Epicurus (341–270 BCE) was born on Samos. He took the kernel of his physics — atomism — from Democritus, but turned it less into cosmology than into a prescription for living. Around 307 BCE in Athens he bought a garden and founded his school, known simply as *Kepos*, 'the Garden'. Unlike the Academy and the Lyceum, the Garden admitted women and slaves as students — a still under-noted but radical step.

His physics is materialist: everything that exists is atoms moving through void. The gods exist but, being perfect and self-sufficient, take no interest in human affairs; oracles, curses, posthumous reward and punishment are baseless fears. *Death is nothing to us; for while we exist, death is not, and when death is present, we no longer exist.* The point of the sentence is not metaphysical but therapeutic — to free a person from the two great consuming fears, of the gods and of death.

Ethics is built on that ground. The aim of life is not pleasure (*hedonê*) as such, but a particular kind of pleasure — *ataraxia*, an unshaken inner calm. The way to it runs not through luxury but through a careful triage of desires: some are natural and necessary (food, water, friendship), some natural but unnecessary (a fine meal), some neither (fame, unlimited wealth). To be happy it is enough that the first kind be met. The modern English usage of *epicure* — a connoisseur of luxury — is precisely the opposite of the original teaching.

Most of Epicurus's own writing is lost; we know the doctrine chiefly through his *Letter to Menoeceus* and the great Latin poem *De Rerum Natura* of Lucretius. The Garden's teaching lived on in the Hellenistic world for centuries, was carried into Rome by Lucretius and Horace, was rediscovered in the Renaissance, and became one of the ethical ancestors of modern scientific materialism.