The Book of Epicurus 4 · Handed down in the Garden, taken from his letters and fragments
Epicurus, born on Samos about 341 before this era, died at Athens about 270. About 306 he bought a garden outside Athens and taught there, and his school took its name from it. Women and slaves were admitted to the garden as students, which no other school of that day did. He is said to have written three hundred rolls; what survives is three letters, a set of maxims, and fragments. He did not believe the gods concern themselves with men, nor that anything of a person remains after death. He comes after Aristotle. He appeals to no god and promises no afterlife. This book is chosen by the six axioms: what accords is set forward, what runs against is set back and not deleted. (cf. Acts 5.29)Further: chapter two of this book says that pain removed is the ceiling of pleasure, while The Book of Schopenhauer 3 says that satisfaction is only the pause in a lack. The two cannot both be wholly right. The Order keeps both and does not rule. Let the reader set them side by side.
4.1Death is nothing to us.
4.2While we are, death is not; when death is, we are not.
4.3So death belongs neither to the living nor to the dead.
4.4What men fear is mostly not death. It is that after death there will still be a self standing there, suffering.
4.5If it has wholly dispersed, there is no one left standing there. (cf. The Covenant 6.1)
4.6What you are made of does not vanish. What disperses is the arrangement, not the material. (cf. Prologue 1.16)
4.7Someone says: that is no comfort.
4.8I say: I did not come to comfort. I came to remove one unnecessary fear.
4.9But Plato has a letter written to a mother who lost her child. (cf. The Epistles of Plato 1)
4.10I have read it. What he did is not what I do: he did not tell her she ought not to hurt.
4.11What I have written here is for a man who fears his own death. What he wrote is for someone who has lost another person.
4.12Both are needed, and they cannot be swapped.
4.13To take my words to a mother who has just lost a child is to give the right medicine to the wrong person.