Epicurus In The Modern World
What Stoics Humanists Buddhists And The Faith Community Need To Understand When Approaching Epicurean Philosophy
Epicurus is having a moment. After nearly two thousand years of suppression, caricature, and deliberate misrepresentation — largely at the hands of the philosophical and religious traditions that succeeded him in the West — his philosophy is attracting renewed serious attention. Popular books invoke his name. Philosophy podcasts discuss his ethics. Online communities study his texts. The language of “Epicurean” has entered the cultural conversation again, however imprecisely.
This renewed interest is welcome. But it brings with it a set of persistent problems that have distorted the reception of Epicurean philosophy for as long as it has been discussed. The problem is not simply ignorance of the texts — though that is common enough. The deeper problem is that most people who encounter Epicurus for the first time bring with them frameworks, assumptions, and prior commitments drawn from other traditions — Stoicism, Humanism, Buddhism, and the Abrahamic religions — that act as lenses distorting what they read before they have even begun to read it honestly. These lenses are so culturally pervasive and so deeply internalized that most readers are unaware they are wearing them.
The purpose of this essay is to address each of these traditions directly: to name the specific ways in which the assumptions of Stoicism, Humanism, Buddhism, and Abrahamic religion generate predictable and systematic misreadings of Epicurus, and to outline what an honest encounter with the actual Epicurean texts requires by way of prior unlearning. The goal is not to attack these traditions for their own sake. It is to clear the ground for a genuine reading of a philosophy that has been buried under centuries of hostile interpretation and is only now beginning to be recovered on its own terms.
I. The Common Root of the Problem: The “True World” Fallacy
Section titled “I. The Common Root of the Problem: The “True World” Fallacy”Before addressing each tradition separately, it is worth naming what they share — because the most important distortions introduced by Stoics, Humanists, Buddhists, and Abrahamists alike all trace back to a single philosophical error that Epicurus identified and attacked, and that Friedrich Nietzsche, two millennia later, called “the longest error in the history of philosophy.”
The error is the positing of a “true world” behind or above or beyond the world of natural experience — a realm of perfect, permanent, unchanging being to which the natural world of sensation, change, and impermanence is merely a pale approximation, a fallen shadow, or an illusion to be transcended. Plato called this realm the Forms. Christianity calls it Heaven and the divine order. Islam calls it the eternal realm of Allah’s design. Stoicism calls it the Logos and Providence. Buddhism in many of its forms posits Nirvana as a liberation from the cycle of impermanent becoming. Modern Humanism, while it has largely abandoned supernatural metaphysics, retains the structure in its commitment to universal Reason, objective moral law grounded in human dignity, and the ideal of Progress toward a rationally ordered future.
All of these frameworks share, at their core, a distrust of the natural world as the proper source of knowledge and value. The senses are unreliable. Pleasure is suspect. Change marks inferiority. The particular — this life, this body, these friendships, these specific pleasures — is subordinated to the universal, the eternal, the abstract. The philosopher’s task is to transcend the natural, not to understand and embrace it.
Epicurus’s philosophy is, from first principle to last conclusion, a systematic refusal of this entire structure. He is not a variant of Platonism, a gentler version of Stoicism, a Hellenistic approximation of Buddhism, or a proto-Humanist. He is something genuinely different — and that difference cannot be appreciated without first recognizing and suspending the assumptions each of these traditions imports into any reading of him.
II. What Stoics Need to Understand
Section titled “II. What Stoics Need to Understand”Of all the modern traditions that engage with Epicurus, Stoicism is the most sophisticated and in many ways the most sympathetic. Stoics and Epicureans are often discussed together, since both were Hellenistic schools responding to similar questions about how to live well in an uncertain world. But the philosophical differences between them are deep, and the fact of their surface similarities makes the Stoic misreading of Epicurus in some ways the most dangerous, because it is the most plausible.
The duty error. The most fundamental Stoic misreading of Epicurus is the assumption that the good philosophy must generate a concept of duty — an obligation to engage with the world, serve others, and participate in civic life that is grounded in something beyond the individual’s own assessment of what brings genuine happiness. Stoics have this concept: we have duties because we are fragments of the divine Logos, because Zeus/Providence has structured the universe as a rational whole in which each part has its proper role, and because we are citizens not merely of our local community but of the cosmos. When Stoics evaluate Epicurus, they apply this standard and find him deficient: Epicurean philosophy, they say, lacks a duty to engage.
