Note 91 — Chapter XXIV · GORGIAS.

Epikurus and his followers assigned the greatest value, in their ethical theory, to the permanent element, or established character of the agent, intellectual and emotional. But great as they reckoned this value to be, they resolved it all into the diminution or mitigation of pains, and, in a certain though inferior degree, the multiplication of pleasures. They did not put it in a separate category of its own, altogether disparate and foreign to pleasures and pains.

See the letter of Epikurus to Menœkeus, Diog. L. x. 128-132; Lucretius, v. 18-45, vi. 12-25; Horat. Epist. i. 2, 48-60.