Epicurus: What He Actually Taught About Pleasure, Death and the Gods

Epicurus ran a philosophical school in Athens called the Garden, and his name now means someone who loves fine food. That is close to the opposite of what he taught. Diogenes Laertius counted about three hundred rolls of his writing. Three of his letters and a list of his key sayings, the Principal Doctrines, survive in full because that later biographer copied them into his Lives of Eminent Philosophers. We quote them from R. D. Hicks’s 1925 translation. Here are eight common claims, checked.

011. “Epicurus taught people to live for pleasure”

Partly He did make pleasure the goal of life, so in the technical sense he was a hedonist. But he meant something unusual by it. In his Letter to Menoeceus he writes: “When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality”. Instead: “By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.” It is “not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry”, but “sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance”.

One of his Principal Doctrines sets the ceiling: “The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain.” On his view, once nothing hurts and nothing troubles a person, more luxury adds nothing. Epicurus’s own word for the untroubled mind is ataraxia, usually translated “tranquillity”. The philosopher Tim O’Keefe, writing in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, suggests “it might be less misleading to call him a ‘tranquillist’ instead of a ‘hedonist.’”

He was not against bodily pleasure, though. Diogenes quotes, in a passage listing what his critics said about him, a line from his book On the Ethical End: “I know not how to conceive the good, apart from the pleasures of taste, sexual pleasures, the pleasures of sound and the pleasures of beautiful form.” How that fits with the rest of his ethics is still argued; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy distinguishes what Epicurus called “static” from “kinetic” pleasure and notes that the precise nature of this distinction “is debated”.

Not	“The pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality”
But	“The absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul”

Letter to Menoeceus, in R. D. Hicks’s translation.

022. “An epicure loves fine food, and so did Epicurus”

Doesn't hold up By his own account he lived very plainly. Diogenes reports that “In his correspondence he himself mentions that he was content with plain bread and water”, and quotes him asking a friend: “Send me a little pot of cheese, that, when I like, I may fare sumptuously.” In the Letter to Menoeceus he writes that “bread and water confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips.”

The Roman philosopher Seneca describes a welcome at the Garden of “barley-meal” and “water also in abundance”. The food-lover meaning of epicure came much later. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the Stoics “first gave his name a reproachful sense”; English dictionaries date the insulting sense of epicure to the mid-1500s, and the sense of a person with refined taste in food and drink came after it.

033. “Epicurus said death is nothing to us”

Holds up He said it, and argued for it: “Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience”. The famous short version, often quoted as “Where death is, I am not”, is a paraphrase of the next lines: “when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.” He adds that people fear death “not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect.”

The Roman poet Lucretius, who set out Epicurus’s system in the Latin poem On the Nature of Things, restates it: in William Ellery Leonard’s verse translation, “Therefore death to us Is nothing, nor concerns us in the least”. Lucretius also adds the mirror argument: we felt nothing in all the ages before we were born.

044. “Epicurus was an atheist”

Doesn't hold up It was an ancient charge, and he denied it. “For verily there are gods, and the knowledge of them is manifest; but they are not such as the multitude believe”. What he rejected was the idea that gods punish, reward or run the world. The first of his Principal Doctrines says: “A blessed and eternal being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being”. O’Keefe notes that Epicureanism was “charged in antiquity with being a godless philosophy, although Epicurus and his followers denied the charge.”

What he meant by “gods” is a real dispute. O’Keefe describes the gods as “unaware of our existence”, living eternally “in the intermundia, the space between the cosmoi”, but he also reports that some scholars “conjecture that Epicurus’ ‘gods’ are thought-constructs, and exist only in human minds as idealizations”. The Internet Encyclopedia also notes that ancient critics thought the gods “a thin smoke-screen to hide Epicurus’ atheism”. The texts do not settle it.

