For more than two millennia, Epicurus has been misread as a philosopher of indulgence, when his surviving letters reveal a far more austere ambition: to free human beings not from discomfort alone, but from the deeper tyranny of fear. Writing in ancient Athens and preserved through later biographers, he argued that the restless wanting which defines so much of human life is not a hunger for pleasure but a symptom of unexamined dread—above all, the dread of death. His teaching, stripped of its caricature, is less an invitation to feast than a quiet instruction to look directly at what frightens