The household of Epicurus resembled a large family, but there was seemingly no sullenness nor sense of confinement, only sympathy and gentleness.
We don’t exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. In small comments, many of them teasing, they reveal they know our foibles and accept them and so, in turn, accept that we have a place in the world. We can ask them ‘Isn’t he frightening?’ or ‘Do you ever feel that …?’ and be understood, rather than encounter the puzzled ‘No, not particularly’ – which can make us feel, even when in company, as lonely as polar explorers.
True friends do not evaluate us according to worldly criteria, it is the core self they are interested in; like ideal parents, their love for us remains unaffected by our appearance or position in the social hierarchy, and so we have no qualms in dressing in old clothes and revealing that we have made little money this year. The desire for riches should perhaps not always be understood as a simple hunger for a luxurious life, a more important motive might be the wish to be appreciated and treated nicely. We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us. Epicurus, discerning our underlying need, recognized that a handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not.
2. Freedom
Epicurus and his friends made a second radical innovation. In order not to have to work for people they didn’t like and answer to potentially humiliating whims, they removed themselves from employment in the commercial world of Athens (‘We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics’), and began what could best have been described as a commune, accepting a simpler way of life in exchange for independence. They would have less money but would never again have to follow the commands of odious superiors.
So they bought a garden near their house, a little outside the old Dipylon gate, and grew a range of vegetables for the kitchen, probably bliton (cabbage), krommyon (onion) and kinara (ancestor of the modern artichoke, of which the bottom was edible but not the scales). Their diet was neither luxurious nor abundant, but it was flavoursome and nutritious. As Epicurus explained to his friend Menoeceus, ‘[The wise man] chooses not the greatest quantity of food but the most pleasant.’
Simplicity did not affect the friends’ sense of status because, by distancing themselves from the values of Athens, they had ceased to judge themselves on a material basis. There was no need to be embarrassed by bare walls, and no benefit in showing off gold. Among a group of friends living outside the political and economic centre of the city, there was – in the financial sense – nothing to prove.
3. Thought
There are few better remedies for anxiety than thought. In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge. And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise.
There was much encouragement to think in the Garden, as Epicurus’s community became known. Many of the friends were writers. According to Diogenes Laertius, Metrodorus, for one, wrote twelve works, among them the lost Way of Wisdom and Of Epicurus’s Weak Health. In the common rooms of the house in Melite and in the vegetable garden, there must have been unbroken opportunities to examine problems with people as intelligent as they were sympathetic.
Epicurus was especially concerned that he and his friends learn to analyse their anxieties about money, illness, death and the supernatural. If one thought rationally about mortality, one would, Epicurus argued, realize that there was nothing but oblivion after death, and that ‘what is no trouble when it arrives is an idle worry in anticipation.’ It was senseless to alarm oneself in advance about a state which one would never experience:
There is nothing dreadful in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.
Sober analysis calmed the mind; it spared Epicurus’s friends the furtive glimpses of difficulties that would have haunted them in the unreflective environment beyond the Garden.
Wealth is of course unlikely ever to make anyone miserable. But the crux of Epicurus’s argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.
To highlight what is essential for happiness and what may, if one is denied prosperity through social injustice or economic turmoil, be forgone without great regrets, Epicurus divided our needs into three categories:
Of the desires, some are natural and necessary. Others are natural but unnecessary. And there are desires that are neither natural nor necessary.
WHAT IS AND IS NOT ESSENTIAL FOR HAPPINESS
Natural and
Natural but
Neither natural
necessary
unnecessary
nor necessary
Friends
Grand house
Fame
Freedom
Private baths
Power
Thought (about main
Banquets
sources of anxiety:
Servants
death, illness,
Fish, meat
poverty, superstition)
Food, shelter, clothes
Crucially for those unable to make or afraid of losing money, Epicurus’s tripartite division suggested that happiness was dependent on some complex psychological goods but relatively independent of material ones, beyond the means required to purchase some warm clothes, somewhere to live and something to eat – a set of priorities designed to provoke thought in those who had equated happiness with the fruition of grand financial schemes, and misery with a modest income.
To plot the Epicurean relation between money and happiness on a graph, money’s capacity to deliver happiness is already present in small salaries and will not rise with the largest. We will not cease being happy with greater outlay, but we will not, Epicurus insisted, surpass levels of happiness already available to those on a limited income.
RELATION OF HAPPINESS TO MONEY FOR SOMEONE WITH FRIENDS, FREEDOM, ETC
.
