Death, the Gods and the Point of Epicurean Physics

Epicurus built his ethics directly on top of a physical theory he inherited and adapted from the atomist Democritus, the claim that everything that exists, including the soul, is made of tiny indivisible particles called atoms moving through empty space, combining and separating according to natural law rather than divine will. If the soul is made of atoms, Epicurus reasoned, then it disperses at death exactly as the body does, so there is no part of a person left over to suffer or to be judged, and the common fear of death and of punishment after death rests on a mistake about what a person actually is. His famous argument runs that death is nothing to us, since while we exist death is not present, and once death is present we no longer exist to experience it, so the two are never encountered together. Epicurus did not deny that gods exist, but he argued that if they exist they are blissful and untroubled beings who take no interest in human affairs and neither reward nor punish anyone, so fear of divine anger is as groundless as fear of the grave. From this physics followed an ethics of manageable, attainable pleasure rather than excess, since Epicurus held that the pleasures hardest to secure and most likely to bring pain in their wake, wealth, fame, extravagant food, are not the pleasures a rational person should chase, while friendship, self sufficiency and freedom from unnecessary want are within nearly everyone's reach.