(An Emulation Book) Alban Dewes Winspear-Lucretius and Scientific Thought-Harvest House (1963)

Books by Alban D.
Winspear
Augustus and Roman Reconstruction

( with Leonard Geweke)
Who Was Socrates?

(with Tom Silverberg)
The Genesis of Plato's Thought
The Roman Poet of Science

ALBAN D. WINSPEAR
LUCRETIUS
AND
SCIENTIFIC
THOUGHT
AN EMULATION BOOK [I[] HARVEST HOUSE, MONTREAL

First Edition May 1963
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-17242
Copyright ~ Canada 1963 by Harvest House Ltd.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book
or parts thereof in any form.
Printed by The Runge Press Ltd., Ottawa

CONTENTS
Preface
The Originality of Lucretius
II Lucretius, The Legend 16
III The Times of Lucretius 22
IV The Fight Against Roman Religion 30
V The Debt to Epicurus 52
VI How Men Should Live 64
VII The World Outlook of Lucretius

I. Physical Theory and its History: 80
Scientific Method
2. The Theory of Natural Evolution 117
3. The Growth of Human Institutions 128
Suggestions for Further Reading 146
Notes on Thinkers Mentioned in this Book 147
Index ISi
In this volume footnote references which occur frequently are not
repeated in full. The first time such a reference appears it is treated thus:
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (D.R.N.), ed. Smith and Leonard, Wis-
consin 1942.
Thereafter, it is cited simply as

D.R.N. followed by the identifying chapter and page number.
PREFACE
It is my conviction that Lucretius as a thinker has been too
much neglected. The reason for this I have, I think, sufficiently
analyzed in The Genesis of Plato's Thought. In a slave--0wning
society, Plato and the Pythagoreans, Aristotle and the Stoics
developed idealism as a defense of social inequality. This outlook
proved all too congenial to the thinkers of later feudal and aristo-
cratic societies. It was only with the eighteenth century A.D., and
the rise of scientific thin.king that Lucretius began to come into his
own as the most articulate exponent of the philosophy of science
in classical antiquity. But even so, the recognition has been half-
hearted. The tendency to depreciate Lucretius has continued on
and on. It is time that someone put forward the thesis of Lucretius'
philosophical originality and essential profundity. This is the theme
of my book.
I am conscious of a throng of obligations, even while I dissent
most-to my great and good friend, William Ellery Leonard, now
dead, with whom I enjoyed twenty years of intimacy and almost
daily discussion on our poet; and Cyril Bailey, the great English
Lucretian scholar; Usener, Guissani and many others who have
toiled with the interpretation of Lucretius. From Lambinus to the
present day, Lachmann, Monroe and Diels have given me much
illumination. Second hand, I have drawn from the studies of Duvau,
Hosius and Chatelaine. The Tuehner edition of Martin I have
consulted from time to time.
The citations from Lucretius are taken from the translation
published as the Roman Poet of Science, New York, 1956, London,
1959, by kind permission of the translator. For this permission I
am very grateful to myself.
I should like to pay tribute to the unfailing courtesy and help-
fulness of the staff of the University libraries of British Columbia
and Alberta (both Edmonton and Calgary).
Mrs. David J. Gravells, Miss Christine Davis and Miss Del
Bording have toiled womanfully with the preparation of the manu-
script and with reading the proof.
Some readers may prefer to leave the closely-argued scholarly
,ummary of Chapter I to the end. These may plunge immediately
into the life and time~ of Lucretius, the subjects of Chapters /I
and lll.
University of Alberta, Calgary.
CHAPTER I
THE ORIGINALITY OF LUCRETIUS'

Most students who have given serious attention to the subject
would admit, I think, that Lucretius was a poet of quite extra-
ordinary talent, that he combines an almost prophetic fervour with
a supreme mastery of the techniques of poetical composition and
that as a consequence of this combination of earnestness and skill
he has produced one of the most profoundly moving poems in the
whole history of literature. But while admitting all this, scholars
tend with a perp1exing unanimity to deny Lucretius' intellectual
originality. Lucretius, it is suggested, was great as a translator and
versifier. The system of ideas which he expounded can be found
ready made in Epicurus. Lucretius' contribution was to translate
the system of Epicurus into the Latin language and expound it in
a tour de force of high poetry. Of original thought in Lucretius there
is, in the received opinion, little trace. For this negative attitude
there may be a historical reason. Lucretius made his greatest impact
on the thought of the Western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries of our era. This was precisely the period when the atomic
theory of matter and the mechanistic interpretations of the findings
of science were most challenging to thoughtful men. (Dalton's New
System of Chemical Philosophy appeared in 1808). Moreover the
ethical implications of these views, hedonism and utilitarianism,
were to some most challenging, to others most disturbing. In both
these fields the thought of Lucretius seemed like exciting anticipa-
tions of modem conclusions-in cosmology the views of Boyle,
Newton, and Dalton; in ethics the views of Hume, Bentham, and
Mill. Now in both these fields Lucretius was admittedly a follower
of Epicurus. In passage after passage of luminous verse he acknowl-
edges his obligation to the master whom he held divine.' No one
can accuse Lucretius of failing to acknowledge sufficiently his obli-
gations.
I. This part. of the. work is_ a condensatio.n or. a paper originally prepared for presentation
to th.c Ph1los4:1ph1cal Society _of t~e Uruvc~s1ty of Alberta and subsequently to the Philo-
sophical Seminar at the Umversny of Bristol, England. It owes much to di~cussion by
P~ofessors Mar~iros_ and Ha_rdy of the Univen,ity of Alberta, Professors Kucrner and
K11to of the Uruvcrsity of Bnstol and Pro.fessor A. Dalzell of the University of Toronto,
•hough none. of 1hese gentlemen nece~san!y agree with the thesis.
2. E.G., l.ucrcc1us, De Rerum Na1ura (D.R.N.), ed. Smith and Leonard Wisconsin 1942:
I. 62-7\1; J. 1-~0; 51-54, 6. I 42. ' '
2 LUCRETIUS AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
But to return to the argument. When, in the latter half of the

