Epicurus: works in Greek and English

The road of the text

Follow the text from Epicurus's own day to the book in your hands. The gaps are the long silences between one mark and the next.

Before you read. Little numbers like ¹ are footnotes. Tap one and it jumps to the source at the bottom of the page, so you can check us. Debated among scholars The evidence allows more than one reading, and specialists disagree. No label? Then the sources simply state it as fact.

The author
Readers
Copies
Print and editions

341 BCThe authorBorn on Samos to Athenian parents^1,2,8
18 years later323 BCThe authorComes to Athens at eighteen^1,2
about 12 years laterc. 311 BCThe authorBegins to teach at Mytilene, then at Lampsacus^2,3
about 5 years later306 BCThe authorBack in Athens for good (307/6 BC); the Garden^2,4
36 years later270 BCThe authorDies at Athens (270 BC by the usual reckoning; 271 in the heading of Hicks's translation)^2,8,9 Debated among scholars
about 220 years later54 BCReadersCicero writes to his brother about the poems of Lucretius²⁹
about 130 years laterAD 79CopiesVesuvius buries the villa at Herculaneum with its Epicurean library²
about 50 years laterc. AD 125ReadersDiogenes of Oenoanda's Epicurean inscription (now dated to Hadrian's reign, 117–138; once to the late second century)²⁸ Debated among scholars
about 130 years laterc. AD 250CopiesDiogenes Laertius copies the three letters and the Principal Doctrines into his Lives (third century)^2,5
about 900 years laterc. 1150CopiesB, the chief manuscript of Diogenes (twelfth century), is written^11,12,32
about 270 years later1417ReadersPoggio Bracciolini finds a manuscript of Lucretius' poem^3,29
about 120 years later1533Print and editionsFirst printed Greek text of Diogenes Laertius (Froben, Basel)^32,35
about 120 years later1649Print and editionsGassendi's edition of Diogenes' book 10¹²
about 100 years later1752CopiesThe first carbonised rolls are found in the Villa of the Papyri^33,34
about 130 years later1884CopiesThe inscription at Oenoanda is discovered²⁸
3 years later1887Print and editionsHermann Usener's Epicurea^2,12
1 year later1888CopiesC. Wotke finds the Vatican Sayings in Vaticanus gr. 1950; they are published the same year^11,12
34 years later1922Print and editionsVon der Mühll's Teubner edition, the Greek text in the reader^11,13
4 years later1926Print and editionsCyril Bailey's Epicurus: The Extant Remains^2,12
47 years later1973Print and editionsArrighetti's Epicuro: Opere, second edition, the standard edition²

Life and work

Checked against sources · 7 October 2026

Epicurus was born in 341 BC on the island of Samos, where Athens had settled some of its own citizens. His parents were Neocles and Chaerestrate, and he was an Athenian of the village district (deme) of Gargettus.^1,2 At eighteen he came to Athens, it seems for the military training that young Athenians had to do.^1,2,3 He founded a school in a garden at Athens which, his ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius could still say some five centuries later, went on without a break while nearly all the others had died out.^2,4 He wrote about three hundred rolls.⁵ Only a handful of short works survive whole.²

A life among friends

He said he took up philosophy at fourteen; the story went that his schoolmasters could not explain to him what Hesiod meant by Chaos.¹ When the Athenian settlers were driven out of Samos after the death of Alexander the Great, he joined his father at Colophon, on the coast of what is now Turkey, in 321. There he studied with Nausiphanes, a follower of the atomist Democritus,^2,3 though he later denied it and called himself self-taught.⁶ Ten years later he began to teach at Mytilene on Lesbos and then at Lampsacus, and in 307/6 he came back to Athens for good.^2,3

