Epicurus 341 BC – 270 BC

Epicurus was a Greek Hellenistic philosopher who founded the school known as the Garden in Athens around 307 BC. His ethics taught that pleasure, properly understood as the absence of pain in the body and disturbance in the soul, is the highest good and the natural goal of human life. His physics was atomistic, drawing on Democritus, and held that the gods exist but take no interest in human affairs. Most of his extensive writings are lost, but his ideas survive in three letters preserved by Diogenes Laertius, in the Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings, and in the Latin epic poem of his follower Lucretius. Epicureanism was a major Hellenistic school for centuries and was rediscovered as a serious philosophical option in the European Renaissance and early modern period.

Epicurus (341–270 BC) founded the Garden, the Athenian school that gave its name to Epicureanism, around 307 BC. He had studied with various pre-Socratic and Platonic teachers and was decisively shaped by the atomism of Democritus before developing his own systematic philosophical position.

Epicurus's surviving works are fragmentary — three letters preserved by Diogenes Laertius (to Herodotus on natural philosophy, to Pythocles on celestial phenomena, to Menoeceus on ethics), the Principal Doctrines, and the Vatican Sayings — supplemented by Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, which expounds Epicurean physics in Latin verse. Epicurean philosophy is built on three pillars: an atomist physics that explains all phenomena through the motion of atoms in void; a canonic that grounds knowledge in sense-perception, prolepsis, and feeling; and an ethics that identifies the highest good with stable pleasure (ataraxia), achieved through moderation, friendship, and the dissolution of irrational fears about gods and death.

The Garden welcomed women and slaves as full members, an unusual feature among ancient philosophical schools. Epicureanism remained one of the dominant Hellenistic schools for centuries before being marginalized under Christian dominance. The early modern recovery of Lucretius — through Poggio Bracciolini's 1417 rediscovery of De Rerum Natura — fed directly into seventeenth-century atomism and Enlightenment thought.