Epicurus
Epicurus founded a school of philosophy whose name became a byword for the opposite of what he taught. Born on Samos in 341 BC to Athenian settler parents, he was a schoolteacher's son and came to philosophy through Democritus's atomism, which reached him through a teacher named Nausiphanes. He taught briefly in Asia Minor and around 306 BC bought a house and garden in Athens, from which the school took its name. The Garden admitted women and slaves as members, which was almost unheard of and drew a good deal of hostile gossip. His physics was materialist. Everything consists of atoms moving in void; the gods exist but take no interest in human affairs; the soul is material and disperses at death, so there is nothing after it. He added the swerve, an unpredictable deviation in atomic motion, to leave room for free will. His ethics followed from that. The greatest goods are the absence of physical pain and the absence of mental disturbance, and the greatest sources of disturbance are the fear of death and the fear of the gods, both of which the physics removes. Death, he wrote, is nothing to us: where we are, it is not, and where it is, we are not. The pleasure he recommended was austere — bread and water, friendship and philosophical conversation, withdrawal from politics — and he wrote that a little pot of cheese was a feast. Almost all of his three hundred works are lost. His system survives chiefly through Lucretius's poem De Rerum Natura. He died in 270 BC of kidney stones, writing that he was happy.
- Lived: 341 BCE – 270 BCE
- Nationality: Greek
- Roles: philosopher
