I often listen to courses on tape in the car to and from work.  The course I am currently working on involves Alexander the Great and Hellenistic Greece.  The current lecture discusses famous Greek philosophers.

  The three best-known Greek philosophers are Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates.  A good way to tell that a philosopher is famous is that Bill and Ted spend their precious time sending their time-traveling phone booth back to ancient Greece to pick him up.   

  However, consider Epicurus.  Epicurus is best known for hedonistic philosophy, where pleasure is good and adherents should spend all their time pursuing it.  Needless to say, many traditional institutions frown upon this policy.  To this day, Judaism uses the word "apikoros" -- a transliteration of Epicurus's name -- to refer to an apostate: someone who has abandoned his or her ancestral traditions.

  Epicurus probably would have had a great deal of trouble dealing with his detractors.  However, he managed to avoid it very easily.  Why?

  The answer is simple.  He never advocated hedonism.  The hedonism is actually a corruption of his teachings.  Perhaps competing 
philosophies and religions wanted to put a bad spin on his teachings.

  Epicurus actually believed that overindulging in pleasure was actually a bad idea -- pleasure was desirable, but in MODERATION.  He recognized that pleasure was addictive, and indulging could cause oneself to start yearning for it more and more.  Too much pleasure could therefore make someone never feel content about anything.

  The thing that is interesting about this is that this seems very similar to Buddhist philosophy, which indicates that desire is the major cause of suffering.  

  Could Epicurus have known of Buddhism?

  Epicurus lived around 300 BC.  Buddha lived in India in 620 BC or so -- and Alexander managed to make it to India.  Could Buddhist philosophy have been transmitted,
to some extent to Greece via Alexander's armies?

  Part of the hedonism misconception could have been from the fact that he also believed that there was no life after death and therefore death should not be feared.  If there's no life after death, then you don't have to worry about Zeus coming after you for your misdeeds in the next world.  So, live it up.  He believed that the body simply decomposed into the smallest indivisible  possible pieces of matter -- the original concept of atoms (which is itself a Greek word derived from this philosophy).  
And that was it.

  So if you are Jewish and someone tells you that you are an apikoros, don't think of it entirely as
negative -- particularly if you have the discipline to enjoy your happiness in moderation.