Epicurus

341–270 BCE

Epicurus of Samos founded the Garden at Athens in 306 BCE and taught there for the rest of his life. Of his three hundred rolls almost nothing survives directly; what we have is preserved by Diogenes Laertius — three letters that epitomise the whole system, on physics, on the heavens, and on the happy life, together with the forty Principal Doctrines the school learned by heart. The gods exist but do not concern themselves with us; death is nothing to us; pleasure, rightly understood, is the beginning and end of the blessed life.