Epicurus

Epicurus was born in 342 BCE on the island of Samos in the eastern Aegean, where his father Neocles had settled as an Athenian colonist ^[1]. The family held Athenian citizenship, and Neocles reportedly worked as a schoolteacher, a modest occupation that later rivals of Epicurus used to mock his origins ^[2]. His mother, Chaerestrate, is said by some ancient sources to have performed purification rites in local households, another detail that hostile biographers exaggerated to belittle the philosopher's background ^[1].

According to Diogenes Laertius, whose tenth book preserves most of what is known about the philosopher's life, Epicurus began studying philosophy at fourteen, allegedly after his teachers could not explain the meaning of chaos in Hesiod ^[1]. On Samos he encountered the ideas of the Platonist Pamphilus, and later he studied with Nausiphanes of Teos, a follower of Democritus ^[2]. The atomism of Democritus, the view that the world consists of indivisible particles moving through void, became the physical foundation of everything Epicurus would later teach, although he never acknowledged much debt to Nausiphanes and spoke of him with open contempt ^[3].

At eighteen Epicurus traveled to Athens to complete the two years of military and civic training required of young Athenian citizens ^[1]. His service coincided with a turbulent moment: Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, and in the upheaval that followed, Athenian settlers were expelled from Samos. His family relocated to Colophon on the coast of Asia Minor, and Epicurus joined them there after his training ended ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Epicurus before Athens must look to the eastern Aegean, where his teaching career actually began. Around 311 BCE he opened a school in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, but his stay was brief and apparently contentious; ancient reports suggest local hostility, possibly from established philosophical rivals, forced him to leave ^[2]. He moved on to Lampsacus on the Hellespont, where he had far greater success and gathered a circle of devoted students, including Metrodorus, Hermarchus, and the wealthy Idomeneus, several of whom would remain with him for life ^[1].

In 306 BCE Epicurus returned to Athens and purchased a house with a garden for eighty minae ^[1]. This property gave the school its enduring name, the Garden, and set it apart from the two dominant institutions of Athenian philosophy, Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum. Where those schools were tied to public gymnasia, the Garden was private, deliberately withdrawn from civic life, and organized more like a community of friends than a formal academy ^[4].

The Garden was notable for admitting women and slaves as full participants, a practice almost unheard of among Greek philosophical schools ^[4]. Leontion, a woman who wrote a treatise against Theophrastus, and Mys, a slave in the household, both appear in ancient accounts as members of the circle ^[1]. Critics seized on the presence of women to spread rumors of scandal, but the surviving evidence points instead to a disciplined, frugal community whose members reportedly lived mainly on bread, cheese, and water ^[2].

The list of Epicurus achievements begins with sheer productivity. Diogenes Laertius credits him with around three hundred rolls of writing, more than any philosopher before him, including the thirty seven book treatise On Nature ^[1]. Almost all of it is lost. What survives directly amounts to three letters preserved by Diogenes (to Herodotus on physics, to Pythocles on celestial phenomena, and to Menoeceus on ethics), a collection of forty sayings called the Principal Doctrines, and a second set of maxims discovered in a Vatican manuscript in 1888 ^[3]. Charred fragments of On Nature have also been recovered from the papyri of Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE ^[5].

His philosophical system rested on three connected parts. In physics he adapted the atomism of Democritus, holding that nothing exists except atoms and void, and he introduced the famous doctrine of the swerve, an uncaused deviation in atomic motion that broke strict determinism and made room for free action ^[3]. In epistemology he insisted that the senses are the ultimate basis of knowledge and that error arises from judgment, not from sensation itself ^[6]. In ethics he argued that pleasure is the goal of life, but he defined the highest pleasure negatively: ataraxia, tranquility of mind, and aponia, absence of bodily pain ^[4].

