The Nexus Archive
Epicureanism · Aphorisms
Additional Remains
by Epicurus and the Epicurean school
Featuring Epicurus
Bailey's edition-bounded B–D fragments: quotations from lost books, remains of letters, and uncertain-source sayings, with cross-links rather than invented complete works.
- Advanced
- 3 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the Choices and problems guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
Much of what Epicurus wrote has disappeared. Diogenes Laertius lists large books and many letters, but the surviving record often gives us only a quotation, a remark reported by another writer, or a title. These fragments show how arguments and stories about Epicurus traveled through friends, critics, and later compilers.
In a reported exchange, Polyaenus questions Epicurus about wine, and an unnamed speaker interrupts. Other excerpts ask for food, rejoice in letters, and plan for the care of children. Thought about pleasure and bodily need shares the page with the work of sustaining a community.
Simple food and modest wants promise freedom, yet pleasure here raises hard questions about law, virtue and responsibility to friends. The sayings at the end turn toward justice and the fear that wrongdoing leaves behind, then toward a life outside the race for wealth and office. Across the fragments, the practical measure keeps returning: whether a way of living brings settled pleasure or merely new reasons to be afraid.
The opening pages
Choices and problems
These fragments do not reassemble a lost treatise. Bailey’s printed B–D sequence has eighty-seven numbered positions. Some positions are only cross-references to Vatican Sayings.
1 Freedom from trouble in the mind and from pain in the body are static pleasures, but joy and exultation are considered as active pleasures involving motion. 2 Will the wise man do things that the laws forbid, knowing that he will not be found out? A simple answer is not easy to find. 3 Prophecy does not exist, and even if it did exist, things that come to pass must be counted nothing to us. 4 But even apart from this argument I do not know how one should say that things in the dark have colour. 5 Polyaenus: Do you, Epicurus, deny the existence of the warmth produced by wine? (Some one interrupted:) It does not appear that wine is unconditionally productive of heat. (And a little later:) It seems that wine is not unconditionally productive of heat, but wine of a certain quantity might be said to produce heat in a certain body. reported Polyaenus dialogue and editorial stage directions; not one continuous Epicurus utterance 6 Therefore we must not speak of wine as unconditionally productive of heat, but rather say that a certain quantity of wine will produce heat in a certain body which is in a certain disposition, or that a different quantity will produce cold in a different body. For in the compound body of wine there are certain particles out of which cold might be produced, if, as need arises, united with different particles they could form a structure which would cause cold. So that those are deceived who say that wine is unconditionally heating or cooling. 7 Wine often enters the body without exerting any power either of heating or of cooling, but when the structure is disturbed and an atomic rearrangement takes place, the atoms which create heat at one time come together and by their number give heat and inflammation to the body, at another they retire and so cool it. 8 Sexual intercourse has never done a man good, and he is lucky if it has not harmed him. 9 It is strange indeed that you were not at all impeded by your youth, as you would say yourself, from attaining, young as you were, a distinction in the art of rhetoric far above all your contemporaries, even the experienced and famous. It is strange indeed, I say, that you were not at all impeded by your youth from winning distinction in the art of rhetoric, which seems to require much practice and habituation, whereas youth can be an impediment to the understanding of the true nature of the world, towards which knowledge might seem to contribute more than practice and habituation. 10 I know not how I can conceive the good, if I withdraw the pleasures of taste, and withdraw the pleasures of love, and withdraw the pleasures of hearing, and withdraw the pleasurable emotions caused to sight by beautiful form. 11 The stable condition of well-being in the body and the sure hope of its continuance holds the fullest and surest joy for those who can rightly calculate it. 12 Beauty and virtue and the like are to be honoured if they give pleasure; but if they do not give pleasure, we must bid them farewell. 13 The nature of the universe consists of bodies and void. 14 The nature of all existing things is bodies and space. …
Chapter guides · 3
Choices and problems
Arguments Outside the Main Books
Bailey’s first group gathers statements from sources that survived unevenly.
What is here
Questions about pleasure, choice, color, and the effects of wine appear as quotations or reports. A reported exchange with Polyaenus makes the effects of wine depend on quantity and bodily condition.
Why it matters
The opening distinction is between settled freedom from pain and active joy. Later pieces tie the good to the pleasures of the senses and honor beauty and virtue only when they give pleasure.
Where it ends
The closing pieces would make Pythocles rich by reducing his desires, then praise frugality for the freedom it brings. A cheap diet is valuable because it frees us from desire, not as a permanent obligation to eat cheaply.
Letters and reported arguments
Letters in Pieces
The middle group follows quotations and fragments associated with lost correspondence.
What is here
The letter excerpts move between affection, bodily illness and the practical support of friends. One requests preserved cheese; another limits an annual contribution; others arrange care for Metrodorus’s children. The last-day letter joins severe illness to joy in remembered conversations. Later pieces turn toward philosophy and the gods.
Two reports of a letter
Diogenes presents the last-day letter as addressed to Idomeneus, and Bailey places it under that name here. Cicero’s parallel quotation names Hermarchus. Both reports preserve its request for the care of Metrodorus’s children.
Where it ends
The last pieces compare philosophy to medicine that heals mental suffering and consider divine life and worship. The closing remark imagines what would happen if human prayers were granted: people would perish because they keep praying for harm to one another.
Later sayings and uncertain remains
Pleasure, Justice, and a Quiet Life
The closing ethical fragments connect happiness with limited desires, self-sufficiency and freedom from fear.
Questions readers ask
- How difficult is Additional Remains?
- Advanced.
- Which translation is this?
- The Cyril Bailey translation from the Ancient Greek. The text follows Epicurus: The Extant Remains (1926).
- Can I read Additional Remains for free?
- Additional Remains is part of Nexus Premium, so reading it needs an account and a Premium subscription. The opening above and two chapter guides on this page are free to read.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 3 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About Epicurus
Epicurus founded his school, the Garden, at Athens in the late fourth century BC. His teaching joined an account of atoms and nature to a practical ethics of friendship, modest wants, and freedom from needless fear. Most of his books are lost; letters, maxims, fragments, and reports preserved by later writers carry the surviving record.
“What would remain of our fears if we understood nature and examined what we truly need?”
Epicurus gave philosophy a daily task: use inquiry into the world to make a human life less frightened and more self-sufficient. His letters and sayings survived through complicated ancient transmission and still challenge easy caricatures of pleasure.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. Additional Remains is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.