There, Diogenes reports, he bought a garden for eighty minae, and friends came from all parts to live with him in it.⁴ The garden, in Greek κῆπος (kēpos), gave the school its name: the Garden.^2,3,7 Women studied there, among them Themista and Leontion,³ and so did slaves: his slave Mys joined in his studies along with his three brothers.⁴ Their life was famously plain; in one of his letters Epicurus wrote: “Send me a little pot of cheese, that, when I like, I may fare sumptuously.”⁴

Debated among scholars He died at Athens in 270 BC by the usual modern reckoning, aged seventy or seventy-one; Diogenes says he was seventy-two, and the heading of Hicks's translation in the reader gives his dates as 341–271.^2,8,9 His successor Hermarchus wrote that he died when a stone blocked his urine, after an illness of a fortnight.⁸ His will left his property to two friends in trust, on condition that they keep the garden for Hermarchus and the school; it freed four of his slaves and provided for the children of his late friend Metrodorus.¹⁰ On his last day he wrote to his friend Idomeneus: “On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you.” His pain, he says, could not be greater, “but over against them all I set gladness of mind at the remembrance of our past conversations.”¹⁰ Whether the letter is really his is not certain, but most scholars accept it.³

What survives

Among those rolls was On Nature, in thirty-seven books.⁵ What we can read whole we owe mostly to Diogenes Laertius, who wrote his Lives of Eminent Philosophers in the third century AD and gave its tenth and last book to Epicurus.² He copied out three letters in which Epicurus summed up his own teaching: to Herodotus on nature, to Pythocles on the heavens and the weather, and to Menoeceus on how to live.^2,5 He added the Principal Doctrines (Kyriai Doxai), forty short sayings; like the letters, they were meant to make the core of the teaching easy to remember.^2,3 A second collection of eighty-one sayings, the Vatican Sayings, turned up in 1888 in a fourteenth-century manuscript in the Vatican.^3,11,12 And charred rolls from a villa at Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, have given back damaged parts of On Nature.² The reader has the letters and both collections of sayings in Peter von der Mühll's Greek of 1922, and Diogenes' tenth book in R. D. Hicks's Greek and English.^9,13

What he taught

Everything, Epicurus says, is made of bodies and empty space: «τὸ πᾶν ἐστι σώματα καὶ κενόν», “the whole of being consists of bodies and space”.¹⁴ The bodies are atoms, solid pieces of matter too small to be seen. Epicurus took the idea from earlier thinkers, above all Democritus, and reworked it.² The gods exist, «θεοὶ μὲν γάρ εἰσιν», “For verily there are gods”,¹⁵ but they live in perfect bliss and take no trouble over us: such a being “has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being”.¹⁶ Epicureans of Roman times called the first four Principal Doctrines the “four-part cure”, the tetrapharmakos, after a medicine compounded of four drugs, and a papyrus of the Epicurean Philodemus from Herculaneum sums them up, in D. S. Hutchinson's free English: “Don't fear god, Don't worry about death; What is good is easy to get, and What is terrible is easy to endure.”³

The goal of life is pleasure, and this is the most misunderstood word in his philosophy. “When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality”; “By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.”¹⁷ Everything we do, he writes, is done “to be free from pain and fear”, and his word for a mind at peace is «ἀταραξίαν», ataraxia, “calmness”.^7,18 Bread and water give the highest pleasure to the hungry, and no one can live pleasantly without living wisely, honourably and justly.¹⁷

Debated among scholars To leave room for free choice, atoms were said to make, now and then, a tiny swerve; but the evidence for the swerve comes chiefly from later writers such as Lucretius and Cicero, and how it works is not entirely clear.²

Friendship mattered most of all: of everything wisdom provides for a happy life, “by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.”¹⁹ One of the Vatican Sayings gives it wings: «Ἡ φιλία περιχορεύει τὴν οἰκουμένην κηρύττουσα δὴ πᾶσιν ἡμῖν ἐγείρεσθαι ἐπὶ τὸν μακαρισμόν», in David Konstan's English “Friendship goes dancing round the world, announcing to all of us to wake up to happiness”.^2,20

