40 Fun Facts About Epicureanism

Which American president called himself an Epicurean, ranking that system the most rational of the ancients?

Thomas Jefferson defended Epicurus against centuries of caricature, calling his system frugal of vicious indulgence and fruitful of virtue.

According to a hostile story passed on by Saint Jerome, what drove the Roman poet Lucretius mad before he died?

A love potion drove him insane, Jerome claimed four centuries later, adding that the poem was written in lucid intervals. Scholars now regard the report as inaccurate.

In the second century AD, how did the wealthy Diogenes of Oenoanda share Epicurus's philosophy with his whole city?

Carving it on a wall some 80 metres long, he set out about 25,000 words of Epicurean teaching to help, as he put it, those who come after us.

The English word 'epicure', taken from the name of Epicurus, now describes a person with refined taste in what?

Food is the epicure's passion, a twist on the original: Epicurus and his followers were known for eating simple meals and taught that nature requires very little.

The Epicurean motto 'Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo' was commonly inscribed on what across the Roman Empire?

Gravestones carried the line, which means 'I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind', a shrug at mortality drawn from Epicurus's teaching.

In Dante's Inferno, Epicurus and his followers lie in burning coffins in the Sixth Circle for denying what?

The soul's immortality was the doctrine they rejected: Epicurus taught that the soul is made of atoms and dies with the body, so no afterlife awaits.

Lucretius defended writing philosophy in verse by comparing his poetry to what, used to sweeten bitter medicine?

Honey is his image for poetry, which coaxes readers into swallowing a doctrine he calls life-saving but often unpleasant. Epicurus himself had discouraged writing verse.

Which school did Epicurus found in Athens around 306 BC, a community known for its simple shared meals?

The Garden took its name from the plot Epicurus bought for his school, which was unusual in welcoming women as students.

In which religion does 'epikoros', a word some trace to the name of Epicurus, mean a heretic?

Judaism uses the term in the Mishnah for a person with no share in the World to Come, though the Talmud derives it instead from a root meaning licentious.

A surviving letter attributed to Epicurus reassures which relative that her disturbing dreams about him mean nothing?

His mother is also asked to stop sending money and supplies, since his companions already support him; the letter explains dreams as mere images in the mind.

Which human bond did Epicurus rank above power or great wealth as the basis of a satisfying life?

Friendship gave Epicureans mutual security and affection, so they formed communities of companions living apart from the public business of the city.

Which sphere of public life did Epicurus advise followers to avoid, in line with his call to live in obscurity?

Politics, Epicurus insisted, could never release a person from fear, so the wise would do better to live quietly among trusted companions.

According to Epicurus, who never denied that the gods exist, what role do those gods play in human affairs?

They take no part at all, Epicurus held, which meant that storms and other frightening weather could not be divine punishment.

The trilemma known as the Epicurean paradox asks why a god both willing and able to help would permit what?

Evil is the puzzle, though no surviving text by Epicurus poses it; the Christian writer Lactantius attributed the trilemma to him centuries later.

Which school founded by Zeno of Citium did later Roman writers portray as the great rival of Epicureanism?

Stoicism prized virtue rather than pleasure as the highest good, and its ethics sat closer to traditional Roman values.

Which earlier Greek thinker, known as the laughing philosopher, supplied the atomism that Epicurus adapted?

Democritus held that everything is tiny particles moving in empty space. Epicurus kept the idea yet denied any debt to earlier thinkers, insisting he was self-taught.

Which Roman goddess does Lucretius invoke to open De rerum natura, urging her to pacify her lover Mars?

Venus is hailed as the ancestress of the Romans, and many scholars read her as a poetic stand-in for nature's creative power rather than a literal deity.

In which Roman town buried by Vesuvius in AD 79 did a villa hold a charred library rich in Epicurean scrolls?

Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri held the scrolls, in the only library from the Graeco-Roman world to survive in its entirety.

Which future revolutionary wrote his doctoral thesis on the atomism of Epicurus and an earlier Greek thinker?

Karl Marx completed the dissertation in 1841 at the University of Jena, judging the worldview of Epicurus internally consistent and practically applicable.

Which label, from the Greek word for pleasure, do philosophers give to the kind of ethics Epicurus taught?

Hedonism in his hands was sober: Epicurus redefined the highest pleasure as the absence of suffering, a calm untouched by distress of body or mind.

Epicurus argued that falling atoms occasionally swerve off course, a tweak to atomism that made room for what?

