Epicurus

Epicurus was born in 341 BC on Samos into a family of Athenian settlers. In 306 BC he bought a garden outside Athens and founded his own school, known as the Garden. Unlike the other schools of his day it admitted women and slaves, and its friends lived there a simple common life. Building on the atomism of Democritus, he taught people to free themselves from the fear of the gods and of death, and held that the highest pleasure is tranquillity of mind and the absence of bodily pain. Of some three hundred books almost everything is lost; three letters and a set of maxims survive.