nineteenth century, the thought of Darwin made its full impact on
the thought of the Western World and men began to look at each
other with a wild surmise and to wonder whether human institutions
were not also susceptible to an evolutionary interpretation, the
pattern of interpretation was already well set. But Lucretius did
have a theory of evolution and most excitingly anticipates the views
of those modems who hold to the theory of evolution in both its
biological and social aspects.
We find the idea of evolution both in the inorganic and
organic. The concept of creation is not, as in the Hebraic a fiat of
a Creator, but a growth, a process. The starry sky and the earth
have developed. Moreover, the same forces that work today for
both worked for their beginning and will work for their end ....
In the organic realm there is the same idea of process, particularly
of origin out of earth herself, which is to Lucretius far more pro-
foundly and eloquently Mother Earth than in any mythology.
There is the same idea of heredity by means of germ seeds that
descend from parent to offspring, reproducing characteristics even
of remote ancestors.•
There is of course, no conception of the evolution of specie.,
. . . . Yet there are two moments in Lucretius' zoology that are
notably Darwinian: the effect of organic adaptation and of domes-
tication upon the preservation of species: the survival value of
swift legs for example; and of animal life in mountains, woods,
thickets, in barnyards and pastures.'
Lucretius' idea, of course, Leonard goes on to argue, includes
explicitly the dying out of species unadapted to their environment
or unprotected by man.
The other notably Darwinian moment that Leonard notes is
the Lucretian reiteration against teleology, that is, design in nature,
a favourite idea of Aristotle and of Lucretius' own much scorned
Stoics. Not only are there no gods planning from without; but
Nature herself, he says, from within is not planning ahead: she
merely grows and things happen and particular functions develop
out of what ha~pens. The tongue was not created that we might
speak, but having tongues, we get to using tongues for speech.
Speech is a by-product of tongues, not the original purpose of
tongues. The debate is still on between the two schools of thought,
1.DRN. ,9
4.lJR.N. 60.
THE ORIGINALITY OF LUCRETIUS
though with far more subtle analysis and with far more biological
data. Most biologists would side vigorously with Lucretius; most
mctaphysicians, and all sound Christian theologian,;, would side
with the Stoics.'
Leonard goes on to notice Lucretius' extraordinary anticipations
of such later disciplines as anthropology, palaeontology, and archae-
ology.' And yet all this has not served to dispel the notion of
Lucretius as a mere imitator. Even Leonard includes in his most
sympathetic exposition the complaint:
Modern literary critics sometimes talk as if Lucretius were as great
a scientist as a poet; but his own contribution to science . . is
that of a masterly expositor of the scientific ideas of others; he is
only a masterly discoverer in that he discovered many phenomena
and episodes in Nature and life to illustrate those principles.'
This view, it seems to me should be challenged. The originality
of Lucretius might be analysed on three levels. First a gift for
exposition which leads him to take a prosaic hint from one of his
predecessors and make it flower with imagery, imagination and
passion. Second an intellectual power which makes him see more
clearly than any other ancient thinker the implications of the philo-
sophical position which he held. Lucretius holds to an evolutionary
and anti-teleological, anti-theological view of the universe and this
outlook he grasps more firmly and expounds more eloquently than
any other ancient thinker. This world outlook he applies to the
evolution of plant, animal and man and puts forward a theory of
biological and social evolution that goes far beyond anything pro-
pounded in classical antiquity. And this is what, perhaps, accounts
for the extraordinary modernity of Lucretius' thought.
The view of Lucretius as imitator too often rests on an assump-
tion. Lucretius draws many of his ethical and physical doctrines
from Epicurus to whom he pays tribute on several occasions. He
also pays tribute to Empedocles. Are his doctrines on biological
and social evolution anticipated in the lost poem of Empedocles? In
the present state of the argument we can only exclaim 'ignoramus'.
First let us examine the passages which Leonard had described
as notably Datwinian-his opposition to teleology and divine cre-
ation, his belief in the survival of species." This is not to argue that
5. D.R.N. 60.
6. D.R.N. 60.
1.D.R.N. 55.
I. D.R.N.4. 822 ti.; 5, 145 ff.; 5, 418 ff.
Winspcar, The Roman Poet o/ Sclen.ce, (R.P.S.) New York, 1956, 170-171; 1941!.; 2061!.
D.R.N. 72-76; 596-60; 656.
Bailey, Tit/ Lucre/I Curi: De Rerum Natura (Oxford 1947) J, 1465. 475-477.
Lucretius produced much that was notably original on this topic.

But it is necessary to emphasize the clarity with which the poet
grasped the fundamentals of the philosophical argument. On the
theory of divine creation, Lucretius lavishes bis deepest scorn, bis
richest irony. Not God creating in advance but atoms in blind
experiment essaying all meetings and all movements. The universe
was not the result of divine creation. It holds too many flaws. Moun-
tains, rocks, swamps, forests as well as the ocean, the desert, the
polar ice cap, all reduce the area available for human habitation.
And even the land that is subject to cultivation demands constant
human effort in order to raise crops. And even when men by con-
stant toil have raised crops, drought or excessive rainfall or sudden
frost or violent winds may destroy them. And man is faced always
with the ravages of wild beast and of pestilence.•
How could our gratitude profit the immortals and make them
undertake a favour for the sake of men? What new thing would
prompt a god to change his way of life and forsake his eternity of
tranquility? How was the passion for creating things implanted in
the gods? How could the gods conceive in advance what they were
to create? How could the infinite possibilities of atomic arrange-
ments be known in advance unless Mother Nature had given
advance demonstration of creative power?
And then to say that for the sake of man
The will of go<l brought forth the glorious universe
And therefore men should praise this glorious work of god,
A11 worthy of all praise;
Hold that creation always was and always will endure
To think ii impious ever to shake in its eternal haunts
Assail with human arguments or overwhelm it utterly
What once for endless time
Was hy the ancient wisdom of the deity
Established for the human race;
To think all this, pile up a mountainous argument,
Is foolishness, my friend.' 0
On this pa~sage the English scholar Cyril Bailey comments; u
The rca,oning here corresponds to the first part of the statement
of Epicuru'.-. ahout t~c heavenly bodies. "They must not be thought
to 11\! due to any being who controls or has ordained them." 1be
.argu,m:nb arc clollCly parallel to those u:i.CLI hy the Epicurean
9. ~ :~1~c~~c~,r!v1l~~\'.,~9~,( ::~~::: ~~~e:~~1 ::~~1~8~n~~·~~:;!.~~e~~°':!

1o~lifN.J':81;ht~1:~11~:t~~,.~-~ ~~~~uru.
IL Batley, T1,1 Lua.-,/ CtJrl R~"'"'
Vr ·"''"turn (01ford 19-47) }, \4,M, 4,7,;-<177.
THE ORIGINALITY OF LUCRETIUS
Velleius in Cicero De Natura Deorum. "Cicero's arguments arc

less profound than those of Lucretius but the coincidence shows
that there must have been a common Epicurean source from
which they came."
Now the De Natura Deorum of Cicero was probab]y written in
44 B.C. We know from the letter of Cicero to his brother Quintus
written in February 54 B.C.u that both brothers were familiar with
the poem of Lucretius in that year even if we do not accept the
tradition preserved by St. Jerome that Cicero edited the poem.
Lucretius' argument therefore could have been turning over in
Cicero's mind for ten years when he wrote his own work. 1' And the
fact that the arguments as put forward by Cicero are less profound
testifies only to Cicero's talent for vulgarizing a philosophical argu-
ment, particularly one for which he has so little sympathy as the
Epicurean account of the origin of the universe. Ruling out then
the evidence of the De Natura Deorum, we are left with the one
sentence from Epicurus that we have just quoted as the "source"
for Lucretius' argument. Surely candour would compel us to admit
that the original is bare, abstract, lifeless, and dull when compared
with the richness of imagery and the warmth of emotion in our poet.
But we can, I think, go beyond this. We can see how the central
doctrine of Epicurus was reinforced with argument after argument
coming from Lucretius. This is more than the work of a masterly
expositor of the ideas of others. Here surely is to be found philo-
sophical originality of a high order. And incidentally Bailey's rather
circular argument illustrates very well the kind of consideration
which has built up the tradition of Lucretius the epigonos.
Now let us consider the other arguments by which Lucretius
strove to convince his friend Memmius that the earth was not made
by divine creation. The first argument is that "nature" is not adapted
in the best way to human needs. The second is that human beings
feel and recognize this imperfect adaptation.
12. Cicero ad Quint, frat. 2. 9.
13. Prof. A. Dalzell points out in a letter that Cicero docs not mention Lucretius in de
Nat, Deor. The fact that Cicero menlions Lucretius with sympathy in 54 and passes
him over in silence in 44 may be e11plained by the events of the decade both historically
and in Cicero's personal lifC?, His belov~d Republic has been destroyed, his political
c~reer seemed 10 be over, his daug_hter 1s dead. For the ~estr~ction of the Republic,
Cicero held to some degree the Epicurean school responsible Jn an intellectual sense.
In 54 Cicero was carrying on a respectful political flirtation with Caesar, e.g., Cic. ad
Fam. 1. S. The savaaery of his resentment of Caesar is well illustrated by his letters
to the conspiralon after the a..ssassinalion, e.g. ad Fam. 10. 28. It seems dangerous to
me to inter from C~cero'~ thoughts and feelinl? in .54 anything about his attitude in 44 .
., Moreover on this point what Leonard wnlcs seems to me apposite (op. di. 10.):
And when we realize what a small, self_..contained well-to-do, upper-class group, a few
hundred at besl, must have ~ the se_nous followen. of_ Greek thought in those days,
and the eames1 creators of literature m those days, 1t 1s hard to believe that Cicero
and Lucretius were not personally acquainted. For Rome was the mind of the Republic
as London of England in Pope's day, or Paris of France in Moliere's." '
6 LUCRETIUS AND SclENTIFIC THOUGHT
The infant boy lies naked on the ground,

