Epicureanism

Epicureanism was founded by Epicurus around 307 BCE in his garden at Athens, a community famously open to women and slaves. It taught a thoroughgoing atomism inherited from Democritus: the universe is nothing but atoms moving in the void, the soul itself material and mortal, the gods real but wholly unconcerned with human affairs.

From this physics followed its ethics. The goal of life is pleasure — not indulgence, but the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance (ataraxia), achieved through simple living, friendship, and the dispelling of fear. 'Death is nothing to us,' Epicurus taught, for where we are death is not, and where death is we are not.

The great Roman poem of Lucretius carried the doctrine to Latin readers. The Platonists and Stoics alike opposed its denial of providence, making Epicureanism the standing rival they argued against.