 Epicurus placed an extremely high value on friendship (or love: philia). A saying with rather a more poetic flair than is Epicurus’ custom runs: “Friendship goes dancing round the world, announcing to all of us to wake up to happiness” (Vatican Saying = VS 52). Epicurus held that a wise man would feel the torture of a friend no less than his own, and would die for a friend rather than betray him, for otherwise his own life would be confounded (VS 56–57). These are powerfully altruistic sentiments for a philosopher who posits as the unique goal in life happiness based on freedom from physical pain and mental anxiety. Epicurus could justify such an attitude by the same prudential calculus that he uses to argue in favor of living justly: only by living in such a way that loyalty to friends is perceived to be a consummate value will one be able to feel secure in one’s friends, and thus maximize one’s felicity. Yet this does not seem quite what Epicurus means when he says that “friendship [or love] had its beginning as a result of utility, but is to be chosen [or is a virtue, if we follow the manuscript reading] for its own sake” (VS 23). The question is further complicated by the report in Cicero’s On Moral Ends (1.66–70) that there was a difference of opinion concerning friendship among later Epicureans. Since human beings were originally asocial and only later learned to form alliances and compacts, it is possible that Epicurus means to say that this capacity for friendship arose out of need, but that once the capacity for such feelings was acquired, feeling them came to be valued in itself. The argument would be similar to the modern idea that altruism could have developed as a result of natural selection. But the evidence does not permit a firm conclusion on this matter.