Epicurus (341-270 BC)
was a
Greek philosopher born on the island of
Sámos of an
Athenian family, and privately
educated by his father, a
schoolteacher, and by various
philosophers. At the age of 18 he went to Athens to perform military service. After a brief stay he joined (322) his father in Colophon, where he began
teaching.
Epicurus founded a
philosophical school in Mitilíni on the island of Lésvos about 311, and two or three years later he became head of a school in Lampsacus (now Lâpseki, Turkey). Returning to Athens in 306, he settled there permanently and
taught his doctrines to a devoted body of followers. Because instruction took place in the garden of Epicurus's home, his followers were known as "
philosophers of the garden."
Both
women and
men frequented his garden, and this occasioned much
gossip about the alleged activities there. Students from all over Greece and Asia Minor flocked to Epicurus's school, attracted as much by his
charm as by his
intellect.
Epicurus was a
prolific author. According to the account of his life by the 3rd-century AD historian and biographer Diogenes Laërtius, he left 300
manuscripts, including 37 treatises on physics and numerous works on
love,
justice, the
gods, and other
subjects. Of his
writings, only three letters and a number of short fragments survive, preserved in Diogenes Laërtius's biography. The
principal additional sources of information about the
doctrines of Epicurus are the works of the Roman writers
Cicero,
Seneca,
Plutarch, and Lucretius, whose poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) delineates the
Epicurean philosophy.
Also see the
Sovran Maxims: Index
Source: http://www.epicureans.org