The Garden

Epicureanism · timeline

From Athens to Herculaneum

A school founded in a garden in Athens, a poem read in Rome, a library buried by a volcano, a philosophy carved on a wall in Lycia. This is the story in order, with a source for each date.

7 min read · Updated 11 November 2026 · Last checked 11 November 2026

The timeline #

Every entry has a numbered note. Dates for the ancient lives come from Diogenes Laertius, who wrote centuries later, so treat the earliest dates as the traditional ones. A small label marks an entry that is approximate, disputed or provisional. This is a selection, not a complete history.

  1. The school in Athens

  2. 341 BCE
    Epicurus is born on the island of Samos, into an Athenian family.1 His life
  3. c. 306 BCE
    He buys a house with a garden in Athens and teaches there. The school is called the Garden.2 approximate
  4. 270 BCE
    Epicurus dies in Athens. His will leaves the house to the school and asks his friends to gather on the twentieth of each month.3,4 The Twentieth

  5. Rome and the Greek-speaking world

  6. February 54 BCE
    A letter from Cicero to his brother Quintus shows that Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of Things was already being read in Rome. Lucretius’s own dates are uncertain; the traditional date of his death is about 55 BCE.5 Read Book III
  7. 1st century BCE
    Philodemus of Gadara, an Epicurean philosopher and poet, works in Italy. Most of the readable texts in the Herculaneum library are his.6
  8. 79 CE
    Vesuvius erupts and buries Herculaneum, and with it a villa on the edge of the town that held a library of papyrus scrolls.7,8 Herculaneum
  9. first half of the 2nd century CE
    A wealthy citizen named Diogenes has a summary of Epicurean teaching carved on a wall in Oenoanda, in Lycia. It may be the longest inscription of the ancient world.9 dated within a range Oenoanda
  10. 176 CE
    The emperor Marcus Aurelius, himself a Stoic, sets up chairs at Athens for the four main schools, the Epicurean among them. Sedley calls it a significant gesture that did not restore the city’s earlier standing.10 Epicurus and the Stoics
  11. late antiquity
    The Oenoanda wall is probably taken down deliberately, in Martin Ferguson Smith’s view, and its blocks are scattered.11 disputed

  12. Lost, found and read again

  13. 1417
    Poggio Bracciolini finds a manuscript of Lucretius, and the poem spreads through Renaissance Europe.12
  14. 1649
    Pierre Gassendi publishes his Latin translation of the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius, on Epicurus, with a long commentary. His work revived an Epicurean atomism in the seventeenth century.13
  15. 1750–1752
    A mosaic floor found at the bottom of a well in 1750 leads to the villa at Herculaneum. The excavators meet the first papyri in 1752.14,15
  16. 1819
    Thomas Jefferson writes to William Short: “I too am an Epicurean.”16
  17. winter 1884
    Two young French epigraphers find the first fragments of the Oenoanda inscription.17
  18. 1888
    Karl Wotke publishes the collection now called the Vatican Sayings, found in a manuscript in the Vatican Library.18
  19. 1968–1973
    Martin Ferguson Smith resumes the search at Oenoanda and finds 38 new fragments.19
  20. 2007–2012
    A new survey of the Oenoanda site. By the end of 2012, 299 pieces of the inscription had been found.20
  21. 2011
    Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve brings the story of Poggio’s find to a wide readership.21
  22. 25 June 2026
    The Vesuvius Challenge team announces results from the unopened Herculaneum scrolls, including one identified as Philodemus, On the Gods, Book 8.22,23 provisional

What the timeline leaves out #

The long stretch between the late ancient world and 1417 is thin because little is securely known of how the Epicurean texts were kept or read, and I have not tried to fill it. Epicureanism also continued in the Greek and Roman world for centuries after Epicurus; this page picks out dated landmarks, not every teacher. For the ideas themselves, begin with the overview or the three letters.

Notes

  1. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book X (Epicurus), trans. R. D. Hicks (Loeb Classical Library, 1925), 10.1, 10.14. ↩
  2. Diogenes Laertius, 10.10. ↩
  3. Diogenes Laertius, 10.14–15. ↩
  4. Diogenes Laertius, 10.18. ↩
  5. Cicero, Letters to his brother Quintus (Ad Quintum fratrem), 2.9. ↩
  6. Herculaneum Society (University of Oxford), 'The Villa of the Papyri'. ↩
  7. J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa dei Papiri, exhibition object notes (2019). ↩
  8. Herculaneum Society, Villa of the Papyri. ↩
  9. Martin Ferguson Smith, 'Excavations at Oinoanda 1997: the new Epicurean texts', Anatolian Studies 48 (1998), 125–70. ↩
  10. David Sedley, 'The imperial era', in 'Ancient philosophy', Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998). ↩
  11. Eric A. Powell, 'In Search of a Philosopher's Stone', Archaeology, July/August 2015. Smith’s hypothesis as reported in the article. It is not settled, and the article does not give a year. ↩
  12. Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton, 2011). The find is dated to 1417. The exact monastery is uncertain. ↩
  13. Saul Fisher, 'Pierre Gassendi', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩
  14. Herculaneum Society, Villa of the Papyri. ↩
  15. Robert L. Fowler, 'The Herculaneum Papyri', Manuscript and Text Cultures 3.1 (2024). ↩
  16. Thomas Jefferson to William Short, 31 October 1819, Founders Online (National Archives). ↩
  17. Powell 2015. ↩
  18. Karl Wotke, 'Epikurische Spruchsammlung', Wiener Studien 10 (1888). ↩
  19. Smith 1998. ↩
  20. Jürgen Hammerstaedt and Martin Ferguson Smith, The Epicurean Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda: Ten Years of New Discoveries and Research (Habelt, 2014). ↩
  21. Greenblatt 2011. A vivid popular account. Some of its larger claims are disputed by specialists. ↩
  22. European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, 'The day the Herculaneum scrolls began speaking again', 25 June 2026. ↩
  23. Diamond Light Source, 'New secrets revealed from the Herculaneum scrolls', 25 June 2026. ↩

Ancient sources cited

Modern works cited

Cite this page. The Garden, ‘From Athens to Herculaneum: a timeline’, https://camelmaps.org/garden/timeline-epicureanism.php, last updated 11 November 2026, last checked 11 November 2026. What has changed.

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