In the matter of enjoyment, we’re all would-be epicures, straining to increase our pleasures to the utmost while reducing our pains to the barest minimum. Unfortunately, pain and pleasure are so closely twinned that the pursuit of one almost always summons the other. The hangover follows the binge as the night the day. Emily Dickinson put it more loftily:

For each ecstatic instant we must an anguish pay in keen and quivering ratio to the ecstasy.

Is there any way to sidestep, if not to solve, this pitiless ratio?

For Epicurus himself (341-270 B.C.), the best answer lay in the cultivation of an inner serenity (euphrosyne in Greek). The Garden of Epicurus was the physical embodiment of this inwardness. There, surrounded by like-minded companions, the philosopher planted and tended his trees as lovingly as his conversations. In Greek the verb for this tranquil but passionate activity was sumphilosophein, literally meaning “to co-philosophize” but more profoundly denoting a fervent devotion to the pursuit of wisdom within a chosen circle of friends.

The Garden of Epicurus circumscribed human aspiration within manageable boundaries and so stands in tacit contrast, and rebuke, to that more famous garden of Genesis. (It is, we remember, where Voltaire’s Candide at the end of his vicissitudes discovered the modest truth that the best we can hope for is “to cultivate our garden.”) The Epicurean garden is intimate with earth; it represents a momentary paradise, not an everlasting one. And friendship, rather than prelapsarian innocence or eternal bliss, is its hallmark.

Great notions, especially when they are this simple, have a way of turning into caricatures. We no longer think of an epicure as someone who seeks tranquility through the cultivation of friendship and inner virtue; for us an epicure is a hedonist. The Roman poet Lucretius based his philosophical poem “On Nature” on the teachings of Democritus and Epicurus, and his mighty hexameters, however sublime, aren’t exactly a pleasure-romp. Other Roman authors were not so high-minded, for which Jupiter – and Bacchus – be praised.

The scurrilous and enigmatic genius known to posterity as Petronius bequeathed us an unforgettable lampoon of Epicureanism gone wrong in his “Satyricon.” The Epicurean school has never fully recovered. After all, who could take seriously a way of life espoused by the extravagantly sleazy Trimalchio, a nouveau riche and vulgarian of heroic proportions? The excesses of the holiday season have caused me to go back to this strange and rambunctious masterpiece and I’ve emerged, newly chastened (if not sobered), by the experience.

Only a few chapters survive of “The Satyricon.” Generally attributed to Titus Petronius Niger, who served as consul in A.D. 62 and subsequently as the Emperor Nero’s “Tutor in Refinement” (“Elegantiae Arbiter”), this ancient novel is narrated by one Encolpius, an impecunious and disgruntled student of rhetoric who suffers – sadly for a committed Epicurean – from sporadic bouts of impotence. There are several good translations, most notably by Frederic Raphael and William Arrowsmith. (The very readable Loeb version of 1913 by the scholar Michael Heseltine maddeningly leaves all “the good parts” in Latin. Why commission a prig to translate Petronius?) I’ve been reading the version by Paul Dinnage in “The Wordsworth Classics of World Literature” (152 pages, $7.99), which includes an interesting introduction, rather coy notes, and a bizarre bibliography (listing not only Fellini’s film but “Quo Vadis?” for reasons that elude me).

I like the Dinnage translation in part because he succeeds with the (generally awful) puns. When Trimalchio, at the banquet to end all banquets, orders a chef named Carpe (“Carver”) to carve the roast, he intones “Carpe, Carpe” in the Latin. This comes out as “Carv’er, Carver!” The pun is also an allusion to the “carpe diem” of Horace (“seize the day, and trust as little as possible to tomorrow”), a poet quoted often, with envious admiration, by the lecherous doggerel-monger Eumolpus (whose adventures conclude the book).

Trimalchio, for all his gluttony and swilling of century-old vintages, is obsessed with time. A clock dominates the banquet hall and a trumpeter tootles out the hour so the bon vivant will be reminded “how much of his life has been lost.” Death fine-tunes the palate yet, in Trimalchio’s degraded Epicureanism, mortality is no summons to tranquil reflection but a harsh seasoning designed to bring pleasure to its highest pitch.

Between fantastical courses, such as wild boar stuffed with living thrushes that flutter from the roast and are then snagged on limed twigs for grilling or – my own favorite – “dormice conserved in honey and sprinkled with poppyseed,” Trimalchio alternately bemoans his chronic constipation or rushes to his chamber-pot (conveniently kept in the dining room), flaunts his ostentation in every possible way, declaims doggerel, blusters, and blubbers, alternately humiliating his nauseated guests and showering them with kitschy party favors.The climax comes when he playacts his own death, summoning fresh trumpeters and commanding them to “pretend I’m dead” and “play something nice!”

Trimalchio’s banquet is one of the great set-scenes in all literature. Out of it stagger later writers like Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, and Sterne, as well as such modern masters of excess as Joyce, Gadda, and Celine. Like Petronius, these authors batten on profusion, even as they resist it. They are Epicureans of language, dancing on the loopy high wire between hyperbole and renunciation.

In “The Satyricon,” Petronius sounds all registers of speech, from pungent proverbs to high-flown, and deliciously ridiculous, dithyrambs. Of a recently deceased citizen, one diner remarks, “He was born with a penny and would have bitten a farthing from a dunghill with his teeth.” Even the most sententious remarks have a distinctive ring; one drunk mutters, “I say the gods creep off with muffled feet, because we dissent.”

At the other extreme is the ludicrous Eumolpus, the poetaster who never met a cliche he didn’t love; whenever he puffs out some rancid stanza, all those present pelt him with stones. Petronius delights in chastising false eloquence, preferring instead a Trimalchian pepperpot of obscenities, epigrams, bombast, and puns. (Even in his final hours, according to legend, Petronius kept up his pungent antics; after opening his veins in the bathtub at Nero’s behest he composed lurid ditties on the emperor’s sexual shenanigans while waiting to die.) After almost two millennia his language still wriggles with life. A true, if subversive, Epicurean, he found the only foolproof way to outwit death.

eormsby@nysun.com