te between him and the
Stoics seems to resolve itself into a question whether the Good lies in
+paschein+ or +poiein+, in Experience or in Action; and average human
beings seem generally to think that the Good for a conscious being must
be something of which he is conscious.

Thus the great system is built, simple, intelligible, dogmatic, and--as
such systems go--remarkably water-tight. It enables man to be unafraid,
and it helps him to be happy. The strange thing is that, although on
more than one point it seems to anticipate most surprisingly the
discoveries of modern science, it was accepted in a spirit more
religious than scientific. As we can see from Lucretius it was taken
almost as a revelation, from one who had saved mankind; whose intellect
had pierced beyond the 'flaming walls of Heaven' and brought back to man
the gospel of an intelligible universe.[106:1]

In 310 B. C., when Epicurus was thirty-two, things had so far improved
that he left Colophon and set up a school of philosophy in Mytilene, but
soon moved to Lampsacus, on the Sea of Marmora, where he had friends.
Disciples gathered about him. Among them were some of the leading men of
the city, like Leonteus and Idomeneus. The doctrine thrilled them and
seemed to bring freedom with it. They felt that such a teacher must be
set up in Athens, the home of the great philosophers. They bought by
subscription a house and garden in Athens for 80 minae (about
L320)[107:1] and presented it to the Master. He crossed to Athens in 306
and, though he four times revisited Lampsacus and has left letters
addressed _To Friends in Lampsacus_, he lived in the famous Garden for
the rest of his life.

Friends from Lampsacus and elsewhere came and lived with him or near
him. The Garden was not only a philosophical school; it was also a sort
of retreat or religious community. There lived there not only
philosophers like Metrodorus, Colotes, Hermarchus, and others; there
were slaves, like Mys, and free women, like Themista, the wife of
Leonteus, to both of whom the Master, as the extant fragments testify,
wrote letters of intimate friendship. And not only free women, but women
with names that show that they were slaves, Leontion, Nikidion,
Mammarion. They were _hetairae_; perhaps victims of war, like many of
the unfortunate heroines in the New Comedy; free women from conquered
cities, who had been sold in the slave market or reduced to misery as
refugees, and to whom now the