Epicurus (341–270 BCE) is often caricatured as the philosopher of gourmet indulgence. His actual ethics is almost the reverse: the safest route to pleasure is to need less, fear less, and cultivate stable friendship and tranquility.

Big idea: The best pleasure is not constant stimulation but freedom from bodily distress (aponia) and mental disturbance (ataraxia).

Epicurus distinguishes desires:

• natural and necessary — food, shelter, friendship;
• natural but unnecessary — luxuries and refinements;
• empty/vain — status, limitless wealth, fame, immortal glory.

The distinction is practical: satisfying simple necessary desires is easy; making your happiness depend on unlimited social comparison is not.

His physics was atomist and materialist. Gods, if they exist, do not micromanage human lives, so fear of divine punishment is misplaced. Death also should not torment us: while we exist, death is not present; when death is present, we no longer experience it.

That argument does not prove that dying, bereavement, or premature death are emotionally irrelevant. It targets the idea of personally experiencing one's own nonexistence forever.

Epicureanism also made friendship unusually central to the good life — not as an optional decoration after private pleasure, but as one of the strongest sources of security and happiness.