Like sailor cast ashore by savage seas,
And lacks all aid for life,
When nature first has cast him forth
By travail from his mother's womb.
And all the place around be fills with piteous cries
As is most natural
Since endless troubles face the child in life.
But various beasts both wild and tame
Grow to maturity,
And have no need of childish toys.u.
The third argument is that the universe as a whole, must know "birth
and death.J'
The earth and Nature---creative queen of everything.
Now since the body of the earth and sea,
The soft caressing breezes, summer's beat
That go to make the sum of things,
All these are made of body that knows birth and death,
It follows that the universe consists of mortal stuff. 11
In this passage, as Giussani well remarks, the poet "ceases to be
Epicurus and becomes Lucretius." Of the three proofs which Lucre-
tius puts forward only one seems to have any antecedents in the
Greek philosophers. And these antecedents are interestingly enough
to be found in Empedocles to whom Lucretius acknowledges his
general obligation in a passage of splendid poetical power. I quote
the fragments of Empedocles in Leonard's verse translation:
0 mortal kind. 0 ye poor sons of grief
From such contentions and such sighings sprung. 11
l wept and wailed beholding the strange place"
A joyless land
Where slaughter and grudge and troops of doom besides,
Where shrivelled Diseases and obscene De.cays
And labours, burdened with the water jars
Do wander down the dismal meads of Bane.i•
There is a passage from the pseudo-Platonic A.xiochw (366 d)
which deals with the same theme but this is almost certainly later
than the date of Epicurus and there is not the slightest evidence that
Lucretius was familiar with it.
14. D.R.N. ,, 222; Wirupnr, R.l'.S. 197.
1~- D.R N. ,, 2'4; Winapcar, R.l'.S. 191.
16 ~c-il:a~~c~~t\';'_..,., d.-, VorlOkr•t//c,r; W. E. Leonard, h•1,-,u1 ol («,..~doc/II)
17. B Ill Olds; Lcooard, E,..p,dodH, 56.
II. B 121 Didi, Lcooard, Emp,doe,-1, 56.
TuE ORIGINALITY OF LUCRETIUS
Leaving aside this passage as doubtful in its influence, there

remain only the three fragments of Empedocles to serve as the
genninant in Lucretius' mind. The use of the observation about an
infant's wailing as proving the imperfections of the natural order
seems to be Lucretius' own as are the other two segments of the
argument. This syndrome does not give any support to the theory
of Lucretius the imitator.
On the other hand, there can be little doubt that the opposition
to teleology reflected in the passage which I cited earlier and the
parallel passage in the fifth book goes back to the beginnings of
Greek philosophy. Aristotle attributes the opposition to teleology
to Anaxagoras and Empedocles and reproduces their arguments in
words which are closely akin to Lucretius' exposition. Here is Aris-
totle's discussion from the Metaphysics:"
Here a difficulty presents itself. Why should not nature work, not
for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as
the sky rains not in order that it may make the corn grow but of
necessity? Why then should it not be the same with the parts in
nature; e.g., that our teeth should come up of necessity-the front
teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for
grinding food-since they did not arise for this end but it was
merely a coincident result; and so with all other parts in which we
suppose there is purpose.
I am using Sir David Ross' translation here, but if one reads the
passage in Greek, it is interesting to find that Aristotle uses the per-
sonification Zeus for the sky and so the translation more exactly
should read, "Just as Zeus rains not in order that he may make the
corn grow." Here as so often translation obscures the fact that Aris-
totle has subtly loaded the argument in favour of the teleological
view. Aristotle's hearers could hardly fail to recall the ribald form
of the account that Aristophanes had given in the Clouds.z Aristotle
makes his own position very clear in De Partibus Animalium.m
"Anaxagoras says that man is the most intelligent of the animals
because he has hands" (a most striking anticipation one might add
of the modern view that man is essentially a tool-making animal).
Aristotle's reply is brief and a bit dogmatic: "It is reasonable to
suppose that man has acquired hands because he is the most intelli-
gent of the animals and not vice versa." The argument was squarely
joined and there can be little doubt that Epicurus took part.
19. 2.8. 198b 6.
20. 372.
21. 4. 10. 687a.
LUCRETIUS AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
But for the high-wrought ecstasy of fantasy and feeling in the

presentation of the argument we have to tum to Lucretius.
Now let us tum to the other passage which Leonard describes as
notably Darwinian, to which I referred a little earlier.•
Bailey's comment on the passage could hardly be bettered:
The germ of this doctrine may again be traced to Empedocles.
It is implied in Aristotle's account: "Wherever all the parts came
together just as they would have been if they had come to be for
an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a
fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and
continue to perish, as Empedocles says his "manfaced ox progeny
did". This is confirmed by Simplicius' comment: "All the parts
(i.e., the separate limbs, etc.) which so combined with each other
as to be able to attain security became animals and survived be-
cause they could do service to one another, the teeth cutting and
grinding down the food, the stomach digesting it, and the liver
turning it into blood; ... all, that did not combine in the appro-
priate proportions perished." But Epicurus got rid of the fanciful
idea of the pre-existence of individual organs and made the whole
theory more definite and scientific.
In this paragraph there is an even greater affinity to the Dar·
winian idea of the survival of the fittest. Life is a continuous battle,
a helium in which only those animals which have the required
qualities can survive, and the others perish; the last three lines of
this paragraph in particular might be adopted without change by
an 'evolutionist'. But, as Robin points out in a very interesting
note, Lucretius has no conception of the development of one
species from another, and his whole idea is the attainment of a
fixity of species. When chance has developed an appropriate kind
of animal then that kind is established as a permanent species.
Once again contingency establishes natural law (/Mdus.)•
I have already referred to the affecting passage in which our poet
pays tribute to Empedocles.
And though this island (i.e. Sicily) seems in many ways
A wondrous place to human eyes, worthy to see,
Rich with good things and great with power of men,
Yet nothing has it ever held that's comparable with this great man
Nothing more holy, nothing more wonderful, more dear.• '
Perhaps we ca~ d~fi~e a little mo_re closely this sense of obligation
and also Lucretius dissent from bis predecessor.
12.DR.N. ,, u,
21. D:.11lcy, lJc HtrU1" N<1tura, J. I~.
l-4. D,R N. I, 71'1; Wln5pcar, R.r.s. p. ll.
THE ORIGINALITY OF LUCRETIUS 9
Empedocles has been often described as an 'evolutionist'. 'First

