people suffer from a common disease, as in a plague, with their false notions about things, and their number is increasing (for in mutual emulation they catch the disease from one another, like sheep)
— Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 3, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith
Somewhere between antiquity and the present day, a false reading of Epicurus took hold that would have struck his ancient students as unrecognizable. This false reading is that Epicurus’s real teaching was not the pursuit of pleasure but the pursuit of tranquility. Under this view, when Epicurus spoke of “absence of pain” he meant a state of tranquility different in kind and intrinsically superior to the active pleasures, such as intellectual and bodily stimulation, friendship, emotional joy, love, and delight. Whereas Epicurus had held that pleasure and “absence of pain” are but two names for a single reality, the Tranquilists hold that “absence of pain” is not pleasure at all, but really refers to “tranquility.” Since — as they allege — this state of tranquility is different from, more important than, and higher than pleasure, a truly wise Epicurean will always prioritize “tranquility” and forgo any amount of kinetic pleasure rather than risk disturbing this alleged state of “tranquility.”
Before we go further, it should be pointed out that Epicurus frequently used important terms in non-standard ways. Epicurean “gods” bear no resemblance to the omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient supernatural gods of common lore. Epicurean “pleasure” includes much more than physical and bodily stimulation — because life itself is valued so highly, it includes every experience of life that is not painful. Epicurean “virtue” is not a set of absolute standards, but recognition that some contextually-driven choices lead to happiness and success while others lead to disaster.
Given this terminology paradigm shift, it would come as no surprise that the term “tranquility” might also require similar expansion and explanation. That, however, is exactly what most Tranquilists refuse to do. The attraction of Tranquilism in many circles gives every appearance of being the same attitudes of resignation, withdrawal, and acceptance of whatever happens to come our way that find a home in viewpoints such as Buddhism or Stoicism. The fact that this is the furthest thing possible from Epicurus’s embrace of life and pleasure — and his dedication to working diligently to make the most of the time we have available — is of no concern to the Tranquilists. This is because from their point of view — we should view NOTHING (and certainly not “Pleasure”) as more important than ‘tranquility.’ Rarely therefore do we encounter a Tranquilist who exerts much effort to explain what they mean by “tranquility.”
Any explanation offered is generally phrased with little more specificity than “calmness.” Some argue that because Epicurus gave special priority to explaining the true nature of gods and of death, tranquility is a term of art aimed at these two concerns specifically. While the emphasis on those questions certainly exists, there is little or no evidence that Epicurus considered the word “tranquility” to be limited to those specific issues. This article argues that it is much more likely that Epicurus — as would anyone — considers being “calm” to be one among many pleasures of life — appropriate in many cases but absolutely inappropriate at others, such as when we must act vigorously to preserve our lives or the lives of our friends.
To be absolutely clear, this article does not argue that calmness is not an attribute to be generally cultivated for appropriate circumstances and endorsed. But the idea that Epicurus was raising calmness to an absolute priority, at all times and places over and above the exhilaration that joy and delight can bring, is absurd. Calmness, like any other pleasurable activity or condition, has its time and its place, but in the end, as with all other activities, context is king. Calmness can be a pleasure, and it often is pleasurable, but as Epicurus said as to any other pleasure, it is not always to be chosen, and it certainly is not the only desirable pleasure. The term “pleasure” includes all pleasures, including calmness, but the term for calmness or tranquility - absent a counterintuitive attempt at redefinition which the Tranquilists generally do not even attempt - manifestly does not include all types of pleasures.
It is of no concern to most Tranquilists that the primary meaning of this word has become established as meaning what we all understand to be that of “taking a tranquilizer” — which means to have our senses dulled and be drugged into a partly or not fully unconscious stupor.
And thus the Tranquilists see no conflict whatsoever in interpreting Epicurus as a Tranquilist — they are happy to enlist him as a “tranquilizer” against the pesky desire for pleasure in themselves or in others. For a philosophy that, as Seneca records, erected a sign reading “Stranger, Here You Will Do Well To Tarry, Here Our Highest Good Is Pleasure” (Seneca, Epistulae Morales, Letter 21), the spread of the idea that Epicurus’s highest good was “tranquility” truly deserves the name Diogenes of Oinoanda himself gave it: a “plague.”
This plague did not begin with Cicero, who allows the Epicurean Torquatus to present a relatively lengthy argument for pleasure that explains very well that for Epicurus, the terms “pleasure” and “absence of pain” refer to the same thing. Cicero’s references to tranquility attempt to make Epicurus look inconsistent, not like an ascetic, and it is obvious throughout his works that Cicero took Epicurus as indeed arguing that the highest good is pleasure. The Tranquilist plague did not catch hold with Plutarch either, whose Non Posse and Adversus Colotem spend their energy attacking hedonism as vulgar and self-defeating, not promoting some purer tranquility-goal in its place.
And the plague certainly was not transmitted even by later Epicureans such as Diogenes of Oinoanda, as we are about to see. While far more of the historical record has been lost than preserved, here in this article we will work backward in time from the nineteenth century to see what evidence we can find as to where the Tranquilist plague entered the public perception of Epicurus.
Immune At The Source: Diogenes of Oinoanda
Section titled “Immune At The Source: Diogenes of Oinoanda”Diogenes of Oinoanda was a wealthy Epicurean who, in the second century AD, some four hundred years after Epicurus’s death — roughly as far removed from him in time as Gassendi is from us — had the entire doctrine carved into a huge public wall in Lycia, explicitly so that ordinary passersby, without needing “oral instruction,” could read the philosophy for themselves. His own stated purpose is the same populist, public-facing project as Frances Wright’s novel A Few Days In Athens or Bernier’s Discourses. Diogenes wrote: “we have had this writing inscribed in public not for ourselves, but for you, citizens, so that we might render it available to all of you in an easily accessible form” (Fr. 29). If a tranquility-first ranking were latent in the doctrine itself, waiting to surface whenever Epicureanism was popularized for a broad audience, this is exactly the kind of document it should appear in. While we are missing many fragments from the original, what we have gives no indication that it did.
Virtue is stated as the means, pleasure as the end, in stark and direct language. Answering critics who wanted to make virtue itself the goal, Diogenes writes:
“since, as I say, the issue is not ‘what is the means of happiness?’ but ‘what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature?’, I say both now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues, which are inopportunely messed about by these people (being transferred from the place of the means to that of the end), are in no way an end, but the means to the end” (Fr. 32).
