Diogenes Laertius
The Life of Epicurus — the slanders, the will, and a letter written while dying
Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων 10.1–28 · Epicurus was born in 341 BCE and died at Athens in 270. Diogenes Laertius, who assembled this life, wrote roughly five hundred years later; the usual placing is the first half of the third century CE and it rests on the latest authors he cites, because almost nothing else about him is known — not his city, not his dates, not his own allegiance. A tenth of Greek philosophy survives because of him, and nothing survives about him.
A biography in two halves that do not agree. The first is a dossier of everything Epicurus's enemies said: that he was an uneducated schoolmaster's son, that he vomited twice a day from over-indulgence, that he wrote to courtesans, that he stole his atoms from Democritus and his pleasure from Aristippus. It is set down at length, with the sources named. Then Diogenes turns in a single sentence — "but these people are stark mad" — and spends the rest defending him, leaning on the will: a document that manumits four people by name, funds a birthday dinner in perpetuity, and provides for a dead friend's children. It closes with the letter Epicurus dictated on the last day of his life, in agony from a blocked bladder, saying he was happy.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Robert Drew Hicks (Q7343637, 1850-1929) translated the Lives for the Loeb Classical Library in 1925, and Perseus serves it under a CC BY-SA licence, which is the reason this text can be published here at all. The English is plain and close, and it tracks the Greek clause by clause. Two habits are worth carrying into every unit. He renders Κύριαι Δόξαι as SOVRAN MAXIMS -- an archaism already in 1925, and one that will not match the rest of this site: another translation on this site calls the same book 'Established Beliefs', and most modern writing calls it the Principal Doctrines. Three names, one book. And he is inconsistent about slavery. At 10.10 the people in Epicurus' household are 'servants'; in the will at 10.21 the same Greek household yields 'Of my slaves I manumit Mys, Nicias, Lycon, and I also give Phaedrium her liberty.' The second is what the document says, and the first softens it.