What if the Epicureans had prevailed?

[Anomalocaris]

Epicureanism would have never prevailed. Epicureanism is fundamentally a satisficing with the pragmatics of what is real. People will always prefer a confident certainty to a qualified pragmatism. It was simply a non starter.

I would think the widespread success of Buddhism and taoism suggest an philosophy like epicureanism could also gain widespread and lasting traction under the right circumstances. A philosophy need not directly satisfy every psychological need to establish itself as a major driver. In most societies an entire array of superstitions and folk religions coexist with dominant intellectual thought to provide relatively confident but utterly unfounded certainties to the needy and unintellectual.

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I often wonder what would history would look like if Epicurean thought had prevailed over cults of the roman era and Christianity had died like Mithraism.
What do you think?

I don't think Epicureanism would have helped Rome much against her internal breakdown and the barbarian incursions that overtaxed her defenses. In the west Rome would still have fallen. It is not clear to me how Epicureanism would have fared in the dark ages after 500 AD.

One possibility is without a powerful amd proselytizing church the civilization western Europe would have collapsed even more thoroughly than it did historically, while without the rise of Islam the eastern empire would have remain much richer and less territorially and militarily pressed than it was, and subsequent center of western civilization would have permanently shifted to the east.

To many uncertainty.