Epicureans - Epicurus (c.341 - 270 BC)

Democritus

The earliest scientific and liberal humanist.Like many attitudes of the 20th century, the philoophy of Epicurus was materialistic , pleasure-seeking, and non-religious.It was the first such philosophy to be fully developed intellectually.
Epicureans was very much the creation of a single thinker. Epicurus ( c. 341 - 270). Its aim above all else was to liberate people from fear, not only the fear of death but the fear of life. In an age when all forms of public life were unpredictable and highly dangerous it taught people to seek happiness and fulfillment in their private lives."Live unknown" was one of the maxims.
      His parents, Neocles and Chaerestrate, both Athenian-born, and his father a citizen, had emigrated to the Athenian settlement on the Aegean island of Samos about ten years before Epicurus's birth in February 341 BC. As a boy, he studied philosophy for four years under the Platonist teacher Pamphilus. At the age of eighteen, he went to Athens for his two-year term of military service. The playwright Menander served in the same age-class of the ephebes as Epicurus.
Epicurus ( Greek: Ἐπίκουρος, Epíkouros, "ally, comrade"; 341–270 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher as well as the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism. Only a few fragments and letters of Epicurus's 300 written works remain. Much of what is known about Epicurean philosophy derives from later followers and commentators.

After the death of Alexander the Great, Perdiccas expelled the Athenian settlers on Samos toColophon, on the coast of what is now Turkey. After the completion of his military service, Epicurus joined his family there. He studied under Nausiphanes, who followed the teachings of Democritus. In 311/310 BC Epicurus taught in Mytilene but caused strife and was forced to leave. He then founded a school in Lampsacus before returning to Athens in 306 BC where he remained until his death. There he founded The Garden (κῆπος), a school named for the garden he owned that served as the school's meeting place, about halfway between the locations of two other schools of philosophy, the Stoa and the Academy.

Even though many of his teachings were heavily influenced by earlier thinkers, especially by Democritus, he differed in a significant way with Democritus on determinism. Epicurus would often deny this influence, denounce other philosophers as confused, and claim to be "self-taught".

Epicurus never married and had no known children. He was most likely a vegetarian. He suffered from kidney stones, to which he finally succumbed in 270 BC at the age of seventy-two, and despite the prolonged pain involved, he wrote to Idomeneus:.