 When Epicurus spoke of friendship, he may have had at least partly in mind specifically the relationship among his followers, who seem to have thought of themselves as friends. Epicureans were encouraged to form communities and to observe certain rituals, although most of these practices, such as the celebration each month of the day (the 20th) on which Epicurus was born or wearing rings bearing an image of Epicurus, may have originated after the founder’s death. The Epicureans paid attention to problems of pedagogy as well, laying out the best way to correct the ideas of people new to the school and its community without cajoling or discouraging them. It must be remembered that Epicurus understood the task of philosophy first and foremost as a form of therapy for life, since philosophy that does not heal the soul is no better than medicine that cannot cure the body (Usener 1887, frag. 221). A life free of mental anxiety and open to the enjoyment of other pleasures was deemed equal to that of the gods. Indeed, it is from the gods themselves, via the simulacra that reach us from their abode, that we derive our image of blessed happiness, and prayer for the Epicureans consisted not in petitioning favors but rather in a receptivity to this vision. (Epicurus encouraged the practice of the conventional cults.) Although they held the gods to be immortal and indestructible (how this might work in a materialist universe remains unclear), human pleasure might nevertheless equal divine, since pleasure, Epicurus maintained (KD 19), is not augmented by duration (compare the idea of perfect health, which is not more perfect for lasting longer); the catastematic pleasure experienced by a human being completely free of mental distress and with no bodily pain to disturb him or her is at the absolute top of the scale. Nor is such pleasure difficult to achieve: it is a mark precisely of those desires that are neither natural nor necessary that they are hard to satisfy. Epicurus was famously content with little, since on such a diet a small delicacy is as good as a feast, in addition to which it is easier to achieve self-sufficiency, and “the greatest benefit of self-sufficiency is freedom” (VS 77).