The analysis depended on a particular understanding of happiness. For Epicurus, we are happy if we are not in active pain. Because we suffer active pain if we lack nutrients and clothes, we must have enough money to buy them. But suffering is too strong a word to describe what will occur if we are obliged to wear an ordinary cardigan rather than a cashmere one or to eat a sandwich rather than sea scallops. Hence the argument that:
Plain dishes offer the same pleasure as a luxurious table, when the pain that comes from want is taken away.
Whether we regularly eat meals like the one on the right or like the one on the left cannot be the decisive factor in our state of mind.
(Ill. 9.1)
(Ill. 9.2)
As for eating meat, it relieves neither any of our nature’s stress nor a desire whose non-satisfaction would give rise to pain … What it contributes to is not life’s maintenance but variation of pleasures … like drinking of exotic wines, all of which our nature is quite capable of doing without.
It may be tempting to attribute this disparagement of luxury to the primitive range of products available to the rich in the undeveloped economy of Hellenistic Greece. Yet the argument may still be defended by pointing to an imbalance in the ratio of price to happiness in products of later ages.
(Ill. 9.3)
We would not be happy with the vehicle on the left but no friends; with a villa but no freedom; with linen sheets but too much anxiety to sleep. So long as essential non-material needs are unattended, the line on the graph of happiness will remain stubbornly low.
RELATION OF HAPPINESS TO MONEY FOR S
OMEONE WITHOUT FRIENDS, FREEDOM, ETC
.
Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.
To avoid acquiring what we do not need or regretting what we cannot afford, we should ask rigorously the moment we desire an expensive object whether we are right to do so. We should undertake a series of thought experiments in which we imagine ourselves projected in time to the moment when our desires have been realized, in order to gauge our likely degree of happiness:
The following method of inquiry must be applied to every desire: What will happen to me if what I long for is accomplished? What will happen if it is not accomplished?
A method which, though no examples of it survive, must have followed at least five steps – which may without injustice be sketched in the language of an instruction manual or recipe book.
1. Identify a project for happiness.
In order to be happy on holiday, I must live in a villa
.
2. Imagine that the project may be false. Look for exceptions to the supposed link between the desired object and happiness. Could one possess the desired object but not be happy? Could one be happy but not have the desired object?
Could I spend money on a villa and still not be happy?
Could I be happy on holiday and not spend as much money as on a villa?
3. If an exception is found, the desired object cannot be a necessary and sufficient cause of happiness.
It is possible to have a miserable time in a villa if, for example, I feel friendless and isolated
.
It is possible for me to be happy in a tent if, for example, I am with someone I love and feel appreciated by
.
4. In order to be accurate about producing happiness, the initial project must be nuanced to take the exception into account.
In so far as I can be happy in an expensive villa, this depends on being with someone I love and feel appreciated by
.
I can be happy without spending money on a villa, as long as I am with someone I love and feel appreciated by
.
5. True needs may now seem very different from the confused initial desire.
Happiness depends more on the possession of a congenial companion than a well-decorated villa
.
The possession of the greatest riches does not resolve the agitation of the soul nor give birth to remarkable joy. (Ill. 9.4)
5
Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them? Because of an error similar to that of the migraine sufferer who drills a hole in the side of his skull: because expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs we don’t understand. Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds but are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends.
We are not solely to blame for our confusions. Our weak understanding of our needs is aggravated by what Epicurus termed the ‘idle opinions’ of those around us, which do not reflect the natural hierarchy of our needs, emphasizing luxury and riches, seldom friendship, freedom and thought. The prevalence of idle opinion is no coincidence. It is in the interests of commercial enterprises to skew the hierarchy of our needs, to promote a material vision of the good and downplay an unsaleable one.
And the way we are enticed is through the sly association of superfluous objects with our other, forgotten needs.
(Ill. 10.1)
It may be a jeep we end up buying, but it was – for Epicurus – freedom we were looking for.
(Ill. 10.2)
It may be the aperitif we purchase, but it was – for Epicurus – friendship we were after.
(Ill. 10.3)
It may be fine bathing accoutrements we acquire, but it was – for Epicurus – thought that would have brought us calm.
To counteract the power of luxurious images Epicureans appreciated the importance of advertising.
In the AD 120s, in the central market-place of Oinoanda, a town of 10,000 inhabitants in the south-western corner of Asia Minor, an enormous stone colonnade 80 metres long and nearly 4 metres high was erected and inscribed with Epicurean slogans for the attention of shoppers:
Luxurious foods and drinks … in no way produce freedom from harm and a healthy condition in the flesh.