055. “The Epicurean paradox about evil is Epicurus’s”

Still argued The argument goes: if God wants to stop evil but cannot, he is not all-powerful; if he can but will not, he is not good; so where does evil come from? It survives in the Christian writer Lactantius’s On the Anger of God, chapter 13, which introduces it as “that argument also of Epicurus” and then sets out to refute it. No surviving work of Epicurus contains it. An earlier version does survive, without his name. The Sceptic Sextus Empiricus, who lived probably in the second or third century CE, sets out the same four cases in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism (book 3): a god who wills to care for everything but cannot is weak, one who can but will not would seem envious, and one who neither wills nor can is both. He does not attribute it to Epicurus.

Its famous English wording is not a translation of Epicurus either. It comes from David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published after his death, where Hume has his character Philo say: “EPICURUS’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent.”

Scholars disagree about whether the argument is Epicurus’s at all. The 1893 critical edition of Lactantius records one scholar’s suggestion that the passage came from a lost part of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, and a 1988 article by Reinhold Glei calls it, in its title, “the alleged Epicurus fragment” (our translation). On the other side, O’Keefe counts Epicurus among “the earliest philosophers we know of to have raised the Problem of Evil”, because he argued against a world run by a caring god. Both can be true: Epicurus denied that the gods govern the world. But the neat four-way argument is credited to him only by a later writer who was arguing against him and names no source, and an older version survives in a Sceptic’s handbook with no mention of him. On that evidence, the argument is better described as used against providence in antiquity than as Epicurus’s own words.

Sextus EmpiricusAn older version: the same four cases, with no mention of Epicurus

LactantiusCredits it to Epicurus, then sets out to refute it

David HumeThe famous English wording, spoken by his character Philo

No surviving work of Epicurus contains it.

066. “Epicurus’s four-part cure”

Partly The ideas are his, but the four-line formula does not appear in any of his own writings that survive. The summary, often called the tetrapharmakos or “fourfold drug”, is known from Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher who lived about two centuries later. His version survives on a charred papyrus from Herculaneum, “buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE”. In the translation of the scholar David Blank: “god is not fearsome, death not frightening, the good easily got, the bad easily endured”. The four lines match the themes of Epicurus’s first four Principal Doctrines: the fourth, for example, says that pain “if extreme, is present a very short time”.

077. “The Garden was a pleasure commune”

Doesn't hold up It was a household of friends. Diogenes writes that “Friends indeed came to him from all parts and lived with him in his garden”, and his Principal Doctrines put friendship first: “by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.” He refused to make his followers pool their property, because “such a practice in his opinion implied mistrust, and without confidence there is no friendship.”

His will provided for a meeting of the school every month on the twentieth day and freed several of his slaves. On what he called the last day of his life he wrote to his friend Idomeneus that his sufferings were so great “that nothing could augment them; but over against them all I set gladness of mind at the remembrance of our past conversations.”

088. “His bad reputation came from later readers who misunderstood him”

Partly It began in his own lifetime. Epicurus himself complained that he was misread “through ignorance, prejudice, or wilful misrepresentation”. Diogenes records the slanders of his enemies: one “adducing fifty scandalous letters as written by Epicurus”, another claiming “that Epicurus vomited twice a day from over-indulgence”, and, centuries later, Epictetus calling him a “preacher of effeminacy”. Diogenes rejects them, and the Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Epicurus’s humane character “was the prevailing view, shared even by hostile witnesses”.

The image stuck anyway. The Roman poet Horace joked about himself as “a hog of Epicurus’ herd”, in C. Smart’s translation, and by Shakespeare’s Macbeth “epicures” was an insult.

09Our reading

Epicurus was a hedonist whose idea of pleasure was not being in pain, not being afraid, and eating bread with friends. His enemies turned that into a byword for indulgence, and the word epicure carries their version, not his. The core of what survives in his own words is short enough to read in an afternoon: three letters and a short list of sayings, most of it arguments against fear, of the gods and of death. More survives in pieces: a second collection of sayings, fragments quoted by later writers, and damaged parts of his long work On Nature recovered from the papyri at Herculaneum.

How we checked this · Last checked September 2026

• Each claim was checked against Epicurus's surviving letters and sayings, in R. D. Hicks's 1925 translation, and the other ancient sources listed below.
• For Reinhold Glei's 1988 article on the paradox we read only its title and record.

Checked September 2026.

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10Sources