Epicurus, son of the Athenian cleruch Neocles, grew up on Samos; he began philosophy with the Platonist Pamphilus and the Democritean Nausiphanes, but declared himself self-taught. Around 307/306 BCE he bought a house with a garden in Athens — the famous "Garden" (Κῆπος), which gave its name to the school-community that, against custom, admitted women and slaves. His teaching survives in summary-letters (to Herodotus, Pythocles, Menoeceus) and in the Principal Doctrines (Κύριαι Δόξαι) — forty aphorisms preserved by Diogenes Laertius (Book X, the chief source). Of some 300 rolls there survive the letters, the KD, the "Vatican Sayings," and the charred papyri of Herculaneum.

For Stoic askesis Epicurus is rival and ally at once. A rival in the main things: his physics is atoms and void, and the cosmos not a providential order but a chance concretion; hence Marcus's central disjunction "providence or atoms" (ἤτοι πρόνοια ἢ ἄτομοι), where "atoms" is precisely the Epicurean picture. A rival in ethics too: the end is ἡδονή (pleasure, understood as ἀπονία and ἀταραξία — freedom from pain and disturbance), not virtue-in-itself; the gods exist but do not care for the world (whence the removal of the fear of gods and of death: "death is nothing to us").

But in the therapy of suffering Marcus openly borrows from his opponent. Twice he takes the Epicurean maxim on pain (KD 4): intense pain is short, lasting pain is bearable; remember its "limits" (ὅροι) and do not "add opinion" (μὴ προσδόξαζε) beyond the sensation. This is pure technique, compatible with any metaphysics — and Marcus takes the best instrument without embarrassment at its origin (7.33, 7.64). The same move is in the disjunction: "providence or atoms" shows that under either cosmology complaint is senseless.

• 07-33 — the Epicurean maxim on pain applied anonymously: "the unbearable carries off, the lasting is bearable."
• 07-64 — the same maxim, but with the name (τὸ τοῦ Ἐπικούρου): pain is "neither unbearable nor everlasting, if you remember its limits and add nothing" (KD 4). One of the two places where Epicurus is named outright.
• The disjunction "providence or atoms" (πρόνοια ἢ ἄτομοι) — Med. 4.3; 06-10; 07-32; 07-50; 8.17; 09-28; 09-39; 10.6; 11.18; 12.14. The Epicurean system is the "atomist" horn of the dilemma, usually unnamed.
• 09-41 — the second explicit naming: Epicurus is adduced as an example of steadfastness in illness (he went on doing φυσιολογία amid bodily pains and would not let the physicians preen). Marcus's upshot: "never to desert philosophy whatever befalls is common to every school."

• Diogenes Laertius X — the life, the letters, the Principal Doctrines
• H. Usener, Epicurea, Leipzig 1887 — the standard collection of fragments
• LS 21–25 (The Hellenistic Philosophers) — texts with commentary
• A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, London 1974
• P. Hadot, The Inner Citadel — on Marcus's Epicurean borrowings (the chapter on the discipline of desire)