- I. The False Foundation: Ataraxia Is Not the Telos
- II. The “Duty” Framework Is Smuggled In, Not Argued For
- III. The Textual Evidence Does Not Say What Pigliucci Claims
- IV. The “Loopholes” Argument Gets the Relationship Between Theory and Evidence Exactly Backwards
- V. The Treatment of Atticus and Cassius Is Inaccurate
- VI. Epicureanism Is Not “a Philosophy of Survival”
- VII. The Real Contrast Between Epicurus and the Stoics on Politics
- Conclusion: Epicurean Philosophy Is A Camp, Not a Bunker
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Massimo Pigliucci’s essay “The Garden Or The Forum: Epicurus, The Stoics, And The Duty To Engage” represents precisely the kind of Stoic-inflected reading of Epicurus that has dominated popular philosophy for decades and that has consistently produced a distorted portrait of true Epicurean philosophy. It is wrong about Epicurus at nearly every key point — not through mere carelessness, but through a pattern of misreading that is characteristic of interpreters who approach Epicurean texts through frameworks shaped by Stoic, Humanist, and Judeo-Christian assumptions. These assumptions are so deeply embedded in Western intellectual culture that they are rarely recognized as assumptions at all. The errors in this essay are not random; they flow from a single misidentification at the foundation: Pigliucci defines Epicureanism as “rooted in the pursuit of ataraxia (tranquility, or freedom from mental disturbance)” and treats this as the telos, the goal of the philosophy. Every subsequent argument — about politics, engagement, “loopholes,” and the meaning of justice — inherits this foundational mistake. The refutation must therefore begin there.
I. The False Foundation: Ataraxia Is Not the Telos
Pigliucci opens his analysis by stating that Epicurus’s ethical system is “rooted in the pursuit of ataraxia (tranquility, or freedom from mental disturbance).” He repeats this characterization throughout: Epicureans seek “peace of mind,” aim at “the overall goal” of ataraxia, and everything — friendship, law, politics — is evaluated by the “ataraxian calculus.” This is the most consequential error in the essay, and it is one shared by a wide range of modern scholarship on Epicurus. It is nevertheless wrong, and the ancient texts are clear on the matter.
Epicurus himself (followed by many subsequent ancient Epicureans) states with clarity that the goal of life is Pleasure, not “Tranquility.” “For the end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear... Wherefore we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a blessed life.” (Letter to Menoeceus, Diogenes Laertius 10.128–129). The telos is not tranquility. The telos is happiness (eudaimonia), defined as a life in which pleasures predominate over pains. This is not a subtle distinction. Epicurus uses the term ataraxia — the absence of mental disturbance — to refer to one form of pleasure, not to refer to pleasure as a whole, as pleasure also includes joy, delight, and the many active pleasures of life which are not at all always “calm.” Calmness of mind is one component of the good life, and a tool for achieving it, but not its definition or goal. This conflation of a part of the goal with the entirety of the goal is best revealed by observing this key point: Whether as stated in Principal Doctrine Three, in Epicurus’ letter to Menoeceus, or in Torquatus’ extensive dialog with Cicero, the point is that just as the entire universe of things can be categorized into matter and void, the entire universe of “feeling” can be categorized into pleasure and pain. And just as where no space exists there must be matter, where no pain exists there must be pleasure. This is an expansive view of pleasure that Cicero and subsequent generations of Stoics and anti-Epicureans refuse to accept, but it is the foundation of a persuasive and perfectly logical ethical system based on feeling, rather than on false views of the nature of the universe. Pigliucci’s error is grounded in following the anti-Epicurean consensus that traces its line back through Plutarch and Cicero to Socrates himself, who a leading ancient Epicurean described as the “Attic Buffoon.”
