Welcome to Episode 311 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week in the absence of Joshua and Kalosyni we will make a brief review of Dr. Emily Austin's "Epicurus and The Politics Of The Fear of Death," which we have discussed in a recent thread thanks to Pacatus bringing the article to our attention.
Next week we will be back with more Tusculan Disputations, but this week we'll set the stage for more discussion of this very good article.
Cassius December 16, 2025 at 1:26 PM
Episode 311 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. This week our episode is entitled: "Is Pain The Only Reason To Be Concerned About Any Aspect Of Death And Dying?"
In the absence of Joshua and Kalosyni this week, this episode is my brief review of Dr. Emily Austin's "Epicurus and The Politics Of The Fear of Death," which we have discussed in a recent thread thanks to Pacatus bringing the article to our attention.
I have to say that the word "happy" does not make me happy in these contexts. The connotations of "happy" in English - effervescent, transitory, fleeting - really don't convey what Epicurus wrote. I also know Cassius doesn't like using Greek words, and I can respect why. Saying "eudaimonia" doesn't really mean anything to many people. It can also be used to try to obfuscate and to give a woowoo mystical feeling to an otherwise ordinary word, ordinary to Epicurus and the ancient Greeks. Like using nirvana or samsara in a Buddhist context.
It's clunky, but I much prefer something like "subjective well-being."
Yep, it's a Herculean task to communicate all the subtleties. i'm fairly comfortable with "happy" in the sense of the Declaration of Independence referring to the "pursuit of happiness" as if that word somehow embodies all the attributes of the best life. But you're right that the way it's interpreted today is much more fleeting.
I do think that a large part of the problem is that it probably also implies more than any single feeling, even "subjective well being." When I see how the translators are using that word to express what you're talking about in terms of blessedness, I don't know that any word or term that focuses primarily on any sort of limited experiences is good enough. I'm thinking more in terms of that Sedley article which compares Cyreniac to Epicurean happiness and talks about how the Epicurean view was more of a total evaluation than a temporary feeling. It also implies something that we'd likely consider to be "objective" in the sense that we can all understand and communicate that this is fundamentally the #1 goal of life. Calling it "subjective" is certainly true in a sense, but it probably implies in English that we are very narrowly saying that we ourselves completely define what it is. Yes we do in a way, but the 'feeling of pleasure' that plays such a large role is given to all of us by nature, and there are "limits and boundaries" within which it operates. If there weren't, we'd never even be able to explain to each other what pleasure means.
In the end maybe I'd equate this to Torquatus saying that Epicurus held "pleasure" to be the highest good. We're talking about an evaluation of a full life, and I suppose that's necessarily an abstraction.
Unless and until we can communicate the seriousness and importance of the ultimate goal, how can we hope to begin to connect with the seriousness that comes through in Lucretius' poem and Epicurus' own work.
I think your comment hits hard on one of the big tasks facing us. We speak English and we have to convey accurately in English what the pursuit of Epicurean philosophy -- and of life -- is all about.
And after responding to Don's very good comment I also want to repeat that I think one of the things Emily Austin points out is the importance of being able to articulate why don't want to die until "our time" arrives. Yes it's because we want "pleasure," but we have to convey he seriousness of what that means.
I'll cite again the understated line in the article I like so much:
Occupying an argumentative space in which one lacks reason to avoid easily and ethically avoidable deaths should, I think, be a last resort.
I think what we'e talking about is sort of the same thing in reverse. What we want to identify is an argumentative space in which we clearly identify the positive reasons why we want to live, for motives other than that we are "afraid" of dying. "Fear" is not the primary focus of Epicurean philosophy. it's demoralizing and terrible "optics" to talk as if that were so. i read Lucretius and the other Epicurean texts as upbeat and positive, not as depressed in any way.
We've been robbed of the experience of talking about these things in both a serious and upbeat way, and that's what we have to get back. I doubt there's any way to do that other than to re-establish our own pattern of communicating about these things over and over ourselves.
Whatever the name we give to it, the phrasing has to convey how we can be so even while dying from kidney disease, or even while "on the rack." That's the level of seriousness we're talking about, as Don is correctly saying, its not "giddiness" at all.
It's clunky, but I much prefer something like "subjective well-being."
As per the thoughts I've already written, would Epicurus describe his condition on his last day as one of "subjective well-being?" In a way definitely yes, but we're not in a place in the world of 2025 where those two words are adequate, standing alone, to explain all of what needs to be said.
