When Epicurus founded his school at Athens in 306 BCE, he did something unusual for the time: he called it the Garden, met in a house and its grounds rather than a public gymnasium, and opened membership to women and enslaved people alongside free male citizens, a mix ancient critics sometimes mocked as scandalous. The community lived simply, largely on bread, water, and a little cheese on special occasions, not from asceticism for its own sake but because Epicurus held that pleasure, properly understood, is not indulgence but the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance, ataraxia, and that lavish desires create more suffering than they relieve by making contentment depend on things outside one's control. He taught that the world is made only of atoms and void, following Democritus, which meant the soul dissolves at death exactly as the body does, so death is, in his famous formula, nothing to us: while we exist death is not present, and once death is present we no longer exist. He argued the gods, if they exist, live in perfect untroubled bliss and take no interest in human affairs, so neither punishment nor reward from them is anything to fear. Friendship he ranked among the highest goods a wise life can secure. The Garden endured as an organized community for roughly seven centuries, its members reciting his maxims and keeping his birthday as a feast day long after his death.