Epicurus Founds the Garden
Pleasure, properly understood, turns out to mean freedom from pain rather than indulgence
Quick facts
- Epicurus's dates
- 341-270 BCE
- Garden founded
- c. 306 BCE, Athens
- Highest good
- Ataraxia (freedom from mental disturbance)
- Later exponent
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
What happened
Epicurus, born in 341 BCE, founded philosophical schools in Mytilene and Lampsacus before moving to Athens around 306 BCE, where he purchased a property that became known as the Garden, a name that later applied to his school as a whole. Epicurus taught that pleasure is the highest good, but defined the goal of life not as active sensory indulgence but as ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance, paired with freedom from bodily pain. Achieving this state, in his view, required banishing needless fears, particularly fear of the gods and of death, through a materialist physics that explained the world without divine intervention in human affairs.
Why it matters
Epicureanism became one of the two great rival schools of Hellenistic ethics alongside Stoicism, and its redefinition of pleasure as tranquil freedom from disturbance rather than sensual excess shaped later hedonist philosophy, including its influence, via the Roman poet Lucretius, on early modern materialist and empiricist thought.
How we know
Only a small portion of Epicurus's own writing survives, chiefly letters preserved by the biographer Diogenes Laertius; the fuller Epicurean system is reconstructed from these fragments together with the Roman poet Lucretius's later exposition, On the Nature of Things.
Sources
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Epicurus · Reputable sourceiep.utm.edu · The domain "iep.utm.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Epicurus · Reputable sourceplato.stanford.edu · The domain "plato.stanford.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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