the plants, conceived as endowed with feeling, sprang up, germina-
tions out of earth. Then animals arose piecemeal-he tells us in one
passage-heads, arms, eyes, roaming ghastly through space, the
chance unions of which resulted in grotesque shapes until joined in
fit number and proportion, they developed into the organisms we see
about us ... Empedocles was a crude evolutionist.• It is clear that
the process of refining away the worst crudities had begun with
Epicurus. But it also seems probable that Lucretius was consciously
carrying forward the process of refinement. It is possible that Lucre-
tius' well-known argument against the possibility of centaurs emerg-
in(' was a conscious criticism of Empedocles' 'Manfaced ox
progeny'.
Lucretius' account of primitive society is interesting and, on the
whole, balanced. Here there is neither the noble savage of the
primaeval forest as envisaged by Rousseau nor the life of nature
in Hobbes-solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. There is little
of the idealization of the golden age which we find in Hesiod, Plato,
and even in Empedocles. Lucretius admits the difficulties and hard-
ships of primitive life but, characteristically enough, uses his descrip-
tion of primitive man to make a savage attack on the institutions,
the intrigues, the luxury, and vice of contemporary aristocratic
Rome.
The following topic--<leath among the primitives-produces
some of his most striking poetry:
And not much more in early times than now
Did men lament to meet untimely end
And leave the sweet, bright light of life behind.
Sometimes a hapless man in earliest times
Was caught by savage beasts,
15. Cf. Leonard, W. E. Empedoc/es, p. 8; and, Zeller, ~- Ou1li11es of Greek Philosoph)',
London 1928 p. S9. His aucmpt to explain the creation of organic beings on a mech-
anistic basis placed him with Anaximandcr among I.be precursors of Darwin. The
relation between Lucretius and Empcdocles has been well defined b)' Leonard (op,
cit. p. 70)
The student will note that each promises mas1cry over Nature: Empcdocles a
ball-mystic, by magical power, not defined In what is preserved to us· Lucretius
Ii.kc a modem, by reasoned understanding of natural laws. He will notC that both
~t!,°; ~·hi::: b~~n;~njn!:~~o:~cn~ui~ 7h~Pfi~~esol~n1:::1s~Cuc:!~fus"'t:a::
those altars arc gathering places of superstitious fcan and a blasphemy against the
all-highest-against intelligence, against humanity. Both pity animals: but Lucretius
because the)' are animals, dumb suffering centers of pain and joy like oursclve1,·
Empcdoclcs, again because of bis belief in the transmigration of souls, '
Lucretius is an evolutionist, not a tcleologist; Empcdoclcs a half mystic. It does not
accm Just, therefore, that anticipations of Lucretius' thought by Empedocles should be
used to deny Lucretius' originality. The two men arc work..ing with quite different
thoucht paUems. The same should be said for Plato. Plato also works out an account
of lhe origin and development of 1oclcty. But his account is an ideal construct intended
to 'prove' Plato's doctrines about the nature of Justice and the state.
26. D.R.N. 5, 877.
Ground by their teeth and gulped down ravenously. .

The woods and glades and hills he'd fill wilh piteous cnes,
Aghast while living tlesh was buried in a living tomb. .
But some escaped by flight though mangled, torn and maimed.
But these then held their trembling hands over their awful sores
And piteous in their anguished cries would seek release,
Until in ignorance of how to dress the wounds
The cramping, griping pains brought death ....
Incidentally, the almost morbid clarity of the poet's imagination in
the last lines, particularly the line:
Aghast while Jiving flesh was buried in a living tomb
strikes some readers as almost pathological.
But in remote antiquity men could escape
The wholesale slaughter of our modem days.
Never were thousands at a time enrolled in warlike hosta,
By thousands at a time to meet catastrophe.
Nor were great liners, with their complements of passengers
and crew,
Dashed on the rocks in early days.
The sea would often rise and rage,
But idly, rashly, vainly would it roar,
And then lay down its idle, empty threats in vain:
No man was coaxed to death
By winning, guileful smile of windless wave.
The treacherous art of navigation was as yet uo.k.nowu.
In ancient times the lack of food brought men to death;
Now, over-abundance lays them low.
Those ancient savages in ignorance poisoned themselves;
But now with knowledge, forethought, skill,
Men hand the poisoned cup to their associates.•
As Bailey comments:
There is no parallel to this paragraph in any Epicurean or other
source and it may well be as Giussani suggests that the poet was
here indulging his own fancy.
It is quite characteristic of Lucretius that be makes the contrast
between death among the primitives and death among the civilu.ed
into a scathing criticism of the manners and institutions of his own
day.
Lucretius follows this account of primitive man with a very
compressed passage in which he discussed the transition to civiliza.
21. D.11..H. ,, 917; Wlmpa.r, R.I'~. 229.
21 D.1'..N. ,. 999; Wlalpear, R.1'.S, 229,
THE O1\IGINALITY OF LUCRETIUS 11
lion.• Man learned to make houses and clothes, to warm himself

with fire, to substitute marriage for casual sexual relations. A gentler
type of character ensued, families united in a rudimentary kind of
social contract to form a community with a common life and to give
protection to the weak. And although there was not yet universal
harmony, enough members of the emerging communities kept their
resolution to ensure the survival and continuity of the race.
No previous thinker has apprehended the question of social
progress so sharply as Lucretius. In only the last point-the primi-
tive social contract-has he been anticipated by Epicurus. "Justice
is never anything in itself but in the dealings of men with one another
in any place whatever at any time it is a kind of compact not to harm
or be harmed.• The rest of the argument and all the poetry seem to
be original with Lucretius.
The long passage on the origin of language in which Lucretius
shows concern to oppose any supernatural or mythical accounts of
human speech follows very closely the treatment by Epicurus in the
Letter to Herodotus. The Antagonist against whom both are arguing
was probably Plato.•
Lucretius' account of the origin of fire puts forward two natur-
alistic theories for its origin-lightning or the friction of tree boughs
in a forest. He does not seem particularly concerned which theory
the reader adopts so long as he rejects the myth of Prometheus, the
fire-bringer. The only possible source for this passage is a lost work
of Democritus• (Aitiai peri puros kai ton en puri). It is impossible
to say whether Lucretius drew on Democritus or not. It is, however,
not inherently improbable that he did.
The passage which follows, Lucretius' account of the rise of
inequality in society and the development of private property, is
most striking and here Lucretius seems to be definitely on his own.
The moralization on the subject of wealth seems, however, to draw
on treatments by Epicurus. "The wealth demanded by nature is both
limited and easily procured; that demanded by idle imaginings
stretches on to infinity."m And again, "All that is natural is easy to
obtain."
29. D.R.N. S; 101 I ff.
lO. Kuriai Do:xal (K.D.), 33.
31. Cf. Ernest Cassircr, An E.uoy on Man, p. 149.
It. W3.:S not an accident. th~t this interjectional th~ry was introduced by a natural
saenllst, the areatest saenust amona the Greek thinkers. Democritus was the tint 10
~ropound the thesis that human s~h originates io certain sounds of a purely emo-
tional character. Later on the same view was upheld by Epicurus and Lucretius on the
~!hd~~~J>~i:n~: it !~·:~i: ~c:a~u::cs~!~ ~~~af: ~~rsAfil~*~i~i
or Rousseau.
0 0
32. D.R.N. 5, 1091-1104.

