Epicureanism

• 1. Introduction

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  Epicureanism was founded in 307 BCE, and for more than six centuries it shaped how millions of people thought about pleasure, death, and the gods. Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher at its center, bought a piece of land in Athens and named it simply the Garden. What happened inside that garden was far stranger, and far more radical, than the word "pleasure" might suggest.

  The school welcomed women and slaves at a time when Athenian philosophy was largely a men's club. It rejected politics, dismissed the gods as indifferent, and taught that death was nothing to be afraid of. It declared pleasure the highest good, then spent most of its energy teaching people how to want less.

  Those apparent contradictions are the heart of the story. How does a philosophy centered on pleasure end up advocating simplicity and withdrawal? Why did Julius Caesar lean toward it, and why did Dante consign its followers to the sixth circle of hell? And how did a set of ideas born in a kitchen garden in Athens survive, vanish, and then return to shape thinkers from Thomas Jefferson to Denis Diderot?

• 2. The Garden and Its Founder

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  Epicurus was born in 342 or 341 BCE on the island of Samos. His education took him first to Pamphilus, a Platonist, and then to Nausiphanes of Teos, a follower of Democritus whose atomic ideas would leave a lasting mark on the young philosopher. Epicurus later tried to downplay those early debts, but scholars have generally concluded that Nausiphanes shaped him more than he admitted.

  At eighteen, Epicurus traveled to Athens for military service. After that, he devoted himself entirely to philosophy, teaching first in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, then in Lampsacus, before returning to Athens. There he bought the property that gave his school its name.

  The Garden was a moderately ascetic community. Members included Hermarchus, who would later lead the school; Idomeneus; Colotes; Polyaenus; and Metrodorus of Lampsacus. Epicurus placed friendship at the center of the good life, and the community reflected that: it was genuinely mixed by the standards of the time, including women and slaves alongside free male citizens. A monthly social gathering called the Eikas was held on the twentieth of the Greek month, a day otherwise considered sacred to the god Apollo. Some members were vegetarians, and there is slight evidence that Epicurus himself did not eat meat, though no formal prohibition was ever issued.

• 3. Atoms, Swerve, and Infinite Worlds

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  In his letter to Herodotus (not the historian), Epicurus set out three foundational claims about physical reality: nothing comes from nothing; nothing that is destroyed ceases to exist entirely; and everything that exists now always did and always will. From those principles he built a picture of a universe composed entirely of matter and void.

  Matter, in Epicurean physics, is made of atoms. Atoms have only three unchanging properties: shape, size, and weight. They cannot be broken down further because atoms contain no void, and without void there is no space for anything to split apart.

  Atoms move in four ways. They collide and bounce. When bound into larger objects, they vibrate while keeping that object's shape. When unimpeded, all atoms fall downward at the same speed. And occasionally they swerve. That last motion was the crucial one. Without the swerve, atoms would never have intersected and nothing would exist. Epicurus also used the swerve to account for free will: without it, every human action would be the product of an unbroken chain of cause and effect, a position he used to criticize Democritus. Because atoms are infinite in number, though finite in type, an infinite number of worlds follow, each separated from the others by vast stretches of void called metakosmia.

• 4. Pleasure, Pain, and the Hierarchy of Desire

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  Epicurus wrote that it was impossible to live pleasantly without living wisely, honorably, and justly, and equally impossible to live wisely, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly. That tight link between ethics and pleasure is what set the school apart.

  The philosophy divided pleasure into pleasures of the body and pleasures of the mind. Bodily pleasures exist only in the present moment: the act of eating, the sensation of comfort. Mental pleasures span past, present, and future, since memory of something pleasant and anticipation of something pleasing are themselves sources of enjoyment. That asymmetry made mental pleasure the higher category.

  Within each category, Epicureans distinguished kinetic pleasures, which involve action or change, from katastematic pleasures, which are the stable states of being free from pain or fear. Aponia (absence of bodily pain) and ataraxia (freedom from mental disturbance) were the katastematic pleasures Epicurus held most important. The goal was not to pile up experiences but to reach a state where all sources of pain, mental or physical, had been removed.

  Desires were sorted into three classes. Natural and necessary desires, such as food, drink, shelter, and friendship, were to be fulfilled. Natural but unnecessary desires, such as wanting delicious food rather than merely adequate food, were permissible as long as they caused no harm and did not crowd out the necessary ones. Unnatural and unnecessary desires, such as the pursuit of wealth, power, or fame, were to be avoided entirely. These last desires were judged dangerous not because they were immoral in any abstract sense, but because they produced more anxiety and fear of loss than any satisfaction they provided.

