Modern Classics

Letters and Sayings

From the Greek: the three letters, the Principal Doctrines, the Vatican Sayings, and his will

by Epicurus

c. 300 BC 2026about 1 hour to read

This is an AI modernization of Letters and Sayings into contemporary English. The original is available from Perseus Digital Library (Diogenes Laertius Book Ten, Hicks's Loeb text, 1925); the Vatican Sayings from Bailey (1926). Also available as an epub.

Editor's Introduction

Epicurus was born in 341 BC on Samos, in the settlement Athens kept on the island, to Athenian parents. After Alexander the Great died in 323, the Athenian settlers were expelled, and the family moved to Colophon on the coast of Asia Minor. Epicurus taught first at Mytilene and then at Lampsacus, and in about 306 BC he came to Athens and bought a house and a garden. The Garden became the name of his school. It took in women as well as men, and it lived simply, as a community of friends. He died there in 270 BC, at seventy-two, of a blockage of the bladder. On his last day he wrote to a friend that the memory of their talks together outweighed the pain.

His Athens was a city fought over by the Macedonian generals who had divided Alexander's empire, and it was crowded with schools: Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, and, from about 300 BC, the Stoics of Zeno. Epicurus offered something they did not. The universe, he taught, is made of atoms moving in an infinite void; worlds form and break up without any god arranging them; the gods exist, but they are blessed and untroubled and do nothing to us; the soul is made of atoms and comes apart at death. If you understand this you need not fear the gods or death, and a life without that fear, among friends, is the happy life.

He is said to have written some three hundred rolls, among them On Nature in thirty-seven books. Almost all of it is lost. Most of what survives whole is in one place, Book Ten of the Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, who wrote in the first half of the third century AD, some five hundred years after Epicurus. Diogenes gives a life of him, his will, and then three letters in full: to Herodotus, a summary of the physics; to Pythocles, on the things in the sky, a letter whose authorship has sometimes been doubted; and to Menoeceus, on how to live. He ends with the forty Principal Doctrines, short maxims meant to be learned by heart. In 1888 a further eighty-one sayings were found in a fourteenth-century manuscript in the Vatican Library, the Vatican Sayings. Some repeat the Doctrines, and a few are by his followers. Beyond these there are charred fragments of On Nature from a library at Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius, and quotations in other writers.

Three conventions need a word. The letters to Herodotus and Pythocles are, as Epicurus says, epitomes for students who already know the long books, so each sentence carries a whole argument; and for the weather and the stars he gives several possible causes at once and insists that all be kept open, because to keep one and throw out another that fits the evidence as well is, in his words, to slide down into myth. The manuscripts also carry notes by an ancient reader, in the third person ("he says this also in Book One of On Nature"), copied into the text by later scribes. They are not Epicurus, and here they are set as notes. And "pleasure" does not mean what the word "epicurean" came to mean. The Middle Ages remembered him as a patron of gluttons and drunkards. His own definition is in the Letter to Menoeceus: not the pleasures of the profligate, but not being in pain in the body and not being troubled in the soul. Barley bread and water, he says, give the highest pleasure to someone who needs them.

This edition is translated from the Greek: for Diogenes, R. D. Hicks's Loeb text of 1925, and for the Vatican Sayings, Cyril Bailey's of 1926. It opens with the Letter to Menoeceus, where Diogenes opens with the physics, and gives the will and the deathbed letter at the end. Where the Greek has a gap, a note says so and nothing is filled in. The older free English, by Hicks, Bailey and C. D. Yonge, reads as Victorian or Edwardian English, and Hicks puts the Letter to Menoeceus into the language of the King James Bible ("Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us"). Peter Saint-Andre's modern version, which he placed in the public domain, is plain and accurate, but it covers the Letter to Menoeceus, the Doctrines and most of the Sayings, and not the two physics letters or the will, which are the larger part of what survives. Here they are all in one English, and the key terms are the same as in this collection's Lucretius, who put Epicurus's physics into Latin verse two centuries later. Diogenes says the last letter went to Idomeneus, a friend from Lampsacus; Cicero, quoting it, has it written to Hermarchus, whom the will leaves at the head of the Garden.

On the cover. A marble head of Epicurus, a Roman copy made in the first century AD of a Greek portrait from the third century BC, now in the Museo Nazionale Romano at the Palazzo Massimo in Rome; the photograph is Marie-Lan Nguyen's (2010). The nose is broken away, but the furrowed brow, the heavy curls and the long beard are the face his followers in Italy chose to keep, three hundred years after he taught in his garden at Athens.

The Letter to Menoeceus

Epicurus to Menoeceus, greetings.

Nobody should put off doing philosophy while he is young, or grow tired of it when he is old. No one is ever too young or too old to look after the health of his soul. To say that the time for philosophy hasn't come yet, or has already gone by, is like saying that the time for happiness hasn't come yet, or is over. Young and old alike, then, should do philosophy: the old, so that as they age they can stay young in good things, through gratitude for what has been; the young, so that they can be young and old at once, because they have no fear of what is to come. We ought to give our care, then, to the things that make for happiness, since when happiness is here we have everything, and when it is not we do everything to get it.

Do the things I have kept urging on you, and practise them, and take them to be the ABC of living well. First, believe that a god is a living being, imperishable and blessed, as the common notion of a god sketches him, and pin nothing on him that is foreign to his imperishability or out of keeping with his blessedness; believe about him whatever can keep his blessedness and his imperishability together. For gods there are, and our knowledge of them is plain to see. But they are not what most people think they are, because people don't stay true to their own idea of them. The impious man is not the one who does away with the gods of the crowd, but the one who pins the crowd's opinions on the gods. What most people declare about the gods are not preconceptions, the clear notions that experience fixes in every one of us, but false assumptions. That is why the greatest harms come upon the wicked from the gods, and the greatest benefits upon the good: the gods are at home, always, with their own virtues, and so they welcome those who are like themselves and count whatever is not of that kind as alien.

Make a habit of thinking that death is nothing to us. Everything good and everything bad lies in sensation, and death is the loss of sensation. A right understanding that death is nothing to us therefore makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding endless time to it but by taking away the longing for immortality. There is nothing terrible in living for the man who has truly grasped that there is nothing terrible in not living. Foolish, then, is the man who says he fears death not because it will hurt when it comes but because it hurts to think of it coming. Whatever does us no harm when it is here gives us only an empty pain while we wait for it. Death, the most dreadful of evils, is therefore nothing to us, since while we are here death is not, and when death is here we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead: for the living it does not exist, and the dead no longer do. Most people, though, sometimes run from death as the greatest of evils and sometimes choose it as a rest from the evils of life. The wise man neither begs to be let off living nor fears not living. Life does not sicken him, and he does not imagine that not living is anything bad. Just as he chooses food that is not the biggest helping but the most delicious, so he enjoys time that is not the longest but the sweetest. Anyone who tells the young to live well and the old to die well is a simpleton, not only because life is welcome but because learning to live well and learning to die well are one and the same practice. Worse still is the man who says, with the old poet Theognis, that it is good not to be born, "but once born, to pass the gates of Hades as fast as you can."

If he says this from conviction, why doesn't he leave life? That is easy enough for him, if he has really made up his mind to it. And if he is joking, he is wasting his breath on people who won't have it.

We should remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that we neither count on it as sure to come nor despair of it as sure not to.

We should also reckon that of our desires some are natural and some are empty. Of the natural ones, some are necessary and some merely natural; and of the necessary ones, some are necessary for happiness, some for the body's freedom from discomfort, and some for life itself. A steady view of these things knows how to refer every choice and every avoidance to the health of the body and the ataraxia of the soul, its freedom from disturbance, since this is the goal of the blessed life. Everything we do, we do for this: so that we are neither in pain nor afraid. Once we have that, the whole storm of the soul dies down, because the living creature has nothing further to go after as though something were missing, and no other thing to look for that would make the good of soul and body complete. We need pleasure when we are in pain because pleasure is absent; when we are not in pain, we no longer need pleasure. And that is why we say that pleasure is the beginning and the end of the blessed life. We have recognised it as our first good, the good we were born with. It is where every choice and every avoidance begins, and it is what we come back to, using the feeling of it as the yardstick by which we judge every good. And precisely because it is our first good and native to us, we do not choose every pleasure. Sometimes we pass over many pleasures, when more trouble than pleasure follows from them; and we think many pains better than pleasures, when a greater pleasure comes to us after we have put up with the pains for a long time. Every pleasure, then, is good, because it is akin to our nature, and yet not every pleasure is to be chosen; just as every pain is bad, and yet not every pain is of a kind to be avoided always. All of these things have to be judged by weighing them against each other and looking at what helps and what harms, for at times we treat the good as bad and, in turn, the bad as good.

