Epicureanism
Pleasure understood as the absence of pain, in a universe of atoms and no providence.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 257 years
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Epicurus founds a school in his Athenian garden around 307 BCE, admitting women and slaves. He teaches that the world is atoms and void, that the gods do not intervene, that death is nothing to us because where death is we are not, and that the greatest pleasures are friendship, freedom from anxiety and simple living. The caricature of hedonism came from his opponents. Lucretius later sets the whole system out in Latin verse.