  The best way for the Epicurean to earn a living is to share his philosophical discourses with those who are able to understand them, and from them to receive gifts of thanks and veneration, as Epicurus did. These discourses should be “truthful, free of competition, and, in brief, serene, since earning one’s living by sophistic or competitive speeches is no better than doing so by demagogic or sycophantic ones” (On Household Management xxiii.22–36). In his books on Rhetoric, Philodemus consistently attacks both the art and the practice of political and forensic oratory: these do not qualify as arts and their practice is destructive of happiness. He insists that there can be no expert method or science of consistently persuading crowds. There is, instead, the Epicurean technê of ‘frank criticism’, which is practiced between individuals in an Epicurean community.