Why does this error recur so persistently in modern scholarship? The most probable explanation is that the concept of “tranquility” as the highest human goal resonates with traditions shaped by Stoic ethics, by Christian ideals of inner peace, and by the broader Humanist assumption that what distinguishes the philosopher is the subordination of passion and desire to a calm, rational equilibrium. These frameworks are so culturally pervasive that when a reader encounters Epicurus using the word ataraxia, it is almost reflexively read as the end goal — because it would be the end goal in any of those other traditions. But Epicurus was not a Stoic, not a Christian, and not a Humanist. He was a philosopher who followed Nature and declared pleasure to be the guide, beginning, and end of the blessed life, and who meant it literally.
The practical consequences of this misidentification are severe. If the goal is tranquility, then political engagement becomes suspect almost by definition, since politics is often noisy, risky, and disturbing. But if the goal is the predominance of pleasure over pain — which includes the pleasures of friendship, civic contribution, intellectual life, and a wide range of active engagement with the world — then the calculus is far more open. Epicurus never said “maximize tranquility.” He said in effect “maximize the conditions under which your life is a happy one.” These are not the same instruction, and conflating them has produced generations of misreadings of Epicurean ethics.
II. The “Duty” Framework Is Smuggled In, Not Argued For
The entire essay is structured around a contrast between Stoic “duty” and Epicurean self-interest. Pigliucci concludes that Stoicism asks “What is my duty to the world?” while Epicureanism asks “What is the most painless way to navigate this mess?” The Stoic “duty to engage” is presented as the admirable standard against which Epicurus is measured and found wanting.
This framing smuggles in the Stoic conclusion as the evaluative premise. Epicurus did not merely fail to ground ethics in duty — he deliberately rejected the concept. The Stoic notion of “duty” (kathekon) rests on theological foundations: we have duties because we are fragments of the divine Logos, because Zeus/Providence has structured the universe as a rational whole in which each part has a role to play. Epicurus rejected every element of this framework. There are no divine purposes. The universe has no design. There is no cosmic citizenship, no Logos assigning us obligations, no divine governance conferring duties.
The concept of duty as a self-justifying moral category — the idea that obligations exist independently of their consequences for actual human happiness — is itself a product of exactly the traditions that have most distorted the reading of Epicurus. Stoic cosmic duty, Judeo-Christian divine command, and Kantian moral obligation are structurally identical in this respect: each posits a source of binding obligation that transcends the natural guidance of pleasure and pain. Epicurus recognized this structure and rejected it as mythology dressed in philosophical language. When modern scholarship evaluates Epicurean ethics by asking “but what is the Epicurean duty?”, it is asking a question that presupposes the very framework Epicurus was refuting.
To say that Epicureanism “lacks a duty to engage” is a Stoic criticism, not a neutral philosophical observation. An Epicurean would respond: on what basis does this “duty” rest? If it rests on a provident universe governed by divine reason, that is mythology. If it rests on “natural sociability,” the Epicurean has a perfectly coherent account of social bonds grounded in pleasure, friendship, and the security provided by mutual agreement — without requiring the apparatus of cosmic duty. The absence of Stoic duty from Epicurean ethics is a feature, not a deficiency.
III. The Textual Evidence Does Not Say What Pigliucci Claims
On Principal Doctrine 14. Pigliucci quotes PD 14 — “the purest security comes from solitude and breaking away from the herd” — as “perhaps the most direct textual evidence for the Epicurean rejection of public life.” This is a misreading of what “the herd” means in this context. The Epicurean texts use “the many” (hoi polloi) and cognate expressions consistently to refer not to fellow citizens as such, but to those driven by irrational fears and vain desires — the crowd stampeding after fame, wealth, and power as remedies for existential anxieties they have never examined. The “purest security” PD 14 advocates is a psychological achievement: freedom from those very anxieties. It is not a geographical prescription to leave town.
Pigliucci himself quotes PD 7 immediately afterward, which confirms this reading: the problem with political ambition is when it is pursued by people whose underlying fears and desires are insatiable — for whom “the empty opinions of others” remain a source of disturbance because they have never addressed the root cause. The argument is not “don’t engage with the city.” The argument is “don’t pursue power as a cure for irrational fear, because it cannot cure what it didn’t cause.”
