Abstract

The article investigates how Diogenes of Oenoanda in his huge 2nd cent. AD Epicurean wall inscription deals with the control of fear. It argues for restoring the fragmentary title of Diogenes’ Ethics–treatise with “feelings [of soul] and [body]”. In this way the importance given in Ethics to the evaluation of our feelings according to the Epicurean doctrine is reflected in the title. Diogenes in his introduction to the whole inscription lists up the control of irrational fears in the first place of achievements of Epicureanism. The analysis of the relevant passages on his Ethics results in assigning fr. 47 III–IV and NF 137 to a subsection dealing with fear of pain from diseases which on the inscription must have followed fr. 48. Fear from gods is abundantly discussed in the recently combined Theological Physics Sequence. The article argues, that this topic was not treated once more in Ethics. Indeed, the “unclear fear” mentioned in fr. 35 refers, as a comparison with Epic. Ep. Hdt. 81–82 and Phld. De Dis I shows, not to some sort of feeling triggered by wrong tales on gods, but to an irrational fear of death.