Epicurus
The Principal Doctrines — forty sentences meant to be known by heart
Κύριαι Δόξαι (Diogenes Laertius 10.139–154) · Compiled from Epicurus's writings, probably within the school and possibly by him; in circulation by the generation after his death in 270 BCE. Diogenes Laertius copied the set entire at the end of book 10, and it is cited here by his sections rather than by doctrine number, so a single unit will usually carry two or three of the forty.
Forty numbered sentences, each short enough to memorise, covering the whole system: the gods are untroubled and untroubling; death is nothing to us; the limit of pleasure is the removal of all pain; if you had never feared the heavens or death you would have had no need of physics. The last eight are the surprise. Doctrines 31 to 38 make justice a contract — nothing is just or unjust in itself, justice is an agreement not to harm or be harmed, it does not exist between creatures that cannot make agreements, and a law that stops being mutually useful stops being just. It is the earliest surviving statement of a social-contract theory of justice, and it sits at the end of a text usually filed under how to be 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. Here the 'Sovran Maxims' problem is not incidental — it is the title of the text you are reading. The same forty sentences appear elsewhere on this site as 'Established Beliefs', in a work where they are being burned in a marketplace.