The Nature of Things

“The poets lie too much”—except, perhaps, the ancient Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus. Although he admits to rimming the cup of his lessons with honey to take some of the edge off his austere message, Lucretius sees it as his task in his six-book poem, De rerum natura, to provide readers with a forthright and truthful account of the cosmos and the place of human beings within it. As a disciple of the early Greek philosopher Epicurus, Lucretius maintains that our anxieties about life and fears surrounding death are due to patently false superstitions about vengeful gods intent on causing trouble for us in this life and in the afterlife. The aim of philosophy as Lucretius sees it is to dispel “our terrors and our darknesses of mind” by giving us “insight into nature” and a schema of “systematic contemplation” that can help us understand who we really are and how the world truly works.

On Lucretius's account, the universe is constituted only by material particles and the void of empty space. The individual things we see around us are comprised of such particles of varied sizes and sorts and are brought together by chance to form relatively stable (but not invariant) patterns of existence and relation. While the individuals, groups, and patterns that form in nature and the cosmos are subject to change and destruction, the particles themselves are indestructible. Human souls are also, according to Lucretius, built from these same particles and, hence, are subject to the same processes of constitution and destruction. Our souls do not survive us after death and thus cannot be subject to punishment by the gods for anything we do in this life. Furthermore, if there are any gods, they would, Lucretius believes, be utterly uninterested in human affairs. The gods control neither the constitution and destruction of assembled particles nor the vicissitudes of human affairs; both realms unfold according to largely deterministic forces as well as random swerves from that predictable order.