On Vatican Saying 58. Pigliucci cites VS 58 — “We must free ourselves from the prison of public education and politics” — as a “blunt dismissal of the political life.” The Vatican Sayings are a late collection of uncertain provenance, and VS 58 is among the most contested in terms of text, context, and meaning. The Greek word translated as “politics” here is politeia, which can mean the conventional structures of public social formation — not “civic participation” as such but the unreflective conformism of received opinion and institutional pressure. Read in context, it is an exhortation to think independently rather than a counsel to abstain from civic life. Not only VS 58 but also many other fragments presume an understanding of Epicurean premises which are exactly opposite of those which Stoics like Pigliucci presume to be understood. Read coherently and in a manner consistent with the fundamental premises of the philosophy they lead to conclusions diametrically opposite to those reached by many modern readers.
IV. The “Loopholes” Argument Gets the Relationship Between Theory and Evidence Exactly Backwards
This is the most consequential structural error in Pigliucci’s essay. Having established (on the basis of the above misplaced textual readings) that Epicurus’s “default” was withdrawal, Pigliucci then addresses the abundant historical evidence of Epicurean political engagement by labeling it a set of “loopholes” — a “Safety and Stability” exception, a “Natural Disposition” exception — that allowed occasional departures from the real Epicurean norm. He even remarks that the “Natural Disposition” loophole “begins to me to look not much like Epicureanism at all” — which is to say, when the evidence contradicts the theory, his instinct is to question the evidence rather than the theory.
This framework has the relationship between theory and evidence exactly reversed. As Aoiz and Boeri demonstrate at length in Theory and Practice in Epicurean Political Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2023), the historical and epigraphic record shows Epicureans routinely and consistently engaged in civic, diplomatic, religious, and political life across five centuries and across the entire Greek and Roman world. The evidence is not a few embarrassing exceptions to a withdrawal principle. It is a sustained pattern that the withdrawal principle cannot account for. Among the documented cases: Cineas of Thessaly as Pyrrhus’s chief diplomat; Philonides of Laodicea as royal adviser to the Seleucid king Demetrius I; Apollophanes of Pergamon conducting his city’s affairs in Rome; multiple Epicureans serving as priests of imperial and local cults, as prophets, as ambassadors, as civic magistrates — inscriptions naming them proudly as Epicurean philosophers while doing so (Ch. 6, §3). The proper conclusion is not that these people found “loopholes” in Epicurean doctrine. It is that the withdrawal reading of that doctrine is wrong.
The “loophole” framing is, as Aoiz and Boeri document, precisely the strategy of Epicurus’s ancient opponents — Cicero, Plutarch, Epictetus — who also acknowledged in practice that Epicureans engaged in political life while insisting in theory that they were being inconsistent. Even Epictetus, while condemning Epicurean “antisocial” views, simultaneously admitted that Epicureans “marry, and father children, and fulfil their duties as citizens, and get appointed to be priests and prophets” (Dissertations 2.20) — inadvertently confirming the very engagement he was denouncing. Pigliucci, without recognizing it, reproduces the ancient anti-Epicurean polemical strategy intact.
V. The Treatment of Atticus and Cassius Is Inaccurate
Pigliucci presents Titus Pomponius Atticus as someone who “decided to leave Rome and spend his life in self-imposed exile in Athens” — the paradigmatic Epicurean response to political upheaval. This portrait is wrong about what Atticus actually did.
Atticus was one of the most politically connected figures in Rome during one of its most turbulent periods. He was banker, publisher, and intimate adviser to leading political figures across all factions — including Cicero, Mark Antony, and Augustus. His correspondence network spanned the entire Roman world. He managed enormous financial operations entangled with Roman political life at every level. Pigliucci’s claim that he “spent his life in self-imposed exile” confuses Atticus’s decision to live for some years in Athens — where he also had extensive financial and social interests — with permanent withdrawal from political life. As Aoiz and Boeri describe, Atticus practiced what they call “vigilant neutrality”: not disengagement, but a shrewd Epicurean cultivation of personal security through friendship, appropriate action, and declining the pursuit of unlimited political power, while remaining deeply embedded in the political world. Atticus died in his eighties, wealthy and respected. This is not a portrait of withdrawal; it is a portrait of sophisticated civic engagement conducted on Epicurean terms.