We also count self-sufficiency a great good, not so that we always make do with little, but so that when we don't have much we can make do with little, truly convinced that the people who enjoy luxury most are the ones who need it least, and that everything natural is easy to get and everything empty is hard to get. Plain flavours bring as much pleasure as an extravagant diet, once the pain of want has been removed, and barley bread and water give the very highest pleasure to someone who needs them and puts them to his lips. Getting used to simple, inexpensive meals, then, gives us all we need for health, makes a person ready and willing for the necessary business of life, puts us in better shape for the lavish meals that come our way now and then, and makes us unafraid of fortune.

When we say, then, that pleasure is the goal, we don't mean the pleasures of the profligate or the pleasures that consist in having a good time, as some people think who don't understand us, or disagree with us, or take us in bad faith. We mean not being in pain in the body and not being troubled in the soul.1

It is not one drinking party after another, or revels, or the enjoyment of boys and women, or of fish and everything else an expensive table carries, that makes a pleasant life. It is sober reasoning, which searches out the grounds of every choice and every avoidance and drives out the opinions that fill our souls with the greatest turmoil. The beginning of all this, and the greatest good, is practical wisdom, the good sense that does the weighing. That is why practical wisdom is more precious even than philosophy: all the other virtues grow out of it. It teaches that you cannot live pleasantly without living wisely and honourably and justly, and you cannot live wisely and honourably and justly without living pleasantly. The virtues have grown up together with the pleasant life, and the pleasant life cannot be separated from them.

Who, after all, could be better than the man who thinks reverently about the gods, who is never afraid of death, and who has worked out what nature's goal is? He understands that the limit of good things is easy to fill and easy to reach, and that bad things are short either in time or in pain. He laughs at the Fate that some people bring on stage as mistress of all things, and says instead that some things happen by necessity, some by fortune, and some are up to us, because necessity answers to no one, fortune, as he can see, never stands still, and what is up to us has no master, and that is why praise and blame naturally go with it. (It would be better, in fact, to go along with the stories about the gods than to be a slave to the fate of the natural philosophers. The stories at least hold out the hope of talking the gods round by honouring them; fate holds a necessity that no prayer can move.) He does not take fortune for a god, as most people do, since a god does nothing at random; nor does he take it for an unreliable cause. He does not think it hands people anything good or bad that makes their lives blessed, though he does think it supplies the starting points of great goods and great evils. And he thinks it better to be unlucky after reasoning well than lucky after reasoning badly, since in what we do it is better that a well-judged course should not need fortune to make it come right.

Practise these things, then, and everything akin to them, day and night, by yourself and with someone like yourself, and you will never be troubled, waking or dreaming, but will live like a god among human beings. For a man who lives among immortal goods is nothing like a mortal creature.

The Principal Doctrines

1. The blessed and imperishable has no troubles of its own and makes none for anyone else, and so it is never in the grip of anger or of favour, since everything of that kind belongs to weakness.2

2. Death is nothing to us. What has come apart has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.

3. The limit of the greatness of pleasures is the removal of everything that gives pain. Wherever pleasure is present, for as long as it is there, there is no pain of body or distress of mind, or both together.

4. Pain does not linger without a break in the flesh. At its sharpest it is present for the shortest time, and the pain that only just outweighs the pleasure in the flesh does not stay for many days together; and long illnesses hold more pleasure in the flesh than pain.

5. You cannot live pleasantly without living wisely and honourably and justly, and you cannot live wisely and honourably and justly without living pleasantly. Whoever lacks the means to live wisely, even if he does live honourably and justly, cannot live pleasantly.

6. For the sake of feeling secure against other people, rule and kingship were a good by nature, as means by which anyone might at some time be able to provide himself with this.

7. Some people have wanted to become famous and admired, thinking that in this way they would win safety from other people. If the life of such people is safe, then they have obtained the good that nature wants; but if it is not safe, they do not have the thing they reached for in the first place, at nature's own prompting.

8. No pleasure is a bad thing in itself; but the things that produce some pleasures bring troubles many times greater than the pleasures.

9. If every pleasure could be concentrated, and lasted through time, and filled the whole compound that we are, or its chief parts, pleasures would never differ from one another.

10. If the things that produce the pleasures of the profligate set the mind free from its fears, the fears about the things in the sky and about death and pains, and taught besides the limit of our desires, we would never have anything to blame the profligate for, since they would be filled full of pleasures from every side and would have pain or distress from no side at all, and pain and distress are precisely what is bad.

11. If we were not troubled at all by our suspicions about the things in the sky, and about death, that it might somehow be something to us, and also by our failure to understand the limits of pains and desires, we would have no need of the study of nature.

12. There was no dissolving our fear about the most important things without knowing what the nature of the universe is, while we still suspected there might be something in the stories. And so without the study of nature there was no having our pleasures pure and unmixed.

13. There was no use in securing safety from other people while the things above us remained objects of suspicion, and the things under the earth, and, in a word, the things in the infinite.

14. Once some measure of safety from other people has been won, by a power able to hold them off and by plenty, the purest safety is the one that comes from a quiet life and withdrawal from the crowd.

15. Nature's wealth is both limited and easy to get; the wealth of empty opinions runs off into infinity.

16. Fortune breaks in on the wise man only in small ways; the greatest and most important things his reasoning has managed, manages, and will manage, through the whole unbroken length of his life.

17. The just man is the least disturbed of all men; the unjust man is full of the greatest disturbance.

18. Pleasure in the flesh does not grow any greater once the pain of want has been removed; it only varies. But for the mind, the limit of pleasure comes from thinking through these very things, and the things akin to them, that used to give the mind its greatest fears.

19. Infinite time holds as much pleasure as limited time, if we measure out the limits of pleasure by reasoning.

20. The flesh takes the limits of pleasure to be unlimited, and only unlimited time could supply such pleasure. But the mind, reckoning out the goal and limit of the flesh, and dissolving the fears about eternity, supplies the complete life, and has no further need of infinite time. Yet it does not run from pleasure either; and even when circumstances are bringing about its departure from life, it does not come to its end as though it lacked anything of the best life.

21. The man who has understood the limits of life knows how easy it is to get what removes the pain of want and makes the whole of life complete; and so he has no need of things that bring struggle and competition with them.

22. We must reckon with the goal that really exists, and with all the clear evidence to which we refer our opinions; otherwise everything will be full of indecision and disturbance.

23. If you fight against all your sensations, you will have nothing to refer to, and so no means of judging even the ones you say are false.

24. If you throw out any single sensation outright, and do not distinguish between what is opinion and still waits for confirmation, and what is already present in sensation and in the feelings and in every focusing of the mind on what appears to it, you will throw the rest of your sensations into confusion too with your idle opinion, and so throw out the criterion of judgement altogether. And if, in the notions you form by opinion, you treat as confirmed both everything that still waits for confirmation and what has no confirmation, you will not escape error, since you will have kept every ground for doubt in every judgement of what is right and what is not.

25. If you do not, at every moment, refer each of your actions to nature's goal, but turn off before you get there towards something else, whether you are avoiding or pursuing, your actions will not keep step with your arguments.

26. Those desires that do not lead to pain if they go unfilled are not necessary, and the craving for them is easily dispersed when they seem hard to satisfy or likely to do harm.

27. Of all the things that wisdom provides for the blessedness of the whole of life, by far the greatest is the possession of friendship.

28. The same conviction that has given us confidence that nothing terrible is eternal, or even long-lasting, has also seen that, within the limits of this life itself, safety is made complete above all by friendship.

29. Of our desires, some are natural and necessary; some are natural but not necessary; and some are neither natural nor necessary, but arise from empty opinion.3

30. Among the natural desires that do not lead to pain if they are not fulfilled, those pursued with fierce effort arise from empty opinion; and when they are not dispersed, it is not because of their own nature but because of the person's empty conceit.

31. Nature's justice is a pledge of advantage: that we neither harm one another nor are harmed.

32. For those living creatures that could not make pacts neither to harm one another nor to be harmed, nothing was just or unjust. And the same holds for those peoples that could not, or would not, make pacts neither to harm nor to be harmed.

33. Justice was never anything in itself. It is a kind of pact, made in people's dealings with one another in whatever places, at whatever times, neither to harm nor to be harmed.

34. Injustice is not bad in itself; its badness lies in the fear that comes with the suspicion that it will not escape the notice of those appointed to punish such things.

35. The man who secretly breaks any of the terms people have agreed with one another, neither to harm nor to be harmed, cannot be confident that he will go unnoticed, even if he goes unnoticed ten thousand times for now; for until his life is over it is uncertain whether he will go on going unnoticed.

