# Loeb Letter to Herodotus prints the warning against empty words as a control on speech

Date: 1925

## The fact

Hicks prints the [Herodotus](/people/herodotus) letter’s demand to keep words on first meanings. Later school discipline, as Philodemus on frank speech shows in later editions, could police members’ talk. The dated Loeb is the public English start of that speech-control heading.

## Context

Semantic hygiene can fight superstition and can also authorise a school to define which utterances count. Low confidence on any later surveillance coefficient.

[Epicurus](/people/epicurus) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official edition, museum, archive, or agency page and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: Diogenes Laertius, Lives, Loeb / Hicks vol. 2 (https://archive.org/details/livesofeminentph02dioguoft; Internet Archive / Loeb Classical Library scan).

## Significance

A canon of first meanings is a speech-governance tool. Do not upgrade it into a secret police.

A canon of first meanings is a speech-governance tool. Do not upgrade it into a secret police.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

## People

- Epicurus: https://factrail.ai/people/epicurus

## Drivers

- Personal-Data Protection: https://factrail.ai/drivers/personal-data-protection

## Sources

- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/
- https://archive.org/details/livesofeminentph02dioguoft

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/ep-empty-sounds-language