This criticism assumes what it is supposed to prove. The Stoic concept of duty rests on theological foundations — the Logos, Providence, cosmic citizenship — that Epicurus explicitly rejected as mythology. There are no divine purposes written into the universe. There is no Providence organizing events for our benefit or instruction. The universe has no design, and our place in it carries no cosmic obligations. To evaluate Epicureanism by asking “but where is the duty?” is simply to ask whether Epicurus accepts Stoic theology. He does not. The correct question is whether Epicureanism provides sufficient motivation for civic and social engagement through its own principles — and it does, through the genuine pleasures of friendship, contribution, intellectual life, and the security of living in a well-ordered community. But these motivations are grounded in nature and pleasure, not in metaphysical obligation.
The ataraxia error. The second major Stoic misreading is the identification of Epicureanism with the pursuit of ataraxia — tranquillity, or freedom from mental disturbance — as its telos, its ultimate goal. This error is nearly universal in modern discussions of Epicurus, including among Stoic commentators, and it generates a false portrait of Epicurean ethics as essentially passive, withdrawal-oriented, and indifferent to active engagement with the world.
The telos of Epicurean ethics is not ataraxia. It is happiness (eudaimonia), defined as a life in which pleasures predominate over pains. Ataraxia — the calm, undisturbed mind — is one component of this happiness, one form that pleasure takes when the mind is free from irrational anxiety. But it is a component, not the whole. The pleasures of active life — of friendship, intellectual engagement, civic contribution, physical pleasure, aesthetic enjoyment, and the full range of what Epicurus called “kinetic” pleasures — are no less genuinely pleasurable for being active rather than calm. The Epicurean goal is not a monk’s tranquillity. It is the richest life of genuine happiness available to a natural creature in a natural world.
The confusion arises partly because Stoicism itself places great emphasis on inner peace and equanimity, and partly because the Judeo-Christian and Humanist frameworks filtering Western readings of both schools favor “calm reason” over pleasure as the mark of philosophical achievement. When a reader formed by these traditions encounters Epicurean language about freedom from disturbance, they hear what their prior formation has trained them to hear — the Stoic sage in serene rational control of his passions — rather than what Epicurus actually said.
The apoliticism error. A third Stoic misreading is the portrait of Epicureans as philosophically apolitical — people who retreat to their Garden while Stoics engage with the republic. This portrait derives almost entirely from ancient Stoic and Academic polemics and does not survive contact with the actual historical record. Epicureans across five centuries served as royal advisers, diplomats, priests, ambassadors, civic magistrates, and active participants in political events at the highest levels. Gaius Cassius Longinus, a committed Epicurean who corresponded with Cicero on the precise doctrines of the school, was a principal figure in the assassination of Julius Caesar. Titus Pomponius Atticus was banker, publisher, and intimate political counselor to Cicero, Mark Antony, and Augustus simultaneously. Trebatius Testa was Caesar’s legal adviser and one of the greatest jurists of his age. Julius Caesar himself displayed many Epicurean tendencies. Philonides of Laodicea converted a Seleucid king to Epicurean philosophy and served as his royal adviser. The list is long and well-documented.
The honest Stoic student of Epicurus needs to engage with the actual texts on their own terms, not through the lens of Stoic duty-language — and needs to confront the historical record honestly rather than filing Epicurean political engagement under “exceptions” and “loopholes.”
III. What Humanists Need to Understand
Section titled “III. What Humanists Need to Understand”Modern Humanism might appear to be the intellectual tradition most amenable to Epicurus, since it shares his naturalism, his rejection of supernatural religion, and his commitment to reason as the guide to the good life. Many contemporary Humanists have claimed Epicurus as a forerunner or kindred spirit. But this affinity is overblown, and where it breaks down the distortions are significant.
The virtue-as-end error. Humanism inherits from its Renaissance origins a deep commitment to the supposed dignity of all humanity, the centrality of rational virtue, and the idea that the good person is defined above all by excellence of character and contribution to the human community. These are broadly Neo-Stoic and Neo-Platonic commitments, and they generate a characteristic misreading of Epicurus: the tendency to treat his philosophy as essentially an ethics of virtue and rational self-cultivation, with the pleasure language handled as rhetorical decoration or loosely interpreted as “well-being.”
