Oenoanda and the wall of Diogenes

Where it is #

Oenoanda (Greek Oinoanda) stood in the mountains of northern Lycia, in the upper valley of the river Xanthos.¹ Lycia is the south-western bulge of what is now Turkey, and its famous cities, such as Xanthos, Patara and Myra, lie on or near the coast. Oenoanda is well inland and high above it, on a hilltop among cedars.²

It is an odd place for a philosophical school. I know of no evidence for an Epicurean community there, though the surviving text is incomplete, so that is a gap in what we know, not proof of absence.

The wall #

Diogenes was a citizen of Oenoanda, and clearly a wealthy one. He had a summary of Epicurean teaching carved on the wall of a stoa, a covered colonnade, beside a public space in the town.³ The inscription is usually dated to the first half of the second century CE, probably under the emperor Hadrian.⁴

It was large. The text may have filled about 260 square metres of wall and run to some 25,000 words, which would make it the longest inscription known from the ancient world.⁵ It set out Epicurean views on physics, on how we know things, and on ethics.⁶ He says he wanted to help people who were passing through as well as his fellow citizens,⁷ and that is part of the point of putting a philosophy on a public wall: a book has to be sought out, and a wall is simply there.

The wall did not last. Smith thought it was either brought down by an earthquake or, more probably, taken down deliberately in late antiquity.⁸ Its blocks ended up scattered over the ruins, which is why the text has to be recovered piece by piece.

Finding it #

Two young French epigraphers found the first fragments in the winter of 1884.⁹ By 1895 French and Austrian scholars had found 88 pieces. Martin Ferguson Smith began searching again in 1968, and between 1968 and 1973 he discovered 38 new fragments and rediscovered most of the nineteenth-century finds.¹⁰ Some later finds came from illegal digging by treasure-hunters.¹¹ A limited legal excavation took place in 1997,¹² and a new survey of the whole site, directed by Martin Bachmann, ran from 2007 to 2012.¹³

By the end of 2012, 299 pieces had been found, 76 of them in the previous ten years. Even so, the recovered text is still less than a third of the whole.¹⁴ New fragments may yet turn up.

Why it matters #

Almost nothing Epicurus wrote has survived directly, and the Epicurean texts we have come through copyists, as the page on his three letters explains. Diogenes’s wall is different. It is stone, it is a primary document of the school as it was taught in the Roman Empire, and it was set up by a believer who plainly thought the teaching would do people good. Parts of it argue that the gods take no interest in human affairs, and parts criticise the Stoics.¹⁵ You can see that argument in a later form on the page on death and the gods and in the essay on Epicurus and the Stoics.

It also shows that Epicureanism was alive in the provinces four hundred years after Epicurus. For a study of Diogenes in his Lycian setting, see Pamela Gordon’s book.¹⁶

What is uncertain #

• The dates and size. The date rests on the style of the lettering and on the names of local families, and the length and word count are reconstructions.
• Who wrote it. Diogenes paid for and dedicated the inscription. Whether he composed every part himself is not certain.
• The map. The positions are for orientation only. I have not marked the site of the stoa, because I have not found a source I trust to give it exactly.

For the surviving text in English, the standard translation is Smith’s The Epicurean Inscription, which is still under copyright and is not reproduced here. It is listed on the reading list.