The Nature of Things

by Lucretius

The fact which we can most confidently assert about Lucretius is one drawn from his poem itself: that he had been converted to the philosophy of Epicurus (341–270 BC) and was possessed with the desire to persuade others of its truth.

One of the achievements of the Greek mind between the eighth and the fifth centuries was a process which might be called separation or differentiation. They discovered that fact is different from fiction and that history is different from myth, that theology and philosophy are different ways of talking about the world, and that each of these is different from natural science.

But gradually the discovery that science and philosophy are different modes of enquiry was made, and in the later fifth century Socrates made the distinction absolute.

Epicurus held that natural science is the route to philosophical understanding, and his system, from one point of view, can be seen as the revival, in a transformed shape, of an older tradition of Greek thought. He begins not with abstract cogitation but with the external world.

insofar as the gods exist, they must be made of atoms, like everything else; they did not create the world, they play no part in its governance and they take no interest in us. Epicurus argues that certain moral truths follow necessarily from these scientific facts. No one can rationally pursue anything other than his own pleasure. Epicurus is thus in the strict sense a hedonist. However, he places a fairly low value on pleasure as the homme moyen sensuel or man in the street is likely to conceive it.

All pleasures of the senses are inferior to such abstract pleasures as friendship and philosophical contemplation. Accordingly, this philosophy, often caricatured as a religion of sensuous self-indulgence, is in reality rather austere. No one could be less of an epicure than Epicurus.

The pious Sophocles (c. 495–406) believes in the gods, but seems to recognize that there is no horror so great that they will protect us from it. The materialist Epicurus, by contrast, denies the existence of providence, but nevertheless holds that we can be assuredly safe. Both Stoicism (which does believe in a divine providence) and Epicureanism assert that the mind of the wise man, enlightened by philosophy, is an impregnable citadel.

The goal of Stoicism was apatheia, not feeling, the goal of Epicureanism ataraxia, not being disturbed – both negative ideals.

There is an obvious paradox in calling Lucretius religious. His denial of the supernatural is absolute, he extols Epicurus for trampling religion underfoot, he declares that religion has often led people into wicked and cruel acts and he illustrates this with the story of Iphigenia, killed by her father Agamemnon as a sacrificial victim so that the Greeks might obtain a fair wind for their voyage to Troy. He sums this up in a line as famous as any in the entire poem: ‘So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong’ (I.101).

Empedocles held that the universe was governed by an interplay between two forces, Love and Strife, and he gave his theory a mythological dress by calling these forces Ares and Aphrodite. These two deities became lovers in a famous story told in the eighth book of Homer’s Odyssey; their Roman equivalents are Mars and Venus. Strife or Ares, it appears, is the force that dissevers, Aphrodite or Love the force that unites.

love/strifde venus/mars

On the largest and the smallest scale there is immutability: the universe is the sum of infinite space and an infinite number of atoms, and nothing can be added to it or subtracted from it; and each single atom is immortal, indivisible and indestructible. In between, everything is activity and mutability, for the atoms are in ceaseless energetic motion. The drama lies in this combination of change and changelessness, and Lucretius’ erotic metaphor celebrates this grand paradox.

But Lucretius is genuinely trying to write philosophy in verse, to expound, argue and persuade, and no one, it seems, had seriously attempted that for nearly four hundred years. The oddity of Lucretius is confirmed by the extent to which other Roman philosophers ignored him. Cicero, despite admiring him as a poet, never once refers to him in his many philosophical works, and does not even pay him the compliment of being worth refutation.

Lucretius, for his part, turns his master into an Odysseus of the imagination, who has roamed the immeasurable universe in mind and soul.

The literary critics of antiquity commonly divided poetry up into genres: epic, lyric, elegy, comedy, tragedy, and so on. The Greeks mastered these genres, and the Romans sought to emulate them, but they often fell short of their models, and in only one genre, didactic, did they decisively outclass the Greek achievement. Through moral and intellectual intensity and (as Cicero saw) by possessing both craftsmanship and natural genius, Lucretius found possibilities in the didactic form that no one had found before, and thus, through his influence on Virgil, he was to affect the course of Western literature as a whole.

The Nature of Things showed Virgil the way to the Georgics, and the Georgics showed him that he could attempt an even longer poem, his epic Aeneid. But there is a deeper influence of Lucretius upon the Aeneid to be considered. Lucretius put the idea of salvation into the ‘great poem’ and Virgil then put it into the heroic poem. Virgil’s Aeneas is a man who is on a quest to found a city, and the poem studies how human beings may hope for happiness and security. Lucretius finds safety within the individual, in the citadel of the soul; the Aeneid finds it in human institutions, in city and land, in tradition, law and custom. But the study of salvation would henceforward be recurrent in the ‘great poem’, in Dante’s Divine Comedy (early fourteenth century), for example, and in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667).

the poor girl was carried By the hands of men up to the altar, not that she be married With solemn ceremony, to the accompanying strain Of loud-sung bridal hymns, but as a maiden, pure of stain, To be impurely slaughtered, at the age when she should wed, Sorrowful sacrifice slain at her father’s hand instead. [100] All this for fair and favourable winds to sail the fleet along! – So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong.

