Epicurus

Epicurus founded his school of philosophy in Athens in 341-270 BC, gathering followers to The Garden where they ate simply and debated how to live well. His system rested on atoms moving through void - borrowed from Democritus but sharpened with the "swerve," a spontaneous deviation that let free will slip into a material cosmos. He wrote over 300 works; nearly all vanished, leaving only letters, the Principal Doctrines, and fragments of On Nature to reach us through later writers like Lucretius. Epicureanism peaked during the late Roman Republic, then faded, and by the Middle Ages his name had been twisted into shorthand for debauchery. The fifteenth century brought rediscovery, the seventeenth brought rehabilitation through Pierre Gassendi, and the Enlightenment carried his influence forward into Locke, Marx, and the modern understanding of pleasure as the absence of pain.