WorkEpicurus

Fragments

The scattered remains of Epicurus — the Vatican Sayings, lines quoted by his enemies, and words still being read from scrolls a volcano charred at Herculaneum.

by Epicurus17 passages held

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First published: 300 BCE(aged 41)
Original language: Ancient Greek

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Overview

These are the pieces that escaped: the sayings, letter-scraps and quoted lines of Epicurus that survive scattered through other people's books and, lately, out of the ground. Two hoards matter most. One is a collection of eighty-odd maxims found in 1888 inside a fourteenth-century Vatican manuscript, copied there beside Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus by some medieval reader who thought them worth keeping — the Vatican Sayings. The other is the library of a villa at Herculaneum, buried under the ash of Vesuvius in 79 AD, carbonized rather than consumed, and dug out in the eighteenth century as blackened lumps that could not be unrolled without destroying them. Modern imaging is only now reading them, and much of what they hold is Epicurus and his school. The remaining fragments come from hostile witnesses — Cicero, Plutarch, later Christian critics — who quoted him in order to attack him and so preserved him by accident. What emerges is not a work but a residue: lines on friendship as the surest safeguard of a happy life, on gratitude, on death, on the folly of fearing the gods. No other ancient philosophy is still being physically recovered like this, a sentence at a time, from a scroll a volcano nearly erased.

Key concepts

What are the Fragments of Epicurus?

Not a single work but the scattered remains of a lost body of writing: sayings, letter-scraps and lines of Epicurus that survive quoted in other people's books or dug from the ground. They come to us as a residue rather than a text, gathered from several sources, and they preserve his thought on friendship, wealth, desire, death and the folly of fearing the gods a sentence at a time.

What are the Vatican Sayings?

A collection of roughly eighty Epicurean maxims found in 1888 inside a fourteenth-century Vatican manuscript, copied there beside Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus by a medieval reader who thought them worth keeping. They are one of the two main hoards of Epicurus's surviving sayings, and many of the most quoted lines on friendship and self-sufficiency come from them.

What are the Herculaneum papyri?

The carbonized library of a villa at Herculaneum, buried under the ash of Vesuvius in 79 AD, charred rather than burned away, and dug out in the eighteenth century as blackened lumps too fragile to unroll. Much of what they hold is Epicurus and his school. Modern imaging is only now reading them, which is why the corpus is still, uniquely, being physically recovered.

How did hostile witnesses preserve Epicurus?

Many fragments survive because critics quoted Epicurus in order to attack him. Cicero, Plutarch and later Christian writers set down his words as targets, and so kept them by accident. This means some of what we have arrives already framed by opponents, and part of reading the fragments is weighing a line against the purpose of the enemy who happened to record it.

Why does Epicurus prize friendship so highly?

The fragments call friendship the surest safeguard of a happy life, worth more than the advantages it might first be sought for. In a philosophy built to secure a person against fear and fortune, a trusted circle offers a security that possessions and public honours cannot. The friendship begins in mutual usefulness, Epicurus grants, but ripens into something valued for itself, a good at the centre of the settled life.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Wealth is measured by what you need

How much is enough? The scattered sayings return again and again to the size of a want, and to the freedom of a person who has learned to need little.

The surviving maxims circle one insight: natural wealth is limited and easily won, while the wealth of empty opinion runs on without end. Nothing satisfies the person for whom enough is too little. Poverty measured against nature's purpose is great riches, and wealth measured against unlimited desire is great poverty. To the fragments, frugality is not privation but the shrewdest calculation, since the taste for luxury, once acquired, becomes a master. A person who fits their wants to what nature actually requires buys a security no fortune can. This is hedonism turned austere, pleasure secured by cutting the appetites that would otherwise devour it.

desire
wealth
frugality
pleasure
happiness
friendship
pleasure and pain
atomism

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Friendship, self-reliance, and a life out of the storm

Where does a happy life find its safety, if not in power or the crowd's regard? The fragments point to friendship and self-sufficiency, and away from the exposure of public life.

Among the gleanings are Epicurus's lines on the safeguards of a happy life. Friendship, he says, is the surest of them, worth more than the goods it might once have been sought for. Self-sufficiency he prizes as a great good, not so that a person may always live on little but so that, if they must, they can, and fortune loses its hold on them. The wise therefore withdraw from the exposure of politics and the chase after fame, empty desires that only multiply anxiety. Security comes not from a wall of possessions or offices but from a small circle of friends and a self that fortune cannot easily reach.

self-sufficiency
security
freedom
fortune
wisdom
politics
natural philosophy

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Within this work

passages held: 17
distinct concepts: 48
by passages held, corpus-wide: #789

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “desire” and “friendship”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 5 concepts, joined by 9 pairings. 14 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
desire	friendship	4
desire	self-sufficiency	4
desire	pleasure and pain	3
friendship	natural philosophy	3
friendship	pleasure and pain	3
friendship	self-sufficiency	3
natural philosophy	pleasure and pain	2
pleasure and pain	self-sufficiency	2
natural philosophy	self-sufficiency	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

-300 Fragments you are here EN
-300 Letter to Herodotus
The physics epitome of Epicurus's system, addressed to a pupil and preserved whole by Diogenes Laertius; it condenses the lost thirty-seven books of On Nature into a single letter.
EN
-300 Letter to Menoeceus
The ethical counterpart to the letter to Herodotus: where that letter treats nature, this treats conduct — death, the gods, desire and pleasure — the same four concerns later gathered into the tetrapharmakos, the four-line Epicurean creed.
EN
-300 Principal Doctrines
Forty numbered sayings, most no longer than a sentence, that condense Epicurus's ethics into a form his followers could memorize and a scattered school could carry and share.
EN

— or open another of their works