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WorkLucretius

On the Nature of Things

A Roman poet set the atoms of Epicurus into Latin verse to free his readers from fear of the gods and of death.

by Lucretius298 passages held

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Original title
De Rerum Natura
First published
50 BCE(published posthumously)
Original language
Latin

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Overview

Fear of the gods and fear of what comes after death, Lucretius argued, are the chief causes of human misery, and both dissolve once a person understands what the world is made of. His answer, in six books of Latin verse, is atoms: tiny bodies moving through empty space, combining and coming apart with no god directing them. The mind is made of them too, and it scatters when the body dies, so nobody is left to suffer anything. He names Greek rivals — Heraclitus with his fire, Empedocles with his four elements — and argues against them that only indivisible particles can explain why things both last and change. The doctrine was not his own. It belonged to Epicurus, a Greek philosopher who had died some two centuries earlier and who wrote in prose; Lucretius set out to carry it into Latin poetry. He addressed the poem to Memmius, most likely the Roman politician Gaius Memmius, later exiled after an electoral scandal. Cicero mentioned the poems in a letter to his brother in February 54 BCE; little else about their author is certain, and the story of a love potion, madness and suicide comes from the Christian scholar Jerome, writing more than four centuries later. Scholars find signs that the poem never received its final revision, and it ends on the plague that struck Athens, retold from the historian Thucydides. Virgil, a generation younger, blessed in his Georgics the man who has learned how nature works and put fear beneath his feet, a passage generally read as a tribute to Lucretius. After antiquity the poem survived in a handful of manuscripts until Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary hunting for lost classical texts, found a copy in 1417. Machiavelli later copied the whole poem out by hand. About a century after the discovery, a Florentine church synod barred it from the schools.

Key concepts

What does On the Nature of Things mean by atoms and void?

Atoms are tiny bodies that cannot be divided, and void is the empty space they move through. Between them they are all there is: everything else, from stones to the human mind, is atoms combining and coming apart. No god directs these meetings. The doctrine is Epicurus's, and the poem argues that only such indivisible particles can explain why things both last and change.

Which two fears is On the Nature of Things written to cure?

Fear of the gods and fear of what comes after death. The poem treats these as the chief causes of human misery and answers them not with reassurance but with an account of what the world is made of. Once a person sees that atoms, not gods, make and unmake things, and that the mind dies with the body, both fears lose their object.

Why is the mind mortal in Lucretius's poem?

Because it is made of atoms like everything else, and so shares the fate of bodies. When a person dies, the particles of the mind scatter along with the rest, and nothing of the person remains to experience anything. The poem draws consolation from this rather than loss: with no one left, nobody can suffer after death, and there is no one for an afterlife to punish.

Why does the poem argue against Heraclitus's fire and Empedocles's four elements?

Because they are the rival answers it names to the question of what things are made of. Heraclitus built the world from fire, Empedocles from four elements. Lucretius holds that neither can account for a world whose things both last and change, and that only particles which cannot be divided can do it. The quarrel is over what the ultimate stuff of the world must be like.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Atoms, Void and a World Nobody Steers

What must the world be made of, if things can both endure and change? The poem's answer leaves no room for a god at the controls.

Everything that exists, on the doctrine Lucretius takes whole from Epicurus, is tiny bodies moving through empty space, combining and coming apart with no god directing them. He defends it against rivals he names, the single fire of Heraclitus and the four elements of Empedocles, on the ground that only particles which cannot be divided explain why things last at all and yet keep changing. What follows is that every birth and every ending in nature is a rearrangement of the same bodies, and none of it is anybody's plan.

  • atomism
  • atoms
  • void
  • matter
  • motion
  • causation
  • generation
  • change
  • cosmology

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A Mind Made of Atoms, and a Death Without a Sufferer

If the mind is built from atoms like everything else, who is left to suffer once the body dies? The poem stakes its consolation on the answer: no one.

The same atoms that make stones and stars make the mind, and the poem grants it no exemption. When the body dies, the mind's particles scatter with the rest, so there is nobody left to be punished, to grieve or to feel the loss of the life that ended. It is a comfort built from physics rather than from hope: it promises nothing after death, it removes the one who could be harmed there. The fear of death turns out to be a mistake about who will be present, not about what will happen.

  • mortality
  • death
  • soul
  • soul mortality
  • mind
  • mind-body relation
  • body

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Knowing How Nature Works as the Cure for Fear

Why are people miserable, and can understanding the world be what frees them? Terror of the gods and of death is the illness here, and knowledge of nature the remedy.

Fear of the gods and fear of what follows death are, for this poem, the chief causes of human misery, and neither is met with reassurance: each is dissolved by explanation. Once a person sees that nature runs by itself, no divine anger stands behind what befalls them. Virgil, a generation younger, blessed the one who has learned how nature works and put fear beneath his feet. Yet the poem does not end in calm. Its last pages retell, from Thucydides, the plague that struck Athens, where death arrives in its worst form.

  • fear
  • religion
  • human nature
  • nature
  • natural philosophy
  • natural phenomena
  • meteorology
  • astronomy

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Within this work

passages held
298
distinct concepts
361
by passages held, corpus-wide
#249

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “atomism” and “perception”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
atomismperception19
atomismmatter17
atomismsensation16
atomismcausation14
atomismcosmology11
causationperception7
atomismnature5
causationnature5
matterperception5
atomismmortality4
cosmologymortality4
mortalitysensation4
perceptionsensation4
causationmatter3
cosmologymatter3
cosmologynature3
causationcosmology2
matternature2
mattersensation2
natureperception2
cosmologyperception1
mattermortality1
mortalitynature1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. -50 On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) you are here EN
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