envy him and therefore wish to do him injury. Even if he escapes outward misfortune, peace of
mind is impossible in such a situation. The wise man will try to live unnoticed, so as to have no
enemies.
Sexual love, as one of the most "dynamic" of pleasures, naturally comes under the ban. "Sexual
intercourse," the philosopher declares, "has never done a man good and he is lucky if it has not
harmed him." He was fond of children (other people's), but for the gratification of this taste he
seems to have relied upon other people not to follow his advice. He seems, in fact, to have liked
children against his better judgement; for he considered marriage and children a distraction
from more serious pursuits. Lucretius, who follows him in denouncing love, sees no harm in
sexual intercourse provided it is divorced from passion.
The safest of social pleasures, in the opinion of Epicurus, is friendship. Epicurus, like Bentham,
is a man who considers that all men, at all times, pursue only their own pleasure, sometimes
wisely, sometimes unwisely; but, again like Bentham, he is constantly seduced by his own
kindly and affectionate nature into admirable behaviour from which, on his own theories, he
ought to have refrained. He obviously liked his friends without regard to what he got out of
them, but he persuaded himself that he was as selfish as his philosophy held all men to be.
According to Cicero, he held that "friendship cannot be divorced from pleasure, and for that
reason must be cultivated, because without it neither can we live in safety and without fear, nor
even pleasantly." Occasionally, however, he forgets his theories more or less: "all friendship is
desirable in itself," he says, adding "though it starts from the need of help." *
Epicurus, though his ethic seemed to others swinish and lacking in moral exaltation, was very
much in earnest. As we have seen, he speaks of the community in the garden as "our holy
body"; he wrote a book On Holiness; he had all the fervour of a religious reformer. He must
have had a strong emotion of pity for the sufferings of mankind, and an unshakeable conviction
that they would be greatly lessened if men would adopt his philosophy. It was a valetudinarian's
philosophy, designed to suit a world in which adventurous happiness had become scarcely
possible. Eat little, for fear of indigestion; drink
* On the subject of friendship and Epicurus's amiable inconsistency, see Bailey, op. cit., pp.
517-20.