36. In general, justice is the same for everyone, since it was something advantageous in people's life in common with one another; but as it applies to a particular country, and to whatever other causes there may be, it does not follow that the same thing is just for everyone.

37. Among the things held to be just, whatever is confirmed as advantageous to the needs of people's life in common has the stamp of justice, whether it turns out the same for everyone or not. But if someone makes a law and it does not turn out to serve the advantage of people's life in common, it no longer has the nature of justice. And if what is advantageous in the way of justice changes, but for a time fits the preconception of justice, it was no less just for that time, to those who do not muddle themselves with empty words but simply look at the facts.

38. Where, with circumstances unchanged, the things held to be just were shown in practice not to fit the preconception, they were not just. But where circumstances changed and the same laws laid down as just were no longer advantageous, there they were just at the time when they were advantageous to the citizens' life in common, and afterwards, when they were no longer advantageous, they were no longer just.

39. The man who has best arranged things against the insecurity that comes from outside has made kin of whatever he could; whatever he could not, he has at least not made foreign; and where he could not do even that, he has had no dealings with it, and has kept away everything it paid him to keep away.

40. Those who had the power to make themselves secure, above all against their neighbours, lived with one another most pleasantly as a result, holding the firmest guarantee; and having enjoyed the fullest intimacy, they did not mourn the early end of the one who died as though it called for pity.

The Vatican Sayings

1. The same as Principal Doctrine 1.

2. The same as Principal Doctrine 2.

3. The same as Principal Doctrine 4.

4. All pain is easy to despise: pain that is intense is short, and pain that lingers in the flesh is mild.

5. The same as Principal Doctrine 5.

6. The same as Principal Doctrine 35.

7. It is hard for a wrongdoer to go unnoticed, and impossible for him to be sure that he will.

8. The same as Principal Doctrine 15.

9. Necessity is a bad thing, but there is no necessity to live with necessity.

10. Remember that, though you are mortal by nature and were given a limited time, you have climbed up, through your reasonings about nature, to infinity and to eternity, and have seen, in Homer's words for the prophet Calchas, "the things that are, and the things that shall be, and the things that were before."4

11. Most people are numb when they are at rest and rabid when they are active.

12. The same as Principal Doctrine 17.

13. The same as Principal Doctrine 27.

14. We are born once; we cannot be born twice, and for all eternity we must be no more. Yet you, who are not master of tomorrow, put off your joy. Life is wasted in putting things off, and each one of us dies busy.

15. We value our characters as our own private property, whether they are good ones that people envy us for or not; in the same way we ought to value our neighbours' characters, if they are decent people.

16. No one who sees what is bad chooses it. He is baited with it as though it were good, and hunted down into an evil greater than itself.

17. It is not the young man who should be counted blessed, but the old man who has lived well. The young man in his prime is tossed this way and that by fortune, never of one mind; the old man has come to anchor in old age as in a harbour, having locked away, in a gratitude that keeps them safe, the good things he once hardly dared to hope for.

18. Take away seeing each other, talking together and living in each other's company, and the passion of love dissolves.

19. The man who forgets the good he has had has grown old this very day.

20. The same as Principal Doctrine 29.

21. We must not force nature but obey her; and we shall obey her if we fulfil the necessary desires, and the natural ones too if they do no harm, and sternly reject the harmful ones.

22. The same as Principal Doctrine 19.

23. Every friendship is worth choosing for its own sake, but it takes its start from the help it brings.

24. Dreams have no divine nature and no power of prophecy; they come about when images fall in upon us.

25. Poverty measured by the goal of nature is great wealth; wealth that knows no limit is great poverty.

26. We must grasp that the long argument and the short one aim at the same goal.

27. In other pursuits the fruit comes only when the work is at last complete; in philosophy delight runs alongside knowledge. Enjoyment does not come after learning: learning and enjoyment come together.

28. We should not approve of those who rush into friendship, nor of those who hang back; for friendship's sake we must even take risks.

29. For my part, speaking freely as I study nature, I would rather proclaim like an oracle the things that are useful to all mankind, even if no one is going to understand me, than fall in with common opinions and reap the praise that falls thick and fast from the crowd.

30. Some people spend their whole lives getting together the means to live, not seeing that the potion poured into every one of us at birth is a deadly one.5

31. Against everything else it is possible to secure safety, but where death is concerned all human beings live in a city without walls.

32. Reverence for the wise man is a great good to those who revere him.

33. The cry of the flesh: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. Whoever has these, and expects to go on having them, could rival even Zeus for happiness.

34. It is not so much our friends' help that we need as the confidence that their help will be there.

35. We should not spoil what we have by wanting what we do not have, but reflect that what we have was once among the things we prayed for.

36. Compared with the lives of others, for its gentleness and self-sufficiency, Epicurus's life might be taken for a legend.6

37. Nature is weak against what is bad, not against what is good: pleasures preserve it and pains break it apart.

38. He is a small man in every way who has many good reasons for leaving life.

39. The friend is neither the one who is always looking for help nor the one who never connects friendship with help. The first trades kindness for a return; the second cuts off all hope for the future.

40. The man who says that everything happens by necessity has no complaint to make against the man who says that not everything happens by necessity; for he says that this too happens by necessity.

41. We must laugh and do philosophy at the same time, and run our households, and make use of everything else that belongs to us, and never stop speaking out the words of true philosophy.

42. The same moment sees both the birth of the greatest good and the enjoyment of it.

43. Love of money is impious if the money is unjust, and shameful if it is just; for it is unseemly to be meanly stingy even with justice on one's side.

44. The wise man, once he has come down to the bare necessities, knows better how to share than to take, so great a treasure of self-sufficiency has he found.

45. The study of nature does not turn out braggarts, or phrase-makers, or men who parade the education the crowd fights over; it makes men who stand tall and are self-sufficient, proud of their own goods and not of their circumstances.

46. Let us drive out our bad habits completely, like wicked men who have done us great harm for a long time.

47. I have beaten you to it, Fortune, and blocked every way you might creep in. We will not give ourselves up to you or to any other circumstance; and when the inevitable leads us out, we will spit hard on life and on those who cling to it in their emptiness, and leave life singing a fine hymn of triumph, that we have lived well.7

48. While we are on the road, we should try to make each stretch better than the last; and when we reach the end, we should be glad, evenly and steadily.

49. The same as Principal Doctrine 12.

50. The same as Principal Doctrine 8.

51. You tell me that the stirring of your flesh inclines you rather too freely towards sex. As long as you do not break the laws, or unsettle customs that are well established, or upset any of your neighbours, or wear your body down, or squander what you need to live, follow your inclination as you like. Still, it is impossible not to be caught by at least one of these. Sex has never done anyone any good, and a man should be content if it has done him no harm.

52. Friendship dances round the world, proclaiming to all of us that we should wake up and count ourselves blessed.

53. We should envy no one. The good do not deserve envy, and the bad, the more they prosper, the more they ruin themselves.

54. We must not pretend to do philosophy, but really do it; for what we need is not to seem healthy but to be truly healthy.

55. We should treat our misfortunes with grateful memory of what we have lost, and by knowing that what has happened cannot be undone.

56-57. The wise man feels no more pain when he is tortured himself than when he sees his friend tortured ... his whole life will be thrown into confusion by faithlessness and turned upside down.8

58. We must set ourselves free from the prison of everyday business and politics.

59. It is not the belly that is insatiable, as most people say, but the false opinion that the belly needs filling without limit.

60. Everyone leaves life as though he had only just been born.

61. Most beautiful, too, is the sight of those close to us, when our first kinship is in harmony, or is working hard to get there.

62. If parents are rightly angry with their children, it is surely pointless to resist and not to ask to be forgiven. If their anger is not right but rather unreasonable, it is quite ridiculous to inflame their unreason further by nursing your own anger, and not to look for some other way, by good feeling, to bring them round.

63. There is a limit in frugality too, and the man who fails to reckon with it suffers much the same as the man who goes wrong by having no limit at all.

64. Praise from others must follow of its own accord; our business is with healing ourselves.

65. It is pointless to ask the gods for what you are able to provide for yourself.

66. Let us share our friends' troubles not by lamenting but by taking thought for them.

67. A free life cannot acquire great wealth, because that is not easy to do without slaving for mobs or monarchs; yet it has everything, in continuous abundance. And if it should happen to come by great wealth, it can easily share it out to win its neighbours' goodwill.

