Someone Forged Fifty Letters in Epicurus's Name. The Forgery Won.

On 25 June 2026, a team working across two particle accelerators announced that they had read a book nobody had opened since the year 79 AD.

The object is catalogued as PHerc. 1667. It is a roll of papyrus roughly a metre and a half long, carbonised in the eruption of Vesuvius, black the whole way through, and so brittle that unrolling it by hand would turn it into flakes. It has sat in the National Library in Naples for most of two centuries. Scanned at the BM18 beamline of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, with further imaging at the I12 beamline of Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, it fed a dataset that for a single scroll can run to three hundred terabytes. Trained models traced the wound layers and flattened them into virtual sheets. The ink came up as about twenty columns of Greek, beginning to end. The Vesuvius Challenge called it the first Herculaneum scroll to be virtually unwrapped and read end to end.

Then the content. It is a treatise on ethics, concerned with impulse, practical wisdom and how a person makes moral progress. At one point it names Aristocreon, the nephew and pupil of Chrysippus. Federica Nicolardi, the papyrologist leading the reading team in Naples, put the awkwardness plainly: if the text had been found in Egypt or anywhere else, it would probably have been classified straight away as a Stoic text.

It did not surface in Egypt. It surfaced in a villa library at Herculaneum of some eighteen hundred rolls and fragments, Epicurean by every other measure: the working library of Philodemus of Gadara, forty four of whose own works sit in it. The Epicureans kept their rivals' books on the shelf. The rivals did not return the favour, and the consequences of that asymmetry are the reason anyone today thinks Epicurus was a man who liked expensive dinners.

The standard account now reaches the correction and stops. He was no hedonist, he lived on bread and water, what he wanted was a mind free of disturbance. That is accurate, it has been in print for five hundred years, and it explains nothing. Somebody performed the misunderstanding. Identifiable people did it, with motives and deadlines, and their version held for twenty three centuries against the plain text of the man's own letters. The question worth asking is how.

Fifty Forged Letters and a Defector From the Garden

It started while he was alive, and it started inside the house. Timocrates of Lampsacus was the brother of Metrodorus, Epicurus's closest friend and most devoted student. Timocrates joined the Garden, left it, and wrote a book called Merriment about his years there. Diogenes Laertius records the charge: Timocrates asserted that Epicurus vomited twice a day from over-indulgence. Metrodorus wrote a furious rebuttal, now lost.

The shape of the attack is worth studying, because it recurs. It came from an insider. It could not be checked. Its subject was digestion, and nobody who heard it needed to have read a word of Epicurean physics to repeat it at dinner.

Getting on for two centuries after Epicurus died, a Stoic named Diotimus escalated. Diogenes Laertius again: "Diotimus the Stoic, who is hostile to him, has assailed him with bitter slanders, adducing fifty scandalous letters as written by Epicurus." Fifty. A manufactured correspondence in a dead philosopher's voice, obscene in content, circulating under his name among readers who had no authenticated text to check it against.

Athenaeus supplies what is probably the sequel, under a variant of the name. A man he calls Theotimus, "who wrote the books against Epicurus, was accused by Zenon the Epicurean, and put to death." Scholars generally take Theotimus and Diotimus to be the same man. Athenaeus does not say the letters were the charge.

Either way, the death of the forger changed nothing. A forgery does not have to survive in order to work. It has to be believed once, by someone whose own book survives, and quoted.

The motive is not mysterious. The Stoics and the Epicureans were competing for the same students in the same city, addressing the same question, and arriving at destinations that looked disconcertingly alike. Both promised a life stripped of fear. Both used the vocabulary of tranquillity. They agreed on the destination and split over the mechanism, which put them in direct competition for every recruit in Athens.

And Epicurus had left an unguarded flank. He put pleasure at the centre of his ethics and then spent his working life defining it into something almost nobody would bother to restate accurately: absence of pain in the body, absence of disturbance in the mind. A headline word with a lurid surface and a technical meaning buried underneath is the easiest target in philosophy. His enemies took the surface and never mentioned the definition.

