protagonist is the most famous atheist in history [Epicurus].”5 Stewart highlights the ideas of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Ethan Allen of the Green Mountain Boys, and Thomas Young, who set off the Boston Tea Party, and then shows how their ideas go back to the Greek philosopher Epicurus, the Roman poet Lucretius and the Dutch philosopher Spinoza. (“I too am an Epicurean,” Jefferson wrote to William Short in 1819.)6 According to this view, the real roots of American freedom, the