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. No institution appears anywhere in the philosophy he built there. 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 The schools went on teaching after their central assumption had been withdrawn.
He noticed the withdrawal most exactly because it was done to him. He was in Athens for his two years of military service as an ephebe when Alexander died. In the same upheaval Perdiccas expelled the Athenian settlers from Samos — the island where his family farmed land the city had given them — and when his service ended there was nowhere to go home to. He joined his father in exile at Colophon in 321, twenty years old, holding proof that a city guarantees nothing.
The doctrine that came out of it 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 by way of his teacher Nausiphanes, then turned to a use Democritus never had. 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 — which bread and water and conversation supply as well as anything else does. For people who had lost, 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 records that a Stoic forged fifty obscene letters under his name, and the slander outran the argument: "Epicurean" still means the appetites he spent his life arguing were unnecessary. He freed four of his slaves in his will and left the property to the school.
He died of a kidney stone after a fortnight of it, and wrote on the last day to his friend Idomeneus that the pain could not be worse and the day was a happy one, weighed against the memory of their talk together — the doctrine submitting to its own test.
Almost none of the writing survived. Three hundred rolls, including On Nature in thirty-seven books, came down to three letters and a set of maxims that Diogenes Laertius copied into a biography five centuries later. The system reached Europe instead through Lucretius's poem On the Nature of Things, unread until Poggio Bracciolini found a copy in a German monastery in 1417; Gassendi made it usable to Christians in the 1640s by throwing out the eternal world and the mortal soul. Scholars still argue whether the atomic swerve Lucretius uses to rescue free will was Epicurus's own move or his poet's. Charred rolls from a villa at Herculaneum, buried in 79 CE, are being read by scanner now, and some of them are books of On Nature.