68. Nothing is enough for the man for whom enough is little.

69. The soul's ungrateful greed makes the creature hungry without end for fancy variations in its food.

70. Do nothing in your life that will make you afraid if your neighbour finds out about it.

71. Every desire should be met with this question: what will happen to me if what this desire seeks is achieved, and what if it is not?

72. The same as Principal Doctrine 13.

73. Even some bodily pains are useful, as a guard against others of the same kind.

74. In a discussion among lovers of learning, the loser gains more, in so far as he has learned something.

75. Ungrateful to the good things of the past is the voice that says, as the proverb does, "Look to the end of a long life."

76. You are, in your old age, just the kind of man I urge people to be, and you have seen clearly what it is to do philosophy for yourself and what it is to do it for Greece. I rejoice with you.

77. The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom.

78. The noble man is most concerned with wisdom and friendship: of these, one is a mortal good, the other immortal.

79. The undisturbed man is no trouble to himself or to anyone else.

80. Let the first part of safety be to watch over your youth and guard against everything that fouls all things through desires that sting like a gadfly.

81. The disturbance of the soul is not ended, and no joy worth speaking of is produced, by the greatest wealth, or by honour and admiration among the crowd, or by anything else that comes from causes without limit.

The Letter to Herodotus

Epicurus to Herodotus, greetings.

There are people, Herodotus, who cannot work through every detail of what I have written about nature, or study closely the longer books I have put together. For them I have myself prepared an epitome of the whole system, enough for them to keep the most general doctrines firmly in memory, so that at every turn they can help themselves on the most important points, as far as they take up the study of nature at all. And even those who have made good progress in surveying the whole must memorise the outline of the whole system, set out in its elements; for we often need to focus on the whole at once, and much less often on the parts.

We must keep going back to those general points, then, and fix enough of them in memory to give us our most authoritative focusing of the mind on the facts; and every exact detail will also be found, once the most general outlines have been well grasped and remembered. For even for someone who has completed his training, the most important part of all exact knowledge is this: to be able to use his focusings quickly, by bringing each thing back to simple elements and simple words. It is impossible to hold the concentrated result of a continuous round of the whole unless one can take in, in a few short words, everything that might also be worked out in detail.

This way of working is useful to everyone who has made the study of nature his own. And since I urge constant activity in the study of nature, and it is in such a life above all that I find my own calm, I have made you this as well: an epitome, an elementary statement, of the doctrines as a whole.

First, Herodotus, we must have grasped what our words stand for, so that we can refer to it the things we hold opinions about, or are inquiring into, or are puzzled by, and judge them; otherwise everything will go unjudged, as we prove one thing by another on to infinity, or we shall be left with empty words. The first notion that goes with each word has to be seen plainly and must need no further proof, if we are to have something to which we can refer what we are inquiring into or puzzling over or holding an opinion about.

Next, we must keep everything under the watch of our sensations, and simply of whatever focusings are present to us, whether of the mind or of any of the criteria, and likewise of the feelings we actually have, so that we have something to use as signs when we judge both what waits for confirmation and what is unseen.

With these points settled, we must now take a view of the things that are unseen. First, nothing comes into being out of nothing: if it did, anything would come into being out of anything, with no need of seeds at all. And if what vanishes were destroyed into nothing, all things would have perished long ago, since there would be nothing for them to dissolve into. Besides, the universe always was such as it is now, and always will be such. There is nothing for it to change into, because outside the universe there is nothing that could enter into it and bring about the change.

Moreover, the universe is bodies and void. That bodies exist, sensation itself bears witness in every case, and it is by sensation that reason must judge what is unseen. And if there were not what we call void and room and intangible nature, bodies would have nowhere to be and nothing to move through, as they plainly are seen to move. Beyond these two, nothing can even be conceived, either by grasping it directly or by analogy with what is so grasped, as a thing existing in its own right, rather than as what we call the properties or the events of such things.9

Again, of bodies some are compounds, and some are the things that compounds are made of. These last are atoms, atomos being Greek for uncuttable, and they cannot change, if everything is not to be destroyed into nothing. They are strong enough to survive when compounds are dissolved, since they are full by nature, and there is nowhere and no way for them to be dissolved. It follows that the first principles of bodies must be uncuttable kinds of body.10

Then again, the universe is infinite. What is limited has an end; an end is seen against something else; but the universe is not seen against anything else. Having no end, then, it has no limit; and having no limit, it must be infinite and not limited.

The universe is infinite, too, both in the number of its bodies and in the extent of its void. If the void were infinite and the bodies limited in number, the bodies would stay nowhere, but would be carried along scattered through the infinite void, with nothing to support them and check them by knocking them back. And if the void were limited, the infinite bodies would have nowhere to be.

Besides this, the atoms, the solid bodies out of which compounds come into being and into which they dissolve, have varieties of shape too many for us to grasp; for so many differences in things could not have come about out of the same shapes, if their number could be grasped. Of each shape there are simply infinitely many atoms alike, but the varieties of shape are not simply infinite, only too many to grasp.11

The atoms move continuously for all time. Some of them spring a long way apart from one another, while others keep up their vibration on the spot, whenever they happen to be locked in by their entanglement, or held under cover by atoms shaped for entangling.12

For it is the nature of the void, which separates each atom from the next, that brings this about, since the void cannot give them support; while the solidity that belongs to the atoms makes them rebound when they collide, as far as their entanglement allows them to spring back from the collision. Of all this there is no beginning, since the atoms and the void are eternal.13

This much, if all of it is kept in memory, gives a sufficient outline for our thinking about the nature of what exists.

And there are worlds without number, each an ordered system of earth and sky and stars, some like this one of ours and some unlike it. The atoms are infinite in number, as was shown just now, and they travel very far. The kind of atoms out of which a world could come into being, or by which one could be made, have not been used up on one world or on any limited number of worlds, whether worlds like this one or worlds different from it. There is nothing, then, to stand in the way of an infinity of worlds.

There are also outlines of the same shape as solid bodies, far finer than anything that appears to us. It is not impossible that such formations should arise in the surrounding air, or that there should be conditions suited to producing things so hollow and so fine, or that there should be outflows from bodies that keep the same order and arrangement their atoms had in the solid. These outlines we call images. And motion through the void, when it meets nothing to collide with, covers any length we can conceive in a time too short to conceive. For it is collision and the absence of collision that take on the look of slowness and speed.

Not that the moving body itself reaches several places at once in the stretches of time that only reason can see: that is unthinkable. And when, in a time the senses can perceive, it arrives all at once from some point or other of the infinite, the place it sets out from will not be the place from which we see its motion begin. For that would amount to collision, even if up to that point we leave the speed of its motion with no collision at all. This too is an element worth holding on to. Next, we must hold that the images have a fineness nothing can surpass, since nothing among the things that appear contradicts it. That is also why they have speeds nothing can surpass, since every passage is the right size for them, and besides, nothing, or very little, collides with them in their endless number, whereas a mass of many atoms, countless atoms, meets with some collision at once.

Besides this, the coming into being of the images happens as fast as thought. There is a continuous flow from the surface of bodies, which shows itself in no shrinking because the loss is constantly made up, and which keeps for a long time the position and order the atoms had in the solid, though sometimes it is thrown into confusion. Formations of this kind also come together quickly in the surrounding air, because they do not need to be filled out in depth; and there are certain other ways in which such things are produced. None of this is contradicted by the sensations, if one looks at how to take in the clear evidence, so as to bring home to ourselves the connections with things outside us as well.

We must also hold that it is when something comes into us from the things outside that we see their shapes and think of them. Things outside could not stamp their own nature, their colour and their shape, on us through the air between us and them, nor by means of rays or any kind of stream travelling from us to them, as well as they do by certain outlines coming into us from the things themselves, of the same colour and the same shape, and of a size to fit our sight or our mind. These outlines move swiftly, and for that reason they give the appearance of one continuous thing, and keep their connection with the object they come from, thanks to the matching pressure from it that comes from the vibration of the atoms deep inside the solid. And whatever appearance we take in by a focusing of the mind or of the sense organs, whether of a shape or of properties, this is the shape of the solid, produced by the image's packed succession or by what remains of it. Falsehood and error always lie in what opinion adds, when a thing waits to be confirmed or not contradicted, and then is not confirmed, or is contradicted.14

The appearances that we take in as if in a picture, or that come to us in sleep, or by other focusings of the mind or of the other criteria, would never be like the things we call real and true, if there were not also things of that kind for us to compare them with. And error would not exist if we did not also have some other movement in ourselves, linked to the focusing on the appearance but distinct from it. By this movement, if it is not confirmed or is contradicted, falsehood comes about; and if it is confirmed or not contradicted, truth.

