Note 10 — Chapter XIV · THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY AS A WHOLE AND ITS HISTORICAL POSITION.

After having been engaged as a teacher in several Schools10 in Asia Minor, he repaired to Athens about the year 306 B.C.,11 and there founded a School of his own.12 The meeting-place of this School was the founder’s garden,13 and its centre of attraction was the founder himself, around whom a circle of friends gathered, knit together by a common set of principles, by a common affection for a master whom they almost worshipped, and by a common enjoyment of cultivated society.14 Opponents charged the Epicureans with gross impropriety, because they admitted not only women,15 but women of loose morality,16 to this circle of philosophic culture; but in the then state of Greek society, such conduct does not appear extraordinary. Here Epicurus laboured for six and thirty years, during which he succeeded in impressing a stamp on his School which is now seen definite and unchanged after the lapse of centuries. In the year 270 B.C.17 he succumbed to disease, the pains and troubles of which he bore with great fortitude.18 Out of the multitude of his writings19 only a few have come down to us, and these are for the most part unimportant ones.20 On the whole, these fragments21 bear out the unfavourable opinions which opponents have expressed with regard to his style.22