About the Content of EpicurusToday.com
The content of EpicurusToday.com is curated, reviewed, and editorially approved by Cassius Amicus, who has been the administator of NewEpicurean.com since 2010 and the EpicureanFriends.com forum since 2015. Cassius Amicus is solely responsible for everything published here. That responsibility is real, unqualified, and not shared with any institution, publisher, or automated system. But the question of where the content comes from — and how much any single person can honestly claim to have originated — deserves a straight answer, and this page provides one.
How This Content Is Produced
Section titled “How This Content Is Produced”No single human being invents all the words in a work of scholarship or editorial synthesis from scratch. Every writer on philosophy draws on translators, commentators, primary sources, reference works, and the accumulated thinking of other people who have spent time on the same questions. The content of EpicurusToday is no different in kind from what you would find in a well-edited encyclopedia article, a careful reference work, or the kind of thorough synthesis that a knowledgeable writer produces by combining deep familiarity with primary sources, engagement with the best available secondary literature, and years of community discussion and testing of ideas against other serious readers.
What is different here — and what should be stated plainly — is that the drafting of articles on this site has been assisted by AI, specifically Claude AI. Artificial intelligence has been used as a research and drafting tool: to help organize arguments, draft explanatory prose, check the internal consistency of analysis, and ensure that the connection between primary Epicurean texts and the editorial conclusions being drawn is as tight and well-supported as possible.
This is not a secret, and it is not something to be embarrassed about. Using AI as a drafting and research assistant is not fundamentally different from relying on an encyclopedia, a dictionary of classical philosophy, or a research database. In each case, the human editor is responsible for selecting what is used, verifying what is claimed, approving what is published, and standing behind the result. That is what happens here.
What “Cassius Amicus Is Solely Responsible” Actually Means
Section titled “What “Cassius Amicus Is Solely Responsible” Actually Means”When we say that Cassius Amicus is solely responsible for the content of EpicurusToday, we mean several specific things:
Every article on this site reflects editorial judgment about what Epicurean philosophy actually teaches, how it has been misrepresented, and what the correct reading of the primary sources is. Those judgments are not the output of any algorithm. They are the result of more than a decade of close study of the primary texts — the letters of Epicurus, the works of Lucretius, Diogenes Laertius Book 10, the inscriptions of Diogenes of Oinoanda, and the relevant passages of Cicero — together with engagement with the most important modern scholarship, including above all Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, and sustained discussion and debate with the community at EpicureanFriends.com.
The specific positions taken on this site — that pleasure, not ataraxia, is the Epicurean goal; that the Tetrapharmakon is not a reliable summary of the philosophy; that DeWitt’s reading of Epicurus is closer to the primary sources than most academic consensus; that the five adulterating traditions have systematically distorted the reception of Epicurus — these are not AI-generated opinions. They are positions arrived at through years of engagement with the sources and the community, defended and tested in discussion, and committed to because the evidence supports them.
What AI contributes is the drafting: the organization of those positions into readable prose, the checking of internal consistency, the synthesis of relevant sources into accessible explanations. The positions themselves, the editorial decisions about what to include and what to reject, and the final approval of everything published — those are human, and they are Cassius Amicus’s.
On the Reliability of the Content
Section titled “On the Reliability of the Content”This site aims at the highest possible accuracy on the questions that matter most: what Epicurus actually taught, what the primary sources actually say, and where the mainstream reception of Epicurus has gone wrong. On those foundational questions, the content here is the result of sustained research and has been tested against serious scrutiny.
On the other hand, any site of this scope and ambition, produced by a small team without a large editorial apparatus, will contain errors of detail. Dates, names, specific textual citations, minor historical claims — these are places where mistakes are possible and in fact likely over the course of a large body of content. We do not regard this as a disqualifying flaw. Wikipedia, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the most careful academic publications all contain errors that are identified and corrected over time. The appropriate standard is not perfection on first publication but ongoing review and correction when errors are identified.
All content on this site is subject to ongoing review. If you find a factual error, a mistaken citation, or a claim that seems inconsistent with the primary sources, we want to know. Corrections and updates can be submitted through the EpicureanFriends.com forum, where ongoing discussion of all topics covered on this site continues. Identified errors will be corrected, and the correction will be noted.
Why We Publish Without Waiting for Perfection
Section titled “Why We Publish Without Waiting for Perfection”The restoration of authentic Epicurean philosophy against twenty-three centuries of misrepresentation, domestication, and outright hostility is not a project that can wait for the perfect moment to begin, or the perfectly verified article to publish. The philosophy of Epicurus has been misrepresented for so long, by so many influential voices, that simply getting accurate information into circulation — available, accessible, clearly argued — is itself a contribution worth making now rather than later.
Vatican Saying 14 says it more directly than we can: “We are born once and there can be no second birth; for all eternity we shall no longer be. But you, who are not master of tomorrow, are putting off your happiness. Life is worn away in procrastination and each of us dies without allowing himself leisure.”
Epicurus was not speaking about website publication schedules. But the principle applies: the urgency of the project is real, the time available is finite, and the people who might benefit from access to this philosophy are alive now, not in some future moment when every detail has been verified to the satisfaction of every possible critic. We publish what we have, we stand behind it, we improve it as we can, and we keep going.
EpicurusToday is not the last word on Epicurean philosophy. It is a contribution to an ongoing project of recovery and restoration — one that has been running for more than ten years at EpicureanFriends.com, that has produced a community of serious readers and discussants, and that continues to develop as the primary sources are read more carefully, the scholarship is engaged more thoroughly, and the arguments are tested more rigorously against all comers.
We welcome your engagement with that project. The forum at EpicureanFriends.com is the place for it.
This page was prepared by Cassius Amicus. It incorporates AI assistance, but all opinions, editorial decisions, and judgments as to content are solely those of Cassius Amicus, who is solely responsible for the content of EpicurusToday.com.