
On Epicurus — and his school of orgies
When word broke out in Athens that Epicurus, the old teacher from Samos had setup a school to study happiness rumors went wild, there were tales of the school hosting orgies every night with enormous feasts to complement. In fact one rumor claimed Epicurus had orgasmed eighteen times in a single night in a room full of virgins.
Enough!! some said, lets go see for ourselves . When they arrived they saw Epicurus studying happiness but very calmly, no orgies, no feasts. He had simply bought a big house and started living with his friends, everyone had their own rooms and there were pleasant shared areas for games too.
Epicurus the Garghettian, Epicurus the master builder of happiness or as Nietzsche calls him, Epicurus the garden-god; was a greek philosopher who lived in Athens during the Hellenistic period . He founded the Epicurean school. His contemporary was Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school. There are some stories about confrontations between Epicurus and Zeno but we shall leave those for another day.
Having studied happiness in depth for years Epicurus boiled it down to three requirements.
Firstly, you need your friends; according to Epicurus we all do have friends but the problem is we do not see them enough. We often think what we need to be happy is lots of money but we fail to take into account the sacrifices, pain and backstabbing we have to endure to attain and maintain money.
Secondly, pleasurable work, according to Epicurus for one to be truly happy one must enjoy ones work. He encouraged all the members of the epicurean commune to take huge pay cuts and involve themselves in crafts that they enjoy and by so doing they can contribute to the world in their own little ways while enjoying every bit of it. Some did farming, some cooking, some pottery others carpentry.
Thirdly, Epicurus found that calmness is in the mind. Epicurus and his friends stopped believing in breathing in-and-out or having a beautiful view to look-out on as a source of calm. They devoted to finding calm in their minds, to spending time on their own; reflecting, meditating, reading and writing.
The first epicurean commune was so successful that in just a short period of time various epicurean communes were open all around the mediterranean. At the peak of the movement there were about 400,000 people living in communes from Spain to present day Israel. It was until the 5th century AD that the Christian church converted the epicurean communes to monasteries. What we know as monasteries are really epicurean communes with a cross on top. Also, Max wrote his PhD thesis on Epicurus and what came to be known to us as communism is a rather scaled-up crooked version of epicureanism.
The detractors of Epicurus, particularly Zeno of Citium often referred to him as a hedonist- meaning he sees pleasure as the only intrinsic goal. However, the man and his philosophy were far from hedonism. Epicureanism focuses on the absence of pain and fear as the greatest pleasure and heavily emphasizes the need for simplicity. Epicurus himself owned two cloaks throughout his life and lived on bread and olives and for a treat, he occasionally added a slice of cheese. The platonists thought Epicurus was an illiterate but Greece later found out Epicurus was far from that. He sat concealed in his little garden at Athens and wrote 300 books. It took Greece 100 years to find them. He did also take swipe at the platonists though. He called them Dionysiokolakes. Which quite literally means flatterers of Dionysus. The insult lies in the fact that the Dionysiokolax was a common name for an actor. In essence the platonists were all actors,tyrants’ accessories and lick-spittles; what we colloquially refer to as kiss-ass. Epicurus wrote on different subjects ranging from religion, ethics ,physics to epistemology. I shall leave you with one of his riddles as recorded by Lactantius:
“God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, then he is weak — and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful — which is equally foreign to god’s nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful, and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them” — Lactantius, De Ira Deorum