33.K.D. IS.
12 LUCRETIUS ANO SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
But whereas the interest of Epicurus in this discussion is pri-

marily ethical, that of Lucretius is historical and scientific. The
analysis shows a power of sociological generalization that surpasses
even the grave words of Thucydides and must reflect Lucretius' own
thinking on the experiences of classical society both Greek and
Roman. Moreover the ethical analysis is more profound than that
of Epicurus. The rise of the kings provokes the resentment of the
dispossessed and though the kings built citadels as protection to
their persons and places of refuge, the resentment of the dis-
possessed breaks out into rebellion. This is the force of the tran-
sitionat ergo (5. 1136) when he resumes the account to tell how
the kings were killed and a period of revolutions was ushered in:
And so the kings were killed,
The ancient prideful majesty
Of thrones and sceptres trampled down,
The glorious majesty that hedged a king was stained with blood,
Crushed 'neath the people's feet,
And mourned its ancient, high estate now lost.
The object once of fear it now in squalor lies.
The ancient polity, I say, is trampled down.
Each single man self-centered now,
Plays his own hand, seeks gain for self alone.
To check all this
The cleverer men established magistrates,
And founded laws that subject folk might willingly obey.
The human race, wearied with passing life in mutual violence
Lay faint from feuding.
And so spontaneously it would submit to statutes
And the woven web of laws,
Because each single man sought vengeance for himself
More savage than allowed by equal laws,
On thi,; account they tired of mutual retribution ..i
all this. It must ~mbody. Lucretius' own reflection on the f:ili:

There is little or nothing in Lucretius' predecessors to acco t f
sequence of ancient. society so often repeated, from the miiitary

d~mocrac~ of the. tnbes to the establishment of the chieftains as
lings, their expuls10.n by a landed aristocracy, the subsequent emer-
gence of a mer~a~tile democracy, and a period of chaos and civil
wars ..Charactcnst~cally the passage ends with the familiar pleas for
r~st~amt and the sm1ple life. Lucretius, let us remember, passed his
life 1n the Roman era of revolutions.
3-4, D R.N. V lll,-1160; Wi.mpcar, R.l'.S. 13!.
THE ORIGINALITY OF LLlCRETIUS 13
Lucretius deals with the discovery of metals and puts in their

right order the stone age, the bronze age, and the iron age.•
The discovery of metallurgy he thought came about accident-
ally when fire raged through a forest, had melted a vein of metal,
and Ieft nuggets that foilowed the contour of the ground. As ante-
cedents for this thought there is singularly little. Posidonius gives a
similar account as is evident from a quotation from Seneca," but as
Posidonius was a contemporary of Lucretius, it is just as Iikely that
he drew the account from Lucretius as that both drew on an inde-
pendent source. Varro, who is also roughly contemporary with
Lucretius, in a short passage quoted in St. Augustine's De civitate
dei mentions the primacy of bronze over iron for tools. But he may
be drawing on Lucretius. The discovery of minerals leads the poet
to a remarkable passage on the development of the use of animals
in warfare. The passage is so macabre and gruesome that some even
of Lucretius' friends see in it evidence for a kind of mental un-
balance. It ends in characteristic Lucretian fashion:
If indeed men really acted so.
But for my part, I can scarce believe
That men would not imagine in advance, what the result would be
If humankind gave all its mind to this grim task
Of bringing to perfection all the arts of war.
Perhaps this picture of warfare's development
Is what might happen in the various worlds that make our universe
Rather than what occurred in any one.
Perhaps men did all this,
Not so much in hopes of victory,
But despairing of themselves and of their cause,
Outmatched in numbers, lacking arms,
They thought to give their foemen cause to mourn,
While going up themselves in one transcendent glorious suicide.'1
Lucretius almost seems to be speaking to the generation of the H
Bomb and the Sputnik. Scholars have combed the classical evidence
for possible antecedents-particularly for the use of animals in
warfare. The crop is singularly scant though Diodorus Siculus does
describe a "representation on a wall of an Egyptian king fighting
with a lion at his side who shares in the fight in a manner terrifying.'*
The hint from Diodorus was probably enough. The strong
humanism of Lucretius, his passionate aversion to war as the ulti-
mate, the most irrational of lusts that interfere with human tran-
JS. D.R.N. 1241-96.
36. Seneca Ep. 90, 12, quoted by Bailey, De Rerum Natura, 3.1521.
37. D.R.N. 1281-1.149; \\1nspcar. R.P S. 241 fl.
38. Diodorus S1culus 148, quoted by Bailey llp. cit. 1529.
quility, probably led the poet to elaborate ,h~ thought into its
present form. Other points developed by Lucretius I have _to pass
over here; there is a discussion of the development of agriculture
and in particular of arboriculture for which no plau~ible an!ecedents
have been found. It is as Giussani put it, accomplished with a few
touches but full of truth and idyllic chann.
Nature herself, creative queen of everything,
Gave men a pattern how to sow and graft.
Berries and nuts would fall from trees,
And then when time was ripe, put out their shoots in swarms.
From Nature too, men learned to graft a wand to parent stem,
Plant shrubs in soil.
And various ways they learned to till their smiling fields,
Domesticate both fruits and beasts
By care and constant tending.
And day by day they beat the woodland back,
Back up the mountain slopes and made the valleys yield a place
for crops.•
On the other topics that Lucretius handles, the origin of music, the
development of weaving, on fashion, on astronomy, and the orderly
processes of the universe, (even foreshadowing the modem science
of archaeology) the report is the same-a hint or two from his pre-
decessors, here a seed of thought nurtured by Lucretius into a
luxuriant plant, here the base metal of prosaic reflection transformed
into the glory and the wild desire of high poetry. It is, however, in
the matter of biological and social evolution, fields of investigation
which give such an extraordinary ring of modernity to the thought
of Lucretius, that the poet can lay claim, as we have argued, to
some originality. And the exposition of these evolutionary assump-
tions was his own:
And so man made his way.
Experience, the tireless search of eager mind,
Has taught him many things-
Of ships and walls and laws, weapons and roads,
Of how to till the soil, and how to dress;
And all life's prizes, life's delights,
Pictures and song and statues finely wrought.
He's learned them stage by stage and bit by bit.
So step by step time brings each thing to view,
And reason raises it to shores of light.
Thing alter thing gn:w clear in human hearts
Until men's an assailed perfection's peak ....
~- ~-z :~: ~: u:t~~~:~~PR~~l·t4t 244·
THE ORIGINALITY OF LUCRETIUS 15
Surely on the subject of Lucretius the thinker the judgment of

Masson is more just than the traditional depreciation of his origi-
nality.
The vigour with which Lucretius tore a deep new channel for
the thought of his age has impressed every succeeding generation.
His rich colouring, crossed with grim shadows, seizes and masters
the imagination. His phrases have an astounding daring and energy;
they seem to project themselves from the page, and assume form
and substance and speak with living voice. The courage with which
he faces the open universe makes him, in this at least, akin to all
those whose worship has risen above fear. His profound pity for
the superstitious and the ignorant, for human illusions and wasted
efforts, is as deep as his indignation against those who deceive men
in the name of god, and it appeals to every generous spirit. The
high prophetic fervour with which he singles out his hearers and
entreats them to cast away their foolish ambitions and take hold
of that alone which shall save them, grips the heart as if he spoke
to us man to man and face to face. And over whomsoever in his
youth Lucretius has cast his spell, he becomes conscious that the
poet wields over him a strange power, insistent and increasing,
beyond what he can explain. From that enchantment he does not
lightly break free.
Carmina tum sublimis sum peritura Lucreti
Exitio terras cum dabit una dies.u
The poems of the sublime Lucretius will only perish
When one day shall give the worlds over to destruction.
And for Lucretius the poet the judgment of John Morely could
scarcely be bettered, "Whatever definition of poetry we borrow
from the poets, the tense, defiant, concentrated, scornful, fervid
daring and majestic verse of Lucretius is unique and bis own."
41. Joba MUIOll, Lwr,tlsu, Eplalu1111 and PC#I, p. 73, 7'; Ovtd Antore.1, 1. 15. Quoted.
CHAPTER II
LUCRETIUS, THE LEGEND