We must hold very firmly to this opinion too, so that neither are the criteria that rest on clear evidence done away with, nor is error given the same footing as truth to throw everything into confusion.

Hearing, too, comes about when a stream travels from whatever is speaking or ringing or crashing, or in any way at all producing the feeling of hearing. This stream is scattered into particles alike in their parts, which keep a certain connection with one another and a unity of their own kind that reaches back to the source; for the most part they produce a perception of the source itself, or, failing that, they only make it plain that something is there outside. Without some connection carried back from the source, no such perception could arise. We should not think, then, that the air itself is shaped by the voice sent out, or by sounds of the same kind, since the air would fall far short of being affected by them in that way. Rather, the blow struck inside us when we utter a sound at once squeezes out certain particles that make up a stream like breath, and it is this that gives us the feeling of hearing.

We must think, too, that smell, like hearing, could never produce any feeling unless certain particles were carried off from the thing, of the right size to stir this sense organ, some of one sort, troubling and unwelcome to it, and some of another, untroubling and welcome.

We must hold, too, that the atoms bring with them none of the qualities of the things that appear to us, except shape and weight and size, and whatever necessarily goes with shape. For every quality changes, but the atoms do not change at all, since, when compounds are dissolved, something must remain that is solid and cannot be dissolved, which makes the changes happen, not into nothing or out of nothing, but by shifts of position in most cases, and in some by atoms coming and going. That is why the things that shift position must be imperishable, without the nature of what changes, but with masses and configurations of their own; for these, too, must remain.

In the things around us that change their shape as parts are stripped away, the shape is seen to stay in the thing, while the qualities do not stay in what is changing, as the shape is left behind, but perish out of the whole body. These things that are left behind, then, are enough to make the differences between compounds, since something must be left behind and not perish into nothing.

Nor again must we think that every size is found among the atoms, or the things that appear will contradict us; but we must think that there are some variations of size. With this added, what happens in our feelings and our sensations will be better explained. But for every size to exist is of no use in explaining the differences of qualities, and besides, some atoms would have had to reach us that were big enough to see; and this is never seen to happen, nor can one conceive how an atom could become visible.

Besides this, we must not think that in a limited body there are infinitely many particles, of any size whatever. We must do away not only with division into smaller and smaller without end, so as not to make everything weak, and be forced, in our grasp of compound things, to grind away what exists and use it up into nothing; we must also not think that in limited bodies one can pass on from part to part without end, even to smaller and smaller ones.

For once someone has said that there are infinitely many particles in something, of whatever size, it is impossible to conceive how that thing could still be limited in size. The infinitely many particles must clearly be of some size; and whatever size they were, the size of the whole would be infinite too. And since what is limited has an end that can be told apart, even if it cannot be seen on its own, one cannot help thinking of the next part beyond it as being of the same kind; and in this way, going forward from one to the next, one would have to reach infinity in thought.

The least thing in sensation, we must understand, is neither like the things that let us pass across them from part to part, nor in every way unlike them. It has something in common with the things that can be passed across, but it has no parts to tell apart. Whenever, because of the likeness that this common feature gives it, we think we shall tell apart something in it, one part on this side and another on that, what meets our eye must be another least thing equal to the first. We look at these one after another, beginning from the first, and not all in the same place, nor touching part with part; it is by their own individual character that they measure out sizes, more of them for a bigger size and fewer for a smaller.

We must think that the least part in the atom follows this same analogy. In smallness it clearly differs from the least thing seen by sensation, but the analogy holds. Indeed it was on the analogy of the things here that we declared that the atom has size at all, only carrying something small a long way further down. Further, we must think of these least parts, these unmixed limits, as providing out of themselves, as the first units, the measure of lengths both greater and smaller, when reason studies the things that cannot be seen. For what they have in common with the things that admit no passing across from part to part is enough to take the argument this far. But they could not come together to form the atom as though they were things with motion of their own.15

Of the infinite, again, we must not say "up" or "down" as though it had a highest and a lowest point. We know, though, that if the direction over our heads is carried on to infinity from wherever we stand, it will never appear to us to be at once up and down relative to the same point; and neither will the direction beneath the point we have in mind, carried on to infinity: that cannot be thought. It is possible, then, to take one motion, thought of as going up to infinity, and one going down, even if what travels from us towards the places over our heads arrives ten thousand times at the feet of the people above us, or what travels down from us arrives at the heads of the people below. For each of these motions as a whole, set against the other, is thought of no less as going on to infinity.

The atoms must also travel at equal speed when they move through the void with nothing colliding with them. Heavy atoms will not travel faster than small, light ones, as long as nothing meets them; nor will small atoms travel faster than large ones, since every passage is the right size for them, as long as nothing collides with the large ones either. Nor is their motion faster when it goes up or sideways because of blows, or down because of their own weight. For as long as either motion holds, so long will the atom keep it, as fast as thought, until something collides with it, either from outside or from its own weight working against the force of what struck it.

In compounds, though, one atom will travel faster than another, although atoms are equal in speed, because the atoms in compounds are travelling towards one place over the least continuous stretch of time, even if not towards one place in the stretches of time that only reason can see. They collide with one another constantly, until the continuity of their motion comes within reach of sensation. For what opinion adds about the unseen, that even the stretches of time that only reason can see will hold a continuous motion, is not true of such things; since it is everything that is actually observed, or grasped by a focusing of the mind, that is true.

After this, always referring back to the sensations and the feelings, since that is how our belief will be most secure, we must see that the soul is a body made of fine parts, scattered through the whole compound, most like breath with a certain blend of heat in it, in some ways like the breath and in some ways like the heat. There is also the third part, which far exceeds even these two in the fineness of its parts, and for that reason is more closely in touch with the rest of the compound as well. All this is shown by the soul's powers and feelings, by the ease of its movements, by its thoughts, and by the things whose loss is our death. We must hold, too, that the soul is the chief cause of sensation. But it would not have had this power unless it were somehow sheltered by the rest of the compound. And the rest of the compound, having provided the soul with this cause, has itself received from the soul a share in this event, though not in everything the soul possesses. That is why, once the soul has gone, the body has no sensation: it never possessed this power in itself. Something else, born together with it, provided it to the body; and this other thing, through the power brought to completion in it by its motion, at once produced in itself the event of sensation, and passed it on to the body too, because the two are neighbours and in touch with each other, as I said.

That is why, as long as the soul is in the body, it never loses sensation when some other part has gone. Whatever parts of the soul may perish along with what shelters it, when that is broken up, whether wholly or in part, the soul, provided it survives, will have sensation. But the rest of the compound, whether it survives whole or in part, has no sensation once the soul has gone, whatever the number of atoms that go together to make up the nature of the soul. And when the whole compound is broken up, the soul is scattered, and no longer has the same powers, or moves, and so it has no sensation either.

For it is impossible to think of the soul as having sensation when it is not in this structure, using these motions, when what shelters and surrounds it is no longer the kind of thing it is in now, where it has these motions.16

We must also take into account what we mean by incorporeal. In the commonest use of the word, we call incorporeal what could be thought of as existing on its own; and nothing can be thought of as incorporeal and existing on its own except the void. The void can neither act nor be acted on; it only lets bodies move through it. Those who say that the soul is incorporeal, then, are talking nonsense. If it were, it could neither act nor be acted on in any way; and as it is, we plainly see both these events belonging to the soul.

If someone, then, refers all these reasonings about the soul back to the feelings and the sensations, remembering what was said at the beginning, he will see that they are sufficiently covered by these outlines for him to work out the details from them with confidence.

Next, shapes and colours and sizes and weights, and everything else said of a body as its properties, the things that always go with it, whether with every body or with every visible one, and that are known by sensation itself: we must not hold that these are natures existing in their own right, for that cannot be conceived; nor that they do not exist at all; nor that they are some other incorporeal things belonging to the body besides; nor that they are parts of it. We must hold that the whole body, taken all together, has its own permanent nature out of all of them, not in the sense that it is packed together out of them, as when a larger compound is formed out of the particles themselves, whether the first particles or magnitudes smaller than some given whole, but only, as I say, in the sense that it has its own permanent nature out of all of them. Each of them has its own ways of being focused on and told apart, but always with the whole body going along with it and never split off from it; it is our notion of the whole together that has earned the name of body.17

Again, it often happens that other things go along with bodies, not permanently, and that these too are neither among the invisible things nor incorporeal. Using the word "event", then, in its commonest sense, we make it plain that the events have neither the nature of the whole, which we take together and call body, nor the nature of the things that always go with it, without which a body cannot be thought of at all. Each of them would be named by a focusing of its own, with the whole body going along with it, but only at whatever time each is seen to happen, since the events do not go along with the body permanently. And we must not banish this clear evidence from what exists, just because an event has neither the nature of the whole it happens to, which we also call body, nor the nature of the things that always go with it. Nor, again, must we think of the events as existing on their own, since that is not thinkable either of them or of the permanent properties. We must think of them, just as they appear, as all of them events of bodies, not going along with them permanently, nor again holding the rank of a nature in their own right; they are seen in just the way that sensation itself gives each its individual character.

