Epicurus preached simple meals and friendship, yet got remembered as a glutton
The Garden in Athens served plain food and long conversation, and its founder taught that happiness comes from taming desire and banishing fear. Medieval Europe nonetheless recalled Epicurus as a patron of drunkards and gluttons. It took a Catholic priest in the 17th century to rescue his reputation.
Epicurus was born in February 341 BC in an Athenian settlement on Samos, seven years after Plato's death, to Athenian parents Neocles and Chaerestrate. He studied for about four years with a Platonist named Pamphilus and later, after the Samian settlers were expelled to Colophon, with Nausiphanes, a follower of Democritus. He nevertheless insisted he was self-taught and dismissed earlier philosophers as confused.
His school, the Garden, held that a self-sufficient life among friends was the best setting for philosophy. The goal was a pleasant, steady happiness reached by managing desires, dropping needless fears and living virtuously. The gods, he taught, exist but take no part in human affairs. Borrowing from Democritus, he explained nature as tiny invisible atoms moving through empty space, but added a twist: atoms can occasionally swerve from their expected paths, leaving room for free will in an otherwise determined universe. From the Cynics he took a commitment to honesty while rejecting their rudeness, arguing that candour should come with courtesy and kindness.
He is said to have written more than 300 works, nearly all lost. What survives is a handful of letters, the collection of sayings known as the Principal Doctrines and fragments of his major treatise On Nature. Much of what we know comes through later admirers such as the Roman poet Lucretius and Diogenes of Oenoanda. His outlook was notably universal, shaped by an age when Greek knowledge of the wider world was expanding rapidly after Alexander's conquests.
Epicureanism peaked in the late Roman Republic and faded by late antiquity. Rediscovered texts spread his ideas again in the 15th century, but they only became respectable in the 17th, when the French priest Pierre Gassendi revived a modified version, taken up by Walter Charleton and Robert Boyle. After the Enlightenment his influence reached thinkers including John Locke and Karl Marx. He died in 270 BC.
Source: Epicurus
