Epicureanism

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.

Everything known about Epicurean physics in its fullest, most persuasive form survives chiefly through one poem by one Roman follower writing more than two centuries after Epicurus's own death. Titus Lucretius Carus's De Rerum Natura, On the Nature of Things, cast Epicurus's atomism, his account of the soul's mortality and his argument against fearing death or the gods into six books of Latin hexameter verse, deliberately sweetening what he called the wormwood of philosophy with poetry so a reluctant reader would swallow it. For most of the medieval period almost no one did; only a handful of manuscript copies are known to have survived at all, and the poem's flat materialism and denial of an afterlife made it a marginal, sometimes suspect text wherever it was known. In 1417 the Italian scholar and papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini found a copy in a German monastery library while hunting for lost classical texts, and the poem's return to circulation is now credited with reintroducing Epicurean physics into European thought at exactly the moment Renaissance and early modern thinkers were questioning inherited authority on nature. Its influence reached Galileo's atomism, Gassendi's attempt to reconcile atomism with Christianity, and eventually the Enlightenment's own materialist currents, all of it descending from a poem whose survival to the present day was, on its own account of chance and atoms colliding without purpose, itself simply a matter of chance.