The Invention and Gendering of Epicurus by Pamela Gordon F'95 now available from University of Michigan Press.

The school of Greek philosopher Epicurus, which became known as the Garden, famously put great stock in happiness and pleasure. As a philosophical community, and a way of seeing the world, Epicureanism had a centuries-long life in Athens and Rome, as well as across the Mediterranean.

The Invention and Gendering of Epicurus studies how the Garden’s outlook on pleasure captured Greek and Roman imaginations—particularly among non-Epicureans—for generations after its legendary founding. Unsympathetic sources from disparate eras generally focus not on historic personages but on the symbolic Epicurean. And yet the traditions of this imagined Garden, with its disreputable women and unmanly men, give us intermittent glimpses of historical Epicureans and their conceptions of the Epicurean life.