There is another thing we must take firm hold of. Time is not to be inquired into in the way we inquire into the other things that belong to some underlying subject, by referring them to the preconceptions we see in ourselves. We must reason from the clear evidence itself by which we speak of a long time or a short time, carrying it about with us as something born in us. We must not adopt other expressions as better ones, but use those we already have for it; nor must we say that something else is time, as though it had the same being as this peculiar thing, as some people do. What we must chiefly reckon out is simply what we link this peculiar thing with and measure it by. That needs no proof, only reckoning out: we link it with days and nights and their parts, and likewise with feelings and the absence of feelings, and with motions and rest, and we think of it as a particular event that goes with these, the very thing we have in mind when we use the word time.18

In addition to what has been said, we must hold that the worlds, and every limited compound that bears a close likeness to the things we see, came into being out of the infinite, all of them separated off from their own clusters of atoms, larger and smaller; and that they all dissolve again, some faster and some slower, some because of one kind of cause and some because of another.19

Further, we must not think that the worlds necessarily have one shape ... For no one could prove that in a world of one kind the seeds out of which animals and plants and all the other things we see are formed might have been enclosed, while in a world of another kind they could not.20,21,22

We must suppose, too, that human nature was taught many things of every kind by circumstances themselves, and was forced into them; and that reasoning afterwards refined what nature had handed on, and made further discoveries, faster in some matters and slower in others, making greater advances in some periods and times and smaller ones in others.

That is why names, too, did not arise at first by agreement. The natures of human beings themselves, in each people, feeling their own particular feelings and taking in their own particular appearances, sent out air in their own particular way, shaped by each of those feelings and appearances, so that the difference between the places where the peoples lived also played its part. Later, each people by common consent laid down its own particular names, so that what they meant would be less ambiguous to one another and could be said more briefly. And people who knew of certain things that others had not seen introduced them and passed on sounds for them, some being driven to utter them, others choosing them by reasoning, on the commonest grounds there are, and in this way they made their meaning plain.

As for the things in the sky, their motions and solstices and eclipses and risings and settings and everything of that family, we must not think that they come about because some being is serving them, and ordering them now or ordering them for the future, while having at the same time all blessedness together with imperishability. For busy affairs and worries and anger and favour do not go with blessedness; they arise in weakness and fear and dependence on one's neighbours. Nor, again, must we think that these lights, which are kindlings of fire balled together, possess blessedness and take on these motions at will. We must keep all the majesty in every word we use for such notions, so that no opinions contrary to that majesty arise out of them; otherwise the contradiction itself will produce the greatest disturbance in our souls. Hence we must hold that this necessity and this regular cycle are brought about by the way these clusters of atoms were originally caught up when the world came into being.

We must think, too, that it is the work of the study of nature to work out exactly the cause of the most important things, and that our blessedness depends on this, on knowing what the natures are that we see in these things in the sky, and on whatever else makes for exact knowledge here.

Further, in these matters there is no "in more ways than one", no "it might be otherwise": there is simply nothing that suggests conflict or disturbance in an imperishable and blessed nature. And the mind can grasp that this is simply so.

But what falls under detailed inquiry, the settings and risings and solstices and eclipses and everything akin to them, contributes nothing more to blessedness for being known. People who have come to know these things, but do not know what the natures are and what the most important causes, have fears just as they would if they had never learned them; perhaps even more fears, when the amazement that comes from what they have added to their understanding cannot find its release in an understanding of how the most important things are ordered.

That is why, even if we find several causes for solstices and settings and risings and eclipses and things of that kind, as we did also in matters of detail, we must not think that our treatment of these matters has fallen short of the exactness needed for our ataraxia and our blessedness. And so, observing in how many ways something similar happens here among us, we must give the causes of the things in the sky and of everything that is unseen, and despise the people who recognise neither what is or happens in one way only, nor what happens in more ways than one; who overlook the appearance that things have from a distance; and who do not know, besides, in what circumstances one cannot be free of disturbance and in what circumstances one can be free of it just the same. If, then, we think that a thing may happen in some one particular way, while recognising the very fact that it happens in more ways than one, we shall be just as untroubled as if we knew that it happened in that particular way.

Beyond all this, taking it all together, we must understand that the chief disturbance in human souls comes, first, from believing that these heavenly things are blessed and imperishable, and at the same time have wishes and actions and causes contrary to that. It comes, too, from always expecting or suspecting something terrible and eternal, because of the myths, or else from fearing the very absence of sensation that there is in death, as though it were something to us. And it comes from suffering all this, not from opinions, but from some unreasoning state of mind; so that people who set no limit to what is terrible suffer a disturbance as great as that of a man who idly holds these opinions, or even greater. And ataraxia is being released from all of this, and keeping a continual memory of the most general and most important principles.

Hence we must attend to the feelings we have at present, and to our sensations, the shared sensations where the matter is shared and our own where it is our own, and to all the clear evidence present to us by each of the criteria. If we attend to these, we shall rightly trace to its cause the source of our disturbance and fear, and free ourselves from it, as we give the causes of the things in the sky and of everything else that keeps happening to us and frightens other people out of their wits.

These, Herodotus, are the most essential points about the nature of things as a whole, set down for you in summary form. If this account is held on to with exactness and takes effect, I think that a man will gain a strength beyond comparison with other people, even if he does not go on to all the exact details. He will make clear for himself, on his own, many of the details worked out in my full treatment of the system, and these points themselves, once stored in his memory, will keep helping him.

For they are of such a kind that even those who are already working out the details well enough, or completely, can make most of their surveys of the whole of nature by breaking their knowledge down into focusings like these; while those who are not altogether among the finished students can use them to make a round of the most important points, without words and as fast as thought, for their calm.

The Letter to Pythocles

Epicurus to Pythocles, greetings.

Cleon brought me your letter. In it you went on showing me a warmth of feeling worthy of the care I have taken over you, and you tried, not unconvincingly, to keep in mind the lines of reasoning that lead to the blessed life; and you asked me to send you a short account of the things in the sky, one easy to take in at a glance, so that you could remember it easily, since what I have written on them elsewhere is hard to remember, you said, even though you carry it about with you constantly. I was glad to take up your request, and found myself held by pleasant hopes. I have written it, then, and am carrying out everything else you asked, since these reasonings will be useful to many others besides you, and above all to those who have only lately had a taste of the genuine study of nature, and to those tangled up in occupations more absorbing than any everyday business. Take them in properly, then, keep them in memory, and go over them quickly, along with the rest of what I sent to Herodotus in the short epitome.

First of all, then, do not think that knowledge of the things in the sky, whether they are discussed along with other subjects or on their own, has any goal but ataraxia and firm conviction, just as with everything else. We must not try to force the impossible, nor hold our theory here on the same footing in every respect as our reasoning about how to live, or as our clearing up of the other problems in the study of nature: that the universe is bodies and intangible nature, for instance, or that the elements are atoms, and everything else of that kind, which has only one way of agreeing with what appears. That is not the case with the things in the sky. They have more than one cause of their coming into being, and more than one account of what they are, that agrees with the sensations.

For we must not study nature by empty axioms and laws of our own making, but as what appears calls on us to. What our life needs now is not unreason and empty opinion but for us to live without turmoil. Everything goes on unshaken, and in agreement with what appears, when each thing is cleared up in more ways than one, provided one duly lets stand whatever can plausibly be said about it. But when someone lets one explanation stand and throws out another that agrees just as well with what appears, it is plain that he falls out of the study of nature altogether and slides down into myth. We must take signs of what goes on in the sky from certain things that appear here among us, which we can observe as they really are, and not from the things that appear in the sky, since these may come about in more ways than one. We must, however, keep watch on the appearance of each thing, and further distinguish what is joined to it, those things whose coming about in more ways than one is not contradicted by what happens here among us.