• 5. Death, the Gods, and What to Fear

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  Epicureanism rejects immortality. The soul, in this view, is as material as the body and dissolves with it at death. Epicurus drew a direct conclusion from that position: death cannot harm the person who dies, because that person no longer exists to be harmed. The doctrine gave rise to an epitaph used by his followers: "Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo." In Latin, that means: I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care. The phrase appears on many ancient gravestones of the Roman Empire.

  The Epicurean position on the gods was equally careful. The philosophy does not deny that gods exist. It denies that they have any involvement in human life or the wider universe. Gods, on this view, do not send storms as punishment or answer prayers. Epicurus wanted to free people from fear of divine retribution precisely because that fear was a chief source of mental disturbance.

  Whether the Epicurean gods exist as actual material beings, living undisturbed in the metakosmia between worlds, or whether they are idealized images of the best human life, remains a genuine scholarly dispute. A. A. Long and David Sedley took up the question in their 1987 book The Hellenistic Philosophers, arguing for the idealist position. No scholarly consensus has settled the debate, though the realist interpretation remains the most widely held view.

• 6. From Athens to Rome and Beyond

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  After Epicurus died, leadership of the Garden passed to Hermarchus, who had originally come from Mytilene. Hermarchus was succeeded by Polystratus. The school spread steadily, establishing communities in Antioch, Alexandria, Rhodes, and Herculaneum.

  One of the earliest Roman writers to take up Epicureanism was Amafinius, though none of his work has survived. The philosopher Cicero heard Phaedrus lecture when Phaedrus led the Athenian school around 90 BCE and had traveled to Rome. Cicero himself was no Epicurean, but he preserved arguments by Lucius Manlius Torquatus and Gaius Velleius defending the school's views.

  The most widely read Epicurean text in the Roman world was the didactic poem De Rerum Natura, written by Titus Lucretius Carus, who lived roughly from 91 to 51 BCE. The poem aimed to liberate readers from fear of the gods and of death and to guide them toward tranquility. Julius Caesar leaned considerably toward Epicureanism, a disposition that shaped his speech against the death penalty during the Catiline conspiracy, where he found himself at odds with the Stoic Cato. Caesar's father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, was also a committed follower.

  In the 2nd century CE, the comedian Lucian of Samosata and the wealthy philosopher-patron Diogenes of Oenoanda were prominent Epicureans. Diogenes had the tenets of the philosophy inscribed on a portico wall in Oenoanda in Lycia, in what is now Turkey. By the late 3rd century CE, however, the school had nearly vanished, displaced by Neoplatonism, Peripateticism, and eventually Christianity.

• 7. Survival, Rediscovery, and Misreading

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  In the 17th century, the French Franciscan priest Pierre Gassendi wrote two books that forcefully revived Epicureanism. Walter Charleton followed shortly after, publishing several works on the philosophy in English. Opposition continued, particularly from the Cambridge Platonists.

  Thomas Jefferson called himself an Epicurean. In a letter, he described Gassendi's Syntagma of Epicurus' doctrines as "the most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients" and praised it as frugal of vicious indulgence and rich in virtue. Other figures who counted themselves Epicureans included Denis Diderot, Frances Wright, and Jeremy Bentham.

  In the 21st century, Stephen Greenblatt identified himself as strongly sympathetic to Epicureanism and Lucretius in his 2011 book The Swerve. Michel Onfray has been developing a post-modern approach to the philosophy in France. Humanistic Judaism as a denomination also claims the Epicurean label.

  The persistent misreading of the school is its own story. In modern popular usage, an Epicurean has come to mean a connoisseur of fine food and drink, almost the opposite of what Epicurus taught. The confusion has ancient roots: critics since antiquity accused the school of promoting sexual excess and luxury. Epicurus responded directly in his surviving writings, insisting that the pleasant life came from sober reasoning and the removal of fear, not from banquets. He was not entirely against occasional indulgence, but the monthly Eikas feast of the Garden was celebrated on the day sacred to Apollo, and one reason the Garden became known as a kitchen garden was that it grew food, not that it prepared elaborate meals. The Epicurea, a collection of Epicurus' texts and fragments assembled by Hermann Usener in 1887, remains one of the key resources for reading the philosopher's actual words.