What do we know of Lucretius as a man, as a person? What do
we know of his life and times? Of Lucretius the person we know
pitifully little, except what be tells us himself in his great poem, De
Rerum Natura, On Nature. In fact there are only three important
references to our poet in the literature of antiquity. And over these
references scholars have spilt almost infinite ink and even (we
suspect) some blood. The first comes from a letter of the famous
Cicero (Marcus) to his less famous brother, Quintus: "The poems
of Lucretius are, as you say, marked by many flashes of genius and
yet done with great art."' The reading seems clear enough. And yet
many scholars who cannot imagine that Cicero would give such
handsome tribute to a philosophical opponent have tried to put a
•not' in somewhere, denying either the genius or the art. The second
reference comes from the chronicles of St. Jerome who wrote cen-
turies after the death of Lucretius. They record the events for the
year 95 B.C. and run as follows: "(in this Year) Titus Lucretius,
the poet, was born, who later was turned to madness by a love
potion, wrote a number of verses in the lucid intervals of insanity,
verses which Cicero afterwards corrected, and died by his own
hand in his forty-fourth year." There is so little we can be sure of
in the life of Lucretius. Even the date of his birth and death are a
subject for controversy. When everything is considered it seems
most probable that he was born in the year 99 B.C. and died in 55.
Aside from these dates, the information in the report of St.
Jerome appears of dubious value. Here is the famous legend of
Lucretius' madness-taken up by Tennyson and skilfully handled
by the English poet in a poem (which every reader of Lucretius
should by all means read.) The sample quoted here will recall the
legend and suggest the madness.
Lucilia, wedded to Lucretius, found
Her master cold; for when the morning flush
Of pa~~ion and the first embrace had died
Between them, tho' he loved her none the !cs~
Yet oltcn when the woman heard his foot ·'
I. Ad QM1nt. f,.,,. 1, 11, 5.
16
LUCRETIUS, THE LEGEND 17
Return from pacings io the field, and ran

To greet him with a kiss, the master took
Small notice, or austerely, for-his mind
Half buried in some weightier argument,
Or fancy, borne perhaps upon the rise
And long roll of the Hexameter-he paused
To turn and ponder those three hundred scrolls
Left by the Teacher, whom he held divine.
She brook'd it not; but wrathful, petulant,
Dreaming some rival, sought and found a witch
Who brew'd the philtre which had power, they said,
To lead an errant passion home again.
And this at times she mingled with his drink,
And this destroyed him; for the wicked broth
Confused the chemic labour of the blood,
And tick.Jing the brute brains within the man's
Made havoc among those tender cells and checked
His power to shape; he loathed himself-
Tennyson out of respect for the Victorian proprieties makes the
lady his wife who, maddened by jealousy, gave him a love philtre
in order to 'bring the errant passion home again'. In St. Jerome's
account, too, is the story of Lucretius' subsequent madness and
suicide. It is true that there is much in the great poem De Rerum
Natura which might suggest to some a disordered mind. There are
lines left unfinished, pathetic half utterances and incoherent pass-
ages. There are inconsistencies and contradictions which to the
unfriendly reader might point to mental breakdown. Here I must
anticipate and give my own view. There is nothing in these contra-
dictions which cannot be understood by seeing Lucretius in the
light of his own times and the class for which he spoke. But the
whole story-that Lucretius was mad, that he wrote the whole
poem in the lucid intervals of insanity, is this credible? Frankly, I
believe, the answer is 'NO'. Here, some people have thought, is
the bias, the slander of some Stoic or Christian controversialist
who felt that a materialist must come to a bad end. If we do not
carry our judgment as far as this, it is perhaps enough to say that
so great an intellectual achievement as the De Rerum Natura could
hardly be composed in the lucid intervals of insanity. Our gener-
ation knows much more about mental sickness than a Jerome or
a Tennyson. 'Great wits are sure to madness near allied.' And some
forms of emotional energy and intellectual concentration may border
on the psychopathic. All that a modem, I think, would he willing
to concede is that the poem itself exhibits a kind of emotional
intensity, an intense preoccupation with thou;;llt and ,insight and

feeling that might seem to the 'average sensual man somewhat
unusual, abnonnal, strange.
Lucretius was too, they noted ( and Leonard rcp?rts) , t~e
victim of other strange states: the very vehemence of ?1~ conv1c-
tions, the very vividness of his accounts of dream v1_s1ons, fits,
drunkenness, and insanity too, the very nightmare notions ab~ut
the destruction of the world, the grotesque satiric pictures of wild
lions and bulls and bears in the horrible hurly-burly of man's war-
fare, his long obsession with death in the third book-all this and
much more might well have seemed-suggestive of a madman.
So little we know about Lucretius the man from external sources.
All that we can confidently affirm is that he wrote in the first half of
the first century B.C. and that he died ( whether by suicide or not,
no one can say) at the age of forty four. Nor can we be certain of
Cicero's editorship ( versus, quos postea Cicero emendavit). It is
not probable that Cicero (the famous Marcus or his less famous
brother Quintus) did more than 'assemble the leaves and lend his
name'.'
If we can learn little of Lucretius from external sources, we can
infer something from the poem itself. We can trace something of
his reading---echoes of the older poets, like Ennius and Empedocles;
references to the older philosophers-the materialists like Demo·
critus and Epicurus whom he mentions with veneration. Others like
Heraclitus to whom he did less than justice. Echoes of the Stoics
and Plato whom he despised. Lucretius seems to have had the
expensive education of a Roman nobleman. Perhaps he studied as
did other distinguished Romans at Athens or Rhodes. Much more
we can detect the close, keen observations of a lover of nature, a
man of the out-of-doors. He has seen, heard, smelled, felt so much.
For him as we shall see, all knowledge comes from the senses and
his senses were incredibly alert. He has moved in high society, he
knows and despises it all-the ostentation of rich palaces, 'gilded
effigies in sumptuous halls with flaming torches in their raised right
hand', designed to give light to midnight feasts. He has heard the
music echo 'from panelled and from gilded beams. He has seen
(and despises) the toilette of lovely ladies'---Corinthian shoes dainty
and sweet to .grace a ladies feet. Yes and great emeralds, flashing
green are set in gold; the sheer and purple gown.
'The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power
And all that beauty all that wealth e'er save'.
2 L«in•rd, l.mp1dod11, p. 9.
All this Lucretius knew and despised. No one was ever more acutely
aware of the frustrations that come from great wealth and man's
wholehearted pursuit of it.
If men
When once they feel a massive burden in their hearts,
Oppressing, weighing down,
Could also know the source, the cause,
They would not live their lives as now we often see men do.
Not knowing what he wants, one runs from place to place,
As though that way he'd lay his burden down.
He often leaves his spacious home and goes outdoors
And then goes back as suddenly, finding outdoors no better.
And then he drives his nags in headlong haste to country home,
As if to fight a fire.
But let him touch the threshold and he turns right round,
Goes back to town.
Or else devotes himself to sleep and seeks oblivion.
ln this way every man is seeking to avoid himself.
But no man as we know can lose himself.
This self will cling to him against his will,
Because he's sick and never grasps the cause of his disease.•
So familiar is Lucretius with great wealth, so understanding about
its haunting dissatisfactions.
His relationship with the great nobleman Memmius points in
the same direction-aristocratic birth and connections. As has often
been pointed out, the intimacy between the poet and the politician
as mirrored in the poems, seems one of friendly equality. 'And his
friend Memmius, we can be fairly certain was the praetor Mem-
mius, the candidate for the consulship, the provincial governor on
whose staff Catullus voyaged to Bithynia in the foolish hope of
filling his empty purse. There is no other Memmi c/ara propago and
none other in those high political circles where Lucretius explicitly
placed him'.' Incidentally Memmius was hardly worthy of the
attention of so fine a soul as Lucretius. He was 'an aristocrat and
politician of unsavoury reputation'.' And so little did he deserve
Lucretius' admiration, so little was he converted by Lucretius' im-
passioned exposition of philosophy that Cicero ( Cicero of all
people, Cicero who abhorred materialism and Epicurus) had to
intervene to prevent Memmius from turning an honest penny through
3. D.R.N. 3, 1053; Winspear, R.P.S. 135.
4.D.R.N. 18.
5. D.R.N. 201 note.
the sale of the famous Garden of Epicurus. History and particularly