Cicero, Piso, and How Epicurean Became an Insult

The Greek slanders would have stayed a quarrel among schools if they had not been picked up in Latin, by an author the West never stopped reading.

Cicero disliked Epicureanism and said so at length. In his dialogue on the ends of good and evil he lets an Epicurean spokesman lay out the case in full, then dismantles it across the following book, which is the courteous version of his opinion. The uncourteous version is a speech he delivered in 55 BC against Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, consul, father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and Cicero's personal enemy. The speech is invective of a coarseness that startles even in Roman politics, and among the materials Cicero worked with was the Greek philosopher living in Piso's household. That philosopher was Philodemus. Across five sections Cicero implicates him in his patron's alleged debauchery while complimenting the elegance of his poems.

Piso is much the most probable owner of the villa at Herculaneum. The library that synchrotrons in France and Oxfordshire are now reading, column by column, is in all likelihood the library Cicero used as a prop in a character assassination.

The method shows up again in his book on the nature of the gods. Leontion, a woman of the Garden, had written a rebuttal to Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor. Cicero calls her a meretricula, a little courtesan, concedes that she wrote in polished Attic Greek, and then attributes her nerve to the licence that prevailed in the garden of Epicurus.

Look at what has happened in that sentence. The Garden's most radical feature, its admission of women, foreigners and slaves as philosophical equals in a city that granted none of them standing, has been converted into evidence of sexual laxity. The raw material was the school's own practice, described by a hostile witness who knew his audience would supply the worst reading. A community of men and women eating simple meals together in a walled garden could be reported truthfully and still land as a scandal, provided the reporter chose his adjectives.

The One Greek School That Could Not Be Baptised

Every other major Greek school found an accommodation with Christianity. Plato brought an immortal soul and a transcendent order of perfect forms, which mapped onto heaven with minor adjustments. Aristotle brought an unmoved mover, which could be renamed. Stoic providence, a rational order governing the whole cosmos, needed almost no translation.

Epicurus brought a soul made of atoms that disperses at death, gods who exist but pay no attention to human beings, and a universe with no designer and no judgment waiting at the end. There was no negotiated settlement available. His theology was not a rival account of God; it was a demonstration that the entire apparatus of reward and punishment rested on a mistake.

Neglect did the rest of the work. Ancient texts survived by being copied out by hand onto expensive material, by institutions with a finite number of scribal hours and a strong sense of priorities. A monastery copied Virgil, who could be read as a pagan prophet of Christ. It copied Cicero, whose moral philosophy caused no trouble. Nobody had to burn Epicurus. Declining to spend the parchment, year after year for a thousand years, was sufficient.

Where the record needed managing, it was managed. Jerome, writing more than four centuries after Lucretius, passed on a story that the poet of Epicurean physics had been driven mad by a love potion, wrote his masterpiece in intervals of sanity and killed himself at forty four. Modern scholars treat this as invention. It travelled anyway, and for centuries it was the first thing any reader learned about the author.

By 1300 the transformation was complete. In the sixth circle of Dante's hell, in flaming open tombs, lie the heretics, and Dante identifies them as Epicurus and his followers, who make the soul die with the body. The two he stops to speak with, Farinata degli Uberti and Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, are Florentine political figures. Neither was a philosopher.

English finished the job. By the 1560s an epicure was one given over to sensual pleasure, and within a decade epicurean was available as a noun for the same thing. By 1774 an epicure was a glutton and a sybarite, with no surviving connection to the argument the word came from. A philosophy built on the discipline of wanting less ended up as an adjective for menus.

Three Hundred Rolls, Down to Three Letters

Diogenes Laertius, counting the works of Epicurus, wrote that "they amount to about three hundred rolls, and contain not a single citation from other authors."

Of those three hundred, this is what remains. Three letters, to Herodotus, Pythocles and Menoeceus, surviving because Diogenes copied them wholesale into a biography in the third century AD. A set of maxims called the Principal Doctrines, from the same source. A second collection of eighty one sayings, the Vatican Sayings, which nobody knew existed until 1888, when it turned up in a manuscript in the Vatican Library. Everything else is quotation, paraphrase and rubble.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes the obvious hazard: short citations of Epicurus in other writers are often taken out of context or presented in a polemical and distorted fashion. When the primary texts are gone, what a philosopher taught becomes whatever the surviving descriptions say he taught. Almost all the surviving descriptions were written by people trying to beat him.

