Epicurus founded Epicureanism, teaching in his school "the Garden" that the natural world consists entirely of atoms moving through void, including an unpredictable random "swerve" that makes room for chance and human freedom within a materialist physics. On this basis he argued that the highest good is pleasure understood as the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance (ataraxia), attainable through modest desires, friendship, and freedom from the fear of death and the gods.
Intellectual setting
Epicurus taught in Hellenistic Athens alongside the rival Stoic and Academic schools, founding a community, the Garden, that admitted women and enslaved people and organized itself around shared philosophical friendship rather than civic political life, in the aftermath of the Macedonian conquests that had diminished the Greek city-state's political autonomy.
Key ideas
Pleasure as the absence of pain (ataraxia)
Epicurus redefined the hedonist good not as active sensory indulgence but as a stable state free of bodily pain and mental disturbance, to be secured by satisfying only natural and necessary desires and avoiding needless wants for wealth, status, or excess.
Death is nothing to us
Epicurus argued that because the soul is a temporary arrangement of atoms that dissolves at death, "when we exist, death is not, and when death exists, we are not," so fearing death is irrational and its removal is essential to a tranquil life.
Legacy
Epicurus's school persisted for centuries and was transmitted to Rome above all through Lucretius's poem "On the Nature of Things," which carried Epicurean atomism and ethics into the Renaissance and early modern materialism, and his hedonist ethics remains a reference point in later utilitarian and hedonic psychology debates.