ABSTRACT
Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism can be seen as philosophies that responded to the need that people in the Hellenistic period felt for some kind of salvation. These philosophies did not give way entirely to the failure of nerve that created philosophical religions of most of the Hellenistic and Roman philosophies. Epicurus was a prolific writer, but most of his work has been lost. Diogenes Laertius cited a number of titles and preserved Epicurus's work Principle Doctrines and letters to three of his disciples, Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus. The metaphysics of Democritus served well the salvation philosophy of the Epicureans, and the psychology of Democritus served equally well. Following the doctrine that only bodies and void exist and that the bodies are composites of atoms. Lucretius held that the soul is a 'fine-structured body, diffused through the whole aggregate'. The ethics of the Epicurean way of life was hedonistic; Epicurus considered pleasure the yardstick for judging whether something is good.