Death is nothing to us

The second Principal Doctrine is his most famous line: «Ὁ θάνατος οὐδὲν πρὸς ἡμᾶς», “Death is nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling, and that which has no feeling is nothing to us.”¹⁶ The Letter to Menoeceus puts the argument in a sentence that is hard to forget: «ὅταν μὲν ἡμεῖς ὦμεν, ὁ θάνατος οὐ πάρεστιν· ὅταν δʼ ὁ θάνατος παρῇ, τόθʼ ἡμεῖς οὐκ ἐσμέν», “when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”²¹ Understood rightly, this takes away “the yearning after immortality”.²¹

Reading Epicurus

Diogenes found him a plain writer who used the ordinary words for things, “so lucid a writer that in the work On Rhetoric he makes clearness the sole requisite.”⁶ His modern editors are less sure. Von der Mühll warned of the “sparing and obscure brevity” (our translation of his Latin) that Epicurus chose for his letters and sayings,¹¹ and Cyril Bailey confessed to “the extreme difficulty of the writings of Epicurus”.¹² The Letter to Menoeceus, a short summary of his ethics² in an eloquent style that has been compared to the orator Isocrates',³ is a good place to begin. It opens: «Μήτε νέος τις ὢν μελλέτω φιλοσοφεῖν, μήτε γέρων ὑπάρχων κοπιάτω φιλοσοφῶν», “Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search thereof when he is grown old.”²² And it ends with a promise: practise these things day and night, and you «ζήσεις δὲ ὡς θεὸς ἐν ἀνθρώποις», “wilt live as a god among men.”²³

After Epicurus

One of his precepts became a target. Plutarch wrote a whole essay against «λάθε βιώσας», “live concealed” as the old translation in the reader puts it, and turned it on Epicurus himself, who wrote to his friends in Asia and sent his books to men and women alike.²⁴ In the first century BC the Roman poet Lucretius set out Epicurus' teaching in six books of Latin verse, On the Nature of Things.² Cicero attacked his ethics,² and Plutarch wrote two more treatises, one against Epicurus' disciple Colotes and one arguing that his teaching makes a pleasant life impossible.^25,26 Lucian tells how an oracle-giver named Alexander burnt «τὰς Ἐπικούρου κυρίας δόξας», the Principal Doctrines, in the market-place, with no idea “what peace, tranquillity, and freedom it engenders in them”.²⁷ In the second century AD a wealthy Epicurean named Diogenes had about 25,000 words of Epicurean teaching carved on a portico wall in the city of Oenoanda in Lycia, to help, he said, “those who come after us”.²⁸

Christian writers singled the school out for attack, and by the early fifth century AD it had all but died out; Dante put Epicurus and his followers in burning tombs in Hell for believing that the soul dies with the body.³ Lucretius' poem, almost lost in the Middle Ages, was found again in 1417,²⁹ and in the seventeenth century Pierre Gassendi, in Bailey's words, “revived the serious study of Epicureanism and may be said to have introduced the theory of atomism to the modern world”.¹²

How the words reached us

Manuscripts & transmission

Passed from hand to hand

Learning by heart. Epicurus meant his teaching to travel in short form. His letter to Herodotus calls itself an epitome for those who cannot work through all his writings on nature,³⁰ and Diocles reported that he trained his friends to learn his treatises by heart.³¹ The Principal Doctrines and the Vatican Sayings had the same purpose: to make the core of the teaching easy to remember.²

Diogenes Laertius and the notes in his margins. By far the greater part of what survives, the three letters and the Principal Doctrines among it, is embedded in the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius, so the text of Epicurus is for the most part the text of Diogenes' manuscripts.¹² Those manuscripts carried notes that later copyists wove into the text itself, especially in the letters to Herodotus and to Pythocles; sometimes they are easy to spot, sometimes it is hard to tell whether Epicurus or a commentator is speaking.^11,12 Hicks's text in the reader puts such notes in square brackets, for example one in the Letter to Herodotus that points to the Larger Epitome and the first book On Nature, and one after the first Principal Doctrine that begins “Elsewhere he says”.^14,16 Von der Mühll suspected that every copy of Diogenes goes back to a single, very faulty book, found at Constantinople in about the ninth century.¹¹

