Recently I have been reading with pleasure a book about pleasure. Or rather, a book about the origins of the philosophy of pleasure. This is classicist Kurt Lampe‘s The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life. Dr. Lampe has recalled to my attention a somewhat obscure figure, Hegesias of Cyrene, whom the good doctor identifies as possibly the one truly thoroughgoing pessimist among all the philosophers of antiquity. What little we know about him comes down to us from doxographical material, but what there is is pretty intriguing. Here is a claim passed on to us by Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations (Book I, paragraph 34). The Latin text is taken from Wikisource and the English translation by C.D. Younge from from Project Gutenberg.
| a malis igitur mors abducit, non a bonis, verum si quaerimus. et quidem hoc a Cyrenaico Hegesia sic copiose disputatur, ut is a rege Ptolomaeo prohibitus esse dicatur illa in scholis dicere, quod multi is auditis mortem sibi ipsi consciscerent. | If, then, our inquiry is after truth, death withdraws us from evil, not from good. This subject is indeed so copiously handled by Hegesias, the Cyrenaic philosopher, that he is said to have been forbidden by Ptolemy from delivering his lectures in the schools, because some who heard him made away with themselves. |
Now that’s persuasion, folks!