Stoicism vs. Epicureanism

Side by side

The two schools grew up in Athens within a few years of each other, around 300 BC, and argued with each other for centuries. The table sets their answers next to each other. The sections below explain the rows that matter most and show what the Stoics themselves wrote about Epicurus.

Sources for the table: for Epicurus, his Letter to Menoeceus and Principal Doctrines, as summarized in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab); for the Stoics, the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on Stoicism (opens in a new tab) and the Internet Encyclopedia’s entry on Stoic ethics (opens in a new tab). The public-life row comes from Seneca’s On Leisure 3, which sets the two founders’ rules side by side; that passage is on What is Stoicism?.

What the two schools agreed on

It is easy to cast them as opposites: the stern Stoic and the pleasure-loving Epicurean. They had more in common than either side liked to admit.

Both treated philosophy as a way of living, not a subject to study. Both aimed at eudaimonia, a flourishing life, and both said most people miss it because of false beliefs: that they need more money, that the gods are waiting to punish them, that death is a disaster. Both held that a good life needs very little. Both described an ideal wise person who stays steady when fortune turns.

In practice they often give the same advice for different reasons. Take the second bottle of wine at dinner. An Epicurean passes on it because tomorrow’s headache costs more pleasure than the wine gives; Epicurus taught that we often skip a pleasure when more discomfort follows from it (Letter to Menoeceus 129). A Stoic passes on it because temperance is part of being a good person, and the headache is beside the point. The behavior matches. The reasons don’t, and the reasons are where the schools part.

The real disagreement: virtue or pleasure

For Epicurus, pleasure is where the good life starts and where it ends. He meant something quieter than the word suggests: freedom from pain in the body and from turmoil in the mind (Letter to Menoeceus 128, 131). He wrote that he did not mean the pleasures of big spenders and the sensual (131), and that no one can live pleasantly without living wisely, honorably and justly (132). Virtue matters to him a great deal, but as the means. It is valuable because it makes life pleasant.

The Stoics reversed that order. Virtue is the only good and is worth having for its own sake. Pleasure is a by-product of acting well, not something to aim at. They even disputed the Epicurean starting point: where the Epicureans said every creature’s first impulse is toward pleasure, the Stoics said it is toward preserving itself (IEP (opens in a new tab)).

Epictetus once put the Stoic view to an Epicurean in person. Discourses 3.7 records a visit from a Roman official, the administrator of the free cities, who was an Epicurean. Epictetus asks him what is best in a human being, and then lists what he thinks we are made for:

Pleasure keeps a job in this picture, as “a minister, a servant” (Discourses 3.7) to family, public duty and piety. It just doesn’t get to run things.

This is where the difference stops being academic. Suppose a coworker is about to take the blame for a mistake you made. Speaking up will cost you an awkward meeting and maybe a mark on your review. An Epicurean can still reach the right answer, because Epicurus argued that a wrongdoer never escapes the fear of being found out (Principal Doctrines 34–35). But that makes honesty depend on a calculation. The Stoic answer needs no calculation: owning the mistake is just, and justice is part of the only thing that is good for you. If it costs you some comfort, you have lost nothing that mattered.

Epictetus pressed a second objection in Discourses 1.23 and 2.20, which we paraphrase. In his telling, Epicurus advised the wise not to raise children or take part in politics, because both bring trouble, and denied that human beings share any natural fellowship. Epictetus answers that even sheep and wolves don’t abandon their young, and that Epicurus refutes himself every time he stays up late with a lamp, writing books for strangers to whom he claims no natural tie.

Gods, atoms and death

The ethics of each school rest on its picture of the world. For the Stoics, the universe is a single living whole run by reason, which they also called God, Zeus or nature. For Epicurus, following the earlier atomists Leucippus and Democritus, it is atoms colliding in empty space. The gods exist, but they live in perfect bliss and pay no attention to us, so there is no reason to fear them.

