Epicurus was born on Samos in 341 BCE, the son of an Athenian schoolteacher, and learned atomism from a follower of Democritus. He taught at Mytilene and Lampsacus before moving to Athens in 307 or 306 BCE, where he bought a house with a garden just outside the city wall. The school was simply called the Garden.
It admitted women and slaves as full members, which Athens found scandalous, and it taught that the good life was quiet, frugal and shared with friends. Epicurus died in 270 BCE of a kidney stone, writing on his last day that the memory of his friends outweighed the pain. His will left the Garden to the school and freed his slaves.
Pleasure is the goal, and pleasure means the absence of pain. Ataraxia, an untroubled mind, and aponia, a body at ease. The feast is not the point. The point is not needing the feast.
Sort your desires. Natural and necessary (food, shelter, friends), natural but unnecessary (a better dinner), and empty (fame, immortality). Happiness lives in the first kind.
Death is nothing to us. Where we are, death is not; where death is, we are not. There is no one left to suffer it.
The gods do not care. They exist, said Epicurus, but they are blessed and untroubled, and a blessed being does not run the weather or punish anyone.
Atoms and the swerve. Everything is atoms falling through void, but atoms sometimes swerve, unpredictably, and that swerve is where freedom lives.
Friendship above all. Of everything wisdom provides for a happy life, Epicurus ranked friendship first.
The Garden was the first school in Athens that women could join as philosophers rather than guests. Leontion wrote a treatise against Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor, which Cicero was still calling impertinent two centuries later, which is a review of sorts. Themista of Lampsacus received letters from Epicurus himself.
The school’s reach was never Athenian either. Epicurus was raised on Samos off the Anatolian coast, Philodemus came from Gadara in what is now Jordan, and the wall at Oenoanda stands in southern Turkey.
The Stoics were the Garden’s opponents for five hundred years, over whether the goal is virtue or pleasure, and both sides would have hated how alike they sound today. Cynicism is a cousin in simple living, minus the public shamelessness. The Platonist Academy and later the early Church treated Epicurus as a byword for gluttony and godlessness, and that campaign is the reason so little of him survives.
The Tetrapharmakos, the four-part cure — don’t fear god, don’t worry about death, what is good is easy to get, what is terrible is easy to endure — reads like a modern anxiety card. The Herculaneum scrolls are still being read, now with X-rays and machine learning, and new Philodemus turns up every few years. Utilitarianism begins from an Epicurean premise. And “epicure” still means gourmet, which would have baffled a man whose idea of a feast was a little cheese.