As far as subjective vs objective, I do think it's up to the individual to assess their sense of well-being with their life. This is why Epicurus can write he could be "happy" with his life on his last day.
But wait...
Let's look quickly at what he wrote, since it is a quote that is often, and rightly, brought up:
22] And when near his end he wrote the following letter to Idomeneus :
"On this blissful (μακαρίαν makarian, same word to describe the life of the gods) day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could augment them ; but over against them all I set gladness of mind (ψυχὴν χαῖρον, psykhe khairon, joy of the mind/spirit/heart - joy = one of the kinetic pleasures) at the remembrance of our past conversations. But I would have you, as becomes your life-long attitude to me and to philosophy, watch over the children of Metrodorus."
So, he does NOT use happy/eudaimonia here. He uses makarios and khairos, blissfulness and joy. μακάριον is often translated as "blessed, fortunate, wealthy, 'well-off.'" There appears to be no certain etymology of the root [makar] or the longer form [makarios/on]. It appears to possibly have something to do with "being wealthy," either literally or figuratively.
So he felt blessed, well-off, surrounded by friends and students and his household. He felt joy - a fleeting pleasure - in his mind at his memories. And though he doesn't write it, I would bet that he felt a sense of well-being and satisfaction as to how he had lived his life.
Just working on some other material today and came across this line in book five of Lucretius. I think the underlined part is something I would add to any list of quotations to support the view that life is desirable and that it is pleasure that makes it so:
Did our life lie in darkness and misery until the world's beginning dawned? Although anyone who has been born must wish to remain in life so long as the caresses of pleasure hold him there, if someone has really never tasted the passion for life and has never been an individual, what harm does it do him not to have been created? (L&S-THP)
Don The following is from Long and Sedley Hellenistic Philosophers. I emphasized the last part with italics. I don't know that Sextus is correct that the entire issue is circular, but it's interesting that he is connecting these two issues (the meaning of happiness and the meaning of blessedness) and maybe the fact that he is doing so means that Epicurus did as well. The view might be unthinkable for skeptics like Sextus, but Epicurus was taking the view that there is apparently an innate aspect to knowledge of the gods.
#### Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 9.43—7
The same reply can be made to Epicurus' belief that the idea of gods arose from dream impressions of human-shaped images. For why should these have given rise to the idea of gods, rather than of outsized men? And in general it will be possible to reply to all the doctrines we have listed that men's idea of god is not based on mere largeness in a human-shaped animal, but includes his being blessed and imperishable and wielding the greatest power in the world. But from what origin, or how, these thoughts occurred among the first men to draw a conception of god, is not explained by those who attribute the cause to dream impressions and to the orderly motion of the heavenly bodies. To this they reply that the idea of god's existence originated from appearances in dreams, or from the world's phenomena, but that the idea of god's being everlasting and imperishable and perfect in happiness arose through a process of transition from men. For just as we acquired the idea of a Cyclops by enlarging the common man in our impression of him, so too we have started with the idea of a happy man, blessed with his full complement of goods, then intensified these features into the idea of god, their supreme fulfillment. And again, having formed an impression of a long-lived man, the men of old increased the time-span to infinity by combining the past and future with the present; and then, having thus arrived at the conception of the everlasting, they said that god was everlasting too. Those who say this are championing a plausible doctrine. But they easily slip into that most puzzling trap, circularity.
For in order first to get the idea of a happy man, and then that of god by transition, we must have an idea of what happiness is, since the idea of the happy man is of one who shares in happiness. But according to them happiness (eudaimonia) was a divine (daimonia) and godly nature, and the word 'happy' (eudaimon) was applied to someone who had his deity (daimon) disposed well (eu). Hence in order to grasp human happiness we must first have the idea of god and deity, but in order to have the idea of god we must first have a conception of a happy man. Therefore each, by presupposing the idea of the other, is unthinkable for us.
This is intriguing, Cassius . I was not aware of Sextus' text. This, to my reading, supports an "idealist" concept of the gods: arising from dream images, expanding the idea of the "happy man" to an enlarged state - physical as well as immeasurably happy.
since the idea of the happy man is of one who shares in happiness. But according to them happiness (eudaimonia) was a divine (daimonia) and godly nature, and the word 'happy' (eudaimon) was applied to someone who had his deity (daimon) disposed well (eu).