A world is a sort of enclosure of sky, holding stars and earth and everything that appears, cut off from the infinite, and ending in a boundary that may be revolving or at rest, and that may be round or triangular or of any outline whatever. All of these are possible, since nothing that appears in this world contradicts them, and in this world there is no grasping where it ends.23

That there are such worlds, infinite in number, can be grasped; and also that a world of this kind can come into being both inside a world and in an interworld, as we call the space between worlds, in a place with plenty of void in it, and not in a great space that is pure and empty, as some people say. It comes into being when suitable seeds stream in from one world or interworld, or from several, and little by little make additions and articulations and shifts to another place, as it may happen, and receive waterings from matter fit for it, until the world is finished and lasts, for as long as the foundations laid down are able to take in more. For it is not enough that a gathering should take place, or a whirl in the void in which a world can come into being, by necessity, as the opinion goes, and that it should grow until it collides with another, as one of the so-called natural philosophers says. That is in conflict with what appears.

The sun and moon and the other stars did not come into being on their own and get taken in afterwards by the world, along with all that it keeps safe. They began at once to take shape and to grow, and so did earth and sea, by accretions and whirlings of certain natures made of fine particles, of the nature of wind or of fire or of both; for this too is what sensation suggests.

The size of the sun and of the other stars, in relation to us, is just as large as it appears. In itself it is either larger than what we see, or a little smaller, or the same. For this is how fires here among us look to the senses too, when they are seen from a distance. And every objection on this point will easily be dissolved by anyone who attends to the clear evidence, as I show in my books On Nature. The risings and settings of the sun and moon and the other stars may come about by kindling and quenching, if the circumstances in both regions, east and west, are such as to bring this about; for nothing that appears contradicts it. The same thing could also be brought about by their coming into view above the earth and then by the earth's blocking them; for nothing that appears contradicts this either. Nor is it impossible that their motions come about through the whirl of the whole sky; or else the sky stands still while they whirl, by a necessity to rise in the east that was generated at the beginning, when the world came into being ... by a most intense heat, through a kind of spreading of the fire as it keeps moving on to the places next in line.24,25

The sun and moon may turn back at their solstices because the sky is tilted and forced in this way at these seasons; or equally because the air pushes back against them; or because the fuel that suits them is always catching fire on the side next to them and giving out on the side they leave; or because these stars were wound up from the beginning in a whirl of such a kind that they move in a sort of spiral. For all such explanations, and those akin to them, are at odds with none of the clear evidence, provided one always holds, in details like these, to what is possible, and is able to bring each of them into agreement with what appears, without fearing the slavish contrivances of the astronomers.

The waning of the moon and its waxing again could come about by the turning of the moon's body, and equally by shapes that the air takes on, and again by things coming in front of it, and in all the ways in which what appears here among us calls on us to account for something of this sort; unless someone has fallen in love with the single way and rejects the others on empty grounds, without having considered what a human being can come to know and what he cannot, and for that reason longs to know what cannot be known. Again, the moon may have its light from itself, and it may have it from the sun. For here among us too we see many things that have their light from themselves, and many that have it from others. And nothing that appears in the sky stands in the way, provided one always remembers that things happen in more ways than one, and considers together the hypotheses and causes that go with what appears, and does not, by looking to what does not fit, puff these things up to no purpose and slide down, now one way and now another, into the single way. The appearance of a face in the moon can come about by variation of its parts, or by something coming in front of it, or in any of the ways that might be seen to agree with what appears. For with all the things in the sky this kind of tracking must not be given up. If someone is at war with the clear evidence, he will never be able to share in genuine ataraxia.

An eclipse of the sun or moon can come about by quenching, just as we see this happen here among us too; and again by other things coming in front, the earth or some other invisible body of that kind. And this is how we must consider together the ways that belong with one another, and see that it is not impossible for some of them to happen together at the same time.26

Further, let the regular order of their circuits be understood in the way that some ordinary things also come about here among us; and let the divine nature not be brought into it in any way, but be kept free of service and in its complete blessedness. If this is not done, the whole account of the causes of things in the sky will be futile, as it has already been for some people who did not lay hold of a possible way, but fell into futility by thinking that things happen in one way only, throwing out all the others that are possible, getting carried off into the unthinkable, and being unable to consider together the things that appear, which we must accept as signs.

The lengths of nights and days vary both because the sun's motions above the earth become fast and then slow again, as the lengths of the regions it crosses vary, and because it passes over some regions faster or more slowly, as we see some things do here among us; and what we say about the things in the sky must agree with these. Those who take hold of one explanation are at war with what appears, and have fallen wide of the way a human being can come to know things.

The signs in the sky that foretell the weather can come about through coincidences of the seasons, as with the animals we see here among us, and also through alterations and changes in the air. Neither of these is at war with what appears; but in which cases it is this cause or that one, there is no seeing.

Clouds can form and gather through the packing of air by the pressure of winds, and through the entangling of atoms that hold on to one another and are suited to bringing this about, and through the collecting of streams from earth and waters; and in several other ways too it is not impossible for such bodies to be put together. Rain can then come from them, sometimes because they are squeezed and sometimes because they change; and again from streams carried off from suitable places and moving through the air, the more violent downpours coming from certain compounds suited to such discharges.

Thunder may come about through wind rolling round in the hollows of the clouds, as it does in our own jars; through the roar, inside them, of fire that has been whipped into wind; through the tearing and parting of clouds; and through the rubbing and breaking of clouds that have frozen into something like ice. Here too, as in the subject as a whole, what appears calls on us to say that it comes about in more ways than one.

Lightning, likewise, happens in several ways. When clouds rub against and collide with one another, the arrangement of atoms that makes fire slips out and begets lightning. Or winds may fan out of the clouds bodies of the kind that make this brightness. Or it may be squeezed out when the clouds are pressed together, either by one another or by winds. Or light scattered down from the stars may be caught up in them, then driven together by the motion of clouds and winds, and fall out through the clouds. Or the finest light may filter through the clouds, and its motion make lightning; this is how the clouds are set ablaze by the fire and the thunder is produced. Or wind may burst into flame through the force of its motion and its violent rolling up. Or the clouds may be torn open by winds, and atoms that make fire fall out and produce the appearance of lightning. And it will be easy to see that it happens in several other ways too, provided one always holds to what appears and is able to consider together what is like it. Lightning comes before thunder, in a certain arrangement of clouds, both because the arrangement that makes lightning is pushed out at the very moment the wind falls on the cloud, while the wind, rolling round afterwards, makes the roar; and, when both strike at once, because lightning travels towards us at a more intense speed and thunder lags behind, as it does with some people we watch from a distance striking blows.

Thunderbolts may come about through several collectings of winds, their violent rolling up and their catching fire; and through a part breaking off and falling more violently to the regions below, the breaking happening because the regions next to it are denser, from the packing of clouds; and also, just as thunder may, through the very falling out of the fire as it rolls about, when the fire has grown greater and been blown into wind more violently, and has torn the cloud because it cannot draw back into the regions next to it, since the clouds are always being packed against one another, mostly against some high mountain, where thunderbolts fall most of all. And there are several other ways in which thunderbolts may be produced. Only let myth be kept out of it; and it will be kept out, if one follows what appears in the right way and takes from it signs of what is not seen.

Presters, the whirlwinds that come down out of the clouds, may come about through a cloud being let down into the regions below like a pillar, pushed by wind massed all together and carried along by a great force of wind, while at the same time wind from outside pushes the cloud sideways; and through wind turning round in a circle, with some air pressing down on it from above; and when a great stream of winds has arisen and cannot flow away sideways because the air round about is packed tight. When the prester comes down as far as the land, tornadoes arise, in whatever way it is produced through the motion of the wind; when it comes down as far as the sea, waterspouts.

Earthquakes may come about through wind being shut up in the earth, set beside small particles of it and moving continuously, so that it makes the earth shake. The earth either takes this wind in from outside, or the wind arises when ground falls in upon cavernous places in the earth and turns the air shut up there into wind. Earthquakes may also be produced by the very passing on of the motion from the falls of much ground, and its being sent back again when it meets the denser parts of the earth. And these motions of the earth may come about in several other ways too.

Winds happen to arise, from time to time, when some matter of a foreign kind keeps slipping in, little by little, and when a great quantity of water collects. The rest of the winds arise when a few winds fall into the many hollows, and are spread out from them.

Hail is produced both by a stronger freezing, when certain windlike bodies gather round from every side and then are broken up; and by a more moderate freezing of certain watery bodies, while certain windlike bodies next to them at the same time press them together and break them apart, so that they hold together as they freeze, both in parts and as a mass. It is not impossible that its roundness comes about because its edges melt away on every side, and because, as it forms, bodies either watery or windlike, as is said, stand round it evenly from every side, part by part.

