  The Epicureans and Stoics who followed Aristotle differed with each other and with him in many ways, but they agreed in tying morality and religion together. For the Epicureans, the gods do not care about us, though they are entertained by looking at our tragicomic lives (rather as we look at soap operas on television). We can be released from a good deal of anxiety, the Epicureans thought, by realizing that the gods are not going to punish us. Our goal should be to be as like the gods as we can, enjoying ourselves without interruption, but for us this means limiting our desires to what we can obtain without frustration. They did not mean that our happiness is self-interested in any narrow sense, because they held that we can include others in our happiness by means of our sympathetic pleasures. The Stoics likewise tied the best kind of human life, for them the life of the sage, to being like the divine. The sage follows nature in all his desires and actions, and is thus the closest to the divine. One of the virtues he will have is ‘apathy’ (in Greek apatheia), which does not mean listlessness, but detachment from wanting anything other than what nature, or the god, is already providing. Like the Epicureans, the Stoics had an argument against any narrow self-interest, but this time based on their conception of right reason which is directed by the law common to all, ‘which pervades everything and is the same as Zeus, lord of the ordering of all that exists’ (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, VII 88. For the views of the Epicureans and Stoics about morality and religion, see Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness, chapters 5 and 7.)