Meaning
Devoted to refined pleasure, especially the table - the connoisseur's word for luxurious taste in food, wine, and comfort. The capital-letter Epicurean still names the philosopher of the Garden, whose idea of pleasure was almost the opposite. Approving in food writing; philosophers wince, since the master's menu was bread, water, and friendship - the rare eponym whose bearer would disown the compliment. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Epicurus bought a house and garden outside Athens around 307 BC and made it a school - cosmopolitan for its day, admitting women and slaves - and its doctrine held that pleasure is the good, defined as the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul: ataraxia, freedom from disturbance, and aponia, freedom from pain. He ranked desires into natural and necessary, natural and unnecessary, and the pointless wealth-fame-power kind to be discarded, insisted that the pleasant life comes not from drinking bouts and revelry but from sober reasoning, and taught that death is nothing to us. The misunderstanding is as old as antiquity: the school was read as advocating decadence almost from the start, and the modern sense - a devotee of gourmet enjoyment - completes the inversion. Wiktionary's citations catch the drift: Tennyson's Maud smiles like a stoic, or like a wiser epicurean, in 1855; Ruxton's hunters practised epicurean gorgings in 1847; and even the usage notes flag that indulgence was precisely what Epicurus warned against.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- an epicure
- epicurean tastes
- epicureanism
Usage Examples
- His epicurean weeks were measured in olive oil: four litres, two villages, one unforgettable lunch.
- The hotel's epicurean claims rested on a chef who considered ketchup a personal insult.
- She had epicurean taste and a student budget, solved with slow braises and faster bicycles.