Epicurus
341–270 BC 4 entries
Biography
Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who founded one of the great schools of ancient philosophy. He was born in 341 BC on the island of Samos, to Athenian parents, and taught first in Mytilene and Lampsacus before settling in Athens around 306 BC. There he bought a house with a garden, and his school, known simply as the Garden, lived in it as a community of friends, open, unusually for its time, to women and slaves.
He taught that pleasure is the beginning and the end of a happy life, but by pleasure he meant above all the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul, reached through a simple life, prudence and friendship. Following Democritus, he held that everything is made of atoms moving through the void, that the gods do not meddle in human affairs and that death, the end of all feeling, is nothing to fear. Of his some three hundred books only three letters, a collection of his principal doctrines and fragments survive, while the Roman poet Lucretius set out his teaching in the poem On the Nature of Things. His name later came, quite unfairly, to stand for a love of fine food and luxury.
- Quotes 4