Epicurus

When Epicurus founded his school at Athens in 306 BCE, he did something unusual for the time: he called it the Garden, met in a house and its grounds rather than a public gymnasium, and opened membership to women and enslaved people alongside free male citizens, a mix ancient critics sometimes mocked as scandalous. The community lived simply, largely on bread, water, and a little cheese on special occasions, not from asceticism for its own sake but because Epicurus held that pleasure, properly understood, is not indulgence but the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance, ataraxia, and that lavish desires create more suffering than they relieve by making contentment depend on things outside one's control. He taught that the world is made only of atoms and void, following Democritus, which meant the soul dissolves at death exactly as the body does, so death is, in his famous formula, nothing to us: while we exist death is not present, and once death is present we no longer exist. He argued the gods, if they exist, live in perfect untroubled bliss and take no interest in human affairs, so neither punishment nor reward from them is anything to fear. Friendship he ranked among the highest goods a wise life can secure. The Garden endured as an organized community for roughly seven centuries, its members reciting his maxims and keeping his birthday as a feast day long after his death.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ancient sources credit Epicurus with an extraordinarily large body of writing, reportedly some three hundred scrolls covering physics, ethics, and the theory of knowledge alike, yet almost none of it survives in its original form. What is known of his own words directly comes chiefly through Diogenes Laertius, whose later biographical compendium preserved three of Epicurus's letters in full, the Letter to Herodotus summarizing his physics, the Letter to Pythocles on astronomical phenomena, and the Letter to Menoeceus on ethics, along with a collection of short maxims known as the Principal Doctrines.

A further, physically direct source emerged only in modern times: charred papyrus scrolls buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and recovered from a private library at Herculaneum, the so called Villa of the Papyri, include Epicurean philosophical texts, among them works by the later Epicurean Philodemus and fragments scholars have connected to Epicurus's own lost treatise On Nature. Advances in imaging technology have continued to make portions of that carbonized, previously unreadable material legible.

Between a late biographer's preserved letters and a volcanic accident's underground library, what survives of Epicurus's own voice is a small, unevenly preserved remainder of a body of writing ancient sources describe as vast, a transmission history as instructive about how philosophy reaches later readers as the doctrine it carries.