Snow may be produced when fine water pours out of the clouds through passages of the right size, and through the violent and constant squeezing of suitable clouds by wind, and when this water then freezes on its way because of some strong cold round about in the regions below the clouds. And through freezing in clouds that are evenly loose in texture, such a discharge from the clouds might occur as the watery parts are pressed against one another and lie side by side; and these, making a kind of pressing together, produce hail, which happens mostly in spring. And when clouds that have frozen rub together, this compound, snow, might be thrown off by rebound. And snow may be produced in other ways too.

Dew is produced both when things of a kind that make such moisture come together out of the air; and when they are carried up from damp places or places that hold water, which are the sort of places where dew forms most, and then come together in one spot, make moisture, and move down again to the regions below, just as we see similar things brought about in many cases here among us. And frost is produced no differently from dew, when things of this kind undergo a certain kind of freezing because cold air surrounds them.

Ice is produced both by the squeezing of the round shapes out of the water and the pressing together of the uneven, sharp-angled shapes that are in the water; and by shapes of this kind joining it from outside, which, driven together, have made the water freeze, after squeezing out a certain number of the round ones.

The rainbow comes about when the sun shines on watery air; or through a particular blending of light and air, which will produce the particular qualities of these colours, either all of them or of one kind only; and from this, as it shines back again, the neighbouring parts of the air will take on the colouring we see, by the light shining on its parts. The appearance of its roundness comes about because our sight sees the distance as equal from every point; or because the atoms in the air, or in the clouds, carried off from the sun, are pressed together in such a way that this compound comes down in a kind of curve.

A halo forms round the moon when air moves towards the moon from every side and either holds back evenly the streams carried off from it, far enough to set this cloudlike thing round it in a circle without breaking it up altogether, or else holds back the air round the moon evenly on every side, so as to set round it a ring of thick texture. This happens in certain parts, either because some stream has forced its way in from outside, or because the heat has taken hold of passages suited to bringing this about.

Comets arise either when fire gathers in certain places in the sky at certain intervals, the circumstances having come about; or when the sky above us has, at intervals, a motion of its own, so that such stars come into view; or when the stars themselves, at certain times, rush forward because of some circumstance, come into the regions near us, and become visible. And they disappear through the causes opposite to these.

Some stars turn round on the spot, and this happens not only because this part of the world stands still while the rest turns round it, as some people say, but also because a circular whirl of air stands round it, which keeps them from travelling round as the other stars do; or else because there is no suitable fuel for them further on, while there is in this place where they are seen to lie. And this can be brought about in several other ways too, if one is able to reason out what agrees with what appears.

That some of the stars wander, if it turns out that this is how they move, while others move evenly, may be because they were moving in a circle from the beginning and were constrained in such a way that some are carried by the same whirl, which is even, and others by another, which has certain irregularities. It may also be that, in the regions they are carried through, there are in some places even stretches of air, pushing them on in the same direction and burning evenly one after another, and in other places uneven ones, so that the variations we observe come about. To give a single cause for these things, when what appears calls for several, is madness, and wrongly done by those who are devoted to idle astronomy and give causes for some things to no purpose, whenever they will not release the divine nature from its services in any way.

That some stars are seen to be left behind by others may be because, going round the same circle, they are carried round more slowly; and because they move in the opposite direction, pulled back by the same whirl; and because some are carried round through a larger space and others through a smaller, while circling with the same whirl. To pronounce flatly on these things is the business of people who want to work wonders for the crowd.

The so-called falling stars may be brought about, in some cases, by the stars rubbing against one another, and by something falling out wherever the wind bursts forth, as we said about lightning; and by a coming together of atoms that make fire, when there is a kinship among them suited to bringing this about, and by their moving wherever the impulse took them at the start, when they came together; and by wind collecting in certain dense, mistlike masses and catching fire because it is penned in, then bursting out of what surrounds it and being carried to whatever place the impulse of its motion takes it. And there are ways beyond number of bringing this about.

The weather signs that come from certain animals come about by a coincidence of the season. The animals do not bring any necessity to bear for a storm to come, nor does some divine nature sit watching for these animals to come out and then fulfil these signs. Such foolishness would not befall any ordinary living creature, if it were ever so little more refined, let alone one that possesses complete happiness.

Keep all these things in memory, Pythocles, for you will get a long way clear of myth, and you will be able to see what is of the same kind as them. Above all, give yourself up to the study of the first principles and of infinity and of what is akin to them, and further of the criteria and the feelings, and of what we reckon all this out for. These, above all, when studied together, will make it easy for you to see the causes of the particular things. Those who have not taken these to heart as fully as they can could neither study these very things well, nor have they gained what they ought to study them for.

Appendix: The Will and the Last Letter

The Will

On these terms I give all my property to Amynomachus son of Philocrates, of the district of Bate, and to Timocrates son of Demetrius, of Potamus, according to the deed of gift to each of them recorded in the Metroön, the temple of the Mother of the Gods where Athens keeps its public records, on condition that they make the garden and everything that goes with it available to Hermarchus son of Agemortus, of Mytilene, and to those who do philosophy with him, and to whomever Hermarchus leaves as his successors in philosophy, to live and study in as philosophers. And to those who do philosophy in our school, for all time, I entrust the life of the school in the garden, so that they may help Amynomachus and Timocrates to preserve it as far as they can; and I entrust it also to the heirs of Amynomachus and Timocrates, in whatever way is safest, so that they too may keep up the garden, as must those to whom the philosophers of our school hand it on. And let Amynomachus and Timocrates allow Hermarchus and those who do philosophy with him to live in the house in Melite for as long as Hermarchus lives.

From the income of the property I have given to Amynomachus and Timocrates, let them, as far as they can, and in consultation with Hermarchus, set aside a share for the offerings to the dead for my father and my mother and my brothers, and for the customary celebration of my birthday every year on the tenth day of Gamelion, the midwinter month, and likewise for the meeting of those who do philosophy with me, held on the twentieth of every month and established in memory of Metrodorus and me. Let them also keep the day of my brothers in Poseideon, in early winter, and the day of Polyaenus in Metageitnion, in late summer, as I have done.

Let Amynomachus and Timocrates also take care of Epicurus, the son of Metrodorus, and of the son of Polyaenus, as long as they do philosophy and live with Hermarchus. In the same way let them take care of the daughter of Metrodorus, and when she comes of age let them give her in marriage to whichever of those who do philosophy with him Hermarchus chooses, provided she is well behaved and obedient to Hermarchus. And for the keep of these children let Amynomachus and Timocrates give, out of the income that belongs to me, whatever seems to them right each year, after consulting Hermarchus.

Let them make Hermarchus master of the income together with themselves, so that everything is done with the man who has grown old with me in philosophy and is left as the leader of those who do philosophy with me. As for the girl's dowry, when she comes of age, let Amynomachus and Timocrates set aside as much as the property will bear, taking it from what there is, with Hermarchus's approval. Let them also look after Nicanor, as I have done, so that none of those who do philosophy with me, who have been of service to me in my private affairs, and shown me every kindness, and chosen to grow old with me in philosophy, should go short of anything they need, so far as my means allow.

All the books I have are to be given to Hermarchus.

If anything should happen to Hermarchus, as it happens to human beings, before the children of Metrodorus come of age, let Amynomachus and Timocrates give, as far as possible, out of the income I have left, enough for each of their needs, provided they behave well. And let them see to all the rest as I have arranged it, so that each thing is done as far as it can be. Of my slaves I set free Mys, Nicias and Lycon, and I give Phaedrium her freedom too.

The Last Letter, to Idomeneus

I write this to you all on this blessed day, which is also the last of my life. Strangury has been with me, the agony of a bladder that cannot pass water, and dysentery with it, and their pains fall short of nothing in their severity. But against all of it, drawn up in battle line, stands the joy in my soul at the memory of the discussions we have had together. And you, as befits the devotion you have shown to me and to philosophy since you were a boy, take care of the children of Metrodorus.

  1. On the Nature of Things by Lucretius

    Two centuries later a Roman poet put Epicurus's physics into Latin verse and praised him as the first to raise a light out of such darkness. Lucretius covers the same ground as the letters to Herodotus and Pythocles, atoms, images, the soul, worlds without number, thunder and presters, at far greater length, and adds the swerve of the atoms, which these letters never mention.

  2. Moral Letters to Lucilius by Seneca

    A Stoic who closes his early letters with a saying of Epicurus, the rival school's founder, because good sense belongs to everyone. His eleventh letter passes on Epicurus's advice to choose someone to live as if he were watching you.

  3. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

    In the eleventh section of the Enquiry, Hume's friend imagines himself as Epicurus, accused before the Athenian people of denying providence, and makes his defence: that nothing in the evidence of the world warrants a god who rewards and punishes. It is Epicurus's case for gods who do nothing to us, argued from Hume's own account of cause and effect.

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