History & overview · every faith gets one
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.
The founding
Epicurus bought a garden between the city wall and the Academy and taught there rather than in a public colonnade — the school is named after the property. He claimed to be self-taught and denied owing anything to Democritus, whose atomism he had plainly absorbed; his opponents found this funny and said so.
Its founding is bound to Epicurus of Samos — c. 306 BCE.
What it holds
Reality. Atoms and void, infinite in extent, with no design and no designer.
The divine. Epicurus 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..
Death and after. None. The soul is atomic and disperses at death, so there is no subject left for anything to happen to..