One must regard wealth beyond what is natural as of no more use than water to a container that is full to overflowing.
Real value is generated not by theatres and baths and perfumes and ointments … but by natural science.
The wall had been paid for by Diogenes, one of Oinoanda’s wealthiest citizens, who had sought, 400 years after Epicurus and his friends had opened the Garden in Athens, to share with his fellow inhabitants the secrets of happiness he had discovered in Epicurus’s philosophy. As he explained on one corner of the wall:
Having already reached the sunset of my life (being almost on the verge of departure from the world on account of old age), I wanted, before being overtaken by death, to compose a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure and so to help now those who are well-constituted. Now, if only one person, or two or three or four or five or six … were in a bad predicament, I should address them individually … but as the majority of people suffer from a common disease, as in a plague, with their false notions about things, and as their number is increasing (for in mutual emulation they catch the disease from each other, like sheep) … I wished to use this stoa to advertise publicly medicines that bring salvation.
The massive limestone wall contained some 25,000 words advertising all aspects of Epicurus’s thought, mentioning the importance of friendship and of the analysis of anxieties. Inhabitants shopping in the boutiques of Oinoanda had been warned in detail that they could expect little happiness from the activity.
(Ill. 10.4)
Advertising would not be so prevalent if we were not such suggestible creatures. We want things when they are beautifully presented on walls, and lose interest when they are ignored or not well spoken of. Lucretius lamented the way in which what we want is ‘chosen by hearsay rather than by the evidence of [our] own senses’.
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of desirable images of luxurious products and costly surroundings, fewer of ordinary settings and individuals. We receive little encouragement to attend to modest gratifications – playing with a child, conversations with a friend, an afternoon in the sun, a clean house, cheese spread across fresh bread (‘Send me a pot of cheese, so that I may have a feast whenever I like’). It is not these elements which are celebrated in the pages of Epicurean Life.
Art may help to correct the bias. Lucretius lent force to Epicurus’s intellectual defence of simplicity by helping us, in superlative Latin verse, to feel the pleasures of inexpensive things:
We find that the requirements of our bodily nature are few indeed, no more than is necessary to banish pain, and also to spread out many pleasures for ourselves. Nature does not periodically seek anything more gratifying than this, not complaining if there are no golden images of youths about the house who are holding flaming torches in their right hands to illuminate banquets that go on long into the night. What does it matter if the hall doesn’t sparkle with silver and gleam with gold, and no carved and gilded rafters ring to the music of the lute? Nature doesn’t miss these luxuries when people can recline in company on the soft grass by a running stream under the branches of a tall tree and refresh their bodies pleasurably at small expense. Better still if the weather smiles on them, and the season of the year stipples the green grass with flowers.
Ergo corpoream ad naturam pauca videmus
esse opus omnino, quae demant cumque dolorem
.
delicias quoque uti multas substernere possint
gratius interdum, neque natura ipsa requirit
,
si non aurea sunt iuvenum simulacra per aedes
lampadas
igniferas manibus retinentia dextris
,
lumina nocturnis epulis ut suppeditentur
,
nec domus argento fulget auroque renidet
nec citharae reboant laqueata aurataque templa
,
cum tamen inter se prostrati in gramine molli
propter aquae rivum sub ramis arboris altae
non magnis opibus iucunde corpora curant
,
praesertim cum tempestas adridet et anni
tempora conspergunt viridantis floribus herbas
.
It is hard to measure the effect on commercial activity in the Greco-Roman world of Lucretius’s poem. It is hard to know whether shoppers in Oinoanda discovered what they needed and ceased buying what they didn’t because of the giant advertisement in their midst. But it is possible that a well-mounted Epicurean advertising campaign would have the power to precipitate global economic collapse. Because, for Epicurus, most businesses stimulate unnecessary desires in people who fail to understand their true needs, levels of consumption would be destroyed by greater self-awareness and appreciation of simplicity. Epicurus would not have been perturbed:
When measured by the natural purpose of life, poverty is great wealth; limitless wealth, great poverty.
It points us to a choice: on the one hand, societies which stimulate unnecessary desires but achieve enormous economic strengths as a result; and on the other, Epicurean societies which would provide for essential material needs but could never raise living standards beyond subsistence level. There would be no mighty monuments in an Epicurean world, no technological advances and little incentive to trade with distant continents. A society in which people were more limited in their needs would also be one of few resources. And yet – if we are to believe the philosopher – such a society would not be unhappy. Lucretius articulated the choice. In a world without Epicurean values:
The Consolations of Philosophy Page 5