the history of ideas is full of strange quirks. But surely this is one
of the strangest.
Nor can it be said that Lucretius admired the life of the poli-
tician. This is a paradox, because as we shall see later the Epicur_ean
philosophy is in a sense the 'ideology' of the Caesarian revolution.
Yet some scholars have thought ( and I am not at all sure that they
have thought wrongly) that Caesar himself was the model for
Lucretius' unflattering description of the politician. For the poli-
tician, too, suffered all the pangs of 'fabled Acheron' which for
Lucretius were all in the here and now.
And SiSyphus is there in life before our eyes,
Who yearns to win election by the people's vote,
To gain the pomp of power and power's relentless instruments,
The savage axes and the lovely rods.
But always comes back home, beaten and sad.
To seek an office that is meaningless and never given,
And for that hope toil endlessly,
That is like striving might and main
To push a boulder up a hill,
And find that always as you near the top,
The stone rolls down and seeks the level plain.t
Ambition and avarice, two of the leading preoccupations of his
class do not win Lucretius' approval. The third preoccupation,
sexual love, call forth his sharpest censure. Some have thought that
the very bitterness of the language suggests that Lucretius had had
an unfortunate experience. This probably we can never know. At
all events his strictures of meo who fall in love are most amusing.
This pleasure then is love for us, thence comes the name.
Hence first of all,
The drops of Love's sweet passion, into heart distilled,
Are I o\lowed by cold care.
Though she, beloved object, is afar
Yet pictures of her haunt the eyes,
Her lovely name the ears.
And yet it's best to banish love's imaginings
And fast from foo<l of love; tum the mind elsewhere
Indulge your lust with anyone at hand '
Nol locu!I ii on one and so pile up '
Mountains of grief assured,
fl D.lf. N. ~. !I'll,, Wimpcv, R.1'..S. 02.
And lover's passion even at possession's hour

Tosses about in dark, blind blundering.
He hesitates what first be should enjoy with band or eye.
Alone of human appetites love is like this,
The more it feeds, the fiercer flames desire.
Think too,
They dissipate their strength and spend their energy.
They pass their life under another's sway.
Work is neglected, name and fame grow sick and faint.
Fortune meanwhile is spent, lavished on Eastern scents,
Corinthian shoes, dainty and sweet, to grace a lady's feet.
Yes, and great emeralds flashing green are set in gold.
Their wealth is spent in bands and ribbons for the hair.
Islands and mainlands send out their gorgeous stuffs.
Wealth is poured out on linens, dainties for the feasts,
(The wealth their fathers won by honest toil)
Games, frequent toasts, perfumes, garlands and wreaths,
But all in vain, for from the fount of charms
There ever flows a bitter drop even 'mid the flowers-
Some pang of conscience, surging of remorse,
That life should pass in idling and in wantonness.
The lady, perhaps, has dropped a heedless word,
To torture him and left its sense in doubt,
A word that lodged in lover's consciousness
And burned to flame.
Or else he finds her eyes too restless, fears another man,
Or finds a gleam of malice in her smile.
Even when love goes well, these torments rise.
But when love's crossed and hopeless, torments countless throng,
Which you could see in darkness with shut eyes.
So it is better far exactly as I've cautioned you
To be on guard beforehand, be on guard, be not enticed.
To shun entanglement in snares of love
That's not so difficult
But once entangled in its mesh, to break away again,
And burst the bonds of love's entanglement,
That's hard.'
The picture of Lucretius begins to emerge, of a Roman aristo-
crat who despised the usual preoccupations of men of his class and
pitied its discontents. Of a deep student and a voracious reader but
a man by no means bookish; rather a man whose perceptions are
incredibly alert and whose observations are far ranging and accurate.
This is all we can affirm with certainty of Lucretius the man.
7. D.R.N. 4, 1057 ff. Wi~pear, R.P.S. 179.
CHAPTER III
THE TIMES OF LUCRETIUS

If we can know little of Lucretius the man ( except what we can
infer from his great poem) we know a great deal about his times
and can relate his work with fair exactitude to the social forces at
work in his day. In the first place, Lucretius was a product of
classical antiquity, the great Greco-Roman civilization of the Medi-
terranean which has done so much to mould the thought, the taste,
the feeling, the culture of subsequent times. The period, which we
call the classical, deserves thought. At first blush and taste, the
thought and outlook of classical antiquity seem to resemble so
closely the dominant taste and outlook of modern western civiliza-
tion that the student may be tempted to draw facile parallels and
overlook the very real differences. So let us define as closely as we
can just what we mean by classical antiquity and just how it differs
from our times. As a convenient time-reference we can regard the
period as a whole as dating from the age of Homer (say 700 B.C.)
to the fall of the Empire in the West-A.D. 476. In spite of super-
ficial resemblances, classical civilization differs from ours in a
number of important and even crucial ways.
Classical civilization was based on slavery. In saying this we
do iiofffiean as some have thought that the institution of slavery
gave leisure to the free man for creative activity, permitted him to
lie in the sun and think great thoughts. Rather we mean that eco-
n~mi_c prod\lctio~ in an!iquity, _the food,_ the_ ggods. the s.erv.ice;Jiy
which; meQ lived depended on slaves in that period just as surely
as in the modern world they depend on machinery and the free
~Orkingman. The Oriental civilizations which- preceded the Greek
and Roman used slaves mainly for the production of great works
of religion, of art, of cult; not in the production of food, clothes,
shelter or luxury commodities for use in trade. It is hard for us to
think back to a time when the invention of slavery was a great
progressive invention. We have lived through a period of emanci-
pation, either from chattel slavery or from colonial slavery, in which
the sympathy of every man of conscience was with the oppressed
rathe.r than .th~ oppressor. But it was precisely the opposite in
classical ant1qu1ty. It was slavery that produced the surpluses in a
22
THE l)MES OF LUCRETIUS 23
fast increasing ratio which made possible the commercial society

