Around 306 BCE, after teaching at Mytilene and Lampsacus, Epicurus bought a garden outside the walls of Athens and taught in it for the rest of his life, admitting women and slaves as members. The philosophy he built there rests on no institution at all. Plato and Aristotle had built their ethics on the citizen: the good life meant taking part in the affairs of a self-governing city, and the city was assumed to be there. Then Alexander died in 323 BCE, Athens lost the war that followed, and a Macedonian garrison sat in the port while the vote was restricted to men with property. The schools went on teaching after their central assumption had been withdrawn.
Epicurus knew what had been withdrawn, because it was withdrawn from him first. He was in Athens for his two years of military service as an ephebe when Alexander died. In the same upheaval Perdiccas, the general who took over Alexander's empire, expelled the Athenian settlers from Samos, the island where Epicurus's family farmed land the city had given them, and when his service ended there was no home to return to. He joined his father in exile at Colophon in 321, twenty years old, holding proof that a city guarantees nothing.
The philosophy that came out of that exile was medicine, and he said so: the study of nature exists to remove fear, and any part of it that removes no fear is not worth knowing. Everything is atoms and empty space — an idea he took from Democritus, the atomist of the century before, by way of his teacher Nausiphanes and turned to a purpose of his own. The soul is atoms too, and it disperses. Death is therefore nothing to us, because when it arrives there is no longer anyone for it to happen to; that is arithmetic, not consolation. The gods exist and are indifferent, having neither made the world nor watched it. And pleasure is the good, meaning the absence of pain in the body and of disturbance in the mind — and bread, water and conversation supply that as well as anything can. For people who had lost their city, here was a philosophy that could not be taken away.
Athens noticed who was admitted to the Garden, and rivals called it a brothel. Diogenes Laertius, who wrote lives of the philosophers, records that a Stoic forged fifty obscene letters under Epicurus's name, and the slander outran the argument: "Epicurean" still names the very appetites he spent his life calling unnecessary.
He died of a kidney stone, after two weeks of pain. On the last day he wrote to his friend Idomeneus that the pain could not be worse, and that the day was still a happy one, weighed against the memory of their talk together. His will freed four of his slaves and left the property to the school.
Almost none of the writing survived. Three hundred rolls, including On Nature in thirty-seven books, shrank to three letters and a set of maxims that Diogenes Laertius copied into a biography five centuries later. The system reached Europe instead through the Roman poet Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, which lay unread until Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary hunting lost manuscripts, found a copy in a German monastery in 1417; in the 1640s Gassendi, a French priest, made it acceptable to Christians by removing two of its doctrines: that the world is eternal and that the soul dies. Scholars still argue whether the atomic swerve Lucretius uses to rescue free will was Epicurus's own move or Lucretius's. Charred rolls from a villa at Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE, are now being read by scanner, and some of them are books of On Nature.