Ancient Greek and Roman · c. 307 BCE
Epicureanism
Overview
The highest goods are modest pleasure, tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear and pain. Not a feast. A life that is hard to disturb.
Epicurus is easy to mishear. The good he names is pleasure, and then he spends the rest of the school taking the feast off the table. The pleasure that lasts is the one that is hard to disturb: a body not in pain, a mind not shaken by fear. He calls the mind’s share of that calm ataraxia. A life full of rare luxuries is, on his count, a life full of new ways to be rattled.
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Two fears do most of the rattling. One is the fear of the gods as meddlers in every hour. The other is the fear of death as an experience waiting for you. Epicurus argues that death is the end of experience, so it is not an event you will be there to suffer. Whether that argument convinces you, the school’s aim is clear: a fear that is never faced ends up in charge.
The practice is modest on purpose. Bread, friendship, a walk, a mind that has looked at its terrors and found them smaller than their reputation. Desire that depends on what you cannot secure is the desire he tells you to set down. The ones that are easy to meet, and that do not cost someone else, are the ones he keeps.
Where it answers
How should we act?
Modest pleasure, calm and a life that fear and pain do not run.
What is real?
Everything is atoms moving in empty space, the soul included, so death is nothing to fear.
Key terms
- Ataraxia
- Tranquility: freedom from mental disturbance and fear.
- Natural and necessary desires
- Wants such as food and shelter, easy to satisfy, unlike empty desires for fame or luxury.
- Atomism
- The view that everything is made of tiny indivisible bodies moving through empty space.
- Katastematic pleasure
- The settled pleasure of being free from pain, valued above the pleasure of excitement.
In their words
“Death is nothing to us.”
Further reading
- Letter to Menoeceus · Epicurus
- Principal Doctrines · Epicurus
- De Rerum Natura · Lucretius
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Quest2Reason. “Epicureanism.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/ideas/epicureanism. Accessed 13 November 2026.