Peace and Safety for Your 20th of September!!

Peace and Safety to the Epicureans among us, no matter where you might be!

As we remember Epicurus and the original pathfinders of Epicureanism, here’s a reminder not only that Epicureans have traditionally been at the forefront of combating false religion, but also that we can expect no help from the Platonists and Stoics, who are soul-brothers of the religious charlatans.

(This text froms from Epicurus.info — where you should be sure to check out the full story of Alexander the Oracle-Monger):

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Well, it was war to the knife between him [Alexander] and Epicurus, and no wonder. What fitter enemy for a charlatan who patronized miracles and hated truth, than the thinker who had grasped the nature of things and was in solitary possession of that truth? As for the Platonists, Stoics, Pythagoreans, they were his good friends; he had no quarrel with them. But the unmitigated Epicurus, as he used to call him, could not but be hateful to him, treating all such pretensions as absurd and puerile.

In this connection Alexander once made himself supremely ridiculous. Coming across Epicurus’ Accepted Maxims, the most admirable of his books, as you know, with its terse presentment of his wise conclusions, he brought it into the middle of the market-place, there burned it on a fig-wood fire for the sins of its author, and cast its ashes into the sea. He issued an oracle on the occasion:

The dotard’s maxims to the flames be given.

The fellow had no conception of the blessings conferred by that book upon its readers, of the peace, tranquillity, and independence of mind it produces, of the protection it gives against terrors, phantoms, and marvels, vain hopes and insubordinate desires, of the judgment and candor that it fosters, or of its true purging of the spirit, not with torches and squills and such rubbish, but with right reason, truth, and frankness.

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My object, dear friend, in making this small selection from a great mass of material has been twofold. First, I was willing to oblige a friend and comrade who is for me the pattern of wisdom, sincerity, good humor, justice, tranquillity, and geniality. But secondly I was still more concerned (a preference which you may be far from resenting) to strike a blow for Epicurus, that great man whose holiness and divinity of nature were not shams, who alone had and imparted true insight into the good, and who brought deliverance to all that consorted with him.

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As Seneca recorded:  Sic fac omnia tamquam spectet Epicurus! So do all things as though watching were Epicurus!

And as Philodemus wrote:    “I will be faithful to Epicurus, according to whom it has been my choice to live.” (Philodemus, On Frankness, fragment 45.9-11)