Epicurus — "A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is no easy thing to do…"
A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is no easy thing to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.
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More from Epicurus
"The wise man is but little favored by fortune, but his reason procures him the greatest and most valuable goods."
"The wise man is a happy man, even in the midst of torture."
"The just man is tranquil, the unjust man is full of the utmost turmoil."
"It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself."
"It is better to be unfortunate in a reasonable manner than to be fortunate in an unreasonable one."
About Epicurus (341-270 BCE)
Greek philosopher who founded the Garden school in Athens, whose materialist atomism and pleasure-as-tranquility ethics shaped Hellenistic thought. Closely associated with Lucretius (Roman successor whose De Rerum Natura preserved Epicurean physics). For an intellectual contrast, see the Stoics (Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), the Hellenistic ethical school of discipline-of-acceptance — Stoic 'live according to nature' and Epicurean 'pleasure and absence of pain' framed every ancient ethical decision — every Roman of Cicero's era was implicitly choosing one path or the other. The Stoic-Epicurean rivalry was the central philosophical debate of the Hellenistic and Roman world for 400 years.
The standard scholarly entry points to Epicurus's work: A.A. Long (UC Berkeley, Classics) — Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (1974); Tim O'Keefe (Georgia State University, ancient philosophy) — Epicureanism (2010); David Sedley (Cambridge, Classics) — Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (1998). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Epicurus.