Epicurus

A philosopher born on the island of Samos in 341 BCE who founded a school in Athens around 307 BCE known as the Garden, admitting women and enslaved people as students alongside free men, unusually for the period. Epicurus taught that pleasure, understood not as indulgence but as the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance, is the only intrinsic good and the natural aim of a well examined life, and that many desires, for wealth, fame or excess, should be refused because satisfying them causes more disturbance than it relieves. Following the atomist physics of Democritus, he held that the universe consists only of atoms and void, that the gods, if they exist, take no interest in human affairs, and that death is nothing to fear.