The school of Epicurus: the gods are blessed and unconcerned, death is nothing to us, and pleasure rightly understood is freedom from pain and fear.
Epicureanism taught in the Garden at Athens that the world is atoms and void, that the gods trouble no one, and that the soul dies with the body, and drew from those austere premises a gentle ethics: simple pleasures, friendship above ambition, and withdrawal from the contests of the city. Lucretius sang the system in Latin verse, and its physics and its therapy of fear both returned with force in the early modern age.
Sources
Primary
- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.
Secondary
- A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (1987).
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