Epicurus c.341-270BC
Greek philosopher and founder of the Epicurean school

Born on the island of Samos, he visited Athens at the age of 18, opened a school at Mitylene (310BC) and taught there and at Lampsacus. He returned to Athens and established a successful school of philosophy (305), known as the 'Gardens', where he led a life of temperance and simplicity. The Gardens became the model for other Epicurean communities, or communes, where members could live peacefully in friendship. Only three letters and a few fragments of his 300 or so works survive and most of our knowledge of his doctrines comes from Cicero, Plutarch and in particular, Lucretius. He believed that pleasure is the chief good and the only goal of morality, by which he meant freedom from pain and anxiety, not (as the term 'epicure' has since come to mean) one who indulges sensual pleasures without stint. These ethical views are supported by a materialistic psychology and an atomistic physics (largely derived from Democritus) which demonstrate that the world operates on mechanical principles and that neither death nor the gods are to be feared, that the gods do not intervene in the world or punish the guilty, and that the human soul and body are a combination of atoms that dissolve and perish together. Epicureanism and Stoicism were the two great philosophies of the Hellenic period, and both found many followers in Rome and endured for many centuries.