Epicurus

I was born on Samos to Athenian parents and taught in Mytilene and Lampsacus before I came to Athens. There, in a small plot beyond the city walls, I founded the Garden. We welcomed women and enslaved persons as fellow inquirers. We ate plainly, conversed frankly, and treated philosophy as a craft for living, not an ornament for display.

I named the good pleasure—not excess, but the settled calm of ataraxia and the painless ease of aponia. I learned to choose and avoid by sorting desires: natural and necessary, natural though unnecessary, and vain. Bread, water, and a friend suffice for feasts. Fame, luxury, and the scramble of politics disturb more than they delight.

I taught that all things are bodies and void. The heavens and the weather have material causes and require no divine alarm. The gods, if they exist, are blessed and unconcerned with us; honor them as models of serenity, but do not fear them. To keep action from being a chain of necessity, I allowed a slight, lawless swerve among the atoms.

I wrote copiously, yet little survives: three letters and the Principal Doctrines, with sayings preserved later, and Lucretius’ poem carrying our physics in Latin verse. My counsel remained constant—friendship, frank speech, measured pleasures, and to live unnoticed. In illness I guarded tranquility and entrusted the Garden to Hermarchus. Ask, and I will show how quiet courage sweetens a short life.