Plutarch
That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible
Ὅτι οὐδ' ἡδέως ζῆν ἔστι κατ' Ἐπίκουρον · Plutarch lived from about 45 to about 120 CE, so this is written some three and a half centuries after Epicurus died, into a world where Epicureanism was a living and successful school with a reputation to be attacked.
A hostile dialogue, and it is a sequel. Colotes, a member of Epicurus's own circle, had written a book arguing that the doctrines of every other philosopher make life impossible to live; Plutarch answered it in a companion piece and then wrote this, which turns the charge round. His case is not that Epicurean pleasure is wicked but that it does not work — that a philosophy which locates the good in the belly, denies the soul's survival, withdraws from public life and strips religion of hope has cut off most of the actual sources of human happiness and left a thin one. It is a dialogue among named friends walking after a lecture, and it is the fullest sustained attack on Epicurean ethics that survives from antiquity.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
William Watson Goodwin (Q8020099, 1831-1912) edited and corrected the Plutarch's Morals published at Boston in 1874, revising a set of much older translations 'by several hands' rather than translating afresh. The prose under his name here is therefore seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English lightly modernised, and it reads like it: 'hath', 'you will needs have me', inverted word order, sentences of great length. Two consequences. The English runs much longer than the Greek — about one Greek word to one and a half English, the loosest ratio in this collection — because the underlying translators expanded to explain. And the technical vocabulary is unstable: the same Greek term may be rendered three ways across as many pages. Where a philosophical term matters, the Greek is worth checking rather than the English.