QI The Book of the Dead

thinkers as diverse as Thomas Jefferson (the words ‘the pursuit of happiness’ in the US constitution are based on it) and Karl Marx (who gained his doctorate from a study of Epicurus). The humanist movement also claims him. The ancient sentence, engraved in Latin on the tombstones of his many Roman followers – non fui, fui, non sum, non curo , ‘I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind’ – is often used at humanist funerals. The philosophy of Epicurus is closer to Buddhism than any other Western philosopher’s. Maxims such as: ‘If you will make a man happy, add not to his riches, but take away from his desires’ and ‘A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs’ suggest he may have known of the teachings of Gautama Buddha (about 563–483 BC ), who had died over a century earlier. Equally likely, Epicurus had simply come to the same conclusions from the same close observation of human life and suffering.
    We don’t know much about Epicurus the man. Perhaps because he advocated the ‘hidden life’: keeping the company of friends, not getting married, and refusing the limelight that other philosophers craved. But even his opponents praised him for his humane and genial temperament. His 300 books have survived only as quotations in the work of other writers. All we have by him are three letters. One was written to his friend and pupil Idomeneus as Epicurus was dying, painfully, from kidney stones:
    I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attacked by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions. And I beg you to take care of the children of Metrodorus, in a manner worthy of the devotion shown by the young man to me, and to philosophy .
     
    This mix of courage, humour and concern for others is the real Epicureanism. Weathering the unjust slurs, it became, with Stoicism, the most popular belief system in the classical world for over 800 years until the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in 312 ad. You can see why the Church suppressed it. Here is Epicurus’ mantra, known as the Tetrapharmakon , or ‘Four Cures’.
    Don’t fear God ,
Don’t worry about death ;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure .
     
    It was almost 2,000 years before anything this simple and useful was produced again in the West: a kind of How to be Cheerful in Four Easy Lessons .

     
    Vegetarianism, brotherly love and kidney stones also figure in the action-packed life of Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), ‘the only President of the United States who was never President of the United States’.
    Of all America’s Founding Fathers, he best represents the excitement, energy and originality of the new colony. Born in Boston, the fifteenth of seventeen children and the youngest son of a youngest son, his parents were English Puritans. His father,Josiah, was a candle-maker who had emigrated from Northampton in 1683. The family wasn’t rich and Ben left school at ten. By twelve, he was working as a printer, apprenticed to his elder brother James.
    In 1721, James had established the New-England Courant , the American colonies’ first independent newspaper. The following year, the paper ran a series of letters purporting to be from a Mrs Silence Dogood, a middle-aged widow. They caused a small sensation; not only were they a fine political satire, aimed at embarrassing the Puritan establishment in the city, but the character of Mrs Dogood was so convincing that several gentlemen wrote in with proposals of marriage. When James discovered the letters were in fact the work of his younger brother, he was furious. But the sixteen-year-old Ben, flushed with his first literary success and tired of being bullied by James, responded by doing the unthinkable: he quit his job and ran away, first to New York and then to Philadelphia, where he found work in another printing house.
    Mischievousness, courage and standing up to tyranny were to be the hallmarks of Ben Franklin’s life, finding their ultimate expression in the Declaration of Independence. After an adventurous two-year interlude in London consorting with ‘lewd