Texts & Documents

Diogenes Laertius' Book Ten - his biography of Epicurus - is the primary source of information about Epicurus remaining to us from the ancient world. The version on this page is that of Cyril Bailey as prepared forhis 1926 work "Epicurus - The Extant Remains." The text here was prepared from a PDF of the original which can be found at Archive.org here. The original PDF contains the full Greek, footnotes, and commentary. Approximate line numbers matching the Bailey edition are placed in brackets such as [20]. Placement of these numbers should not be considered to be exact, and should be used primarily as an aid in looking up the same section in other translations. Headings are not a part of the original text. The Perseus Greek edition, from which individual words can be looked up for English definitions, is here.NOTE:A PDF prepared by Tau Phi with three parallel public domain translations of this and the other letters of Epicurus is here. As of this writing 4/7/25, a work-in-progress of a side-by-side page is here, but the text and especially the line numbers are not yet reliable.

For purposes of inclusion in our regular 20th meetings, the following is a list of prominent Epicureans with notations of their accomplishments. Each month - in addition to Epicurus and Metrodorus - we can remember two others so that each year we rotate through the complete list. The goal for each month would be:To memorialize Epicurus and Metrodorus every month as per the directions in Epicurus' will.To memorialize two other prominent Epicureans from a list of 24 names that everyone ought to know.To memorialize one from a list of "lesser-known" Epicureans about whom we may not know much but which we know enough to make for an interesting mention.To prepare this we can use Nate's list of "Epicurean Philosophers."Full discussion thread for this project.

This is a collaborative page for developing pamplets on Epicurean Ethics suitable for handing out at an in-person meeting. The goal is to keep this both simple and practical.

This page is currently a work-in-progress for an "Epicurean Week" college level guided program to be used in an introductory philosophy course. The program will last for seven days and students will choose exercises to enhance their understanding of Epicurean philosphy. These are "modern" exercises based upon the core teachings of the Epicurean philosophy and the extant texts..This is a collection of proposals created by several individuals. Several members of the EpicureanFriends forum have been granted editing privilages so that we can collaboratively create this material.**Note to those who have been granted editing permission: please either create your own section in which you present your own individual proposal -- or -- if you add to anyone else's existing proposal please note any changes by placing those changes inside brackets and adding your name and the date of the change -- [ idea..., name, date ]. Also if you think something should be removed please do not delete anything but instead use brackets and write that as an editing note, with your name, and date. [ editing note..., name, date ].

LIGHTNING 🙝

"It has pleased God in his Goodness to Mankind, at length to discover to them the Means of securing their Habitations and other Buildings from Mischief by Thunder and Lightning."

--Benjamin Franklin; Poor Richard's Almanac; 1753

❧ This entry is titled Lightning, and will be a good place for quotations on thunder, the armaments of Zeus, and the causes of stormy weather.

Horace; Odes; 1;34: "Once I wandered, an expert in crazy wisdom, a scant and infrequent adorer of gods, now I’m…

DEATH 🙝

"Death has this much to be said for it:

You don't have to get out of bed for it.

Wherever you happen to be

They bring it to you—free.”

-Kingsley Amis

❧ This entry is titled Death, and will be a good place for quotations on fear, dying, and what happens--or doesn't--after.


Dawkins, Richard; Unweaving the Rainbow; 1998: "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here…

EARTH 🙝

"My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time."

-Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian, 1994

❧ This entry is titled Earth, and will be a good place for quotations on the third planet…

SYNOPTIC VIEW 🙝

"Many a man, when I tell him that I have been on to a mountain, asks if I took a glass with me. No doubt, I could have seen further with a glass, and particular objects more distinctly--could have counted more meeting-houses; but this has nothing to do with the particular beauty and grandeur that an elevated position affords. It was not to see a few particular objects, as if they were near at hand, as I had been accustomed to see them, that I ascended the mountain, but to see…

ATHEISM 🙝

"It has been very well said, that if triangles were to make to themselves gods, they would give them three sides. My dear Usbek, when I behold men, mere crawlers on this atom, the earth, which is but a point in the universe, proposing themselves as exact models for Providence, I know not how to harmonise such extravagance with such littleness."

--Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, "Persian Letters", 1714, transl. John Davidson

❧ This entry is titled…

ASTRONOMY 🙝

"We are star stuff harvesting star light. Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars. Our ancestors knew that their survival depended on understanding the heavens. They built observatories and computers to predict the changing of the seasons by the motions in the skies. We are all of us descended from astronomers."

