The followers of Epicurus are often portrayed as “atheists,” but they were nothing of the kind. They were what we today would call deists, falling into the third group enumerated by Epictetus: according to them, God does exist, but He is immersed in the contemplation of divine things, paying no heed at all to earthly matters and human affairs. The world, for the Epicureans, is made of a chaos of atoms randomly bumping into each
