QI The Book of the Dead

barley bread and fruit, with cheese as a special treat only on feast days. Celibate himself, he discouraged sexual relations among his followers, and his students were allowed no more than a pint of wine a day.
    But Epicurus had the misfortune to live in the highly competitive golden age of Greek philosophy, where he found himself up against the Academy founded by Plato, and the porch ( stoa ) of the Stoics: both articulate and well-organised opponents. The mud they slung at him over two millennia ago has stuck firm.
    He was born into an Athenian family but grew up on the island of Samos, a mile off the coast of what is now Turkey. Hewas thirty-five before he arrived in Athens, taking a house with a large garden and setting up a school. He had brought his pupils with him and, unlike the Academicians and Stoics, with their very public disputations, the Epicureans kept themselves to themselves. Inscribed over the entrance arch were the alluring words: ‘Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.’ You can see how the rumours started.
    In fact, the Epicurean definition of pleasure is quite precise. It is simply ‘the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul’, or ataraxia . This tranquil state is to be attained by ‘sober reasoning’ and most specifically not by ‘an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry’, ‘sexual lust’ and ‘the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies’.
    Epicurus’ idea of ‘the good life’ was also not what you’d expect. ‘It is impossible’, he wrote, ‘to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honourably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honourably and justly without living pleasantly.’ Decent behaviour depends on a decent standard of living. Asked to name the bare necessities, most of us would list food, water, warmth and shelter, but Epicurus insisted on a few more: freedom, thought and friendship. ‘Of all the things’, he wrote, ‘which contribute to a blessed life, none is more important, more fruitful, than friendship.’ Food and wine are pleasurable mainly because they are sociable. ‘Eating or drinking without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.’
    For a good meal with friends, something you can well do without (‘fish and other delicacies’ aside) is fear. ‘It is better to be free of fear while lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.’ The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed: ‘Wisdom hasn’t come a stepfurther since Epicurus, but has often gone many thousands of steps backwards.’ One such backward step is to forget Epicurus’ core idea: that freedom from pain depends on the absence of fear – fear of loss, fear of being found out, and, worst of all, fear of death. Epicurus solved the last one by dropping the whole idea of an afterlife – and with it the fear of eternal punishment. When you’re gone, you’re gone. What matters is a calm and contented life in the here and now. Ideally, sitting under a tree, talking philosophy with friends. But what Epicurus meant by ‘philosophy’ was different, too. ‘Vain is the word of a philosopher’, he said, ‘which does not heal any suffering.’
    This cheery benevolence makes Epicurus one of the sanest and most attractive of the major Greek philosophers. But there is much more to him than that. He was the first person to advocate equal rights for slaves and for women, and the first to offer free schooling. In teaching that we should believe only what we can test through observation, he laid the cornerstone of scientific method; and he was also one of the founders of atomic physics. Democritus of Abdera (460–570 BC ) – known as the ‘laughing philosopher’ for finding life more comic than tragic – had guessed that the world was composed of atomoi : units of matter that were too small to be divided, but Epicurus took this further: ‘Events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space.’ That implied no organising intelligence – any gods were made of atoms like the rest of us. These ideas – of fundamental randomness and the lack of a planned design for nature – anticipate both quantum mechanics and natural selection. Furthermore, Epicurus’ dictum ‘minimise harm; maximise happiness’ was the first Greek version of the Golden Rule (‘do as you would be done by’). It hasinspired