This is Diogenes speaking in his own voice, to the general public, not staging an opponent’s view. There is no room in it for tranquility to be quietly promoted from means to end either — the whole passage is built to close off exactly that argument, made here against critics who wanted to replace pleasure with virtue instead of tranquility.
Where Diogenes discusses the limit of pleasure, the language is quantitative, not a division into kinds. Diogenes has Epicurus’s own Principal Doctrine 3 inscribed in the margin beneath his discussion of pleasure:
“[The quantitative limit of pleasure is the] removal of all pain. [Whoever experiences pleasure, so long as it continues, cannot ever be troubled] by pain of body or of mind or [of both together]” (Fr. 34, lower margin, quoting Epicurus).
Quantitative limit — not a boundary between a “genuine” static pleasure and a lesser kinetic one, but a ceiling that any pleasure, of any kind, reaches once pain is fully removed. Diogenes’s own surrounding text treats the two sides of the doctrine as continuous rather than ranked: “when the emotions which disturb the soul are removed, those which produce pleasure enter into it to take their place” (Fr. 34) — disturbance leaving and pleasure entering are one movement, not two destinations of unequal worth.
The Freethinkers Immune To The Plague - Frances Wright and the Utilitarians
Section titled “The Freethinkers Immune To The Plague - Frances Wright and the Utilitarians”Having established the ancient baseline, this article now works backward through the modern reception of Epicurus to see where the plague enters it. In more modern times, one place to start testing for the Tranquilist reading is the Benthamite and Utilitarian revival of Epicurus in the early nineteenth century, when modern hedonism looked back to Epicurus for support.
Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens (written 1822, dedicated to Jeremy Bentham “as a testimony of her admiration of his enlightened sentiments, useful labours, and active philanthropy”) is a test case. Thomas Jefferson himself praised its fidelity to the ancient sources. It is, as directly as anything in the era, an attempt to dramatize Epicurus for a modern audience. If tranquilism is going to show up anywhere in the Benthamite bloodline, it should show up here.
It doesn’t. If anything, the book inoculates against it.
The foundational statement. In Chapter Three, on Theon’s first morning in the Garden, Epicurus gives his most direct self-definition in the whole book — more plain than anything that comes later:
“I think virtue only the highest pleasure, and vice, or ungoverned passions and appetites, the worst misery. Other pleasures are requisite to form a state of perfect ease, which is happiness.” (Wright, Chapter III).
Other pleasures — not simply static pleasures, but kinetic, additive, and exactly the kind later Tranquilist readings exclude from “blessedness” — are not excluded here. The broad description instead names them as the material that constitutes the state of perfect ease. There is no gatekeeper category standing between ordinary pleasure and happiness. Happiness is built from pleasure, and is pleasure, with no restriction as to type.
The Stoic caricature is staged and refuted. Aside from a very un-tranquil scene where Epicurus himself physically participates in a rescue conducted in the midst of a raging storm, the book’s most dramatic section is the debate between Zeno and Epicurus in Chapter Seven. Zeno’s case against Epicurus is analogous to the Tranquilist misreading. Zeno accuses Epicurus of teaching “virtue robed in pleasures, and lolling in ease,” a doctrine of passive repose dressed up as philosophy. Epicurus’s answer rejects passivity as the goal directly:
“Let us quiet our passions, not by gratifying, but subduing them; let us conquer our weariness, not by rest, but by exertion.” (Wright, Chapter VII).
Wright does not let the Tranquilist reading stand as Epicurus’s own position anywhere in the book. She puts it in the mouths of his opponents — first Cleanthes, then Zeno — as their hostile caricature of the Garden, and has Epicurus answer it by name.
“Tranquillity” used correctly, and immediately explained. Chapter Ten does use the word “tranquillity” prominently, in an allegorical speech Epicurus attributes to personified Philosophy. But it identifies tranquility with pleasure at its fullness rather than ranking it above pleasure: “Perfect pleasure, which is happiness, you will have attained when you have brought your bodies and souls into a state of satisfied tranquillity.” (Wright, Chapter X). This is the correct “two names, one reality” perspective. Tranquility can be properly described as what the full cup of pleasure that is neither overflowing nor under-filled looks like. It is a different description of the same thing targeted at the level of filling, neither overflowing nor rising nor falling, not a separate and distinct vessel or set of contents.
And Wright does not let her use of the term go unqualified. In the same chapter, she has Epicurus give a sharp anti-risk-minimization argument on the subject of loving and losing friends: “Should we, then, to avoid the evil, forego the good? Shall we shut love from our hearts, that we may not feel the pain of his departure? No; happiness forbids it. Experience forbids it.” (Wright, Chapter X).
Kinetic joy affirmed, not merely tolerated. Chapter Twelve introduces Hedeia, who is beautiful, witty, and unphilosophical; entirely a creature of laughter, music, and flirtation. Neither the narrative nor Epicurus treats her as a lesser case next to the sage’s composure. “I grant there’s some truth, my girl, in thy nonsense,” Epicurus tells her, after she claims to take “a shorter cut to the goal” than his most diligent scholars (Wright, Chapter XII). No condemnation of Hedeia’s views is expressed - the book holds up her liveliness and the sage’s calm as two instances of the same thing, not a hierarchy of one over the other.
The author’s own voice. Chapter Fourteen breaks the fictional frame entirely for a “Note by the Translator” — Wright speaking in her own person, to a readership she has already told us includes Bentham. Here the standard of value is stated with no tranquility-gatekeeping at all: “In the pleasure, — utility, — propriety of human action — whatever word we employ, the meaning is the same — in the consequences of human actions… we must ever find the only test of their intrinsic merit or demerit.” (Wright, Chapter XIV, “Note by the Translator”). This is Benthamite consequentialism, and it has no room in it for a completeness requirement that locks kinetic pleasure out of the good life.
The book’s last word. Chapter Sixteen closes the whole work on Epicurus’s address to the Athenian public — its final statement, not incidental to it: “Enjoy, and be happy!… The good is — all which can yield you pleasure: the evil — what must bring you pain. Here is no paradox, no dark saying.” (Wright, Chapter XVI).
Taken together, these six passages establish that Frances Wright was not a carrier of the Tranquilist plague. Wright had every occasion to produce a tranquility-first Epicurus. She was writing to present her utilitarian-influenced views to largely Christian audience, translating a philosopher already associated in the popular mind with “ease” and “repose.” She was writing at a time when the allegorical attraction of virtue would have made the passive Tranquilist reading very tempting to include.