Seneca, addressing Epicurus directly, said this left God powerless and indifferent to us:

Both schools land on the same practical advice: don’t fear the gods. Epicurus gets there by putting the gods out of reach. Seneca gets there by arguing that the gods are good, and “it is madness to fear what is beneficial” (On Benefits 4.19). Epictetus lists the view that the gods exist but take no care of anything among the positions a student has to weigh and reject (Discourses 1.12).

Marcus Aurelius kept both pictures in view. By the count in the Stanford Encyclopedia (opens in a new tab), he sets out the choice between providence and atoms nine times in the Meditations, and his usual conclusion is that his conduct shouldn’t depend on the answer:

If the world is ordered, accept your part in it. If it is only atoms, there is still no reason to be disturbed, and your own mind is still the thing you can keep in order. For readers who doubt Stoic providence, this may be the most useful move in the whole debate; Is Stoicism a religion? follows it further.

Death follows from the physics. For Epicurus, the soul is made of atoms that scatter when we die, so no one is left to be harmed: death is nothing to us (Letter to Menoeceus 124–125). The Stoics also refused to call death an evil, but for them it is a change within nature, the elements of a person returning to the whole. Marcus sometimes holds both views in a single thought, as in Meditations 7.32, where death is either extinction or change. His other lines on the subject are collected in Stoic quotes on death.

What Seneca and Marcus said about Epicurus

By Seneca’s own account, most Stoics treated Epicurus as a teacher of vice. Seneca, in his essay On the Happy Life, defended him against his own side:

His complaint is with the label, not the man. People hear the word pleasure, enroll, and bring their vices with them, while the teaching itself, he says, is “upright and holy” (On the Happy Life 13). In the chapter before, he calls Epicurus’s pleasure sober and temperate. A few lines later, he states the difference that remains:

Pleasure following virtue “like a shadow” (On the Happy Life 13) is the Stoic position in a single picture. It is welcome, but it doesn’t lead.

Seneca borrowed from Epicurus more openly than any other Stoic whose writings survive. Many of his early Letters to Lucilius close with a saying for his friend to carry away, and many of those sayings come from Epicurus. In Letter 12 he answers the charge of quoting a rival: in our paraphrase, whatever is true belongs to everyone. Letter 16 shows the pattern. In the app’s paraphrase below, the last line is the saying of Epicurus that closes the letter:

Marcus Aurelius names Epicurus twice in the Meditations, both times with approval. The first is on pain:

The Epicurean point is that pain “is neither intolerable nor everlasting” (Meditations 7.64) if you remember its limits and add nothing to it in imagination. Marcus sets it inside a Stoic frame. Before he gets to Epicurus, he reminds himself that pain is nothing to be ashamed of and leaves his reasoning mind no worse. The second time he goes further and tells himself to copy how Epicurus behaved when he was ill:

Neither Seneca nor Marcus became an Epicurean. Both kept the Stoic view that virtue, not pleasure, is the good. What they took from Epicurus was practical: how to want less, how to bear pain, how to keep your mind on what matters when your body is failing. Marcus says outright that staying with philosophy whatever happens is a principle every school shares.

Which one fits you

The honest answer depends on what you think a life is for.

Epicurus may suit you if your aim is a quiet, pleasant life with good friends, few wants and as little fear as possible, and if you doubt that the universe has a plan. His sorting of desires into natural and necessary, natural but unnecessary, and empty (Letter to Menoeceus 127) is useful to anyone, Stoic or not.

Stoicism may suit you if you think some things are worth doing even when they make life less pleasant: telling an unwelcome truth, caring for a parent through a long illness, taking the committee seat nobody else wants. It gives you a reason to act that doesn’t depend on how the act feels, and a practice for the days that go badly. You don’t have to accept Stoic providence for that. Marcus’s either-way argument still holds, and the four virtues work the same in an ordered world or a world of atoms.

You can borrow from both, as Seneca and Marcus did. What you can’t do is make both the goal. On most days the two schools agree on what to do. When pleasure and right action finally pull apart, you have to decide which one you are living for, and that decision is the whole difference between them.

The simplest way to test the Stoic side is to practice it for a few weeks: read one teaching each morning and review each day at night with the Evening Examination. The Stoic principles and What is Stoicism? cover the rest of the system.