Further, substances consist either of a single kind Of atom, or are made of compounds, elements combined. But the atoms of things are such, there is no power that can snuff Them out, for they prevail at last with stoutness of their stuff.

For idiots admire things all the more When they discern them hidden in tangled words, and set great store In anything that tickles the ear, in phrases dyed a shade Of purple.

Nature won’t permit The Sum of Things to ring itself with any kind of limit, Because she makes it such that matter has to be surrounded [1010] By emptiness, and emptiness must be by matter bounded, Making sure, by alternation, the cosmos has no end.

But being myriad and many-mingled, plagued by blows And buffeted throughout the universe for all time past, By trying every motion and combination, they at last Fell into the present form in which this universe appears.

How sweet it is to watch from dry land when the storm-winds roil A mighty ocean’s waters, and see another’s bitter toil – Not because you relish someone else’s misery – Rather, it’s sweet to know from what misfortunes you are free.

Nor do raging fevers any faster cease to burn If you have fancy tapestries on which to toss and turn And royal-purple sheets to wrap in, than if you are broke And all you have to huddle under is a peasant’s cloak.

Empty void cannot at any part or time withstand Any object, but it must continually heed Its nature and give way, so all things fall at equal speed, Even though of differing weights, through the still void.

Nor can any power change the universe – there’s no Place beyond the universe to which matter could go, No place outside the universe from which a new supply Of matter could arise to burst inside the Sum thereby Changing the whole Nature of Things, and altering the course Of its motions.

For godhead by its nature must enjoy eternal life In utmost peace, removed from us and far from mortal strife, Apart from any suffering, apart from any danger, [650] Powerful of itself, not needing us, and both a stranger To our attempts to win it over and untouched by anger.

For when you rearrange [1021] Atoms, their order, shapes and motions, then you also change What they compose.

The mind seeks explanation. Since the universe extends Forever out beyond those ramparts at which our world ends, The mind forever yearns to peer into infinity, To project beyond and outside of itself, and there soar free.

Since empty space is limitless on all sides and the amount Of atoms meandering in the measureless universe, past count, All flitting about in many different ways, endlessly hurled In restless motion, it is most unlikely that this world, This sky and rondure of the earth, was made the only one, And all those atoms outside of our world get nothing done;

Another error into which you never ought to stray, Though set forth in the scripture of Democritus, the great Philosopher: that atoms of flesh and spirit alternate, One then the other, thus knitting the fabric of the flesh. For since The elements of soul are smaller than the elements Of flesh in size, so also they are fewer in their numbers, And are distributed but sparsely through the body’s members.

‘What’s so much the matter with you, mortal, that you wallow In morbid mourning? Why bemoan your death and weep in sorrow? For if you’ve relished the life that you have led, if you did not Gather all your blessings, as it were, in a leaky pot So that they’ve drained away and perished, with no chance to please, Why not, like a banquet guest, who’s drunk life to the lees, Depart, you dolt, and go to peaceful rest, your mind at ease?

But by adding on to life, we don’t diminish by one jot The length of death, nor are we able to subtract instead Anything to abbreviate the time that we are dead.

The stars all seem to be at rest, nailed in the vaults of heaven, But are perpetually in motion, since once they have arisen, Returning to their setting place, on far-flung paths they go Across the sky from end to end, with bodies all aglow.

Things are made of many seeds in myriad ways combined.

Females can arise From the paternal seed, just as the male offspring, likewise, Can be created from the mother’s flesh. For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother.

A human baby’s like a sailor washed up on a beach By the battering of the surf, naked, lacking the power of speech, Possessing no means of survival, when first Nature pours Him forth with birth-pangs from his mother’s womb upon Light’s shores. He fills the room up with his sorrowful squalls, and rightly so! – Just think what lies in store for him, Life’s full supply of woe.

Thus you can know that things require an ever-renewed supply Of light, because wave after wave the previous shafts die, And the only way things in the sun appear before our sight Is they are ever replenished by that fountainhead of light.

And whose flesh does not creep with awe, when the burnt earth shakes Struck by hair-raising bolts of lightning, and the vast sky quakes With rumbling thunder? Do not nations tremble, peoples quiver? Do not proud kings, struck by dread of the gods, curl up and shiver, Terrified lest for some despicable crime or cruel command The heavy day of reckoning is finally at hand?

Add to this, a thunderbolt is made of atoms small And smooth, so that it’s difficult to block its way at all, Since it can slip between and slide through pores and passageways, Nor does it balk at many hindrances so it delays, And that is why it zips along at such a spanking pace.

Two factors are at work when violent downpours come to pass: The clouds are violently pressed by winds and squeezed by their own mass, While steady rains that don’t let up and last for quite a while [520] Happen when many water-seeds arise and cloud-racks pile On sopping clouds, gathered from every quarter, and the terrain, Steaming everywhere, exhales the moisture up again.