Look up the word epicure and you picture a foodie savoring a ten-course tasting menu with shaved truffles. The actual Epicurus lived on bread and water, maybe a little cheese on festive days, and believed that minimizing desire, not indulging it, was the path to happiness. This episode traces how a philosopher born in 341 BC into the chaos following Alexander the Great became the patron saint of luxury through centuries of terrible public relations, and why his forgotten rules for happiness may be exactly what an age of anxiety needs.

We follow his family’s expulsion from Samos, his break from Democritus’s determinism through the atomic swerve, and the founding of the Garden in Athens, a communal school that welcomed women and slaves. We unpack his definitions of ataraxia and aponia, his three categories of desire, the Tetrapharmakos or four-part cure, and the deathbed letter in which he described a happy day amid the agony of kidney stones. We close with his placement in Dante’s sixth circle of hell and his revival through Pierre Gassendi, Locke, and Marx.

• Why Epicurus denied ever having teachers, and how the swerve rescued free will from a rigged cosmic pool table
• The principle of multiple explanations as a guard against superstition
• Natural and necessary, natural but unnecessary, unnatural and unnecessary: a Marie Kondo approach to the soul
• Do not fear the gods, do not fear death: the logic behind each rule of the four-part cure
• How the attention economy manufactures the exact desires Epicurus warned would guarantee a lifetime of anxiety