Free will needed the swerve, Epicurus thought: without it, people would be locked in an endless chain of cause and effect. Lucretius called the motion the clinamen.

Which Greek term names the untroubled state of mind that Epicurus set as the goal of a happy life?

Ataraxia literally means not being disturbed, and outside philosophy it described the ideal calm of soldiers going into battle.

On which Aegean island was Epicurus born in 341 BC, to parents who were Athenian settlers there?

Samos lost its Athenian settlers after Alexander the Great died, when they were expelled to Colophon on the coast of what is now Turkey.

Epicurus reportedly stayed cheerful and kept teaching while dying at seventy-two of what painful condition?

A urinary stone blocked his urinary tract, yet in a farewell letter he called his last day a happy one, cheered by recalling his philosophical contemplation.

According to Saint Jerome, which famous Roman orator emended the books that the poet Lucretius left behind?

Cicero was no admirer of the school: he scolded the earliest Epicurean writers in Latin for their poor prose and gave the doctrine spokesmen in his own dialogues.

Which Italian book hunter found a copy of Lucretius's long-neglected poem in a German monastery in 1417?

Poggio Bracciolini never named the monastery, though Fulda is the likeliest candidate; his other finds included the treatise on architecture by Vitruvius.

Lucretius's De rerum natura breaks off abruptly during a harrowing account of which historical catastrophe?

The plague of Athens struck during the Peloponnesian War, and the poem's sudden stop there suggests Lucretius died before he could finish revising.

In which poetic metre, the traditional verse form of Greek and Latin epic, did Lucretius write De rerum natura?

Dactylic hexameter carries all six books, some 7,400 lines, in a poem framed like a hymn that echoes the openings of Homer and Hesiod.

Into which of his three classes of desire did Epicurus put the craving for wealth, power or fame?

Unnatural and unnecessary desires were to be suppressed, Epicurus taught, because they are limitless and so can never be satisfied.

According to the followers of Epicurus, where do the gods dwell?

Between worlds, in a region called the metakosmia, is where the gods sit on the prevailing reading, as physical, immortal beings made of atoms. Other scholars think Epicurus meant them only as ideals.

Which collection of forty short sayings by Epicurus survives complete and opens with the tetrapharmakos?

Principal Doctrines were written to be memorised, and a second set of eighty-one Epicurean sayings turned up in a Vatican manuscript in 1888.

Which French priest revived Epicurean atomism in the seventeenth century, reshaping it to suit Christian readers?

Pierre Gassendi argued that atoms were not eternal but created by God in a huge yet finite number, a version that later shaped John Locke's empiricism.

Which Epicurean philosopher from Gadara wrote many of the charred scrolls found in a library buried by Vesuvius?

Philodemus studied in Athens before settling in Italy under a wealthy Roman patron, and was once known chiefly for his short poems.

Which follower from Mytilene inherited the school of Epicurus and succeeded him as its head in about 270 BC?

Hermarchus was the son of a poor man and trained first as a rhetorician; Epicurus also left him all of his books.

Which woman of Epicurus's school published an elegantly written attack on the Aristotelian leader Theophrastus?

Leontion was labelled a courtesan, perhaps as a slur by rival schools, yet even hostile writers conceded her intelligence and the quality of her prose.

Which Greek word did Epicureans use for the absence of bodily pain, the physical partner of mental tranquillity?

Aponia could be reached, Epicurus thought, by keeping desires few and easy to satisfy, so that the body rarely suffers from going without.

To which Roman praetor, later prosecuted for bribery in his run for consul, did Lucretius dedicate De rerum natura?

Gaius Memmius is addressed by name in books one, two and five but never in the other three, a pattern that has fuelled theories about how the poem was revised.

Which term did Epicureans use for pleasures of action or change, as opposed to the calm 'katastematic' kind?

Kinetic pleasures include satisfying a desire or feeling a burst of joy, but Epicurean ethics aimed chiefly at the calm state that follows.

Which British ethical movement, shaped by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, drew on Epicurus's account of happiness?

Utilitarianism sought to maximise overall happiness, which went further than Epicurus, who never made the general happiness an ethical goal.

Lucretius is credited as the first to propose that humans used stone, then copper and bronze, and finally which metal?

Iron ploughs and swords replaced bronze only by slow degrees, he wrote, and he guessed that smelting was discovered by accident, perhaps after a forest fire.