Epicureanism: beliefs, history and sources

History & overview

Nothing to fear in the gods, nothing to feel in death.

A school founded in a walled garden outside Athens on the claim that everything is atoms and void, that the soul dies with the body, and that once you stop being afraid of gods and death the remaining requirements for a good life are small — bread, water, shelter and friends. It admitted women and slaves as members, endowed a monthly dinner in its founder's will, and that dinner is still kept.

Why it is filed this way

A philosophy that behaved like a sect: a founder whose birthday was observed, a fixed canon its members learned by heart, a monthly common meal, and a rule against public life. Ancient critics from both the Stoics and the early Church treated it as a rival religion rather than a rival argument, and its texts were the ones least likely to be copied by Christian scribes.

The Athenian succession broke by late antiquity and the school as an institution ended. Small societies reconstructed the practice from Diogenes Laertius and Lucretius; the Society of Friends of Epicurus publishes an essay for the Eikas on the twentieth of each month.

DeitiesEpicurus did not deny the gods. He held that they exist, are made of fine atoms, live blissfully in the spaces between worlds and take no interest whatever in human beings — so there is nothing to petition and nothing to fear. Later opponents called this atheism with a courtesy clause, and Epicureans kept attending the city's festivals anyway.

Foundedc. 306 BCE · Athens

FounderEpicurus of Samos

AfterlifeNone. The soul is atomic and disperses at death, so there is no subject left for anything to happen to.

TextsThe Kyriai Doxai (Principal Doctrines), forty sentences · Letter to Menoeceus · Lucretius, De rerum natura

The map

Epicureanism’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum Enter →

Death is nothing to us. Where death is, we are not; where we are, death is not. The fear is of an experience that by definition has no experiencer. Go deeper — context →

The gods exist, and they are not thinking about you. A blessed and indestructible being has no business with anger or favour. Prayer is therefore not wicked but pointless, and the fear of divine punishment is the largest avoidable source of human misery. Go deeper — context →

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Enter →

E Epicurus — the man who left money for a dinner. His will freed slaves, provided for the children of a dead colleague, and paid for the school to keep eating together once a month. It is a strikingly institutional document for a philosophy about withdrawing from institutions. Domain Pleasure correctly understood as the absence of painStanding Wrote some three hundred rolls; three letters and forty doctrines survive intact Meet them — context →

Rites & Ritual

what its people do — and when Enter →

The Eikas — dinner on the twentieth. Epicurus endowed it in his will: money set aside for a monthly gathering of the school in memory of himself and Metrodorus. It is the oldest continuously named observance in Western philosophy and it is still kept. When Monthly, on the twentiethWho Members of the school; women and slaves included from the start Go deeper — context & 1 source →

Where next

the museum exit — every door leads deeper in

Buddhism — 11 shared ideas, a different faith Jainism — 11 shared ideas, a different faith Hinduism — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Sikhism — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Branch Epicureanism — inherit everything, change what you must The library of ideas — what Epicureanism shares with every other faith A faith at random — somewhere you have never been

Sources

1 cited texts

Epicurus, will, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers X.18, R. D. Hicks translation
The Eikas — dinner on the twentieth. →

These citations identify texts used in the linked passages. Follow each passage to read its quotation and context. A tradition’s own texts explain its teachings; historical claims may also require independent scholarship. Translations marked (rendered) are our own plain-English wording, not a standard edition; where a passage matters, read it in a full translation.