This was not the indulgence that the modern word epicurean suggests. Epicurus classified desires as natural and necessary, natural but unnecessary, or empty, and he taught that the wise person satisfies only the first group, since simple needs are easy to meet and extravagant ones breed anxiety ^[6]. His remedy for the two greatest human fears was equally direct. The gods, he argued, exist but are blessed beings who take no interest in human affairs, so divine punishment is nothing to dread; and death is nothing to us, because when death is present we no longer exist to experience it ^[3]. Later Epicureans compressed this therapy into a four part formula known as the tetrapharmakos, the fourfold cure ^[5].

Epicurus never married and had no children, a choice consistent with his general advice that the wise man should usually avoid entanglements that disturb tranquility ^[1]. Friendship, by contrast, he treated as close to sacred. One of his Principal Doctrines states that of everything wisdom provides for a happy life, the acquisition of friendship is by far the greatest, and the Garden itself functioned as a standing experiment in living among friends ^[4].

His personal habits, as far as the record shows, matched his teaching. He praised plain living, and a surviving fragment has him asking a friend to send a small pot of cheese so that he might feast when he wished ^[2]. He also kept up a warm correspondence with followers scattered around the Aegean, and celebrated regular common meals with his community, including a monthly gathering that continued in his memory long after his death ^[1].

Epicurus deliberately avoided politics, summarizing his stance in the maxim live unnoticed ^[6]. This withdrawal drew criticism in antiquity from Stoics and others who considered civic participation a duty, and the dispute over whether a good life requires public engagement ran through ancient philosophy for centuries afterward ^[4].

Epicurus led the Garden for more than three decades, from his arrival in Athens in 306 BCE until his death, and unlike many ancient schools it suffered no succession crisis while he lived ^[1]. He endured the deaths of close companions, including Metrodorus, who died around 278 BCE and whom Epicurus had expected to succeed him; the philosopher instead named Hermarchus of Mytilene as the next head of the school ^[2].

In his final years he suffered from kidney stones, an agonizing condition in the ancient world. He died in Athens in 270 BCE at the age of seventy two ^[1]. Diogenes Laertius preserves a letter written on his last day, addressed to Idomeneus, in which Epicurus describes his physical pain as extreme but says it is counterbalanced by the joy of remembering past conversations with his friends ^[1]. Ancient readers on both sides of the debate about his philosophy cited the letter, some as proof of serenity under suffering, others with skepticism.

His will, also preserved by Diogenes, left the Garden and its library to Hermarchus and made provision for the children of Metrodorus, for annual commemorations of his own birthday, and for the freeing of several slaves, including Mys ^[1]. The school he organized proved remarkably durable, maintaining an unusually fixed body of doctrine and surviving in Athens for hundreds of years ^[4].

Epicureanism spread widely across the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Its most celebrated monument is De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), the Latin poem in which Lucretius, writing in the first century BCE, set out the entire Epicurean system in six books of hexameter verse ^[7]. Cicero, though a critic, discussed the doctrine extensively, and in the second century CE a wealthy follower named Diogenes commissioned a huge inscription of Epicurean teachings on a wall in Oenoanda in Asia Minor, portions of which archaeologists have recovered ^[5].

The rise of Christianity brought hostility. Because Epicurus denied providence, divine punishment, and the immortality of the soul, later religious writers treated his name as shorthand for godlessness, and Dante placed the Epicureans among the heretics ^[3]. The word epicure meanwhile drifted into meaning a lover of fine food, almost the reverse of the frugal life the philosopher practiced. Recovery began in the Renaissance: Poggio Bracciolini found a manuscript of Lucretius in 1417, and in the seventeenth century the French priest Pierre Gassendi rehabilitated Epicurean atomism in a form that influenced Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton ^[7].

Modern assessments place Epicurus among the founders of empiricism, hedonistic ethics, and secular thinking about death. Thomas Jefferson declared himself an Epicurean in an 1819 letter, and Karl Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation comparing Democritean and Epicurean physics ^[6]. For anyone weighing Epicurus facts against his popular reputation, the record is clear: any serious Epicurus biography describes not a glutton but an ascetic of contentment, a thinker who held that a calm mind, simple needs, and good friends are enough for a happy life ^[4].