This is one of the primary reasons I like translating eudaimonia as "well-being" being almost a literal translation with at least a reasonable parallel to a modern understanding of the word. Here's the LSJ entry for daimon:
Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, δαίμων
It doesn't stretch my imagination to consider one's daimon as that part of one's mind we might call our "conscience." I could easily see that being personified, the better angels of our nature (to use a more modern phrase). One's daimon - one's conscience - if pushing one to live a moral, noble life is a eu-daimon. Hence, one lives a eudaimonic - a happy - life. If one's daimon - one's conscience - if more aligned with steering one's life in a negative direction - it's a kako-daimon.
I don't think it has to be circular. It's starting out from a human-centric position and expanding the potential of one's daimon to the extreme: blessedness and imperishability. The gods - the super-daimons - life a life of uninterrupted blessedness and uninterrupted imperishability - no backsliding ever ever. It's aspirational but unachievable for a mortal being. We can live as if we are gods but we will still not BE gods. We can have tastes and glimpses of a divine imperishable blessedness but we live in a mortal physical body that will experience pain.
I remain intrigued, but I feel Sextus doth protest too much.
I've always been fascinated by thls chicken-or-egg line of reasoning:
Further, how was there first implanted in the gods a pattern for the begetting of things, yea, and the concept of man, so that they might know and see in their mind what they wished to do, or in what way was the power of the first-beginnings ever learnt, or what they could do when they shifted their order one with the other, if nature did not herself give a model of creation? For so many first-beginnings of things in many ways, driven on by blows from time everlasting until now, and moved by their own weight, have been wont to be borne on, and to unite in every way, and essay everything that they might create, meeting one with another, that it is no wonder if they have fallen also into such arrangements, and have passed into such movements, as those whereby this present sum of things is carried on, ever and again replenished.
I interpret the meaning of this to be that there was never a necessity for gods to have a pattern because the universe and it's process have always existed.
As for intelligence and concepts, paraphrasing the deWitt quote Joshua likes to cite, a universe with no design or intention or concepts of its own naturally produced beings who do have concepts and designs and intentions.
Sextus can argue that:
Hence in order to grasp human happiness we must first have the idea of god and deity, but in order to have the idea of god we must first have a conception of a happy man. Therefore each, by presupposing the idea of the other, is unthinkable for us.
But there's no reason to think that there was ever a "first" example of such a being, given that the universe's processes have been operating eternally. So the issue isn't "unthinkable" as Sextus alleges. In fact it's the contrary. What is unthinkable is that the processes we observe today of biological beings developing over time to produce intelligence and concepts and designs ever had a beginning. These processes are natural and therefore the "conceptions" we are talking about have always existed at innumerable places and times in the past, and will continue to do so eternally into the future.
It's Sextus and the intelligent designers who are starting from an unthinkable premise -- divine creation from nothing.
And of course all of this is to forget the other side of the ledger, which Stephen Greenblatt cites here from Lorenzo Valla's De Voluptate:
At the center of his dialogue, Valla constructs a remarkably vigorous and sustained defense of key Epicurean principles: the wisdom of withdrawing from competitive striving into the tranquil garden of philosophy (“From the shore you shall laugh in safety at the waves, or rather at those who are wave-tossed”), the primacy of bodily pleasure, the advantages of moderation, the perverse unnaturalness of sexual abstinence, the denial of any afterlife. “It is plain,” the Epicurean states, “that there are no rewards for the dead, certainly there are no punishments either.” And lest this formulation allow an ambiguity, still setting human souls apart from all other created things, he returns to the point to render it unequivocal:
- According to my Epicurus . . . nothing remains after the dissolution of the living being, and in the term “living being” he included man just as much as he did the lion, the wolf, the dog, and all other things that breathe. With all this I agree. They eat, we eat; they drink, we drink; they sleep, and so do we. They engender, conceive, give birth, and nourish their young in no way different from ours. They possess some part of reason and memory, some more than others, and we a little more than they. We are like them in almost everything; finally, they die and we die—both of us completely.
If we grasp this end clearly—“finally, they die and we die—both of us completely”—then our determination should be equally clear: “Therefore, for as long as possible (would that it were longer!) let us not allow those bodily pleasures to slip away that cannot be doubted and cannot be recovered in another life.”
He is speaking here about death, but the real point is that there is nothing which marks humans out as special in comparison to other living beings (animantem in Valla's Latin). It did not require circular reasoning for Lucretius to notice the symptoms of grief and loss in the mother cow whose calf has been selected for sacrifice, and we don't actually need it now to observe in these lower animals the signs of the same feelings of joy, gladness, and pleasure that we feel ourselves.
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