And Wright does indeed include reference to the tranquility argument, but only to hand it to Epicurus’s opponents and have him refute it.
Before we proceed further back in time to writers who were not so immune to tranquilism, it is important to remember that Wright herself was not merely irreligious in some vague sense, but explicitly anti-theistic by her own account: “I am neither Jew nor Gentile, Mahomedan nor Theist… in things, not in words; in nature, not in human imagination.” She was a freethinker and rational materialist who spent her public career working against organized religion in general, not merely its more dogmatic excesses. She had no theology to protect and no audience of the devout to reassure.
Immunity confirmed in the wider Utilitarian tradition. Wright’s freethinking Epicurus was not an isolated case among the Utilitarians. A. A. Long’s survey of Epicurus’s presence in the ethics of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick — the founders of the tradition Wright dedicated her book to — shows the same pattern across the whole Benthamite movement. Pleasure and absence of pain are treated as one thing, not two, and neither is ranked above the other.
Bentham states the foundation of his whole philosophy in a line that is, in substance, exactly the “two names, one reality” identity of pleasure and absence of pain:
“immunity from pain comes to the same thing” as pleasure (Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, p.34; quoted in Long, p.748).
Bentham does not treat freedom from pain as a superior, separate category that sensory pleasure merely serves or falls short of. He treats it as identical with pleasure at its full extent. And where Bentham does introduce a hierarchy, it runs in the opposite direction from any tranquility-first ranking — flattening distinctions between pleasures altogether, rather than elevating one kind over another:
“Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.” (Bentham, The Rationale of Reward, p.206; quoted in Long, p.747).
This is about as far from Gassendi’s “true and genuine pleasure” — examined further back in this investigation, below — as a hedonist can get. Bentham’s founding declaration of his whole system states pleasure and pain as jointly sovereign, neither one subordinate to the other:
“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.” (Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, p.11; quoted in Long, p.746-747).
Mill’s account of what “every writer, from Epicurus to Bentham” meant by the theory of utility runs the same way, treating pleasure and freedom from pain as one thing rather than as a hierarchy:
“every writer, from Epicurus to Bentham, who maintained the theory of utility, meant by it, not something to be contradistinguished from pleasure, but pleasure itself, together with exemption from pain.” (Mill, Utilitarianism, p.256; quoted in Long, p.748).
When Mill states the foundation of his own ethics, pleasure and freedom from pain are named jointly, as the only two things desirable as ends, with neither one gate-keeping the other:
“By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness pain, and the privation of pleasure… pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.” (Mill, Utilitarianism, p.257, 262; quoted in Long, p.748-749).
Sidgwick, writing after Mill and often critical of him, reads Epicurus’s own doctrine the same non-ranked way. Discussing what he calls “the paradox of Epicurus,” Sidgwick writes:
”… the paradox of Epicurus, that painlessness is equivalent to the highest possible pleasure: so that if we can attain absolute freedom from pain, the goal of Hedonism is reached: after that we may vary, but cannot increase our pleasure.” (Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, p.113; quoted in Long, p.755).
Painlessness is not, on this reading, a separate and superior category standing above ordinary pleasure. It is the highest possible pleasure — the same “two names, one reality” identity, arrived at independently by a scholar with no stake in defending Epicurus’s respectability. Long’s own analysis of the point reaches the identical conclusion about what the correct reading has to be: “Epicurus… denied that there is such a neutral condition [between pleasure and pain]… pain and pleasure are simply mutually exclusive… the removal of all pain constitutes the maximum of pleasure” (Long, p.753-754). This wording is not a ranking of one kind of pleasure over another, but a claim that they are one and the same.
Long’s account also places Wright’s Epicurus within a much longer chain of exactly this same non-ranked, unapologetic hedonism, reaching back well before Bentham: “Traces of Epicurean social theory and moral psychology are evident in the writings of such major philosophers as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume,” and Francis Hutcheson, “one of the first thinkers to speak of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, was an important precursor of the Victorian utilitarians and also, by virtue of his hedonism, an implicit follower of Epicurus” (Long, p.743). This is the same tradition Wright’s book stands in and was written to serve — and nowhere in it, from Hobbes through Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick, does the specific tranquility-above-all argument appear.
Utilitarianism faced a version of the same problem the writers examined further back in this investigation faced: an audience for whom Epicurean hedonism was, by default, disreputable. Long notes that well into the modern era, Epicurus’s ideas “were rarely acknowledged as Epicurean explicitly and positively,” because of “the widespread belief that the hedonism and virtual atheism of Epicurean philosophy were inimical to piety, morality, and social well-being” (Long, p.743). Bentham and Mill answered that same suspicion, but with an argument much different from the religiously motivated writers examined below. Rather than ranking one kind of pleasure above another to make hedonism sound more like a soul at peace with God, Bentham refused to rank any pleasure above any other at all. He famously equated push-pin and poetry to be of equal value. He built his whole system on the flat, undifferentiated supremacy of pleasure and pain together. Where reconciliation with a religious audience was needed, tranquilism was an arguable solution, but the Utilitarians did not read it into Epicurus.
Carriers Of The Plague - Religion Tries To Domesticate Epicurus
Section titled “Carriers Of The Plague - Religion Tries To Domesticate Epicurus”Going back roughly a century and a half earlier than Wright lands on Pierre Gassendi, a Catholic priest and working astronomer who spent decades writing for an audience deeply suspicious of Epicurus on both religious and moral grounds. Gassendi’s Latin works were popularized in French by his friend and student François Bernier, whose Abrégé de la Philosophie de Gassendi became, once translated into English, the Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty (French original c. 1678; English translation 1699).
There in this project of religious reconciliation we indeed find the Tranquilist ranking. As it turns out, going back further still, the specific rhetorical technique both men rely on did not originate with either of them — a point taken up later in this investigation, once Gassendi’s own hand has been examined directly.
Bernier, A Transmitter
Section titled “Bernier, A Transmitter”Bernier’s project declares itself in the preface. The preface states the purpose of the undertaking before a single doctrine of Epicurus is discussed: Gassendi took on his work “to vindicate the Morals of Epicurus… from the Slanders of Mistake and Malice, and to shew that their principal Design was, to lead Men by smooth and easie Paths to a just, sober, wise and virtuous Behaviour.”
