Epicurus
Letter to Menoeceus — death is nothing to us, and pleasure is not what you think
Ἐπιστολὴ πρὸς Μενοικέα (Diogenes Laertius 10.122–138) · Athens, between about 306 and 270 BCE, and no closer. Transmitted entire inside Diogenes Laertius book 10, and cited here by his sections.
The shortest and most read thing Epicurus wrote: the ethics in about fifteen hundred words. It contains the four sentences the whole system is usually reduced to — that the gods exist but are not angry, that death is nothing to us because where death is we are not, that desires divide into natural and necessary and neither, and that the pleasant life is produced by sober reasoning rather than by drinking and delicacies. It closes by telling Menoeceus to practise these things day and night with someone like himself, which is the school's actual method. The last three sections, added by Diogenes rather than by Epicurus, set the doctrine of pleasure against the Cyrenaics and are the clearest surviving statement of the distinction between pleasure in motion and pleasure at rest.
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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. One mannerism is concentrated in this letter specifically. Hicks renders the second person in biblical English — 'those things which without ceasing I have declared unto thee, those do, and exercise thyself therein'. The Greek is ordinary koine written by a teacher to a student, with no scriptural colour whatever. Where this text sounds like a gospel, that is Hicks and 1925, not Epicurus.