On Cassius: Pigliucci frames his participation in the assassination of Caesar as a “Safety and Stability loophole.” But Cassius’s own letters to Cicero — in which he explicitly defends Epicurean doctrine against Cicero’s criticisms and argues that living pleasurably requires living justly and nobly, not in spite of it — demonstrate a principled Epicurean justification for political action grounded in the philosophy itself, not a reluctant resort to an exception clause. The loophole framing reduces a philosophically sophisticated man’s considered political action to mere self-preservation. Cassius engaged because engagement was consistent with his Epicurean understanding of the good life, not because a default withdrawal principle had been momentarily suspended.
VI. Epicureanism Is Not “a Philosophy of Survival”
Pigliucci writes that “Epicureanism was, above all, a philosophy of survival.” This reduction follows directly from the ataraxia misidentification and the implicit Stoic evaluative standard operating throughout the essay, but it is contradicted by the primary sources.
Epicureanism is a philosophy of happiness - of flourishing through pleasure - of the richest possible life available to a natural creature in a natural world. Epicurus valued friendship as “by far the greatest” of all the goods wisdom provides (Principal Doctrine 27). He valued intellectual pleasure, the pleasures of learning, of philosophy, of memory, of conversation, and of community. He wrote prolifically and engaged correspondents across the Mediterranean. His school was a camp of committed friends with an outward focus on bringing true philosophy to an ever-expanding range of people, not a bunker clinging to simple survival. The image of Epicureans as risk-averse minimalists sheltering from the world is a caricature assembled from hostile ancient sources and filtered through subsequent cultural frameworks that found pleasure-based ethics philosophically suspect — because those frameworks were, at root, committed to different and incompatible accounts of what made a human life valuable. Such slanders against the Epicureans say much more about the presumptions and faults of those who generated those accusations than against the Epicureans.
The related claim that “justice is a shield, not a calling” and “politics is a trap” is similarly a distortion. Epicurean justice is contractual rather than divinely ordained — but the contract theory does not reduce justice to a merely defensive personal tool. Hermarchus and Lucretius argue that justice and law made civilized life possible and continue to provide the security without which a genuinely good life cannot be lived. Epicureans recognize the polis not as a necessary evil but as a positive precondition of everything they value. Philodemus argues explicitly that the Epicurean philosopher should advise rulers, educate the young in law-abiding, and contribute to better governance — not from Stoic duty, but because it genuinely serves the good life of everyone involved (On the Good King According to Homer; On Rhetoric).
VII. The Real Contrast Between Epicurus and the Stoics on Politics
Pigliucci’s concluding comparison between the two schools — framed as Stoic duty versus Epicurean self-interest, with the Epicurean column defined throughout by ataraxia-seeking — is distorted by the same foundational misreading that runs through the entire essay. The genuine contrast is both more interesting and more philosophically significant.
Stoicism presupposes a positive obligation to political engagement rooted in cosmic duty: we are fragments of the divine Logos, human beings are social not simply by nature but in a deep metaphysical sense, and justice is an absolute that is written into the fabric of the universe. Whether one finds this framework compelling depends entirely on whether one accepts its theological foundations — a provident universe, a governing divine reason, a cosmic human nature. Epicurean philosophy rejects all of that, and does so on well-reasoned philosophical grounds.
Epicureanism generates a strong positive motivation for civic engagement rooted in nature’s guidance through pleasure and pain, without any false appeal to metaphysical obligation. Engagement — when pursued on the right terms, for the right reasons — is genuinely pleasurable: it satisfies the deep human goods of friendship, contribution, intellectual life, and the security that comes from living in a well-ordered society. What Epicurus rejected was not civic engagement but the anxious pursuit of unlimited political power as a remedy for irrational fear — the compulsive striving for fame and dominance driven not by genuine assessment of what brings safety and happiness but by the existential anxiety that leads people to fear the gods and death.