This is not neutral historical reconstruction. It is an apologetic brief, written to make Epicurus acceptable to an audience for whom he was, by default, morally and religiously suspect. That audience is the broader Judeo-Christian society, and the terms of acceptability are their terms. Everything that follows in the Discourses has to be read against that opening commitment.
The reconciliation shows up immediately, in the choice of what to discuss first. Long before Bernier reaches his chapter on pleasure, he walks through the “Particulars” Epicurus supposedly recommends for a tranquil mind, and the very first of them is “the Knowledge and Fear of God” (p.21-22). This is a significant act of translation in itself. The actual Epicurean position is that the gods are blessed and utterly indifferent to human affairs, which Epicurus taught was essential to understand so that fear of them can be discarded, not redirected into reverence. Bernier’s Epicurus instead opens with something closer to natural theology: right belief about what is presumed to be the Judeo-Christian God as the foundation of a peaceful life. The register has shifted from therapeutic dismissal of divine punishment to devotional correctness about a supernatural God’s nature — a shift that only makes sense if the goal is to make Epicurus sound like a defensible theologian rather than the sharpest ancient critic of popular religion.
Scripture is recruited to defend the very word “pleasure.” Confronting the accusation that “pleasure” as an ethical goal is inherently degrading, Bernier reaches for Genesis: “We read also in the Holy Scriptures, that God himself in the beginning Planted a Garden or Paradise of Pleasure” (p.48). Rather than defending pleasure on Epicurus’s own naturalistic terms — as the report from Nature that every living creature receives from birth, prior to and independent of any theology — Bernier defends pleasure by looking for Biblical precedent for the word. The argument being made is not “trust your senses,” it is “the Bible uses this word approvingly.” That is an argument aimed at a Judeo-Christian reader’s anxiety, not a restatement of the Epicurean case.
The afterlife gets grafted directly onto the pleasure/pain structure. Later, summarizing why pleasure must be the chief good and pain the chief evil, Bernier writes: “as we believe that our chief Good or Happiness, consists in enjoying the everlasting Delights and Joys in Heaven: So we believe, That our greatest Unhappiness or Misery, consists in being tormented in Hell, with unspeakable Tortures in everlasting Flames” (p.112). This sentence has no equivalent in Epicurean doctrine, which holds that death ends sensation and that no reckoning of any kind follows it. Bernier is not explaining Epicurus’s pleasure/pain binary; he is re-anchoring it to a Judeo-Christian worldview of the sort Epicurus explicitly denied. Bernier is treating heaven and hell as if they simply confirm, on a cosmic scale, what Epicurus said about pleasure and pain on a human one.
Once the project is to make Epicurus theologically respectable, the two halves of his pleasure — the sensory and the tranquil — stop being equally defensible. Kinetic, bodily pleasure is exactly the part of Epicureanism that fed centuries of accusations of brutish sensuality. Tranquility of mind, by contrast, maps comfortably onto an ideal Judeo-Christian moral literature already prized under names like peace, contentment, and freedom from passion. An apologist working to rehabilitate Epicurus for a Judeo-Christian audience has every reason to emphasize the half of the doctrine that sounds like a monk’s inner peace, and to quietly subordinate the half that sounds anything like appetite. And this is exactly the bias the text shows, repeatedly, in Bernier’s own voice rather than staged as an opponent’s caricature the way Wright stages it:
“the chief Happiness of Epicurus is not that Pleasure which is in Motion, or in the pleasing of our Senses, but rather that which is and appears in Rest, in a freedom from trouble” (p.53).
“the Pleasure meant by Epicurus*… is quite contrary, Pure and Undefiled, viz. An Indolency of the Body, and the Tranquility of the Mind, but chiefly the latter”* (p.68).
“that Pleasure that we before called the Tranquility of the Mind… Nature seems chiefly to aim, as not having regard to other Pleasures, which are always shifting and in a constant Motion, any otherwise than to make them useful in the obtaining this” (p.113-114).
“tho the chief part of Happiness consists in the Tranquility of the Mind, yet we must not despise the other part, which consists in the freedom from bodily Pain” (p.130).
Bodily pleasures like taste exist, on this account, only “to oblige us to the Act” of eating; tranquility is what Nature “reserv’d as her last End, and designed as her chief Good.”
All these statements make the same argument: tranquility is named “chief,” sensory pleasure demoted to instrument or afterthought. This is not incidental, but embedded in the reconciliation project stated in the preface — the cutting away at Epicurean philosophy that has to be made, piece by piece, to be presentable to Bernier’s audience.
It must be said that by no means are all of Bernier’s interpretations objectionable. Bernier treats virtue as strictly instrumental to pleasure — not desirable in itself, valuable only because it reliably produces a pleasant life. In fact, Bernier closely follows Torquatus in Cicero across a long stretch of the text (pp. 69-75, 98-103). Bernier includes the correct Epicurean rejection of the Stoic claim that virtue alone suffices for happiness independent of pleasure. And Bernier explicitly defends Epicurus’s right to call tranquility “pleasure” against Cicero’s objection that these are different things by nature: “why should we hinder Epicurus the giving it that Name… Therefore this State or Condition of Life… may be very well esteem’d and called Pleasure” (p.114).
Technically, the identity claim — that freedom from pain simply is pleasure, not a lesser or different thing — survives in Bernier’s text. What does not survive is the equal standing of the two halves of that identity. Bernier keeps saying they are the same thing, and then keeps ranking one above the other anyway, in exactly the places where a Judeo-Christian audience would need the ranking to feel comfortable with the conclusion.
Gassendi, A Carrier, Introduced Into English
Section titled “Gassendi, A Carrier, Introduced Into English”If the Tranquilist misreading entered the modern tradition before the nineteenth century, did Bernier inherit the Tranquilist position fully formed from Gassendi’s own work forty years earlier? Thomas Stanley’s 1659 English rendering of Gassendi’s Epicurus, His Life and Doctrine answers that question directly: the ranking is present there too, stated more starkly and more systematically than in Bernier.
The tranquility-first framing is not confined to the ethics — it is the book’s opening definition of what philosophy is for. Before Gassendi’s Epicurus reaches any doctrine of pleasure at all, the section titled “The Doctrine of Epicurus” opens with a general statement of what philosophy accomplishes:
“happy life consisting in the tranquillity of the mind, and indolency of the body, but especially in the former, (in regard, the goods of the mind are better than those of the body, and the ills thereof worse); it comes to passe, that Philosophy is chiefly profitable… for as much as it conferrs to health and soundnesse… [and its end is] nothing… but its tranquillity” (Stanley, p.129-130).
