Epicurus

Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who founded one of the great schools of the Hellenistic age, known after its meeting place as the Garden. He taught that the universe is made of atoms moving in empty space, that the gods take no interest in human affairs, that death is nothing to fear, and that the goal of life is pleasure, understood not as indulgence but as freedom from pain and anxiety. His followers kept his teaching almost unchanged for six centuries, and his ideas returned with force in early modern Europe.

Epicurus was born in 341 BCE on the island of Samos, in the eastern Aegean. His parents, Neocles and Chaerestrate, were Athenian citizens who had settled there as colonists after Athens took control of the island. As a teenager he studied with a Platonist named Pamphilus and later with Nausiphanes of Teos, a follower of Democritus, whose atomic theory he would take over and rework, although he later spoke of both teachers with scorn and liked to present himself as self-taught.

At eighteen he went to Athens for the two years of military training required of young citizens. During this period, in 323 BCE, Alexander the Great died, and in the upheaval that followed the Athenian settlers were expelled from Samos. Epicurus joined his family in exile at Colophon, on the coast of Asia Minor, where he spent about ten years studying and developing his own views.

Around 311 BCE he began teaching at Mytilene on Lesbos, but his ideas caused trouble there and he moved to Lampsacus, near the Hellespont, where he gathered a circle of devoted friends and students, among them Metrodorus, Hermarchus and Colotes. In about 306 BCE he returned to Athens, bought a house with a garden outside the city walls and settled there for the rest of his life.

The Garden was unusual among the schools of Greece. It admitted women and slaves as well as free men, and its members lived together in a simple, communal way, sharing meals of bread, water and occasionally cheese. Friendship was at the heart of the community, and Epicurus regarded it as one of the greatest goods a person could have. Members were encouraged to memorise short summaries of his doctrines, and the school honoured its founder with monthly gatherings. Critics accused the Epicureans of gluttony and debauchery, a reputation that had little to do with the actual life of the community.

Epicurus held that everything that exists is made of tiny, indivisible bodies, atoms, moving through an infinite void. Worlds form and dissolve as atoms collide and combine, without any plan or purpose. Unlike Democritus, he argued that atoms occasionally make a tiny, unpredictable swerve from their paths. The surviving evidence for the swerve comes mainly from later Epicureans, but its purpose seems to have been twofold: to explain how atoms falling in parallel ever meet, and to leave room for human freedom in a world that would otherwise be strictly determined.

His physics served his ethics. If the world runs by natural causes, there is no reason to fear divine anger or punishment. Epicurus did not deny that gods exist; he thought they were blessed, immortal beings living in perfect calm, and that such beings would never trouble themselves with human affairs. The soul, too, is made of atoms, and it scatters when the body dies. Death is therefore the end of all sensation, and what cannot be felt cannot harm us. Where death is, as he put it, we are not.

He also developed a theory of knowledge based on the senses. All perceptions are true reports of the atomic images that reach us, and errors arise only from the judgements we add to them. Feelings of pleasure and pain, and the general concepts formed from repeated experience, serve as further tests of truth.

For Epicurus, pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life, the natural goal that every creature pursues. But he distinguished carefully between kinds of pleasure and kinds of desire. Some desires are natural and necessary, such as those for food, shelter and friendship; some are natural but unnecessary, such as the wish for luxurious food; and some, such as the craving for fame, wealth or power, are neither natural nor necessary and can never be satisfied. The wise person satisfies the first kind, enjoys the second when it comes easily, and rejects the third.

The highest pleasure, in his view, is a settled state: aponia, the absence of bodily pain, and ataraxia, tranquillity of mind. A person who has enough to eat, is free from fear of the gods and death, and lives among friends already possesses everything needed for happiness. Later followers summed up his teaching in a fourfold remedy: the gods are not to be feared, death is nothing to worry about, the good is easy to obtain, and the bad is easy to endure. He advised withdrawal from political life, which brings anxiety and danger, summed up in the maxim to live unnoticed.

Epicurus wrote a great deal, including a massive work On Nature in 37 books, but almost all of it is lost. Three letters, to Herodotus on physics, to Pythocles on astronomy and weather, and to Menoeceus on ethics, survive because the biographer Diogenes Laertius copied them into his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, together with a collection of forty short Principal Doctrines. Another set of sayings was found in a Vatican manuscript in 1888. Charred fragments of On Nature and of works by later Epicureans have been recovered from the library of a villa at Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE near modern Naples.

Epicurus died in 270 BCE, probably of kidney stones, after a long and painful illness. In a letter written on his last day he said that the joy of remembering his conversations with friends outweighed his suffering. He left the Garden to Hermarchus.

The Epicurean school lasted well into the Roman era. Its greatest literary monument is On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, a long Latin poem written in the last years of the Roman Republic. Epicureanism competed with the school of Zeno of Citium, and even the Stoic Seneca quoted Epicurus with approval in his letters. Christian writers, however, attacked the denial of providence and of the soul's survival, and the school faded in late antiquity. In the Middle Ages the name of Epicurus became a byword for atheism and self-indulgence.

The rediscovery of Lucretius's poem in 1417 brought his ideas back into circulation. In the seventeenth century the French priest Pierre Gassendi tried to reconcile Epicurean atomism with Christianity, and atomism fed into the new science of the period. Thomas Jefferson described himself as an Epicurean, and the young Karl Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation on the differences between the natural philosophy of Democritus and that of Epicurus. Today Epicurus is read as an early advocate of a scientific, naturalistic view of the world and of a modest, humane idea of happiness. He is a central figure of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, alongside Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum and the Stoa.