e been preserved, and show a touch of intimate
affection which of course must have existed between human beings from
the remotest times, but of which we possess no earlier record. And
fragments of his letters to his friends strike the same note.[103:1]

His first discovery was that men torture themselves with unnecessary
fears. He must teach them courage, +tharrein apo ton theon, tharrein apo
anthropon+, to fear no evil from either man or God. God is a blessed
being; and no blessed being either suffers evil or inflicts evil on
others. And as for men, most of the evils you fear from them can be
avoided by Justice; and if they do come, they can be borne. Death is
like sleep, an unconscious state, nowise to be feared. Pain when it
comes can be endured; it is the anticipation that makes men miserable
and saps their courage. The refugees were forgotten by the world, and
had no hope of any great change in their condition. Well, he argued, so
much the better! Let them till the earth and love one another, and they
would find that they had already in them that Natural Happiness which is
man's possession until he throws it away. And of all things that
contribute to happiness the greatest is Affection, +philia+.

Like the Cynics and Stoics, he rejected the world and all its
conventions and prizes, its desires and passions and futility. But where
the Stoic and Cynic proclaimed that in spite of all the pain and
suffering of a wicked world, man can by the force of his own will be
virtuous, Epicurus brought the more surprising good news that man can
after all be happy.

But to make this good news credible he had to construct a system of
thought. He had to answer the temple authorities and their adherents
among the vulgar, who threatened his followers with the torments of
Hades for their impiety. He had to answer the Stoics and Cynics,
preaching that all is worthless except Arete; and the Sceptics, who
dwelt on the fallibility of the senses, and the logical impossibility of
knowledge.

He met the last of these by the traditional Ionian doctrine of
sense-impressions, ingeniously developed. We can, he argued, know the
outer world, because our sense impressions are literally 'impressions'
or stamps made by external objects upon our organs. To see, for
instance, is to be struck by an infinitely tenuous stream of images,
flowing from the object and directly impinging upon the retina. Such
streams are flowing from all objects in every di