On the Nature of Things

A six-book poem in Latin hexameters, written in the first century BC, setting out Epicurean philosophy as a complete physical system: everything is atoms and void, the atoms are eternal and move by their own weight and a slight swerve, the soul is material and dissolves at death, and the gods — if they exist — take no interest in us. Lucretius’s stated purpose is therapeutic rather than scientific. If the universe has no providence in it and death is simply the end of sensation, then the two great sources of human misery, fear of the gods and fear of dying, have nothing to stand on.

The poem was nearly lost and survives because a single manuscript was recovered in 1417, an episode that has its own literature; its atomism and its argument against an afterlife made it dangerous reading for centuries and influential on the early modern natural philosophers and on Jefferson, who owned several copies.

Context: The only Philosophy entry in this shard, and at Lexile 1370 among the list’s hardest. It is also the clearest ancestor on the list of the materialist strand in Enlightenment thought.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Lucretius — the author, about whom almost nothing else is known.
• Materialism — the poem is its founding statement in the West.
• Rome — the late republic, a generation before Augustus.
• Renaissance — the 1417 recovery of the manuscript and what followed.
• Enlightenment — the tradition that took up the physics and the anticlericalism together.
• Progress — Lucretius’s book five contains one of antiquity’s few accounts of human development as cumulative.