A Teacher
Epicurus
Atomism and ataraxia
The transmission
Epicurus (341–270 BCE) was a Greek philosopher, born on the island of Samos to Athenian settlers, who founded one of the most influential schools of antiquity. Around 307 BCE he established his community at Athens in a house with a garden—“the Garden”—where, unusually for the age, women and slaves were welcomed alongside free men in the pursuit of philosophy as a way of life.
He wrote voluminously, though most survives only in a few letters, maxims, and the great Latin poem of his Roman follower Lucretius. (Note: the tradition tag skepticism is the closest available family for his anti-superstitious materialism; Epicureanism itself has no dedicated tag.) For the mind-power lineage, Epicurus is the principled counter-voice—a respectful reminder, within a “sincere experiment,” that not every ancient sage located the cause of things in mind or spirit.
Reviving the atomism of Democritus, he held that everything is composed of atoms moving in void, that the soul too is material and dissolves at death, and that the gods, if they exist, take no interest in human affairs.
From this physics he drew a therapeutic ethics: since death is “nothing to us” and the gods are not to be feared, the wise life is one of ataraxia—freedom from mental disturbance—and aponia, freedom from bodily pain, attained through modest pleasures, friendship, and the clearing away of false beliefs and superstitious dread.
His insistence that fear and anxiety arise from mistaken beliefs, and dissolve when those beliefs are corrected, is itself a sharp psychological insight into how the mind constructs its own suffering.
What they gave
Suffering as the product of false belief: Holds that fear of death and the gods springs from mistaken beliefs and dissolves when corrected—a cognitive insight into mind-made distress, even within a materialist frame.
- Ataraxia as the goal: Centers the good life on tranquillity and freedom from disturbance, an inner state cultivated by reasoning away groundless fears.
- A materialist counterpoint: Offers a disciplined naturalism that denies mental or divine causation of the cosmos, marking the boundary against which mind-first traditions define themselves.
- Therapy of belief: Treats philosophy as a medicine for the soul that works by replacing false opinions with true ones, a structure that echoes far beyond his own doctrines.
In their words
Death is nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling, and that which has no feeling is nothing to us.
Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.
It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living pleasantly.
Of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.
Of our desires some are natural and necessary, others are natural, but not necessary; others, again, are neither natural nor necessary, but are due to illusory opinion.
The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom.
We are born once and cannot be born twice, but for all time must be no more. But you, who are not master of tomorrow, postpone your happiness. Life is wasted in procrastination, and each one of us dies while occupied.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Democritus (atomism and void); the Cyrenaic hedonists (pleasure as the good); and his teacher Nausiphanes.
- Influenced: Lucretius and Roman Epicureanism; Renaissance and Enlightenment materialism; Thomas Jefferson (a self-described Epicurean); and modern secular and therapeutic ethics.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Letter to Menoeceusc.300 BCE
- Principal Doctrines (Kyriai Doxai)c.300 BCE