Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/388

358 advances in philosophy and science, and have therefore profoundly influenced the best intellects of all ages. Still this school did not immediately affect society in the same way as the two next schools founded at Athens, which long retained their head- quarters there—the Epicureans and the Stoics. The doctrines of Epicurus (B.C. 342–270) radically changed the views of a large number of people in the two points which concern men most obviously—religion and morals. In regard to the former, though Epicurus did not deny the existence of gods, he regarded them as unconcerned with the world and men, living apart in endless bliss, not interfering in the world which they did not create and would not guide. The origin of the universe he explained—as the earlier philosophers, Leucippus, Anaxagoras, and Democritus, had done—by the theory of innumerable atoms combining by natural or accidental causes in infinite space. By this doctrine he claimed to have freed mankind from the long tyranny of superstition and fear. The soul was a function of the body and with the body dissolved at death. In death, therefore, there were no terrors, "for as long as we are death is not with us, and when death comes then we are not." Lucretius, whose poem interpreted Epicurus to the Romans, dwells on this point, as Tennyson makes him say—