Content area
Full Text
Jan Erik Heßler. Epikur. Brief an Menoikeus: Edition, Übersetzung, Einleitung und Kommentar. Schwabe Epicurea, 4. Basel: Schwabe, 2014. Pp. 378. CHF 85.00. ISBN 978-3-7965-3213-9.
All students of Epicureanism will be grateful for this splendid new edition of the Letter to Menoeceus. The volume, which began life as a dissertation under the direction of Michael Erler, provides an extensive introduction surveying Epicurus' life and works, and a detailed analysis of the Letter itself, treating it for the first time as a literary work in its own right, both as an epistle and as a protreptikos logos ("Der Menoikeusbrief Epikurs wird im Allgemeinen als protreptischer Text betrachtet," 40). This has significant implications for the interpretation of the Letter: in a propaedeutic and hortatory composition, Epicurus cannot count on readers having an extensive prior knowledge of Epicurean doctrines. For example, in determining the unexpressed subject of apodekhontai in 124.2, Heßler reviews seven alternatives (the virtuous, the gods, the wise, the many, and three combinations of the foregoing). Of these, he rejects "the wise" in part because "diese Lesart scheint mir nicht geeignet für einen protreptischen Brief" (this reading does not seem to me appropriate for a protreptic letter) and "the wise and the gods" because "ist auch diese Deutung für...