Epicurus

Epicurus (Greek: Ἐπίκουρος) (341 BCE – 270 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of Epicureanism, one of the several schools of philosophy from the Hellenistic period. He was a prolific author, though very few of his works have survived to the modern day and all but a few fragments have come from excerpts in other, later authors. During his life his school had a sizable following at The Garden, an estate he purchased in Athens halfway between the Stoa and the Academy.

His philosophy was characterized by a focus on attaining ἀταραξία (ataraxia, calmness or a lack of anxiety). To reach this state, he exhorted his followers to not fear the gods or death and to remember that what is good is easy to get and what is bad is easy to endure. Epicurus strengthened his ethical arguments by relying on his materialist, atomist physics, following in the footsteps of the early atomists Democritus and Leucippus. Relying on consequences of this physics he developed an epistemology he called the κανών (canon, ruler or measure), as it provides a method for measuring the validity of a sense perception.

Life

Very little is known with certainty about Epicurus' life, due to the lack of any evidence from his lifetime. Rather, we must rely on the reports of others, writing usually several hundred years after his death. In particular, the biography by Diogenes Laertius in the last book of his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, written most likely in the first half of the third century CE, provides most of what is supposed to be true about Epicurus' life.

According to that account, Epicurus was born to Neocles and Chaerestrate, two otherwise unknown Athenians, on the island of Samos. His parents likely moved there as colonists after Athens seized the island from the Persian Empire. There he began his philosophical training under the tutelage of the Platonist Pamphilus of Samos. He turned to philosophy, according to the likely apocryphal account, because his school teacher could not explain to him the concept of chaos (χάος) in Hesiod's writings.

He moved to Athens when he was 18 to fulfill his required military service as an ephebe, but left again shortly thereafter when his parents wer expelled from Samos, along with the other Athenians, when Athens lost the island to Macedonia during the Lamian War. Epicurus then stayed with his parents in Colophon for a time and continued to study philosophy and began to attract disciples.

Diogenes Laertius reports that several ancient chronologers claimed that Epicurus studied under Nausiphanes in Teos for several years, though it is unclear whether this was supposed to have occured before coming to Athens or after. Nausiphanes was a disciple of Democritus, whose philosophy centered on atomism, a cornerstone of Epicureanism. Epicurus himself denied that he learned from Nausiphanes and claims that he was self-taught. This claim likely led to the attack, quoted by Diogenes Laertius, that Epicurus claimed to have invented atomism, rather than Democritus. It is now widely accepted that Democritus, either alone or following Leucippus, first based a philosophy on atomism and that Epicurus was likely influenced heavily by him.

He finally returned to Athens in the archonship of Anaxicrates (307 – 6 BCE) and shortly therafter purchased the property that would become his communal Garden (ὁ κῆπος). There he studied and practiced philosophy with his followers until his death at 72 years of age in he second year of the 127th Olympiad (270 BCE). He died of a kidney stone and according to his will left his Garden to Hermarchus so that he could continue the study of his philosophy there.

Teachings

See main page: Epicureanism