Epicureanism
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40 free Epicureanism trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Epicurus has one of the most misunderstood names in philosophy. The word built from it now suggests luxury and indulgence, yet the man himself taught that a calm mind and modest wants are all a happy life needs. His ideas about atoms, chance and mortality still sound strikingly modern. This quiz covers the life of Epicurus and the community he founded in Athens, the core teachings on happiness, desire, the gods and death, and the Roman poet Lucretius, whose long poem De rerum natura carried those ideas into Latin. It also follows the philosophy's afterlife, from buried scrolls and medieval hostility to its rediscovery in the Renaissance and its admirers in the modern age. The questions suit philosophy students revising the Hellenistic schools, classics readers working through Lucretius, and anyone curious about what Epicureans really believed. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
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Q 01Which American president called himself an Epicurean, ranking that system the most rational of the ancients?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson defended Epicurus against centuries of caricature, calling his system frugal of vicious indulgence and fruitful of virtue.
Q 02According to a hostile story passed on by Saint Jerome, what drove the Roman poet Lucretius mad before he died?
A love potion
A love potion drove him insane, Jerome claimed four centuries later, adding that the poem was written in lucid intervals. Scholars now regard the report as inaccurate.
Q 03In the second century AD, how did the wealthy Diogenes of Oenoanda share Epicurus's philosophy with his whole city?
Carving it on a wall
Carving it on a wall some 80 metres long, he set out about 25,000 words of Epicurean teaching to help, as he put it, those who come after us.
Q 04The English word 'epicure', taken from the name of Epicurus, now describes a person with refined taste in what?
Food
Food is the epicure's passion, a twist on the original: Epicurus and his followers were known for eating simple meals and taught that nature requires very little.
Q 05The Epicurean motto 'Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo' was commonly inscribed on what across the Roman Empire?
Gravestones
Gravestones carried the line, which means 'I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind', a shrug at mortality drawn from Epicurus's teaching.
Q 06In Dante's Inferno, Epicurus and his followers lie in burning coffins in the Sixth Circle for denying what?
The soul's immortality
The soul's immortality was the doctrine they rejected: Epicurus taught that the soul is made of atoms and dies with the body, so no afterlife awaits.
Q 07Lucretius defended writing philosophy in verse by comparing his poetry to what, used to sweeten bitter medicine?
Honey
Honey is his image for poetry, which coaxes readers into swallowing a doctrine he calls life-saving but often unpleasant. Epicurus himself had discouraged writing verse.
Q 08Which school did Epicurus found in Athens around 306 BC, a community known for its simple shared meals?
The Garden
The Garden took its name from the plot Epicurus bought for his school, which was unusual in welcoming women as students.
Q 09In which religion does 'epikoros', a word some trace to the name of Epicurus, mean a heretic?
Judaism
Judaism uses the term in the Mishnah for a person with no share in the World to Come, though the Talmud derives it instead from a root meaning licentious.
Q 10A surviving letter attributed to Epicurus reassures which relative that her disturbing dreams about him mean nothing?
His mother
His mother is also asked to stop sending money and supplies, since his companions already support him; the letter explains dreams as mere images in the mind.
Q 11Which human bond did Epicurus rank above power or great wealth as the basis of a satisfying life?
Friendship
Friendship gave Epicureans mutual security and affection, so they formed communities of companions living apart from the public business of the city.
Q 12Which sphere of public life did Epicurus advise followers to avoid, in line with his call to live in obscurity?
Politics
Politics, Epicurus insisted, could never release a person from fear, so the wise would do better to live quietly among trusted companions.
Q 13According to Epicurus, who never denied that the gods exist, what role do those gods play in human affairs?
They take no part
Q 21Epicurus argued that falling atoms occasionally swerve off course, a tweak to atomism that made room for what?
Free will
Free will needed the swerve, Epicurus thought: without it, people would be locked in an endless chain of cause and effect. Lucretius called the motion the clinamen.
Q 22Which Greek term names the untroubled state of mind that Epicurus set as the goal of a happy life?