But Epicurus is explicit and unambiguous: virtue is not the goal of life. It is the most important instrument for achieving the goal, which is happiness defined as the predominance of pleasure over pain. Every virtue — courage, justice, temperance, prudence, friendship — is valued by Epicurus because and insofar as it actually produces pleasure and reduces pain in real human lives. Virtue that did not produce pleasure would have no claim on us. This is not a subtle qualification. It is the foundation of the whole ethical system, and it is directly opposed to every tradition — Platonic, Stoic, Kantian, Humanist — that treats virtue or rational dignity as an end in itself.
The Humanist reader who softens this into “Epicurus valued virtue because it conduces to well-being” is on the right track but needs to go further: pleasure — actual, felt pleasure, the real experience of a living creature — is the measure by which virtue is judged valuable. Not “well-being” in a thin, sanitized sense, but the concrete guidance of the feelings that Nature has built into us. This is a much more radical commitment than most Humanist accounts of Epicurus acknowledge.
The universal reason error. Humanism is characterized by the commitment to universal human reason — the idea that all human beings share a rational nature that grounds universal rights, universal dignity, and universal moral obligations. This commitment has Stoic roots (the divine Logos present in all rational beings) and Kantian elaborations (the categorical imperative binding all rational agents), and it is irreconcilable with Epicurean philosophy at several points.
Epicurean justice is not universal and eternal but contractual and contextual. Justice is a compact — an agreement between people not to harm one another and not to be harmed — that is just only so long as it actually serves mutual benefit in the relevant circumstances. “Justice never is anything in itself” (Principal Doctrine 33). Laws that cease to serve the purpose of the compact cease to be just. There is no Platonic Form of Justice, no divine command, no categorical imperative grounding absolute universal obligations. The just is what actually works, for actual people, in actual circumstances.
This does not make Epicurean ethics relativistic in the Sophistic sense — the anticipation (prolepsis) of justice is shared by all human beings because we share a common nature with common needs and experiences of benefit and harm. But the contract theory is genuinely incompatible with the kind of universal rational rights-language that dominates modern Humanism, and the Humanist reader who tries to press Epicurus into that framework will find the texts resisting at every turn.
The progress narrative. Modern Humanism typically embeds ethics in a narrative of progress — the rational improvement of human institutions, the expansion of rights, the gradual realization of universal human dignity. This narrative has deep roots in Enlightenment thought and carries an implicitly teleological structure: history is moving somewhere, and the philosopher’s task is to contribute to that movement.
Epicurus has no such narrative. The universe has no telos. History has no direction. Human civilization has a natural genealogy — Lucretius traces it in remarkable detail in De Rerum Natura Book 5 — but that genealogy is not a story of progress toward a rational ideal. It is a story of natural processes generating the social arrangements that provide security and the conditions for genuine happiness. The task is not to advance a progressive narrative but to understand the natural world clearly enough to live well in it. This is a genuinely different orientation, and the Humanist who comes to Epicurus expecting a philosophical ally in the progressive project will need to reckon honestly with the difference.
IV. What Buddhists Need to Understand
Section titled “IV. What Buddhists Need to Understand”Of all the non-Western traditions that are often compared to Epicureanism, Buddhism is the most frequently cited. Surface resemblances are indeed present: both philosophies emphasize the importance of understanding the nature of suffering, both value mental equanimity, both have strong traditions of communal philosophical practice, and both counsel against the anxious pursuit of things that cannot satisfy. These resemblances have led some modern readers to treat Epicurus and the Buddha as essentially teaching the same philosophy in different cultural idioms.
They are not. The differences are deep and philosophically significant, and the Buddhist reader who approaches Epicurus expecting to find a Greek cousin of the Dharma will misread him at almost every crucial point.
The suffering vs. pleasure inversion. Buddhism begins with the first noble truth: dukkha — suffering, unsatisfactoriness, the pervasive sense that conditioned existence is inadequate. The philosophical project of Buddhism is, at its core, a project of liberation from the suffering inherent in conditioned existence. The diagnosis is that attachment to impermanent things generates suffering, and the cure is the progressive detachment from craving and aversion that culminates, in many Buddhist formulations, in Nirvana — a state that is not happiness in any ordinary sense but the cessation of the conditions that generate suffering.