This is not a citation buried in a chapter on pleasure. It is the frame the entire doctrine is placed in before a single canon or ethical argument has been given — tranquility named as philosophy’s whole business, on the first page.
Chapter IV of the Ethics states the ranking in its most explicit form. After several chapters establishing, in thoroughly orthodox Epicurean terms, that pleasure is the good and pain the evil (Chapters I-III closely track Epicurus’s own Letter to Menoeceus, including the correct point that a wise man will forgo a pleasure that brings greater pain and endure a pain that brings greater pleasure), Chapter IV asks directly which kind of pleasure felicity actually consists in:
“There being… two kinds of pleasures; one in station or rest, which is a placidity, calmnesse, and vacuity, or immunity from trouble and grief; the other in motion… as to eat and drink out of hunger and thirst. It may be demanded, Whether in this, or in either, in which consists Felicity? We say, that pleasure wherein felicity consists, is of the first kind, the stable… and so can be no other than indolence of body, and tranquility of mind” (Stanley, p.231).
This is not Bernier’s move of quietly foregrounding tranquility while nominally keeping the two kinds equal. This is a direct question — which kind of pleasure is felicity? — answered with an explicit exclusion of the other kind. The chapter continues into the same subordination found in Bernier, but pushed further:
“If any externall blandishments happen, they increase not the chiefe good, but as I may say season it; for the absolute good of humane nature is contained in the peace of the soul and body” (Stanley, p.233).
Kinetic pleasure does not merely rank below tranquility here — it is denied any power to add to the good at all. It can only “season” a felicity that is already complete without it. Bernier’s parallel passage said tranquility was what “Nature seems chiefly to aim” at, leaving bodily pleasures a supporting role. Stanley’s Gassendi says flatly that bodily pleasure cannot increase the good in the first place. This is the stronger version of the claim, and it is forty years older.
The Carrier’s Own Hand: Gassendi’s Original Latin
Section titled “The Carrier’s Own Hand: Gassendi’s Original Latin”Reading only Stanley’s English digest of the Ethics chapters, the theological scaffolding that is so visible in Bernier — Genesis, “the Knowledge and Fear of God,” Heaven and Hell mapped onto pleasure and pain — looks conspicuously absent. It would be easy to conclude from that absence that Gassendi’s version of the ranking is theologically neutral: a scholar’s interpretive choice, made while reconstructing Epicurus from ambiguous ancient testimony, with no comparable stake in the outcome that Bernier had. Reading Gassendi’s own 1647 Latin original, rather than only Stanley’s digest of it, shows that conclusion is wrong.
Gassendi was a Catholic priest, and says so on his own title page. Before any doctrine is discussed, the title page of De vita et moribus Epicuri identifies its author as “Petro Gassendo, Diniensis Ecclesiae Praeposito” — “Pierre Gassendi, Provost of the Church of Digne.” Gassendi held a senior clerical office in the French Catholic Church for the whole of his career as Epicurus’s foremost early modern reviver, and he wanted that fact printed on the book itself.
His dedicatory epistle states the theological stakes before a single doctrine is examined. Addressing his patron and friend François Luillier, Gassendi flags Epicurus’s denial of divine Providence and of the soul’s immortality as points where the ancient philosopher stands against the Catholic faith, and pledges to “bend all my strength against Epicurus… as often as anything occurs which might seem even in the slightest degree at variance with the sacred Faith.” He closes the dedication by submitting the entire undertaking to the authority of the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church over his own reasoning. This is not a scholar’s disinterested preface. It is a churchman announcing, in writing, before his book begins, that his reconstruction of Epicurus will answer to theology first. Nothing in Frances Wright’s book, or in her life, has an equivalent — there is no comparable passage anywhere in her work because there was no theology for her to protect.
The tranquility ranking, in Gassendi’s own explanatory voice, already divides pleasure into a “genuine” kind and something lesser. In Book III of the Latin original, discussing why Epicurus made tranquility the goal, Gassendi’s own voice — not a staged opponent’s — reaches for a specific phrase: “veram germanamque voluptatem” — “true and genuine pleasure.” That is exactly the plague this article is tracing: pleasure split into a “genuine” kind and something lesser, rather than treated as always comparative and quantitative, greater or lesser but never divided in kind. Its use here, by a Catholic priest working through Epicurus’s ethics inside a book that opens by pledging to defend the faith against him, is a plausible historical point of origin for it.
A few pages later, in the same book, Gassendi calls Epicurus’s denial of Providence his “gravissimus lapsus” — his “gravest lapse” — and pledges, with God’s help, to refute it as contrary to both religion and natural reason. The tranquility-first ranking is not sitting in a separate, theologically neutral compartment of the text from this pledge. It is argued a few pages away from it, in the same author’s hand, in the same book.
Book IV shows Gassendi doing technical Catholic theology to make Epicurus’s piety “legitimate.” Answering the ancient charge that Epicurus was impious, Gassendi distinguishes a “filial” piety toward God — natural, reason-based, born of admiration — from a “servile” piety rooted in fear of punishment, and argues that Epicurus’s reverence for the divine qualifies as the natural, filial kind, while carefully specifying what it is not:
“non illa sane supernaturalis, seu ex gratia iustificante, secundum quam etiam filii Dei nominamur, & sumus; verùm naturalis, & qualem recta ratio suggerit” — “not, to be sure, that supernatural [piety], or [piety] by justifying grace, according to which we too are called and are sons of God; but a natural one, of the kind right reason suggests” (Gassendi, p.113-114).
Gratia iustificante — “justifying grace” — is precise, technical Counter-Reformation Catholic doctrinal vocabulary, not loose devotional language. Gassendi is doing real dogmatic theology here, carving out a category in which a pagan philosopher can be graded “pious” without any claim that he possessed Christian grace. A few pages later, defending Epicurus’s rejection of certain religious rites, Gassendi runs the same move again: Epicurus opposed only superstitio (false religion), never vera religio (true religion), and even Lucretius’s famous line about religion’s power to counsel evils is re-glossed as targeting only the superstitious kind. And when he must account for the fact that Epicurus outwardly took part in his homeland’s pagan ceremonies, Gassendi supplies an explicit excuse rather than treating it as a problem:
“Intererat enim, quia ius ciuile, & tranquillitas publica illud ex ipso exigebat: Improbabat, quia nihil cogit animum Sapientis, vt vulgaria sapiat. Intùs erat sui iuris; extra, legibus obstrictus societatis hominum.” — “He took part, because civil law and public tranquility demanded it of him; he disapproved, because nothing compels the mind of the wise man to feel as the common people do. Within, he was his own master; outside, he was bound by the laws of human society” (Gassendi, p.117).