The manuscripts. They fall into two classes.^11,12 In Bailey's account the oldest of the better class is B, a twelfth-century parchment book now in Naples.^12,32 Beside it stands P (Paris, gr. 1759), much corrected by later hands; von der Mühll and Bailey date it to the beginning of the fourteenth century, while the more recent edition of Tiziano Dorandi puts it in the eleventh or twelfth.^11,12,32 The chief book of the other class is F (Florence, Laurentianus 69.13), which Usener dated to the twelfth century and von der Mühll to the thirteenth.^11,12 The Vatican Sayings survive in one book only, Vaticanus gr. 1950, of the fourteenth century. C. Wotke found them there in 1888, and they appeared that year in the Vienna journal Wiener Studien; Bailey credits the first edition to Wotke, with notes by Usener and Gomperz, von der Mühll to Usener.^11,12 Usener showed that the collection was put together from some of the Principal Doctrines and from the letters of Epicurus and his three leading companions, Metrodorus, Polyaenus and Hermarchus.¹¹

Stone and papyrus. The inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda, found in 1884 and first published, in 64 fragments, in 1892, preserves letters of Epicurus, among them one to his mother, which most scholars accept as his.^3,28 It also showed that the Principal Doctrines once circulated in a different order.¹¹ At Herculaneum the Villa of the Papyri was found in 1750³³ and gave up its first carbonised rolls in 1752;^33,34 its library almost certainly held the working collection of the Epicurean Philodemus.² From 1756 Antonio Piaggio unrolled them with a machine that pulled each roll open on silk threads, a method that destroyed the beginning of every roll.³⁴ Large parts of books 14, 15, 25 and 28 of On Nature are among them.³⁴

Print. Ambrogio Traversari's Latin translation of Diogenes was printed at Rome in 1472, and the whole Greek text first came out from Hieronymus Froben at Basel in 1533.^32,35 Bailey judges that the sixteenth-century editors, among them Stephanus (1570), had only inferior manuscripts, though some of their corrections are still printed; Gassendi's edition of book 10 (1649) practically rewrote the text.¹² The section numbers used today, such as 10.122 for the opening of the Letter to Menoeceus, go back to Marcus Meibom's edition of 1692.³² Hermann Usener's Epicurea (Leipzig, 1887) made a fresh start from the manuscripts and gathered quotations of Epicurus from the whole range of classical literature; it is still the fullest collection of the fragments.^2,12 Von der Mühll's Teubner edition of 1922 read the manuscripts again and added new ones,^11,12 and Graziano Arrighetti's Epicuro: Opere (2nd edition, Turin, 1973) is the standard edition of the works.² Diogenes himself has had three critical editions: H. S. Long's (Oxford, 1964), Miroslav Marcovich's (Teubner, 1999–2002) and Dorandi's (Cambridge, 2013).³²

Textual variants

Where the copies disagree

Does the wise man laugh at Destiny? In the Letter to Menoeceus Hicks's English says of the wise man: “Destiny, which some introduce as sovereign over all things, he laughs to scorn”.³⁶ The manuscripts do not quite say that. Where Hicks's Greek has «διαγελῶντος» (“laughing at”), the manuscripts B and F have ἀγγέλλοντος (“announcing”), which von der Mühll judged corrupt; his notes give διαγελῶντος, with the words after it in angle brackets, as Hermann Usener's restoration.^7,11,36 Von der Mühll prints «ἀγγέλλοντος» with a dagger, the sign that an editor cannot mend a passage, followed by a gap, and he suspected that the next lines were a commentator's note.^11,37,38

