Epicurus

Epicurus (341–270 BCE) was born in February 341 BCE on the island of Samos to Athenian citizens — his father Neocles had been settled there as a cleruch. He received the standard Greek education, with early philosophical instruction from the Platonist Pamphilus. Around 323 BCE, at age 18, he travelled to Athens for the first time for ephebic military service (Xenocrates then headed the Academy). Shortly after — Alexander having died and the Lamian War ending in Athenian defeat — the Athenian cleruchs were expelled from Samos and Epicurus rejoined his family at Colophon on the Anatolian coast. In this period he studied with the Democritean Nausiphanes, whose atomic physics decisively shaped his thinking (the sources differ on where and exactly when: Colophon c. 321 BCE in one account, Teos c. 327–324 BCE in others). Epicurus would nevertheless insist he was self-taught — indeed he later denigrated Nausiphanes by name. He began teaching around 311 BCE at Mytilene on Lesbos, moved to Lampsacus on the Hellespont, and finally returned to Athens around 307/306 BCE for the rest of his life.

In Athens he founded the Garden (Kepos), a philosophical community of a kind unprecedented in the Greek world. Unlike the aristocratic Academy and Lyceum, the Garden admitted women, slaves, and the poor on equal terms, organized around friendship (philia), shared simple meals, and the deliberate cultivation of contentment with little. Epicurus's leading disciples included Metrodorus, Hermarchus, and Polyaenus, and the community kept his writings — three letters survive intact (to Herodotus on physics, to Pythocles on meteorology, to Menoeceus on ethics), along with the Principal Doctrines (Kuriai Doxai) and the Vatican Sayings. The school endured at Athens for some five centuries.

Epicurus's physics was atomist: indivisible atoms move eternally through infinite void, combining and dissolving to form bodies. To explain how free agency is possible in a deterministic atomic cosmos he introduced the swerve (parenklisis, Lucretius's clinamen), a minute, uncaused deviation of atoms from their straight fall. The gods exist — they are themselves blessed and immortal living beings — but they are wholly indifferent to human affairs; petitionary religion is a misunderstanding. Death is the dissolution of the atomic soul and therefore not an evil: "when we are, death is not; when death is, we are not." The good is pleasure, properly understood as the absence of bodily pain (aponia) and mental disturbance (ataraxia), pursued through the elimination of empty desires — not luxury. The Tetrapharmakos, the four-part remedy, condenses the whole therapy: the gods are not to be feared; death is nothing to us; what is good is easy to obtain; what is terrible is easy to endure.

Epicureanism's afterlife is a study in misrepresentation and recovery. Lucretius's Latin poem De Rerum Natura (1st c. BCE) transmitted the system to Rome in unmatched literary form; Cicero, though hostile, preserved much of it; the school produced inscriptions and treatises across the empire. But its denial of divine providence and personal immortality scandalized Stoics, Skeptics, Jews, and (above all) Christians; the word "Epicurean" became a byword for hedonism, and Dante consigned Epicurus to the Sixth Circle of Hell. The recovery began in the seventeenth century with Pierre Gassendi, who reconciled Epicurean atomism with Christian theology and transmitted it to early modern science (Boyle, Locke). Modern atomism, empiricism, secular ethics, and the philosophy of mortality all owe Epicurus a debt his ancient critics would have found unimaginable.