This is a churchman building a permission structure, term by term, for Epicurus to be graded pious, orthodox in his private conscience, and only outwardly conformist — not a scholar reporting doctrine from a neutral distance.
This changes what the absence of Bernier’s specific rhetorical apparatus in Stanley’s digest actually means. Bernier’s version of the ranking is wrapped in Genesis, in “the Knowledge and Fear of God,” in Heaven and Hell mapped directly onto pleasure and pain. None of that specific machinery appears in Stanley’s English rendering of Gassendi’s Ethics chapters. It would be a mistake to read that absence as meaning the ranking, in Gassendi, is theologically unmotivated. Gassendi’s own theological labor is simply pitched in a different register than Bernier’s — the technical vocabulary of Tridentine grace and natural versus supernatural piety, aimed at a Latin-reading clerical and scholarly audience, rather than Bernier’s vernacular scriptural proof-texting aimed at a lay reading public. Bernier did not invent the theological motive when he added his Biblical apparatus. He translated Gassendi’s own, already-present theological motive into the idiom his own French and English readers needed.
The book’s own closing line confirms its genre. De vita et moribus Epicuri ends: “Haec iam de vita, & moribus Epicuri dicta sufficiant” — “Let this much said about the life and character of Epicurus suffice” — with a note that a further volume on Epicurus’s physics will follow, “God being well-disposed.” This 236-page book is explicitly framed by its own author as a preparatory work clearing Epicurus’s reputation — answering charges of impiety, malice, gluttony, lust, and hatred of learning one by one across its eight books — before any systematic philosophical reconstruction is attempted. It is apologetic biography by its own stated design, not incidental to it.
Before Gassendi: Raimondi and Valla
Section titled “Before Gassendi: Raimondi and Valla”Going back roughly two hundred years earlier than Gassendi, we have Cosma Raimondi’s letter defending Epicurus (c.1429) and Lorenzo Valla’s dialogue On Pleasure (1431), written within two years of each other, in the first wave of Renaissance writers to take up Epicurus’s cause after centuries of apparent silence about him. One of these two writers shows no trace of the Tranquilist ranking; the other already has it fully formed, Biblical citations and all.
Immune: Cosma Raimondi (c.1429)
Section titled “Immune: Cosma Raimondi (c.1429)”The non-ranked reading of pleasure and tranquility is not a nineteenth-century invention. Cosma Raimondi’s Letter to Ambrogio Tignosi in Defence of Epicurus against the Stoics, Academics and Peripatetics is, if anything, more vigorous in its defense of bodily and sensory pleasure than Wright’s novel. Raimondi builds his whole case for pleasure directly on the evidence of the senses, with no completeness-gate excluding any of them. From the letter:
“She endowed him with senses so distinct, varied and useful that though there were many different types of pleasure, there was none in which he could not share. First she gave him eyes… We love to look at things of beauty… Is there anyone, again, who does not thoroughly enjoy hearing singing and the sweet sounds of music? The lyre and other such instruments seem to have been invented for the specific purpose of charming our souls.”
Raimondi explicitly rejects any account of happiness that would exclude the body in favor of the mind alone — precisely the move a tranquility-first ranking requires:
“since we are composed of a mind and a body, why do they leave out of this account of human happiness something that is part of mankind and properly pertains to it? … in the same way that the body is not to be thought healthy when some part of it is sick, so man himself cannot be thought happy if he is suffering in some part of himself.”
And where Raimondi does reach for the word “tranquility,” he uses it exactly as the correct doctrine requires — as another name for pleasure, not a rival, superior category ranked above it:
“Since, then, virtue is sought for the tranquility it brings to life (in which, under the name of pleasure, Epicurus identified the supreme good), again I ask the Peripatetics why they are unwilling to place the greatest good in pleasure.”
Tranquility here is what pleasure is called when it is stable; it is not ranked above the pleasures of sight, sound, and the rest that Raimondi has just spent pages celebrating. Notably, Raimondi is careful to bracket theology out of his defense entirely: “I wish it to be understood that I am not now considering that absolute and true philosophy which we call theology. This entire enquiry concerns the human good of humankind” (Raimondi, Letter to Ambrogio Tignosi). Like Wright and the Utilitarians four centuries later, Raimondi had no theological reconciliation project to complete, and his Epicurus shows no trace of the ranking that the Tranquilist project would later require.
Carrier: Lorenzo Valla (1431)
Section titled “Carrier: Lorenzo Valla (1431)”The attempt to accommodate the term “pleasure” to a religious audience is found in well-developed form in Lorenzo Valla’s dialogue On Pleasure (De Voluptate, later retitled On the True and the False Good), written in 1431.
Valla stages a debate between a Stoic (Catone), an Epicurean poet (Maffeo Vegio), and a Christian monk and theologian (Antonio da Rho) who adjudicates between them. Vegio’s defense of Epicurus in Books I and II is, like Raimondi’s, an unqualified defense of pleasure with no tranquility-first ranking: “That pleasure is a good I perceive not only to have been agreed on by many eminent authors but to be the testimony of general opinion… Thus, every kind of pleasure is good” (Valla, Book I).
But in Book III, when the Christian judge Antonio da Rho delivers his verdict, the religious reconciliation argument appears:
“Who would hesitate to call this happiness ‘pleasure,’ or who could give it a better name? I find it called by this name, as in Genesis, ‘paradise of pleasure,’ and in Ezekiel, ‘fruit and tree of pleasure,’ and the like, when the goods associated with the divine are spoken of. We find in Psalms, ‘Thou shalt make them drink of the torrent of pleasure’” (Valla, Book III).
