Epicurus — "A free man cannot acquire many possessions, because this is difficult to do with…"
A free man cannot acquire many possessions, because this is difficult to do without serving either crowds or kings.
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More from Epicurus
"Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship."
"Pleasure is the beginning and the end of the blessed life."
"The wise man avoids pain, but does not seek pleasure."
"We should rather laugh than be sad at the misfortunes of others."
"Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not."
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.