# Loeb Cicero reprints the swerve as a philosopher’s dodge of fate and of law

Date: 1914

## The fact

[Cicero](/people/cicero)’s Loeb philosophical corpus prints the clinamen/swerve as an undignified Epicurean device to save freedom. Later readers could treat chance as a solvent of legal responsibility.

## Context

A physics of random deviation is not a pardon. Reception sometimes made it one. Store the printed mockery-and-heading, not a measured crime series.

[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: Cicero, De finibus 1 — Perseus (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Cic.+Fin.; Perseus Digital Library / Tufts).

## Significance

Chance-as-freedom can erode the idea that a court may hold an agent. Keep confidence medium.

Chance-as-freedom can erode the idea that a court may hold an agent. Keep confidence medium.

## 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

- Judicial independence erosion (court capture): https://factrail.ai/drivers/justice-judicial-independence-erosion

## Sources

- https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Cic.+Fin.+1
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Epicurus

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/ep-swerve-as-excuse