comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything that alarms or eludes you. That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat to yourself the simplest fact of existence—atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else—your life will change. You will no longer fear Jove’s wrath, whenever you hear a peal of thunder, or suspect that someone has offended Apollo, whenever there is an outbreak of influenza. And you will be freed from a terrible affliction—what Hamlet, many centuries later, described as “the dread of something after death,/The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns.”
The affliction—the fear of some horrendous punishment waiting for one in a realm beyond the grave—no longer weighs heavily on most modern men and women, but it evidently did in the ancient Athens of Epicurus and the ancient Rome of Lucretius, and it did as well in the Christian world inhabited by Poggio. Certainly Poggio would have seen images of such horrors , lovingly carved on the tympanum above the doors to churches or painted on their inner walls. And those horrors were in turn modeled on accounts of the afterlife fashioned in the pagan imagination. To be sure, not everyone in any of these periods, pagan or Christian, believed in such accounts. Aren’t you terrified, one of the characters in a dialogue by Cicero asks, by the underworld, with its terrible three-headed dog, its black river, its hideous punishments? “Do you suppose 31 me so crazy as to believe such tales?” his companion replies. Fear of death is not about the fate of Sisyphus and Tantalus: “Where is the crone so silly as to be afraid” of such scare stories? It is about the dread of suffering and the dread of perishing, and it is difficult to understand, 32 Cicero wrote, why the Epicureans think that they are offering any palliative. To be told that one perishes completely and forever, soul as well as body, is hardly a robust consolation.
Followers of Epicurus responded by recalling the last days of the master, dying from an excruciating obstruction of the bladder but achieving serenity of spirit by recalling all of the pleasures he had experienced in his life. It is not clear that this model was easily imitable—“Who can hold a fire in his hand/By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?” as one of Shakespeare’s characters asks—but then it is not clear that any of the available alternatives, in a world without Demerol or morphine, was more successful at dealing with death agonies. What the Greek philosopher offered was not help in dying but help in living. Liberated from superstition, Epicurus taught, you would be free to pursue pleasure.
Epicurus’ enemies seized upon his celebration of pleasure and invented malicious stories of his debauchery, stories heightened by his unusual inclusion of women as well as men among his followers. He “vomited twice a day 33 from over-indulgence,” went one of these stories, and spent a fortune on his feasting. In reality, the philosopher seems to have lived a conspicuously simple and frugal life. “Send me a pot of cheese,” he wrote once to a friend, “that, when I like, I may fare sumptuously.” So much for the alleged abundance of his table. And he urged a comparable frugality on his students. The motto carved over the door to Epicurus’ garden urged the stranger to linger, for “here our highest good is pleasure.” But according to the philosopher Seneca, who quotes these words in a famous letter that Poggio and his friends knew and admired, the passerby who entered 34 would be served a simple meal of barley gruel and water. “When we say, then, 35 that pleasure is the goal,” Epicurus wrote in one of his few surviving letters, “we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality.” The feverish attempt to satisfy certain appetites—“an unbroken
The affliction—the fear of some horrendous punishment waiting for one in a realm beyond the grave—no longer weighs heavily on most modern men and women, but it evidently did in the ancient Athens of Epicurus and the ancient Rome of Lucretius, and it did as well in the Christian world inhabited by Poggio. Certainly Poggio would have seen images of such horrors , lovingly carved on the tympanum above the doors to churches or painted on their inner walls. And those horrors were in turn modeled on accounts of the afterlife fashioned in the pagan imagination. To be sure, not everyone in any of these periods, pagan or Christian, believed in such accounts. Aren’t you terrified, one of the characters in a dialogue by Cicero asks, by the underworld, with its terrible three-headed dog, its black river, its hideous punishments? “Do you suppose 31 me so crazy as to believe such tales?” his companion replies. Fear of death is not about the fate of Sisyphus and Tantalus: “Where is the crone so silly as to be afraid” of such scare stories? It is about the dread of suffering and the dread of perishing, and it is difficult to understand, 32 Cicero wrote, why the Epicureans think that they are offering any palliative. To be told that one perishes completely and forever, soul as well as body, is hardly a robust consolation.
Followers of Epicurus responded by recalling the last days of the master, dying from an excruciating obstruction of the bladder but achieving serenity of spirit by recalling all of the pleasures he had experienced in his life. It is not clear that this model was easily imitable—“Who can hold a fire in his hand/By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?” as one of Shakespeare’s characters asks—but then it is not clear that any of the available alternatives, in a world without Demerol or morphine, was more successful at dealing with death agonies. What the Greek philosopher offered was not help in dying but help in living. Liberated from superstition, Epicurus taught, you would be free to pursue pleasure.
Epicurus’ enemies seized upon his celebration of pleasure and invented malicious stories of his debauchery, stories heightened by his unusual inclusion of women as well as men among his followers. He “vomited twice a day 33 from over-indulgence,” went one of these stories, and spent a fortune on his feasting. In reality, the philosopher seems to have lived a conspicuously simple and frugal life. “Send me a pot of cheese,” he wrote once to a friend, “that, when I like, I may fare sumptuously.” So much for the alleged abundance of his table. And he urged a comparable frugality on his students. The motto carved over the door to Epicurus’ garden urged the stranger to linger, for “here our highest good is pleasure.” But according to the philosopher Seneca, who quotes these words in a famous letter that Poggio and his friends knew and admired, the passerby who entered 34 would be served a simple meal of barley gruel and water. “When we say, then, 35 that pleasure is the goal,” Epicurus wrote in one of his few surviving letters, “we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality.” The feverish attempt to satisfy certain appetites—“an unbroken
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