The Garden
Epicurus, 341 to 270 BCE, Samos and then Athens. He bought a garden outside the city and taught there, which is where the school gets its name.
The Garden was unusual in a way that scandalised Athens: it admitted women and enslaved people as full members. That fact alone produced a great deal of hostile gossip about what went on there, and much of the later reputation for debauchery traces back to slander from rival schools.
Almost all of his writing is lost. We have three letters, the Principal Doctrines, the Vatican Sayings, and charred scrolls from Herculaneum still being read by imaging techniques. The fullest surviving exposition of his system is Lucretius' poem De Rerum Natura, written two centuries later.
What he actually taught
Pleasure is the good, yes. But he defines pleasure as the absence of bodily pain (aponia) and mental disturbance (ataraxia), which turns the whole thing inside out. You're not accumulating pleasures. You're removing sources of trouble.
From which follows a classification of desires that's still useful:
| Type of desire | Examples | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Natural and necessary | Food, shelter, friendship, freedom from pain | Satisfy these. They're cheap and they're enough. |
| Natural but unnecessary | Rich food, a nicer house | Enjoy occasionally, don't organise your life around them. |
| Neither natural nor necessary | Fame, power, wealth, status | Drop these. They're unlimited by definition and can never be satisfied. |
The argument about death
His best-known move, and it still gets debated in philosophy departments.
Death is nothing to us, he says, because while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we do not exist. There is no moment at which death is bad for the person who dies, because there's no subject left for it to be bad for.
He pairs it with the symmetry argument: you weren't distressed by the eternity before your birth, so it's inconsistent to be distressed by the eternity after your death.
Whether it works is a live question. It addresses the badness of being dead, and arguably says nothing about deprivation, or about the badness of dying, or about grief for other people. But it's a real argument rather than a consolation, which is rarer than it should be.
Friendship, and the gods
He rated friendship above almost everything: of all the things wisdom provides for a blessed life, he said, much the greatest is friendship. The Garden was a community, not a lecture hall, and that was the point.
On the gods: he didn't deny them, he simply held that they take no interest in us. They exist, blissfully, elsewhere, and neither reward nor punish. That was atheism as far as most Athenians were concerned, and it's why Epicureanism was so aggressively slandered for centuries.
Reading him
The Art of Happiness (Penguin) collects the surviving material and is short. Lucretius' On the Nature of Things is the full system in verse, and the Stallings translation is superb.
Neighbours: Stoicism, the rival school with a surprising amount in common, and simple living, which he arguably invented. 365 Days of Philosophy covers him in the Hellenistic sequence.
Common questions
What did Epicurus actually teach?
That pleasure is the good, but defined as the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance. The practical upshot is removing sources of trouble and limiting desire, not accumulating luxuries.
Why is 'epicurean' associated with fine dining?
Slander from rival schools, amplified over centuries, partly because his Garden admitted women and enslaved people and scandalised Athens. He himself lived on bread and water with occasional cheese.
What is Epicurus's argument about death?
That death is nothing to us: while we exist it isn't present, and when it's present we don't exist, so there's no subject for it to be bad for. He adds that the eternity before your birth didn't trouble you.
Did Epicurus believe in gods?
He accepted that gods exist but held that they take no interest in human affairs and neither reward nor punish. Most Athenians treated that as atheism.
What should I read to understand Epicureanism?
The Penguin collection The Art of Happiness for the surviving fragments, and Lucretius' On the Nature of Things for the full system. A.E. Stallings' verse translation of Lucretius is excellent.