According to the account of his life by the 3rd-century AD historian and biographer Diogenes La rtius , he left 300 manuscripts, including 37 treatises on physics and numerous works on love, justice, the gods, and other subjects. Of his writings, only three letters and a number of short fragments survive, preserved in Diogenes La rtius's biography . See Epicureanism . Epicureanism Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based chiefly on the teachings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus . The essential doctrine of Epicureanism is that pleasure is the supreme good and main goal of life.
Intellectual pleasures are preferred to sensual ones, which tend to disturb peace of mind.
True happiness, Epicurus taught, is the serenity resulting from the conquest of fear of the gods, of death, and of the afterlife. The ultimate aim of all Epicurean speculation about nature is to rid people of such fears. Epicurean physics is atomistic, in the tradition of the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus . Epicurus regarded the universe as infinite and eternal and as consisting only of bodies and space. Of the bodies, some are compound and some are atoms, or indivisible, stable elements of which the compounds are formed.