At the very same time as Zeno, Epicurus set up at Athens a school destined through all its existence to wage a battle with stoicism, yet aiming by different means at the same end, the freedom of the individual man from anxiety and disturbance.(430) If Zeno’s world was an intelligent animal, that of Epicurus was a machine formed and kept in action by chance. He assumed the atomic theory of Democritus, that all bodies—and there are nothing else but corporeal things—have arisen originally from atoms moving themselves in empty space. They are eternal and indestructible, without quality, but not without quantity, and endlessly various in figure. As these from mere weight and impulse would fall like an everlasting rain in empty space without meeting each other, Epicurus devised a third motion, a slight declension from the perpendicular, in virtue of which their agglomeration is produced: and thus it is a work of pure chance that out of these, the countless worlds which frame the universe began to be. Any order or higher guidance of the universe, as directed to a purpose, is not to be thought of, any more than necessary laws, according to which the appearances of nature reproduce themselves. For a law would ultimately lead to a lawgiver, and this might reawaken fear, and disturb the wise man’s repose. He utterly denied the intervention either of one god or of many gods in the forming or the maintenance of the world: the main purpose indeed of his philosophy was to overthrow that religious view which saw in the argument from design a sure proof of a divine Providence.(431) Nothing, he thought, was more perverted than that the opinion that nature was directed for the good of man, or generally for any object at all; that we have tongues in order to speak, or ears in order to hear, for in fact just the reverse is true. We speak because we have tongues, and hear because we have ears. The powers of nature have worked purely under the law of necessity. Among their manifold productions some were necessarily composed in accordance with an end: hence resulted for man in particular many means and powers; but such result must not be viewed as intentional, rather as a purely casual consequence of naturally necessary operations. Gods, such as the people believed, he utterly repudiated. Not he who denied such gods, but he who assumed their existence, was godless. He allowed, indeed, that there existed an immense multitude of gods, beings of human form, but endued with subtle, ethereal, transparent, indestructible bodies, who occupied the intermundial spaces, free from care, regardless of human things, enjoying their own blissful repose.(432) His gods are in fact a company of Epicurean philosophers, possessing everything which they can desire, eternal life, no care, and perpetual opportunity of agreeable entertainment.