Epicurus: The Garden, the Atom, and the Sober Pursuit of Happiness

Around 306 BC, a philosopher named Epicurus bought a garden on the outskirts of Athens and founded a school unlike any other in the ancient world. He invited women and slaves alongside free men, taught that the gods held no interest in human affairs, that death was simply the end of sensation and therefore nothing to fear, and that happiness was both achievable and modest in its requirements: friendship, freedom from pain, and the quiet pleasures of an examined life. This book traces the life, ideas, and astonishing afterlife of Epicurus — from his atomic theory of a universe governed by chance and the swerve of particles, to his practical ethics of desire and satisfaction, to the letter that preserved his teachings through centuries of hostility. It follows his ideas through Lucretius and the poem that shook the Renaissance, through the gardens of Rome and the libraries of Alexandria, into the work of Gassendi, Jefferson, and the Enlightenment, and finally into contemporary debates about pleasure, meaning, and the good life. Epicurus was caricatured as a glutton, condemned as a heretic, and nearly lost to history. What he actually taught is among the most radical and enduring ideas in Western philosophy.