Letter to Menoeceus

It is Epicurus's short letter of moral advice to a young man, the most concentrated statement of his ethics that survives. Where the Letter to Herodotus treats nature, this one treats living. It argues away the fear of death and of the gods, then explains what pleasure rightly understood is and how, by wanting little and choosing well, a person reaches a calm and happy life. Diogenes Laertius preserved it in full.

The four-part remedy, a summary later Epicureans distilled from the opening Principal Doctrines and echoed in this letter: the gods hold no threat, death holds no danger, what is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure. Four short lines against the four great sources of anxiety. It functioned as a memorable creed, a portable cure a follower could recite to steady the mind.

Not indulgence but the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance. The highest pleasure is a settled tranquillity, not a stream of intense sensations, which is why plain food can satisfy as fully as a feast. Epicurus distinguishes such static pleasure from the passing kind, and holds that once pain is gone pleasure cannot be increased, only varied, so more is not better.

Into three kinds. Some are natural and necessary, like food, shelter, and freedom from fear; some are natural but unnecessary, like rich meals or luxury; and some are empty or groundless, like the hunger for fame, wealth or power, which have no natural limit. The route to contentment is to satisfy the first, take the second sparingly, and see through the third, which can never be filled.

Because living pleasantly depends on choosing well, and that is prudence's work: the sober calculation of which pleasures to pursue and which to decline, which pains to accept now for a greater calm later. Epicurus goes further, holding that one cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, honourably and justly, nor live wisely without living pleasantly, so the virtues and the good life come as one.