This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ancient sources credit Epicurus with an extraordinarily large body of writing, reportedly some three hundred scrolls covering physics, ethics, and the theory of knowledge alike, yet almost none of it survives in its original form. What is known of his own words directly comes chiefly through Diogenes Laertius, whose later biographical compendium preserved three of Epicurus's letters in full, the Letter to Herodotus summarizing his physics, the Letter to Pythocles on astronomical phenomena, and the Letter to Menoeceus on ethics, along with a collection of short maxims known as the Principal Doctrines.
A further, physically direct source emerged only in modern times: charred papyrus scrolls buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and recovered from a private library at Herculaneum, the so called Villa of the Papyri, include Epicurean philosophical texts, among them works by the later Epicurean Philodemus and fragments scholars have connected to Epicurus's own lost treatise On Nature. Advances in imaging technology have continued to make portions of that carbonized, previously unreadable material legible.
Between a late biographer's preserved letters and a volcanic accident's underground library, what survives of Epicurus's own voice is a small, unevenly preserved remainder of a body of writing ancient sources describe as vast, a transmission history as instructive about how philosophy reaches later readers as the doctrine it carries.