[kromem]

It's wild to me that to this day we still perpetuate the philosophical biases that originated with the early church, and as such everyone is familiar with Stoic and (Neo)Platonic philosophy, and yet very few people are familiar with the Epicureans.

A book like De Rerum Natura was talking about the quantization of light, survival of the fittest and the progression of now extinct 'freaks' of nature in the development of life, a universe that originated by atoms clashing randomly in the void. That rainbows were from light interacting with water vapor and that lightning and thunder might happen at the same time and just take different lengths of time to reach us.

And their philosophy for living a good life boiled down to self-knowledge, socialization with friends, and avoiding suffering.

They deserve far more credit than they got, and were effectively ignored throughout most of modern history because they saw a world that operated by its own laws and thus didn't see appeasement of gods as something to be concerned with.

The Stoics and Platonists with their perfect origin from which existence emerged by design was much more palatable to the church, and the group with the best understanding of the physical world in hindsight remains mostly a footnote, despite in antiquity (before the rise of the church) having been one of the major philosophical schools.