A sentence that runs both ways. The same letter teaches that one cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, honourably and justly, nor wisely, honourably and justly without living pleasantly.¹⁷ The manuscripts have a gap where the second half should be; an early editor, Stephanus, filled it from the fifth Principal Doctrine.¹¹ Von der Mühll prints the restored words in angle brackets, the sign for words a copyist left out and an editor has put back, while Hicks's text prints them without.^17,37,39 In the fifth Principal Doctrine itself Hicks also puts the matching words in angle brackets,⁴⁰ and the copy of that saying among the Vatican Sayings runs one way only.^11,41

Debated among scholars To be chosen, or a virtue? The twenty-third Vatican Saying begins «Πᾶσα φιλία δι’ ἑαυτὴν αἱρετή», in our translation “every friendship is to be chosen for its own sake”, and adds that friendship began from usefulness.⁴² The Vatican manuscript has ἀρετή, “a virtue”; αἱρετή, “to be chosen”, is Usener's correction, which von der Mühll accepts.^7,11 Konstan notes the alternative: on the manuscript's reading, friendship is a virtue for its own sake.²

Whose sayings? Not every “Vatican Saying” is by Epicurus. Von der Mühll's notes show that several repeat the Principal Doctrines, and they identify the tenth as fragment 37 of his friend Metrodorus in Körte's collection;¹¹ it ends with a line of Homer about the seer Calchas, who knew «τά τʼ ἐόντα τά τʼ ἐσσόμενα πρό τʼ ἐόντα», what is, what will be and what was before (our translation).^43,44 The fourteenth saying, «Γεγόναμεν ἅπαξ», “we are born once” (our translation), is also quoted in the anthology of Stobaeus, and the two copies differ. The word κύριος (“master”, in “not master of tomorrow”) is missing in the Vatican manuscript and is supplied from Stobaeus; and where Stobaeus has «τὸν καιρόν», “the right moment”, the Vatican manuscript has τὸ χαῖρον, from the verb for rejoicing.^7,11,43

Debated among scholars Is the Letter to Pythocles his? Its text is the most disordered of the three, and some scholars have denied it to Epicurus; it was doubted even in antiquity, as a passage of Philodemus shows. Von der Mühll blamed the disorder on notes that crept into the text and thought the letter genuine, as Konstan does, while Bailey leaned to Usener's view that it is a compilation made by Epicureans.^2,11,12

Books to read it in

P. von der Mühll, Epicuri epistulae tres et ratae sententiae a Laertio Diogene servatae; accedit Gnomologium Epicureum Vaticanum (Teubner, Leipzig, 1922).^11,13 The Greek of the letters, the Principal Doctrines and the Vatican Sayings in the reader.
R. D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Harvard University Press and Heinemann, 1925).⁹ The Greek and English of Diogenes' book 10 in the reader.
H. Usener, Epicurea (Teubner, Leipzig, 1887).^2,12 Still the fullest collection of the fragments and the ancient reports.
C. Bailey, Epicurus: The Extant Remains (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1926).^2,12 Greek text with a short critical apparatus, English translation and notes.
G. Arrighetti, Epicuro: Opere, 2nd edition (Einaudi, Turin, 1973).² The standard Greek edition, with Italian translation.
A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1987).² The sources arranged by topic, in English, with the Greek in volume 2.
T. Dorandi (ed.), Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Cambridge University Press, 2013); English translation by Pamela Mensch (Oxford University Press, 2018).² The modern Greek text of Diogenes, and an English version based on it.
B. Inwood and L. P. Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, 2nd edition (Hackett, Indianapolis, 1997).² English translations of the main sources; the Epicurean part is also published on its own.

Where this comes from

Sources (44)

We checked every statement above against these sources on 7 October 2026. Where they disagree, we say so. What we could not confirm, we left out.

Epicurus

The 5 works