Just like Bernier, Valla reaches for Genesis to license the word “pleasure” for an audience anxious about it. Valla’s judge then splits pleasure in half in terms even starker than Gassendi’s Chapter IV:
“This experience is twofold: one pleasure now on earth, the other hereafter in the heavens… one pleasure is the mother of vices, the other, of virtues… Our pleasure here is more uncertain and deceptive; that pleasure above is certain and stable… We cannot enjoy both of them, because they differ from each other as do heaven and earth, soul and body” (Valla, Book III).
Earthly, bodily pleasure is not merely ranked below heavenly pleasure here, as in Gassendi’s Chapter IV. Earthly pleasure is denied any power to contribute to the true good at all. Valla’s Christian judge goes further than Gassendi ever does by explicitly instructing the reader to “abstain from the pleasure here below if we want to enjoy the one above” (Valla, Book III). Where Gassendi prefers to speak of grace and natural versus supernatural piety, Valla’s Christian judge employs deeper Biblical citation for the same purpose — salvaging the word “pleasure” for a devoutly religious audience.
Valla’s dialogue makes the argument for tranquility clear: an avowed defense of unranked Epicurean pleasure (Vegio, Books I-II) is followed by an avowed Christian subordination of that same pleasure to a heavenly, ranked version of it (da Rho, Book III), with the author’s own final verdict resting entirely with the second.
Summarizing The Origins Of The Tranquilist Plague
Section titled “Summarizing The Origins Of The Tranquilist Plague”Working backward from Wright to Gassendi and Bernier to Raimondi and Valla turns up the likely source of the plague: when a writer decides to humor a religious or asceticly-inclined audience, tranquility gets promoted from a description of pleasure into a rival, superior thing standing over pleasure. When a writer had no such audience to answer to, tranquility stays what Diogenes of Oinoanda, writing in Epicurus’s own tradition centuries before any of these, already understood it to be — pleasure itself, viewed from the perspective of its stability rather than its motion, complete in quantity and qualitatively the same, even though composed of numberless varieties and combinations of pleasures.
The tranquility-first ranking does not originate from confusion or mistranslation, and it is not merely an ancient terminological ambiguity picked up neutrally by those with no stake in the outcome. As with Gassendi, who announces his theological commitments on his title page and in his dedication, the purpose throughout is to sanitize and domesticate Epicurus into a non-threatening footnote to the religious tradition.
Those like Wright and the Utilitarians, who have no motive to appeal to religion or asceticism in any form, are largely immune to the Tranquilist plague. Wright goes further, recognizing the tranquilist reading and placing it in the mouths of Epicurus’s enemies as something to be refuted.
The diagnosis of the source of the contagion is clear — accommodation with competing religious and philosophical views . This eclecticism is a plague that has swamped even the best efforts to reinvigorate the study of Epicurus in the world today today. But diagnosis can and should be followed by treatment.
The dispute over Tranquilism is not to be dismissed as a mild difference of opinion about which flavor of ice cream (pleasure or tranquility) is tastier. The dispute is about which takes priority, which comes first, and which deserves to be the banner under which we study and promote Epicurean philosophy. Epicurus built his philosophy on a reasoned and evidence-based rejection of supernatural gods and otherworldly idealism. The issue of Pleasure vs. Tranquility is not a taste preference. Pleasure is the banner under which Epicurus campaigned against otherworldliness in favor of embrace of the guidance of Nature. Nature gives that guidance in two forms - pleasure and pain. It is our responsibility to look to that guidance and process it correctly. If we look to that guidance but then decide to go in some other direction - toward virtue, toward piety, toward “tranquility” or toward anything else, then we are betraying the foundations that Epicurus himself built and on which alone his philosophy stands.
A note on scope. This article is far from a complete history of the Tranquilist plague’s transmission, and it does not claim to have located patient zero. It works backward from the nineteenth century — Wright and the Utilitarians — through the seventeenth — Gassendi and Bernier — to the first wave of Renaissance Epicurus-defenses in the 1430s — Cosma Raimondi and Lorenzo Valla — measured throughout against the ancient baseline established at the outset by Diogenes of Oinoanda. It will likely continue to grow, and to reach further back, as further pre-modern writers on Epicurus are reviewed. The absence of a given writer from this article should not be read as a claim that their work is irrelevant to the question of where the Tranquilist plague comes from — only that it has not yet been examined for it.
A note on sources and translation. This article draws on six documents. Five are in English: the surviving fragments of Diogenes of Oinoanda’s inscription, in Martin Ferguson Smith’s standard translation; Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens; Bernier’s Three Discourses; Thomas Stanley’s English rendering of Gassendi’s Epicurus, His Life and Doctrine, published in The History of Philosophy, Volume Three (London, 1659-1660). This last is itself a digest, not a full translation, of Gassendi’s much larger Latin work. We also consider A. A. Long’s chapter “Epicureanism and Utilitarianism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism (Oxford, 2020). The sixth is Gassendi’s own original 1647 Latin work, De vita et moribus Epicuri libri octo (“Eight Books on the Life and Character of Epicurus”), taken from a scanned copy of the original edition. No academic, peer-reviewed English translation of Gassendi’s Latin text is known by me to exist. The passages quoted from it below were translated for this article using an AI model reading the scanned page images. These translations should be treated as probative but not scholarly-certified. The full set of translated excerpts, with page citations, is preserved at the end of this article for anyone who wants to check the wording directly.
Appendix: translated excerpts from Gassendi’s Latin
Section titled “Appendix: translated excerpts from Gassendi’s Latin”The passages below are the full set of excerpts translated from Gassendi’s De vita et moribus Epicuri libri octo (1647) for this article, with page citations to the printed edition, provided so the translations used above can be checked directly. As noted above, no peer-reviewed English translation of this text is known to exist; these renderings were produced by an AI model reading the scanned page images, with no OCR layer or existing scholarly translation to check the work against.
Title page.
“Authore Petro Gassendo, Diniensis Ecclesiae Praeposito” “By the author Pierre Gassendi, Provost of the Church of Digne.”
Dedicatory epistle (to François Luillier, unnumbered/early pages). Gassendi pledges to defend the Catholic faith against Epicurus’s doctrine wherever the two conflict, and declares his submission to Church authority over his own reasoning. Across several sentences: Epicurus’s denial of Providence and of the soul’s immortality is flagged as contrary to the Faith; Gassendi commits to “bend all my strength against Epicurus… as often as anything occurs which might seem even in the slightest degree at variance with the sacred Faith”; and he submits all of it to the authority of the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church.
Book III, p.81-82 — the tranquility ranking in Gassendi’s own voice.
