Plutarch's dialogue arguing that Epicurean hedonism cannot actually deliver a pleasant life, since bodily pleasure is fragile and the loss of hope in an afterlife is itself painful.
"That It Is Not Even Possible to Live Pleasantly According to Epicurus" is a dialogue set in the Peripatos (the walking-grounds of Aristotle's school) among Plutarch, Theon, Zeuxippus, and Aristodemus, following on from an earlier session against the Epicurean writer Colotes. Rather than reprising the earlier defense of individual philosophers Colotes had mocked, the group turns to a harder question: even granting the Epicureans their own premise that pleasure is the good, can their doctrine actually make a life pleasant?
The speakers argue that it cannot. Bodily pleasure, they contend, runs through the same narrow channels of flesh that also admit disease, gout, fever, and the surgeon's knife, so the goods Epicureans chase are inherently unstable and outnumbered by the pains lurking in the same organs. The argument then turns to Epicurus's own supposed comfort against the fear of death - that non-existence is nothing to us and so nothing to fear. Plutarch's speakers turn this against Epicurus: if death is only the loss of goods, then for a happy, flourishing person death is a uniquely severe loss, since it strips away a certain good (a pleasant life) rather than merely ending an uncertain hope, as it does for the wretched. They invoke Herodotus's remark that god gives life a taste of sweetness only to show himself envious, and conclude that removing all hope of an immortal soul, and of the intellectual and honor-seeking satisfactions the Epicureans dismiss, actually narrows human nature to something poorer, not richer.
The piece matters as a specimen of ancient Middle Platonist and Peripatetic polemic against Epicureanism, conducted symposium-style with named interlocutors trading set speeches. It shows how seriously the loss of an afterlife hope was treated as an emotional and philosophical cost in antiquity, and it preserves quotations from Epicurus, Metrodorus, and Aeschylus's lost play on Philoctetes that survive nowhere else in full context.
“Colotes, the companion of Epicurus, published a book entitled "That According to the Doctrines of the Other Philosophers It Is Not Even Possible to Live."”
— Non Posse Suaviter Vivi Secundum Epicurum · read this chapter →
“They hold that the good lies in the belly and in all the other channels of the flesh, through which pleasure and the absence of pain make their entry”
— Non Posse Suaviter Vivi Secundum Epicurum · read this chapter →
“for it is not possible to be born twice, and for eternity one must not be”
— Non Posse Suaviter Vivi Secundum Epicurum · read this chapter →
“god, having given life a taste of sweetness, shows himself to be envious in it”
— Non Posse Suaviter Vivi Secundum Epicurum · read this chapter →
“living pleasantly without living nobly is nonexistent, as they themselves say”
— Non Posse Suaviter Vivi Secundum Epicurum · read this chapter →
It is a Plutarch dialogue arguing that even by Epicurus's own standard, pleasure as the good, an Epicurean life cannot actually be pleasant. The speakers claim bodily pleasure is fragile and outweighed by the pains that share its same physical channels, and that denying an afterlife makes death a greater loss for happy people than for the wretched.
Plutarch himself, along with Theon, Zeuxippus, and Aristodemus, converse in the Peripatos after an earlier school session that had responded to the Epicurean Colotes. Theon and Aristodemus lead most of the argument, with Plutarch's narrator largely listening and prompting.
He argues that Epicurus's comfort, that non-existence after death is nothing to us, actually backfires: for a fortunate person, death removes a certain good (a pleasant life) rather than merely an uncertain hope, making it a uniquely severe and even eternal deprivation.
It quotes them directly, including Metrodorus's claim that wise inventions serve the pleasure of the belly, and Epicurus's line that one cannot be born twice and must not exist for eternity, then argues these positions undercut the promise of a pleasant life rather than support it.
No, but it is a companion piece. The dialogue's opening explains it follows an earlier session that answered Colotes's book, and this essay takes up a further, harder question raised in that same conversation: whether it is even possible to live pleasantly on Epicurean principles.
The speakers cite Aeschylus's lost play, where Philoctetes describes the snakebite that maimed him, as a vivid witness to how deeply and persistently physical pain can take root, supporting their argument that pain outlasts and outweighs Epicurean pleasure.
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