 Epicurus’ doctrine can be considered eudaimonist. While Plato and Aristotle maintain that virtue is constitutive of happiness, Epicurus holds that virtue is the only means to achieve happiness, where happiness is understood as a continuous experience of the pleasure that comes from freedom from pain and from mental distress. Thus, he is a eudaimonist in that he holds virtue is indispensable to happiness; but he does not identify virtuous activity, in whole or in part, with happiness. Finally, Epicurus is usually interpreted to have held a version of psychological hedonism – i.e., everything we do is done for the sake of pleasure – rather than ethical hedonism – i.e., we ought to do everything for the sake of pleasure. However, Principal Doctrine XXV suggests the latter position; and when in the Letter to Menoeceus he says that “we” do everything in order not to be in pain or in fear, he might mean to be referring to “we” Epicureans. If so, the claim would be normative. Still, once all disturbance of the soul is dispelled, he says, one is no longer in need nor is there any other good that could be added (128). Since this claim appears to be descriptive, Epicurus could be taken, as he usually has been, to be arguing that whatever we do is done for the sake of pleasure. In this account, that aspect of human nature on which virtue is based is fairly straightforward. The account is certainly less complex than, e.g., Aristotle’s. In turn, Epicurus seems to have argued in such a way as to make pleasure the only reason for being virtuous. If psychological hedonism is true, then when one realizes the necessary link between virtue and pleasure, one has all the reason one needs to be virtuous and the only reason one can have.