Epicurean Ethics Codified in Letters and Doctrines

Epicureanism built its memory with brevity. Within the Garden’s walls, Epicurus wrote letters designed to be copied, learned, and lived. The Letter to Menoeceus, preserved later by Diogenes Laertius, compressed the school’s therapy into paragraphs: do not fear the gods; do not fear death; pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life; choose desires that fit nature’s limits [8].

This literature matched the setting. Where Plato’s Academy leaned on dialogues and the Lyceum on treatises, the Garden taught through epigrammatic clarity. Principal Doctrines listed core claims to keep the mind steady when the city’s noise pressed. The sound of instruction was light: a sentence repeated, a nod, the rustle of leaves overhead [20][8].

Epicurus’ exhortation—“Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when young nor weary in the search of it when old”—made the school’s admissions policy clear. Age, status, and gender did not bar entry. The walled space collected Athenians and newcomers who wanted to replace crimson ambition with the soft green of contentment. Meals embodied doctrine: bread, water, conversation [8][19].

Atomist physics underwrote the ethics. If the world is made of atoms and void, with occasional swerves allowing for freedom, then fear of divine punishment dissolves; if pleasure is understood as the absence of pain, then modest living makes sense. Letters taught these connections as mnemonics, not as proofs. The Agora’s appetites sounded far away when your stomach was full of enough [20].

Outside the wall, rivals listened. Stoics at the Stoa Poikile argued that virtue alone is good and that pleasure misleads; they sang to Zeus as the law of nature that governs all things. The Garden replied that fear, not fate, is the enemy, and that friendship, not providence, secures peace. The debate sharpened each sentence Epicurus crafted [17][9].

These texts gave the school portability. When students left Athens, they carried letters and doctrines in memory and on papyrus, able to plant gardens elsewhere. The method—short, clear, repeatable—fit a world where not everyone could build a library. In this way, the Garden competed with the Lyceum’s shelves as effectively as any argument could [19][20].