Epicurus begins from the opposite direction. His first move is not a diagnosis of suffering but an affirmation of pleasure as the natural guide given to all living creatures by Nature itself. The question is not “how do we escape the suffering inherent in existence?” but “what kind of life actually produces the greatest predominance of pleasure over pain?” Life is not the problem. The natural world is not the problem. The problem is false beliefs — about the gods, about death, about what actually brings pleasure — that cause people to pursue things that generate more pain than pleasure and to fear things that are not genuinely harmful.
This is a fundamental difference in starting point and it generates fundamentally different practical conclusions. The Epicurean is not detaching from pleasure in order to escape suffering. He is reasoning clearly about which experiences bring the most net pleasure and which apparently-desirable experiences conceal greater pains, in order to maximize the actual happiness available in a natural life. He remains fully engaged with the world of sensation, friendship, and active pleasure — because these are the sources of genuine happiness, not obstacles to it.
The impermanence question. Buddhism treats the impermanence of all conditioned things (anicca) as one of the three marks of existence and as a source of dukkha: we suffer because we become attached to things that do not last. The Buddhist response is to cultivate non-attachment — to see clearly that nothing permanent can be found in the conditioned world and to release the craving for permanence.
For Epicurus, the impermanence of things is not a source of suffering but simply a fact about the natural world — and a fact that carries no negative implication. The flower is not less beautiful for being temporary. The pleasure of friendship is not diminished by the knowledge that it will end. The wise person understands that pleasure does not need to be permanent to be genuine, and that the attempt to cling to pleasures beyond their natural duration generates more pain than the pleasures themselves are worth. But this is a counsel of clear-eyed appreciation, not of non-attachment. Epicurus explicitly valued the memory of past pleasures as a source of present happiness and anticipated future pleasures as a source of present joy. He was deeply attached to his friends and said so without apology.
The Buddhist framework reads the Epicurean counsel against the anxious pursuit of fame and power as a form of non-attachment, and finds in the Epicurean community of the Garden a parallel to the Sangha. These surface resemblances are misleading. The philosophical justifications are entirely different, and the conclusions diverge at the most important points: Epicurus is not counseling detachment from the world but intelligent engagement with it; not the cessation of desire but the rational cultivation of the desires that actually produce happiness; not liberation from impermanent becoming but the full affirmation of a natural life as sufficient for genuine happiness.
The supernatural residue. Many forms of Buddhism — including many of the forms most familiar to Western practitioners — carry significant metaphysical commitments that are flatly incompatible with Epicurean physics: karma, rebirth, the reality of mental states that are not reducible to physical processes, and in some traditions a rich cosmology of non-physical realms and beings. Epicurus would have treated all of these as mythology — as exactly the kind of false belief about the nature of reality that generates irrational fear and prevents genuine happiness. The soul is material and mortal. There is no rebirth. There is no karma in any metaphysical sense. The universe consists entirely of atoms and void. The reader who comes to Epicurus from a tradition that accepts these Buddhist metaphysical commitments will need to reckon honestly with the fact that Epicurean physics is not compatible with them.
V. What The Abrahamic Faith Community Needs To Understand
Section titled “V. What The Abrahamic Faith Community Needs To Understand”Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share a common philosophical and theological inheritance that makes them, in many respects, the most radically incompatible traditions with Epicurean philosophy — and also, paradoxically, the communities that stand to gain the most from an honest encounter with it. The distortions introduced by Abrahamic assumptions are severe, systematic, and deeply consequential, and they have been operating on Western readings of Epicurus for so long that they are often entirely invisible to the readers who carry them.
The creator God problem. All three Abrahamic religions are founded on the existence of a personal, omnipotent, omniscient God who created the universe, sustains it in being, governs it by providence, and has a will and purpose for human beings within it. This God is not a feature that can be quietly set aside while engaging with the rest of the tradition. It is the foundation on which everything else rests: the source of moral obligation, the guarantor of justice, the explainer of suffering, the basis of hope.
