Epicurus

The Garden — pleasure, atoms, and freedom from fear

The founder of Epicureanism, one of the most influential and most maligned philosophies of antiquity. Teaching in his Athenian garden, Epicurus held that the goal of life is ataraxia — tranquillity won by removing fear of the gods and of death, and by limiting desire to what is natural and necessary. Building on Democritus' atomism, he argued that the soul too is material and dissolves at death, so 'death is nothing to us.' His thought survives most fully through Lucretius' great poem.

Key works

• Letter to Menoeceusc. 300 BC— The ethics of pleasure and the dissolution of the fear of death
  Preserved by Diogenes Laertius
• Principal Doctrines (Kyriai Doxai)c. 300 BC— Forty maxims of the Epicurean life
  Preserved by Diogenes Laertius

Connections

External