Letter to Herodotus
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~6,950 words · 33 passages
Cite this work
- APADiogenes Laertius. (n.d.). Letter to Herodotus. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/diogenes-laertius/letter-to-herodotus
- MLADiogenes Laertius. Letter to Herodotus. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/diogenes-laertius/letter-to-herodotus.
- ChicagoDiogenes Laertius. Letter to Herodotus. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/diogenes-laertius/letter-to-herodotus.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Epicurus's Letter to Herodotus, as it reached us: inside Diogenes Laertius.
Context and history
Epicurus wrote three hundred scrolls and not one survives. This letter exists because Diogenes Laertius copied it out in full in book X of his Lives of the Philosophers, in the third century. That is why it is filed under Diogenes and not Epicurus: **this is the actual source**, and anyone citing it should cite it that way. It is Epicurus's own summary of atomist physics, made for students who could not read the complete work.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Again, we must believe that smelling, like hearing, would produce no sensation, were there not particles conveyed from the object which are of the proper sort for exciting the organ of smelling, some of one sort, some of another, some exciting it confusedly and strangely, others quietly and agreeably. Moreover, we must hold that the atoms in fact possess none of the qualities belonging to things which come under our observation, except shape, weight, and size, and the properties necessarily conjoined with shape. For every quality changes, but the atoms do not change, since, when the composite bodies are dissolved, there must needs be a permanent something, solid and indissoluble, left behind, which makes change possible: not changes into or from the non-existent. but often through differences of arrangement, and sometimes through additions and subtractions of the atoms. Hence these somethings capable of being diversely arranged must be indestructible, exempt from change, but possessed each of its own distinctive mass and configuration. This must remain. For in the case of changes of configuration within our experience the figure is supposed to be inherent when other qualities are stripped of, but the qualities are not supposed, like the shape which is left behind, to inhere in the subject of change, but to vanish altogether from the body. Thus, then, what is left behind is sufficient to account for the differences in composite bodies, since something at least must necessarily be left remaining and be immune from annihilation. Again, you should not suppose that the atoms have any and every size, lest you be contradicted by facts; but differences of size must be admitted; for this addition renders the facts of feeling and sensation easier of explanation.…