Epicurus rejected the existence of any such God — not on emotional grounds but on philosophical and physical grounds. The universe was not created. It has always existed, consisting eternally of atoms and void. Nothing comes from nothing. A being that created the universe from nothing is not a philosophical concept but a self-contradiction. Moreover, a being that concerns itself with human affairs — that answers prayers, punishes the wicked, rewards the just, and governs history toward a providential end — is a being in a state of anxiety and need, which is precisely the opposite of the blessed life. The gods of Epicurus exist and are worthy of reverence as models of the blessed life, but they have no more concern for human affairs than for any other arrangement of atoms. They do not create, do not intervene, do not judge, do not redeem.
The Abrahamic reader who attempts to reconcile this with their faith will find that there is no reconciliation to be had at the foundational level. Epicurean physics is not agnostic. It is not merely “secular.” It is a coherent physical account of the universe that leaves no room for a creator God and no room for supernatural intervention of any kind. The honest Abrahamic reader must acknowledge this incompatibility plainly rather than attempting to import divine providence back into the philosophy through the back door.
The afterlife and the fear of death. One of the most practically consequential aspects of Epicurean philosophy — and one of the most consistently attacked by all three Abrahamic traditions — is the treatment of death and the afterlife. For Epicurus, death is the complete and final cessation of sensation. The soul is material and dissolves at death just as the body does. There is no afterlife, no divine judgment, no heaven, no hell, no purgatory, no continuation of personal identity beyond the dissolution of the body. “Death is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not” (Letter to Menoeceus, DL 10.125).
This argument is one of the most powerful and liberating in all of ancient philosophy. It does not deny that death is real, or that we have good reasons to prefer life when life contains more pleasure than pain. It denies specifically that death is something to dread as a future state of suffering — because suffering requires sensation, and where death is, sensation is not. The fear of divine judgment after death — which Epicurus, living before Christianity, saw operating through Greek mythology and mystery religion — is, on this account, a manufactured fear with no basis in the nature of things, and one of the primary sources of the irrational anxiety that prevents genuine happiness.
For all three Abrahamic traditions, this is not merely a philosophical disagreement but a direct challenge to a central pillar of their moral and emotional architecture. The fear of divine judgment — and the hope of divine reward — are foundational to the ethical motivation structures of these traditions. Epicurus is not proposing an alternative within a shared framework. He is dismantling the framework itself, arguing that it was built on a false account of what death is and what the gods are, and that the liberation from this fear is one of the primary achievements of genuine philosophy.
The problem of pleasure. No aspect of Epicurean philosophy has been more systematically distorted by Abrahamic traditions than its account of pleasure. The caricature — that Epicurus counseled a life of immediate sensory indulgence and self-gratification — was already being propagated by ancient critics in the second century before Christianity was even founded. It was enthusiastically adopted and amplified by Christian apologists, who found in “Epicurean hedonism” a convenient foil for Christian asceticism. Lactantius, one of the most influential early Christian writers, described Epicurus as attracting followers because “the word pleasure is so popular” and because “no one is immune to vices.” This portrait has proven extraordinarily durable.
It is also completely false, and the falsity is provable directly from the texts. Epicurus’s account of pleasure is philosophically sophisticated, and its practical implications are entirely different from the caricature. Pleasure is defined broadly as all experience that is not painful — including not only conventional active physical pleasures but also calm, rest, friendship, intellectual activity, memory of past goods, and anticipation of future goods. The wise person pursues not the most pleasure but the greatest — which requires careful reasoning about which pleasures conceal greater pains and which pains are worth accepting to achieve greater pleasures. The “natural and necessary” classification of desires is a tool for this reasoning: it shows that the foundation of happiness is generally readily available, not that we should live our entire lives on bread and water. Epicurus valued fine food, wine, intellectual conversation, and friendship. He simply recognized that the anxious pursuit of unlimited wealth and fame — driven by irrational fears — generates more pain than pleasure.
The Abrahamic reader who has absorbed centuries of anti-Epicurean polemic needs to encounter this directly and honestly: the caricature of Epicurean hedonism is a weapon forged by ancient critics and sharpened by centuries of Judeo-Christian apologetics. It bears no relationship to what Epicurus actually taught.
The cosmic moral order. All three Abrahamic traditions are founded on the conviction that the universe has a moral order — that goodness and justice are built into the structure of things by divine will, that there is a cosmic guarantee that the wicked will eventually be punished and the righteous rewarded. This conviction is foundational to Abrahamic ethics, theodicy, and eschatology.
