Epicurus (342 BCE - 270 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of Epicureanism, one of the principal schools of Hellenistic thought. [1] Teaching from a garden in Athens, he combined an atomist account of nature with an ethics in which pleasure, understood as freedom from bodily pain and mental disturbance, is the goal of life. [2]
Life
Epicurus was born in 342 BCE on the Aegean island of Samos to Athenian parents who had settled there as colonists. [1] He is said to have begun studying philosophy in his teens and was influenced by the atomism of Democritus through the teacher Nausiphanes. After the Athenians were expelled from Samos he lived in Colophon, and he later taught at Mytilene on Lesbos and at Lampsacus, where he gathered his first circle of followers.
Around 307 or 306 BCE he settled in Athens and bought a property that became known as the Garden, which served as both school and residence for his community. Unusually for the period, the Garden admitted women and enslaved people as members, and it cultivated a life of withdrawal from public affairs. Epicurus died in Athens in 270 BCE after a long illness.
Physics
Epicurus held that the universe consists of atoms and void, infinite in extent, with no purpose or design behind it. [3] Compound bodies form and dissolve as atoms combine and separate, and worlds come into being and perish without divine direction. To this inherited atomism he added the swerve, an unpredictable deviation in the motion of atoms, which he used to explain both the formation of compounds and the possibility of human freedom in a world of moving matter.
He argued that the soul, too, is composed of atoms and disperses at death. From this he drew his best-known consolation: since sensation ends with death, death is nothing to the one who dies, and the fear of it is groundless. [2]
Ethics
The Epicurean goal was ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance, together with aponia, the absence of bodily pain. Pleasure so understood is not indulgence but a stable condition reached by limiting desire to what is natural and necessary: simple food, shelter, safety and above all friendship, which Epicurus considered the greatest source of lifelong happiness. [4]
He taught that the gods exist but live in perfect tranquillity and take no interest in human affairs, so that religious dread is unfounded. This position led ancient critics to charge the school with impiety, and later usage distorted the word "epicurean" into a term for luxury and sensual excess, a sense at odds with his actual teaching.
Writings and influence
Epicurus was a prolific author, but his major work On Nature survives only in fragments, some recovered from charred papyrus rolls at Herculaneum. What is known of his doctrine comes chiefly from three letters and a set of maxims, the Principal Doctrines, preserved by the biographer Diogenes Laertius. [1]
His philosophy spread widely in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds and received its fullest surviving exposition in the Latin poem De rerum natura by Lucretius. Rediscovered in the Renaissance, Epicurean atomism and its critique of superstition influenced early modern natural philosophy and later utilitarian and secular ethics. [3]
