Abstract

In 1976, Fred Miller published a brief, but highly original, paper entitled “Epicurus on the Art of Dying.” This was shortly after Thomas Nagel’s well-known 1970 paper which attempted to counter Epicurus’s claim that death does us no harm, and somewhat before ancient philosophers and their philosophical colleagues started turning Epicurus’s death arguments into a major growth industry. I argue that if Epicurean scholars had taken Miller’s arguments to heart it would have saved them going down a lot of blind alleys in what is now the almost 50 years since the paper appeared. Using elements taken from his arguments, I elaborate them in the light of subsequent scholarship in order to show why a series of leading contemporary interpretations of Epicurean claims about death are deeply inadequate and why Epicurus’s view is not just a clever puzzle, but, as Miller argued, a position with considerable, even attractive, argumentative resources.