For Epicurus, there is no such cosmic moral order. Justice is a human compact for mutual benefit, not a divine law. The universe does not care about human virtue. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people without cosmic significance, because the universe is not arranged around human moral categories at all. The atoms fall, combine, and dissolve according to their own natures, not according to a divine moral plan. This is not a counsel of despair. It is an invitation to a different and more honest kind of moral seriousness: we pursue justice and friendship and the good life because they genuinely produce happiness for us and those we love, not because we are performing for a cosmic audience that will grade us at the end.
The Abrahamic reader who finds this disturbing rather than liberating is demonstrating exactly what Epicurus diagnosed: a life organized around the assumption of divine surveillance, divine judgment, and divine reward is a life still in the grip of the irrational fears that prevent genuine happiness. The Epicurean cure is not cynicism but clarity — the clarity of a person who has understood the nature of the universe well enough to find genuine happiness in it without requiring the universe to be something other than what it is.
VI. What Epicurus Actually Offers the Modern World
Section titled “VI. What Epicurus Actually Offers the Modern World”It would be a mistake to conclude from the foregoing that Epicurus has nothing to offer Stoics, Humanists, Buddhists, and people of Abrahamic faith. He has a great deal to offer — but only to those willing to encounter him honestly rather than through the distorting lenses of their prior commitments.
What Epicurus offers, above everything else, is a complete philosophical system built on the most fundamental and universal features of natural human experience: the feelings of pleasure and pain that Nature itself has provided to every living creature as guides to what is beneficial and what is harmful. This system does not require theological foundations that may or may not be true. It does not require universal reason that may or may not be accessible to all people. It does not require liberation from a world that may or may not be fundamentally unsatisfactory. It requires only the honest application of faculties that every human being already possesses — the senses, the accumulated patterns of experience that Epicurus called anticipations, and the feelings of pleasure and pain — to the project of living as well as it is possible to live.
This is a philosophy for the natural world, built by and for natural creatures. It takes the body seriously. It takes pleasure seriously. It takes friendship — real, particular, embodied friendship — seriously as the greatest available source of pleasure. It takes death seriously, not as a gateway to another world but as the natural end of a natural life, to be understood without terror and without denial. And it takes the community seriously — not as the arena for the performance of duty or the accumulation of merit, but as the source of the security and friendship without which no genuinely happy life is possible.
Nietzsche (as just one example of a modern thinker who appreciated Epicurus) understood what was at stake. Against the whole tradition of life-denial — Platonic, Stoic, Christian, Kantian — he consistently invoked Epicurus as the philosopher who said yes to the world as it actually is. In The Gay Science, in Twilight of the Idols, in The Antichrist, he returned repeatedly to Epicurus as the one ancient philosopher who had understood that the sensory world of becoming is not deficient reality but the only reality, that the natural guidance of pleasure and pain is not a base appetite to be transcended but the most honest measure of value that exists, and that a philosophy built on these foundations can produce genuine human happiness without requiring the universe to be what it is not.
The modern world has more tools for understanding Epicurus than any previous era: access to the primary texts, the developing scholarship that is recovering what ancient polemics suppressed, and an intellectual culture increasingly willing to question the theological and metaphysical foundations that have dominated Western thought for two thousand years. The opportunity is real. But it will not be realized by those who come to Epicurus determined to find a Greek Stoic, a secular Buddhist, a proto-Humanist, or a philosophical alibi for religious commitments he spent his life refuting.
It will be realized by those willing to read the texts as they are, to let the philosophy challenge their prior commitments rather than simply confirming them, and to discover in the process what Epicurus himself promised and what the long subsequent record of Epicurean lives confirms: that nature, honestly understood through the faculties nature provides, is sufficient for genuine happiness.
The Garden was not a bunker and not a monastery and not a lecture hall and not a temple. It was a camp: a community of friends working toward the shared goal of taking nature seriously and living accordingly. That model remains fully valid today.
For further reading: Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus; Letter to Herodotus; Principal Doctrines; Vatican Sayings (in Diogenes Laertius, Book Ten); Lucretius, De Rerum Natura; Nietzsche, The Gay Science; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist; Javier Aoiz and Marcelo Boeri, Theory and Practice in Epicurean Political Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2023). For the Epicurean community: EpicureanFriends.com and EpicurusToday.com.