What the salvaged letters contain, for anyone curious about the gap between the doctrine and the word, is a theory of limits. Pleasure is defined as freedom from pain in the body and freedom from disturbance in the mind, a stable condition that thrills do not add to. Desires are sorted into three classes: natural and necessary, meaning food, shelter, safety and friendship; natural but unnecessary, meaning elaborate food where plain food would do; and empty, meaning fame, power and unbounded wealth, which have no natural ceiling and therefore can never be reached. The empty desires are named as the primary engine of human misery. A later Epicurean compressed the system into four lines meant to be memorised and carried about: nothing to fear in god, nothing to feel in death, what is good is easy to get, what is terrible is easy to endure. One surviving letter asks a friend for a little pot of cheese, so that the writer could fare sumptuously whenever he chose. He taught that the greatest thing wisdom provides for a happy life is friendship.

None of that is hidden. It has been printable, teachable and checkable since the Renaissance, and the caricature beat it comprehensively for another five hundred years after the texts came back into circulation. The reason is structural. A caricature travels as a single word that fits in a sentence about someone else. A doctrine travels as a book that has to be copied, bought, opened and finished. Only one of those is cheap to move, and the cheap one had a two thousand year head start.

What the Vesuvius Challenge Is Pulling Out of the Ash

In 1750 a well shaft sunk outside Herculaneum struck the mosaic floor of a buried house. Excavators working for the King of Naples, under the Swiss engineer Karl Weber, tunnelled into a vast seaside villa, and by 1752 they were hauling out lumps of what they took to be charcoal. Someone noticed writing on them.

What followed was two centuries of destruction by rescue. Camillo Paderni sliced rolls open, copied whatever text lay exposed and lost the rest, a procedure used on hundreds of scrolls. In 1756 a priest named Antonio Piaggio built a machine of silk threads and weights that peeled a scroll apart at a rate measured in millimetres per day. The first roll took four years. Humphry Davy attacked the problem with chlorine gas in 1819 and 1820 and got twenty three partly open. By the middle of the twentieth century, 585 rolls or fragments had been completely unrolled and 209 unrolled in part. The rest were considered unreadable by any means that did not destroy them.

Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky spent decades arguing the reading could be done without opening anything, and in 2023, with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, turned it into an open competition. The scanning was the easy part. Ink and papyrus are both carbon, so the letters are invisible to X-rays; models had to be trained to recognise the faint textural signature of ink on a surface with no contrast at all.

The results have arrived in stages. In 2025, PHerc. 172 at Oxford's Bodleian Library gave up more than seventy columns and, at last, a title: Philodemus, On Vices, Book 1. Sean Johnson, a former contestant who had joined the challenge's technical team, was among those who read it. Then, in June 2026, PHerc. 1667 read whole, and a title sequence in PHerc. 139 resolved as Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8. Only the first book of On Gods was previously known. The work ran to at least eight.

Among the rolls opened long ago, and now readable at far better resolution, are large parts of Books 14, 15, 25 and 28 of Epicurus's own On Nature, the thirty seven roll treatise the caricature was built to replace. Lower levels of the villa, found beneath the atrium quarter in the 1990s, remain largely unexcavated.

None of this settles an argument about pleasure. It changes the evidentiary position, which is a different and more consequential thing. For twenty three centuries the question of what Epicurus believed has been answered out of a hostile secondary literature and a handful of letters preserved by accident. Machines in Grenoble and Oxfordshire are now working the other side of that ledger, a scroll at a time, from a library that survived because a volcano buried it before anyone could decide it was not worth copying. The first scroll they read from beginning to end turned out to be, in all probability, a Stoic. The Epicureans had kept it.

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Adapted from a longform audio episode, Everyone Has Epicurus Wrong, produced for Sleepy Philosophy Radio.