Epicurean philosophy is a genuine philosophical revolution that deserves evaluation on its own terms, not through distorted prisms of Stoicism, Humanism, and Judeo-Christianity. The difference between Epicurus and his detractors does not come down to engagement vs. withdrawal. The difference is that of engagement grounded in false ideas of cosmic duty deriving from a “true world” beyond the senses vs. engagement grounded in the rational pursuit of genuine human happiness under terms set by Nature. Epicurean philosophy is fully capable of producing politically active, civically engaged people. The five-century historical record of Epicureanism in the ancient world confirms this, and the evidence continues today in men as diverse as Thomas Jefferson, who approvingly and specifically cited Epicurus in his private letters, and Frederich Nietzsche, who embodied Epicurean arguments in his Twilight of the Idols, Antichrist, and many other works. The Stoic enters the forum from a false perception of the universe and of duty. The Epicurean participates in the forum and every other aspect of life because it preserves and advances the genuine happiness of himself and his friends. The difference lies goes to the heart of one’s assessment of the universe and one’s place in it, not in any reflexive preference for selfish retreat over civic engagement.
Conclusion: Epicurean Philosophy Is A Camp, Not a Bunker
Pigliucci’s essay ultimately reproduces an ancient anti-Epicurean polemic with modern philosophical packaging — and it does so through the same mechanisms that have distorted the reading of Epicurus since antiquity: the imposition of a Stoic evaluative framework that treats duty as self-evidently foundational, a residual Judeo-Christian suspicion of pleasure as a legitimate philosophical category, and a broadly Humanist assumption that the good person is defined by rational self-restraint and service rather than by the intelligent pursuit of genuine happiness based on pleasure. These lenses are so thoroughly embedded in Western academic philosophy that they operate largely invisibly, producing confident misreadings that feel like plain common sense.
The structure of Pigliucci’s argument is identical to Cicero’s: take the slogans “live unnoticed” and “do not participate in politics” out of their context, treat the abundant counter-evidence as mere exceptions, contrast Epicurean pleasure-seeking with Stoic duty, and conclude that Epicureans are civic free-riders. Cicero knew perfectly well that Cassius, Atticus, Torquatus, Trebatius, and many others were Epicureans — he corresponded with them and he knew well that Julius Caesar’s camp had spawned a new generation of young Epicureans — yet Cicero persisted in the same portrait anyway, because his purpose was polemical, not interpretive. The portrait has survived largely intact into modern popular philosophy, and this essay is another iteration.
The actual Epicurean position, read directly from the texts and confirmed by the historical record, is that Epicurus was a loyal citizen of Athens who loved his city, respected its laws and institutions, engaged in its religious life, deposited his works in its public archive, and cultivated friendships with politicians. Epicureans across five centuries served as diplomats, royal advisers, priests, ambassadors, legal experts, and civic leaders, without their Epicureanism being thought inconsistent with any of it. The Garden was not outside the city walls in any philosophically meaningful sense. The Garden itself was located closer to the city gates than was the Academy, and the House of Epicurus was located within the walls and near the city center. Throughout its ancient history the philosophy of Epicurus produced a community of people who learned to engage with the world on the basis of honest reasoning about nature and happiness based on the feelings given us by nature rather than religious or rationalistic fantasies — and that possibility remains open to those of us today who are willing to engage with what the record actually shows, rather than how the Stoics and Humanists and Abrahamists would prefer that we interpret it.
For Further Reading: Javier Aoiz and Marcelo Boeri, Theory and Practice in Epicurean Political Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2023), Introduction, Ch. 5, Ch. 6. Those who are interested in the ideas presented in this essay may also consult https://www.epicureanfriends.com and https://www.epicurustoday.com.
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