We are not solely to blame for our confusions. Our weak understanding of our needs is aggravated by what Epicurus termed the ‘idle opinions’ of those around us, which do not reflect the natural hierarchy of our needs, emphasizing luxury and riches, seldom friendship, freedom and thought. The prevalence of idle opinion is no coincidence. It is in the interests of commercial enterprises to skew the hierarchy of our needs, to promote a material vision of the good and downplay an unsaleable one.
And the way we are enticed is through the sly association of superfluous objects with our other, forgotten needs.
(Ill. 10.1)
It may be a jeep we end up buying, but it was – for Epicurus – freedom we were looking for.
(Ill. 10.2)
It may be the aperitif we purchase, but it was – for Epicurus – friendship we were after.
(Ill. 10.3)
It may be fine bathing accoutrements we acquire, but it was – for Epicurus – thought that would have brought us calm.
To counteract the power of luxurious images Epicureans appreciated the importance of advertising.
In the AD 120s, in the central market-place of Oinoanda, a town of 10,000 inhabitants in the south-western corner of Asia Minor, an enormous stone colonnade 80 metres long and nearly 4 metres high was erected and inscribed with Epicurean slogans for the attention of shoppers:
Luxurious foods and drinks … in no way produce freedom from harm and a healthy condition in the flesh.
One must regard wealth beyond what is natural as of no more use than water to a container that is full to overflowing.
Real value is generated not by theatres and baths and perfumes and ointments … but by natural science.
The wall had been paid for by Diogenes, one of Oinoanda’s wealthiest citizens, who had sought, 400 years after Epicurus and his friends had opened the Garden in Athens, to share with his fellow inhabitants the secrets of happiness he had discovered in Epicurus’s philosophy. As he explained on one corner of the walclass="underline"
Having already reached the sunset of my life (being almost on the verge of departure from the world on account of old age), I wanted, before being overtaken by death, to compose a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure and so to help now those who are well-constituted. Now, if only one person, or two or three or four or five or six … were in a bad predicament, I should address them individually … but as the majority of people suffer from a common disease, as in a plague, with their false notions about things, and as their number is increasing (for in mutual emulation they catch the disease from each other, like sheep) … I wished to use this stoa to advertise publicly medicines that bring salvation.
The massive limestone wall contained some 25,000 words advertising all aspects of Epicurus’s thought, mentioning the importance of friendship and of the analysis of anxieties. Inhabitants shopping in the boutiques of Oinoanda had been warned in detail that they could expect little happiness from the activity.
(Ill. 10.4)
Advertising would not be so prevalent if we were not such suggestible creatures. We want things when they are beautifully presented on walls, and lose interest when they are ignored or not well spoken of. Lucretius lamented the way in which what we want is ‘chosen by hearsay rather than by the evidence of [our] own senses’.
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of desirable images of luxurious products and costly surroundings, fewer of ordinary settings and individuals. We receive little encouragement to attend to modest gratifications – playing with a child, conversations with a friend, an afternoon in the sun, a clean house, cheese spread across fresh bread (‘Send me a pot of cheese, so that I may have a feast whenever I like’). It is not these elements which are celebrated in the pages of Epicurean Life.
Art may help to correct the bias. Lucretius lent force to Epicurus’s intellectual defence of simplicity by helping us, in superlative Latin verse, to feel the pleasures of inexpensive things:
We find that the requirements of our bodily nature are few indeed, no more than is necessary to banish pain, and also to spread out many pleasures for ourselves. Nature does not periodically seek anything more gratifying than this, not complaining if there are no golden images of youths about the house who are holding flaming torches in their right hands to illuminate banquets that go on long into the night. What does it matter if the hall doesn’t sparkle with silver and gleam with gold, and no carved and gilded rafters ring to the music of the lute? Nature doesn’t miss these luxuries when people can recline in company on the soft grass by a running stream under the branches of a tall tree and refresh their bodies pleasurably at small expense. Better still if the weather smiles on them, and the season of the year stipples the green grass with flowers.
Ergo corpoream ad naturam pauca videmus
esse opus omnino, quae demant cumque dolorem
.
delicias quoque uti multas substernere possint
gratius interdum, neque natura ipsa requirit
,
si non aurea sunt iuvenum simulacra per aedes
lampadas igniferas manibus retinentia dextris
,
lumina nocturnis epulis ut suppeditentur
,
nec domus argento fulget auroque renidet
nec citharae reboant laqueata aurataque templa
,
cum tamen inter se prostrati in gramine molli
propter aquae rivum sub ramis arboris altae
non magnis opibus iucunde corpora curant
,
praesertim cum tempestas adridet et anni
tempora conspergunt viridantis floribus herbas
.
It is hard to measure the effect on commercial activity in the Greco-Roman world of Lucretius’s poem. It is hard to know whether shoppers in Oinoanda discovered what they needed and ceased buying what they didn’t because of the giant advertisement in their midst. But it is possible that a well-mounted Epicurean advertising campaign would have the power to precipitate global economic collapse. Because, for Epicurus, most businesses stimulate unnecessary desires in people who fail to understand their true needs, levels of consumption would be destroyed by greater self-awareness and appreciation of simplicity. Epicurus would not have been perturbed:
When measured by the natural purpose of life, poverty is great wealth; limitless wealth, great poverty.
It points us to a choice: on the one hand, societies which stimulate unnecessary desires but achieve enormous economic strengths as a result; and on the other, Epicurean societies which would provide for essential material needs but could never raise living standards beyond subsistence level. There would be no mighty monuments in an Epicurean world, no technological advances and little incentive to trade with distant continents. A society in which people were more limited in their needs would also be one of few resources. And yet – if we are to believe the philosopher – such a society would not be unhappy. Lucretius articulated the choice. In a world without Epicurean values:
Mankind is perpetually the victim of a pointless and futile martyrdom, fretting life away in fruitless worries through failure to realise what limit is set to acquisition and to the growth of genuine pleasure.