 Epicurean philosophy played a very different role in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, providing a classical ‘cover’ for hedonistic and anti-religious sentiment among intellectuals attracted by the vision of a tranquil life free of fear of the gods (Kargon 1966; Wilson 2008). Women philosophers and intellectuals were unusually prominent amongst the seventeenth century advocates and translators of Epicurus (Wilson 2008). The Cambridge Platonists may have fueled the identification of atomism with atheism, because of the presentation of ancient Greek natural philosophy in Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe. A tendency to mischaracterize Epicurean philosophy as licentious persisted.