Ataraxia
Ataraxia literally means not being disturbed, and outside philosophy it described the ideal calm of soldiers going into battle.
Q 23On which Aegean island was Epicurus born in 341 BC, to parents who were Athenian settlers there?
Samos
Samos lost its Athenian settlers after Alexander the Great died, when they were expelled to Colophon on the coast of what is now Turkey.
They take no part at all, Epicurus held, which meant that storms and other frightening weather could not be divine punishment.
Q 14The trilemma known as the Epicurean paradox asks why a god both willing and able to help would permit what?
Evil
Evil is the puzzle, though no surviving text by Epicurus poses it; the Christian writer Lactantius attributed the trilemma to him centuries later.
Q 15Which school founded by Zeno of Citium did later Roman writers portray as the great rival of Epicureanism?
Stoicism
Stoicism prized virtue rather than pleasure as the highest good, and its ethics sat closer to traditional Roman values.
Q 16Which earlier Greek thinker, known as the laughing philosopher, supplied the atomism that Epicurus adapted?
Democritus
Democritus held that everything is tiny particles moving in empty space. Epicurus kept the idea yet denied any debt to earlier thinkers, insisting he was self-taught.
Q 17Which Roman goddess does Lucretius invoke to open De rerum natura, urging her to pacify her lover Mars?
Venus
Venus is hailed as the ancestress of the Romans, and many scholars read her as a poetic stand-in for nature's creative power rather than a literal deity.
Q 18In which Roman town buried by Vesuvius in AD 79 did a villa hold a charred library rich in Epicurean scrolls?
Herculaneum
Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri held the scrolls, in the only library from the Graeco-Roman world to survive in its entirety.
Q 19Which future revolutionary wrote his doctoral thesis on the atomism of Epicurus and an earlier Greek thinker?
Karl Marx
Karl Marx completed the dissertation in 1841 at the University of Jena, judging the worldview of Epicurus internally consistent and practically applicable.
Q 20Which label, from the Greek word for pleasure, do philosophers give to the kind of ethics Epicurus taught?
Hedonism
Hedonism in his hands was sober: Epicurus redefined the highest pleasure as the absence of suffering, a calm untouched by distress of body or mind.
Q 24Epicurus reportedly stayed cheerful and kept teaching while dying at seventy-two of what painful condition?
A urinary stone
A urinary stone blocked his urinary tract, yet in a farewell letter he called his last day a happy one, cheered by recalling his philosophical contemplation.
Q 25According to Saint Jerome, which famous Roman orator emended the books that the poet Lucretius left behind?
Cicero
Cicero was no admirer of the school: he scolded the earliest Epicurean writers in Latin for their poor prose and gave the doctrine spokesmen in his own dialogues.
Q 26Which Italian book hunter found a copy of Lucretius's long-neglected poem in a German monastery in 1417?
Poggio Bracciolini
Poggio Bracciolini never named the monastery, though Fulda is the likeliest candidate; his other finds included the treatise on architecture by Vitruvius.
Q 27Lucretius's De rerum natura breaks off abruptly during a harrowing account of which historical catastrophe?
The plague of Athens
The plague of Athens struck during the Peloponnesian War, and the poem's sudden stop there suggests Lucretius died before he could finish revising.
Q 28In which poetic metre, the traditional verse form of Greek and Latin epic, did Lucretius write De rerum natura?
Dactylic hexameter
Dactylic hexameter carries all six books, some 7,400 lines, in a poem framed like a hymn that echoes the openings of Homer and Hesiod.
Q 29Into which of his three classes of desire did Epicurus put the craving for wealth, power or fame?
Unnatural and unnecessary
Unnatural and unnecessary desires were to be suppressed, Epicurus taught, because they are limitless and so can never be satisfied.
Q 30According to the followers of Epicurus, where do the gods dwell?
Between worlds
Between worlds, in a region called the metakosmia, is where the gods sit on the prevailing reading, as physical, immortal beings made of atoms. Other scholars think Epicurus meant them only as ideals.