Friends, he added, are essential during meals, like the one Tom and I are enjoying. To eat and drink without a friend is “to devour like the lion and the wolf.” Epicurus’s emphasis on friendship seems to contradict his pleasure-first principle. Genuine friendship, after all, means sometimes placing a friend’s pleasure above your own. Doesn’t that throw off the hedonic calculus? No, says Epicurus. Friendship, taken as a whole, alleviates pain and promotes pleasure. Whatever pain is associated with friendship is more than offset by its pleasures.
