Epicurus prized pleasure, but his idea of it was a quiet, simple life
Epicurean now suggests feasts and fine wine. Epicurus meant almost the opposite. The Greek philosopher, who founded his school in 307 BCE, taught that the highest pleasure is freedom from pain and fear, reached by limiting desires, cultivating friends and staying out of politics. Some of his followers were vegetarians.
Born on Samos in 342 or 341 BCE, Epicurus studied under a Platonist and then under Nausiphanes, a follower of the atomist Democritus, whose influence he later played down. He taught in Mytilene and Lampsacus before buying a property in Athens called the Garden, which gave the school its name. By Athenian standards it was unusually open, admitting women and slaves, and members gathered monthly for a social occasion called the Eikas. The two goals were ataraxia, tranquillity free of fear, and aponia, the absence of bodily pain.
His physics set out to banish superstition. The universe, he argued, contains only atoms and void. Atoms are indivisible, possess only shape, size and weight, and exist in infinite number, so there must be infinitely many worlds, some much like ours, separated by empty gulfs. Atoms naturally fall at the same speed, but occasionally swerve at random; without that swerve they would never collide to form objects, and, Epicurus thought, humans would be trapped in an endless chain of cause and effect with no free will. Epicureans used this point to criticise Democritus. Perception worked through particles streaming off objects, and every sensation was considered true; mistakes lay only in our judgements, as when a distant square tower looks round.
The school became one of the leading Hellenistic philosophies alongside Stoicism and Platonism. Julius Caesar leaned toward it, and the poet Lucretius, who lived from about 91 to 51 BCE, set out its core ideas in De rerum natura, aiming to free readers from fear of the gods and death. In the second century CE a wealthy Epicurean, Diogenes of Oenoanda, had its teachings carved on a wall in Lycia for passers-by.
Very little of Epicurus' own writing survives: three letters and a list of principal doctrines preserved by Diogenes Laertius. Much more came to light from carbonised scrolls at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, largely by the philosopher Philodemus. The school had faded by the late third century CE under pressure from Neoplatonism and later Christianity, before interest revived in the Enlightenment.
Source: Epicureanism
