Epicurus’ three letters: a reading guide

Why start with the letters #

The letters are the nearest thing we have to Epicurus speaking for himself. They are short, and each was written to be a summary: Epicurus knew that few of his friends would read his large works, so he condensed the teaching for them.¹

All three come to us through one book, Book X of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, which also preserves the Principal Doctrines.² That has two consequences worth keeping in mind. We read Epicurus through a copyist of uneven reliability, and we have no second manuscript tradition to check the letters against.

A note on this page. Section numbers are those of the standard Book X numbering; check them against your copy, as ranges for a theme can differ by a line or two between translations. It does not reproduce a translation. It describes the letters and points to the free text, so that you read the words themselves in a version you can check. The two short quotations below are from R. D. Hicks’ 1925 translation.

The three letters at a glance #

On a narrow screen, swipe the table sideways.

The book gives them in the order Herodotus, Pythocles, Menoeceus, followed by the Principal Doctrines. If you have time for one letter, read Menoeceus. It is about two pages.

The Letter to Menoeceus #

The full text is on this site: read the Letter to Menoeceus.

This is the letter most people mean when they say they have read Epicurus. It opens with the claim that nobody is too young or too old to look after the health of the soul. In Hicks’ wording: ‘Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search thereof when he is grown old.’³

It then moves through the ideas that make up the Epicurean way of living:

• The gods. They exist and are blessed and undying, but they are not as the crowd imagines them, and we should not credit them with our own anger and favouritism.⁴
• Death. It is nothing to us, because good and bad need sensation and death ends sensation. Fearing it in advance is therefore groundless.⁵ The longer treatment is on the page about death and the gods.
• Desire. Some desires are natural and necessary, some natural and not necessary, some empty. The aim is a healthy body and an untroubled mind.⁶ See natural and necessary desires, Aponia and Ataraxia.
• Pleasure. It is the beginning and end of the blessed life, but Epicurus insists this does not mean the pleasures of the dissolute. He means freedom from pain in the body and trouble in the soul.⁷
• Prudence. It is the root of the other virtues, and one cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, honourably and justly.⁸
• Fate and chance. He rejects fate as a master of all things, holding that some events happen by necessity, some by chance and some are up to us, and that it is better to fail while acting reasonably than to succeed by luck while acting unreasonably.⁹

The letter ends with a promise that someone who practises these things will live like a god among mortals. In Hicks’ closing words, such a person ‘loses all semblance of mortality by living in the midst of immortal blessings’.¹⁰

Worth knowing. Epicurus’ claim that pleasure is the goal is often read as a licence for indulgence. This letter is the clearest place to see that he meant something much plainer. Scholars still argue about how exactly his two kinds of pleasure fit together; see katastematic pleasure.

The Letter to Herodotus #

The full text is now on this site: read the Letter to Herodotus in Hicks’ translation.

This is the longest of the three and the hardest. It is an epitome of Epicurus’ physics, written for readers who could not work through his long book On Nature.¹¹ It begins with the meaning of words and with sensations and feelings as the tests of what is true, and then builds the picture of the world from the ground up.¹²

The main claims, in the order the letter makes them, are these:

• Nothing comes into being from what does not exist, and nothing is destroyed into what does not exist.¹³
• The universe is made of bodies and void, and the bodies are in the end made of indivisible atoms.¹⁴ See Atomism.
• The universe is unlimited, and so is the number of worlds in it.¹⁵
• We see and think because thin films of atoms stream off things and reach us.¹⁶
• The soul is a fine-grained body spread through the whole frame, and it disperses at death.¹⁷

Read it for the way the argument is built rather than for its science. The physics is ancient and much of it is wrong. Its job in the system is to remove fear, and the letter says so near its end.¹⁸ That purpose is also stated in the Principal Doctrines; see the restatement on this site (Doctrines 11 and 12).

The Letter to Pythocles #

The full text is on this site: read the Letter to Pythocles.

This is a handbook of astronomy and weather: the sun and moon, eclipses, clouds, thunder and lightning, comets. Its distinctive feature is that, for most phenomena, Epicurus does not pick one cause. He lists several that fit what we can observe and says that more than one may be true.¹⁹

The reason is in the aim. He wanted to remove the fear that the sky is run by angry gods, and for that it is enough to show that natural causes are possible. A single confident answer would claim more than the evidence allows.²⁰

A caution about authorship. Some scholars have doubted that Epicurus wrote this letter as it stands. I have not checked where that debate stands today, so treat the question as open and look at a recent scholarly introduction before relying on it as his own words.

Where to read them #

On this site: the Letter to Herodotus, the Letter to Menoeceus, the Letter to Pythocles and the Principal Doctrines, in Hicks’ translation. The links below lead to other copies, for comparison.

Hicks’ translation was published in 1925 and is in the public domain. A free digital copy of the same text is maintained by Perseus, and it is licensed for reuse with credit.²¹ Wikisource carries it too, as does the Internet Archive scan of the printed volume. Those sites are separate from this one and can be slow or briefly unavailable.

• Diogenes Laertius on Wikisource, for both the Hicks and the older Yonge translations
• The 1925 Loeb volume (Books VI to X) on the Internet Archive, as plain scanned text

Hicks is accurate but dated in style, and he softened some passages. A modern translation reads more easily; the translations in the reading list on the Epicurus and Lucretius page are the ones I would reach for.

A way to read them #

1. Menoeceus first, in one sitting, without notes.
2. Then the Principal Doctrines, a few at a time, using the restatement here as a companion.
3. Then Herodotus, reading only the opening and the section on the soul on a first pass.
4. Pythocles last, and mostly as a case study in how Epicurus argued.

Keep the glossary open beside you, since the letters use a small vocabulary and use it exactly.