Thank you. It's fascinating that people used to consider the chest as a seat of higher thought. I guess even now we strongly associate it with emotions.

Based on that article I would say Hume's overall body of work is by a wide margin more contemporary than Epicurus' if not more subtle and sophisticated. The passions-slave-reason quotation is really only a tiny part of his writing. For example, Hume provides an intricate and judicious account of epistemology in which causality is reduced to a kind of anthropic pattern-recognition. This reconciles his account of psychology with the enlightenment understanding of the scientific method, which did not exist at the time of Epicurus.