Excerpt from The Historic Gallery of Portraits and Paintings, Vol. 4 The two first heads have been wrought from a single block of marble. That which interests the reader to the left is the portrait of Epicurus, chief of a sect of philoso phers, no less famous among the ancients than the moderns. They pretended that happiness consisted in voluptuousness but this pleasure, in their opinion, was no other thing than virtue. We are not to reproach them for the eccentricities of some of their sectarista. Epicurus was laborious and frugal. He was born in a village of Attica, in the year 342 B. C. And died at the age of seventy-two, completely worn out by fatigue. He composed a variety of philosophical treatises, the most part of which are lost. It is from his works that Ln cretins collected opinions which he decorated with all the charms of poetry. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.