that freedom from pain depends on the absence of fear—fear of loss, fear of being found out, and worst of all, fear of death. Epicurus solved the last one by dropping the whole idea of an afterlife—and with it the fear of eternal punishment. When you’re gone, you’re gone. What matters is a calm and contented life in the here and now. Ideally, sitting under a tree, talking philosophy with friends. But what Epicurus meant by “philosophy” was different, too. “Vain is the word of a philosopher,” he said, “which does not heal any suffering.”
This cheery benevolence makes Epicurus one of the sanest and most attractive of the major Greek philosophers. But there is much more to him than that. He was the first person to advocate equal rights for slaves and for women, and the first to offer free schooling. In teaching that we should believe only what we can test through observation, he laid the cornerstone of scientific method; and he was also one of the founders of atomic physics. Democritus of Abdera (460–570 BC)—known as the “laughing philosopher” for finding life more comic than tragic—had guessed that the world was composed of
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 three hundred 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, humor, 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 more than eight hundred years, until the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in AD 312. You can see why the Church suppressed it. Here is Epicurus’s mantra, known as the
It was almost two thousand years before anything this simple and useful was produced again in the West: a kind of
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
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 women,” impressing the British by swimming in the Thames, and learning the art of typesetting, he returned to Philadelphia, where he set up his own printing firm and founded a society of like-minded tradesmen called the Junto—loosely derived from the Spanish for “joined”—whose innovative thinking was to revolutionize the city.
Philadelphia was already an interesting place. Named after the Greek for “brotherly love,” unlike most of the Puritan enclaves (such as Boston) it embraced religious toleration. All the Protestant denominations were represented—Moravians, Lutherans, Quakers, Calvinists—and there was even a Jewish community. Franklin, though always a believer, was no sectarian. He approved of the idea that all faiths should be allowed to flourish side by side. In a letter justifying his views to his hard-line Puritan parents he explained: “I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. And the Scripture assures me that at the last day we shall not be examined by what we thought, but what we did.”
As Franklin’s business prospered, he was able to do an astonishing amount. In 1737, at the age of thirty, he was appointed as the city’s postmaster and swiftly transformed the postal service. Along with his colleagues in the Junto, he helped finance America’s first public library, started the first civic fire brigade and fire insurance scheme, opened the first public hospital, improved the city’s street lighting, built pavements, set up a police force, and founded the University of Pennsylvania. Some historians have argued that the close partnership between business, charities, and civic institutions that is still such a feature of American cities today was Franklin’s invention.
It was by no means the only thing he invented. As an eleven-year-old he devised a pair of wooden hand flippers to help him swim faster. They didn’t work particularly well, but he never looked back. He is credited with inventing the lightning conductor; the odometer; the domestic log-burning stove (known still as a Franklin stove today); an extension arm for removing books from high shelves; a twenty-four-hour clock; a phonetic alphabet that did without the letters