--Carl Sagan, "Cosmos", 1980

❧ This entry is titled Astronomy, and will be a good place for quotations on the stars, the phenomena of…

ATOMISM 🙝

"Knowing this, be wise, and leave Epicurus to enquire in vain

where is the void and what are the atoms."

--Automedon, Book XI of the Greek Anthology, transl. W. R. Paton

❧ This entry is titled Atomism, and will be a good place for quotations on the atoms, the void, and the swerve .

Santayana, George; Three Philosophical Poets; 1910; "This double experience of mutation and recurrence, an experience at once sentimental and scientific, soon brought with it a very great thought, perhaps the…

TRAVELS 🙝

"Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which

I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others--which,

in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist."

-- Lucian of Samosata , A True Story, transl. by A. M. Harmon

❧ This entry is titled Travels, and will be a good place for quotations from or about Histories, Travelogues, adventures,

and whether the map is the same as the territory.

Jefferson, Thomas;  Letter to Peter Carr; August…

QUOTATIONS 🙝PASSAGES FROM A WORLD WHERENOTHING COMES FROM NOTHINGA TOPICAL REFERENCE SOURCE❧ COMPILED BY JOSHUA ELBERT

The purpose of this page is to present a table of major passages from the core texts for which there are translation controversies and as to the real meaning. In many or most cases, the issue involved is controversial, and the choice of words used to translate the text assumes that one among various possibilities is correct. The purpose here is to highlight the ambiguity and the various possibilities so as not to obscure the difficulty, but make it possible to explore the difficulty more deeply, in the spirit of PD24.PD24. If you reject any single sensation, and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion, as to the appearance awaiting confirmation, and that which is actually given by the sensation or feeling, or each intuitive apprehension of the mind, you will confound all other sensations, as well, with the same groundless opinion, so that you will reject every standard of judgment. And if among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm both that which awaits confirmation, and that which does not, you will not escape error, since you will have preserved the whole cause of doubt in every judgment between what is right and what is wrong.Edits and contributions to this table by Level 3 or above participants at EpicureanFriends.com are welcome. If you attempt to edit and do not have access, please message a moderator.This lexicon entry replaces the old entry located here: Table of Texts With Translation or Corruption Difficulties

A member who would like to get a book from the list sends a private message to the owner to ask for the book and to write the address to where the book should be shipped. Then, the owner sends the book, pays the shipping fee and removes the book from the list, and the requestor gets it for free and becomes the new owner of the book. It is up to the owner and the requestor to negotiate different terms.Preferably, the content of books on the list should be philosophy, science, history, self-help or non-trivial fiction, but there are no restrictions on the content except for spam, partisan politics and material which is restricted by law in some countries such as pornography, calls to commit a crime, or political propaganda of any kind (which is beyond the scope of the EpicureanFriends.com community rules of discussion).

This book has a lot of good information about Epicurean ethics, because it is an exchange in which Cicero dispute's Torquatus' statement of Epicurean ethics. Unfortunately we don't talk about it nearly as much as we talk about Book One. Part of the reason it is less referenced is that rather than being a straightforward narrative by Torquatus, this section is a question / answer dialog as in Plato's works. Unfortunately, the standard texts do not break the exchanges down by speaker, so the text is hard to follow in the standard editions. This page has been set up to prepare a version that is broken down into dialog presentation form and is therefore easier to read.If anyone would like to help edit this text, or knows of a printed version where we can more easily pull out the changes in speakers, please let Cassius know.This is a work in process. The place where editing stops is marked with a horizontal line divider, but it's easy to tell also because the names of the speakers stop appearing.

CHAPTER I.

"Oh monstrous," cried the young Theon, as he came from the portico of Zeno. "Ye Gods! and will ye suffer your names to be thus blasphemed? How do ye not strike with thunder the actor and teacher of such enormities? What! will ye suffer our youth, and the youth of after ages, to be seduced by this shameless Gargettian? Shall the Stoic portico be forsaken for the garden of Epicurus ? Minerva, shield thy city! Shut the ears of thy sons against the voice of this deceiver!"

Thus did Theon…

Tyndall - Address at Belfast

Boris Nikolsky is the author of the article "Epicurus on Pleasure"which explains that the kinetic / katastematic distinction was not of significance to Epicurus and was a much later non-Epicurean accretion.