The Fourfold Remedy

Epicurus explicitly compared the philosopher to a physician: both diagnose an illness and prescribe a remedy. The illness is the suffering caused by unfounded fears and misdirected desires; the remedy is philosophical understanding applied consistently to life. The four propositions of the Tetrapharmakos are the active ingredients of the cure. They are not abstract truths to be contemplated from a distance but medicines to be taken daily — phrases to be recalled in moments of fear or distress until they reshape the habitual responses of the mind.

The gods, Epicurus holds, are blessed and imperishable beings who have no interest in human affairs — neither rewarding the pious nor punishing the wicked. This is not atheism but a theology of divine serenity: the gods are the Epicurean ideal writ large, models of ataraxia rather than interventionist rulers. Fear of divine punishment is therefore as unfounded as fear of death. Together, these two fears account for the largest portion of human dread about the cosmos, and together the first two remedies dissolve them.

What is genuinely good — pleasure in the relevant sense, friendship, philosophical companionship — requires relatively little to obtain. Water, bread, and the company of good friends are among the simplest things in life, and they constitute the core of Epicurean happiness. What is genuinely terrible — physical pain, loss, deprivation — is either short in duration, in which case it is endurable, or it kills, in which case it ends. The Tetrapharmakos does not deny suffering but frames it as manageable: the wise person is not immune to pain but is freed from the additional suffering of dreading what is inevitable or lamenting what cannot be changed.

The Tetrapharmakos is preserved in Philodemus's Adversus Sophistas (Herculaneum Papyrus 1005). It is a compressed version of the ethical core of the Letter to Menoeceus and the Principal Doctrines. The medical analogy for philosophy appears in several Epicurean fragments and was influential on later Stoic therapy of the passions.