“…veram germanamque voluptatem…” “…true and genuine pleasure…”
Context: Gassendi’s own explanation (not staged as an opponent’s view) for why Epicurus made tranquility the goal, already containing the ranking of tranquil over kinetic pleasure (“but especially the latter”).
Book III, p.91-92 — Providence-denial as “gravest lapse.”
“grauissimus lapsus” “gravest lapse”
Context: Gassendi calls Epicurus’s denial of divine Providence his gravissimus lapsus, and pledges — with God’s aid — to refute it as contrary to both religion and natural reason.
Book III, Chapter IX (pp.98-104) — the Church Fathers. Chapter heading: “De sanctis Patribus, ac nominatim Clemente, Lactantio, Ambrosio” — “On the holy Church Fathers, specifically Clement, Lactantius, and Ambrose.” Discusses Lactantius’s Institutiones contrasting Epicurus’s “summum bonum in voluptate animi” (highest good in the pleasure of the mind) with Aristippus’s “in voluptate corporis” (in the pleasure of the body), and Ambrose’s citation of the Letter to Menoeceus.
Book IV, Chapter III, p.113-114 — filial vs. servile piety; technical Tridentine theology.
“non illa sane supernaturalis, seu ex gratia iustificante, secundum quam etiam filii Dei nominamur, & sumus; verùm naturalis, & qualem recta ratio suggerit” “not, to be sure, that supernatural [piety], or [piety] by justifying grace, according to which we too are called and are sons of God; but a natural one, of the kind right reason suggests.”
Context: Gassendi distinguishes a natural, reason-based “filial” piety toward God from the supernatural piety of adopted sonship conferred by grace, and argues Epicurus’s reverence for the divine qualifies as the natural kind.
Book IV, Chapter IV, p.115-117 — true religion vs. superstition; civic-conformity excuse. Gassendi argues Epicurus opposed only superstitio (false religion), never vera religio (true religion), and re-glosses Lucretius’s line on religion’s power to counsel evils as targeting only the superstitious kind.
“Intererat enim, quia ius ciuile, & tranquillitas publica illud ex ipso exigebat: Improbabat, quia nihil cogit animum Sapientis, vt vulgaria sapiat. Intùs erat sui iuris; extra, legibus obstrictus societatis hominum.” “He took part [in the rites of his homeland], because civil law and public tranquility demanded it of him; he disapproved [inwardly], because nothing compels the mind of the wise man to feel as the common people do. Within, he was his own master; outside, he was bound by the laws of human society.”
Book VI, p.150-151 — Epicurus as the biblical Prodigal Son. Cites the Church Father Chrysologus’s sermon, which allegorizes Epicurus’s circle as the Gospel’s Prodigal Son: abandoning belief in God, Providence, judgment, and the future, in favor of gluttony. Also cites commentary (Olympiodorus) reading the Book of Wisdom’s “let us crown ourselves with roses before they wither” passage (Wisdom 2) as a portrait of Epicurus’s followers.
Book VII, p.191-193 — Gassendi’s place in a prior rehabilitation tradition. Lists earlier post-classical defenders/admirers of Epicurus predating Gassendi: Franciscus Philelphus, Alexander ab Alexandro, Caelius Rhodiginus, Raphael Volaterranus, Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, Baptista Guarinus (De Secta Epicuri), and Antonius Bonciarius, whose Epicurus, sive dialogus de antiqua philosophia is quoted as arguing:
“neminem ex priscis Philosophis accessisse propius ad veritatem, quàm Epicurum; contra, nullos ab ea longiùs recessisse, quàm Stoicos.” “none of the ancient philosophers came closer to the truth than Epicurus; on the contrary, none strayed further from it than the Stoics.”
Book VIII, p.209-210 — philosophy’s purpose is tranquility, in Gassendi’s own analytical voice.
“…quomodo multa, quae nos, propter imperitiam terrent, vbi perspecta fuerint, animi pariant tranquillitatem.” “…how many things, which through our ignorance terrify us, once clearly perceived, produce tranquility of mind.”
Context: Gassendi’s own explanation for why he rated physics/physiologia as the most valuable of the arts and sciences for wisdom and happiness (sapientiam… felicitatem) — because understanding nature correctly yields tranquility of mind. This independently confirms, from the Latin original, the same tranquility-first framing documented above from Thomas Stanley’s 1659 English digest (p.129-130).
Closing line, p.236.
“Haec iam de vita, & moribus Epicuri dicta sufficiant.” “Let this much said about the life and character of Epicurus suffice.”
The work closes by pointing to a planned separate volume “on the World, on the Stars” (i.e., the systematic physics/philosophy, which became Gassendi’s later Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri), confirming that this 236-page work is explicitly framed as a preparatory, apologetic biography — clearing Epicurus’s reputation before the doctrinal reconstruction proper.
A note on completeness. There is nowhere near as much surviving evidence about pre-modern writers on Epicurus as we would like to have, and this article can only test the sources presently at hand. If you know of other candidates — ancient, medieval, or early modern — who belong on either the immune or the carrier side of this investigation, let me know and I will update this article accordingly.
Sources: Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, Letter 21. Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragments 3, 19, 29, 32, and 34, translated by Martin Ferguson Smith, in The Epicurean Inscription (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993) and Supplement to Diogenes of Oinoanda: The Epicurean Inscription (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2003). Frances Wright, A Few Days in Athens (written 1822; cited here by chapter, since editions vary in pagination). A. A. Long, “Epicureanism and Utilitarianism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism, edited by P. Mitsis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 742-60. François Bernier, Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty (London, 1699). Petrus Gassendus [Pierre Gassendi], De vita et moribus Epicuri libri octo (1647), Books III, IV, VI, VII, VIII, and the closing line (p.236). Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy, Volume Three (London, 1659-1660), Part Five, “Epicurus, His Life and Doctrine, Written by Petrus Gassendus,” Chapters I-XXXI of the Ethics section (pp.226-275), with reference also to the general doctrinal preface (p.129-130). Cosma Raimondi, Letter to Ambrogio Tignosi in Defence of Epicurus against the Stoics, Academics and Peripatetics (c.1429), translated by Martin Davies. Lorenzo Valla, On Pleasure: De Voluptate (Of the True and the False Good) (1431), edited by M. Lorch, translated by A. Kent Hiett and M. Lorch (New York: Albaris Books, 1977).