The emphasis in Epicurean philosophy on the importance of pleasure has often given rise to misunderstanding and misrepresentation, in the time of Epicurus and ever since.
The author Athenaeus, who flourished around AD 200, records with approval the Roman attitude to honour and virtue, which led Roman authorities to banish philosophers whose teachings they considered repugnant to their ideals of what is good and right. In discussing the philosophy of Epicurus, he says that Epicurus and his followers made virtue and honour subordinate to pleasure, and it was therefore admirable that the Romans excluded the Epicureans Alcius (also spelled Alcaeus) and Philiscus from Rome because of their encouragement of pleasure (Athenaeus, Learned Banqueters, Book XII, 547a). Similarly, he says, the Messenians banished the Epicureans, and Antiochus banished philosophers from his kingdom.
Athenaeus also points out that, before the time of Epicurus, Sophocles was promoting the idea of pleasure, as can be seen from a passage quoted from the Antigone (lines 1165-1171) in which the speaker rejects wealth and power as worthless in comparison with pleasure: if heaping up riches and living as a king exclude pleasure, they are not worth ‘the shadow of a vapour’ (in Jebb’s phrase); a man who has forfeited his pleasures is not truly alive but a living corpse.
According to this passage in Sophocles, pleasure can be understood as better than power and wealth. As quoted by Athenaeus, the passage is supposed to show Sophocles in a bad light. In fact it helps to illustrate the reasonableness of Epicurus’ argument that pleasure is a superior ideal.
A translation of Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, may be read online on the University of Wisconsin website; for the relevant passages in Book XII see pp. 874-876. The passage from the Antigone can be read online in an 1893 translation by R.C. Jebb (quoted), and on the Perseus website in Jebb’s Greek text and 1891 translation.