of classical antiquity. It underlay the 'Glory that was Greece and
the Grandeur that was Rome'.
Equally the period of history which comes after the classical,
that which we call the 'Feudal' or 'Middle Ages' was not based on
slavery, but on the foriruiilyiree peasant or serf, (And so in spite
oCsiipemcial appearances, classically expressed in the title of
Gibbon's great work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
the transition from classical society to feudal was in a social sense
not a decline but an advance.)
It is difficult even for the trained historical imagination to con-
ceive all the consequences which flow from the apparently simple
statement that the society of classical antiquity was based on slavery
while ours is based on the machine. Let us notice just one which is
important for the history of thought and particularly important for
a consideration of Lucretius. In antiquity the whole bias of man's
thinking was bound to be opposed to science. We, in the modem
world, almost as by instinct, attribute results to the machine, science,
natural law, cause and effect. (We sometimes use the image of a
mathine when it is not appropriate as, for example, we speak of
say, the Kelly-Nash machine.' As though men behaved in their
social relations like a well-oiled slot machine!)
Just as inevitably as we think of the machine as the cause of
everything, the men of classical antiquity attributed everything to
the agency of human hands (or divine hands, bigger, stronger,
cleverer.) And this was inevitable, because as a matter of fact,
e_y~ry!]]ing was created by human hands with the help of a few
relatively simple tools. And it created a strong presumption every-
where throughout society against science. For ~l~!istocrats, the
governing class, did not work with their hands. They thought up
ideas;7tfey cllrected, they governed. Manual labor such men re-
garded as 'illiberal', as beneath the dignity of a free man. Even, we
are told, in a characteristic expression, the splendid sculpture of
Phidias, the glory of the Parthenon would be degrading to a Greek
aristocrat, because these monuments were the product of manual
labor. But science depends on manual labor, on work with the
hands, on experiment. We should have a very poor opinion of a
scientist who, if the work of his science demanded it, refused to get
his hands dirty, smelling with acid or plastered with grease.
I. The .~elly-Nash machine was a political or1anization that for many yea.rs controlled the
rnumapat polidc, of Chlcqo.
But this prejudice was deeply felt and widdy spread in classical
antiquity; and the Rrejudice against_ manual labo~ led natural!y ~ a
prejudice against SC1ence and the philosophy of science, matenalism.
For many men of antiquity, too often the only kind of valid th?u~t
was the pure idea. Their kind of philosopher was one who sat ID his
study or his cloister and dreamed up a whole universe out of his
own head. For them the idea was more important than the fact, the
object, the material thing. And so the dominant philosophy of
autiquity was 'ideaism' (or as it is more commoriiycalled 'idealism')
based on the conviction that the idea or thought was more import-
ant than, and came before, the material fact, the thing.
Scientific thinking in antiquity was carried forward by a very
small minority of the governing class in the teeth of determined
opposition from the rest. This point will help us to appreciate the
towering greatness of Lucretius even more.
As though these conflicts were not enough for the student who
wants a scientific understanding of the Poet of Science and his times
there is yet another problem to explore. Although agriculture re-
mained the basic industry of classical times, in the later days of the
Roman Republic agriculture became increasingly large-scale agri-
culture. Great estates manned by slave labour began to appear-
the Romans called them latifundia. These great estates gradually
squeezed out Ihe free peasant who had provided the backbone of
the economy, and incidentally, the armies of the earlier Roman
state. The slave trade which had developed on a large scale in the
Hellenistic world after the death of Alexander the Great became
even more extensive in the Roman economy of the last two centuries
before Christ. Modem scholars tend to question the more grandiose
figures of the extent of slave trade .
. . . A single and unsupported statement of Strabo . . . that
the island (i.e. Delos) could receive and send away ten thousand
slaves upon the same day is without doubt a gross exaggeration
of the physical possibilities and of the docking capacities and the
businc,;s facilities of the islands.•
But nonetheless it cannot be denied that the numbers of slaves in
Italy increased tremendously in the period under review.
In 90 B.C. the leaders of the revolting Italian allies were able
to collect an<l arm. almost twenty thousand slo.ves against Rome.
l he fact that Sulla 1~ 81 B.C. could set free and arm ten thousand
slaves of the proscribed to serve as his bodyguard is significant
2. WnlcnnU11:1, Thr (Sla\'11 SyJ111ms) o/ Gr,rl/J, 11,rd Rmn11,r A1ulq1dty, Philadelphia. 19SS.
TuE TIMES OF LUCRETIUS 25
of the great numbers of slaves that had been concentrated in the

familiae of the upper classes in and about Rome. Appian
gives the armies under Spartacus (the leader of a great slave
revolt against the Roman state 72~ 71 B.C.) • at seventy thousand
in 72 B.C. with a rapid increase to one hundred and twenty
thousand when he marched against Rome.'
In the meantime the great and growing urban populace of the city
was increasingly fed by imported grain, brought first from Sicily,
later from Africa and Egypt, stored in the granaries at Ostia, and
distributed to the people of Rome at low prices below the market
price.
There appeared a section of the owning and governing classes
whose wealth was basecf not On revenues from the ownership of
Italian land:as was the case with the older families, but on trade,
COfBfftC1"Ce and handicraft-factories peopled by slaves and free
w<1J'ters:41re-·tendency was reinforced by the peculiar systeffiOf
~ n of the state revenues developed by the Roman Republic
as a substitute for a budget and a trained civil service. Great com-
panies of tax-collectors were formed in Rome to bid for the privi-
lege of collecting taxes. After paying a fixed sum to the Roman
treasury to ensure themselves of the privilege these stock companies
sent out their agents, publicani, to the provinces to collect all that
they possibly could squeeze out of the wretched provincials. (The
point of view of the provincials is sufficiently indicated by the
accusation made against Jesus that he sat down to meat with
publicans and sinners.) This system was first developed in Sicily
but was extended to Asia by Caius Gracchus.
The new section of the governing and possessing classes is some-
times referred to by modern scholars as 'capitalist'. There is,
perhaps, no objection to this use of the word if we can shed many
of the implications that the word conveys and do not confuse the
ancient entrepreneur with the modern industrial and financial mag-
nate. An industrial system developed in Rome only in a very
primitive and even embryonic form.
The presence of a growing number of slaves in industrial services
in Italy is to be conjectured from the twenty-nine dedications
containing names of slave and freedmen magislri and magi.rtrae
which were found at the industrial town of Minturnae.'
3. Parenlhes.is Winspcar.
4. Westermann, Slavt Sysu,ru, 66.
ji,Westermann, S/al't Sys1tms, p. 66.
Heavy manual labor, such as grinding meal in . bake~es, was

relegated to slaves and used as punishment for d1sobed1ence or
trickery, as shown in frequent references in the ~oman co.me?y,
to work in the pistrinum corresponding to that m the gnndmg
mills (my/ones) of the New Comedy at Athens. After 150 B.C.
the continued introduction, chiefly from the eastern Mediterranean
area, of slaves technically equipped for handicraft specialties, gave
a notable impetus to the development of the industries of Italy,
affecting primarily the larger handicraft shops, but penetrating
also into the economy of the small shop owners. The collection
an<l use of a wrecking and building corps of five hundred com-
petent slaves by Marcus Crassus represents the highest example
of organization of slave labor known to us from the West during
the Republic. The signatures of the master craftsmen or shop
owners which appear upon the relief-ceramics from Cales and
upon Umbrian beakers arc predominantly those of freeborn
Roman citizens, slaves' names appearing only exceptionally on the
Calenian wares. Allowing for slave labor used for the less exacting
manual tasks of this craft such as tending the ovens, free labor
evidently maintained a strong hold in the pottery industry, pos-
sibly until about the end of the second century B.C. The magistri
lists of Minturnae do not indicate the occupations of the s1aves
and freedmen who are listed except where corporations of the
city owned the slaves. Five slaves appear who were owned by the
guild of pitch manufacturers; and it is highly probable that most
of the remaining slaves and freedmen were industrial workers,
with the possibility that a few were engaged in household services!
The use of slaves in 'industry' was probably less important in
an economic sense than their use on the great estates, many of
which developed small supplementary industries, and their use, in
numbers which now seem to us enormous, in the private households
of wealthy and powerful Romans. Nonetheless the evidence over-
whelmingly indicates great importance to the slave trade in the
Roman economy. And equally certainly there developed, in res-
ponse to the new economic needs, a class of men whose wealth
was based on 'moveable property' instead of only the possession
of land. That section of ancient society which developed in the
direclion of commerce was particularly dependent on a plentiful
supply of ~laves. And so these ancient entrepreneur.J, tax collectors,
usurer::,, financiers, rentiers, owners of handicraft factories, owners
of slaves whom they rented out from time to time, frequently pressed
6 Waterm.i11U1., SUlu Sy,Ulfll, p. 73.
THE TIMES OP LUCRETIUS 27
for wan and expansion in order to bring in a plentiful supply of

slaves.'
It frequently happened and particularly in the period under
review that the equestrian interest found the political power of the
nobles, who really owned and controlled the state, an obstacle
hindering them from the fulfillment of their plans. When this
happened, the Knights formed a political coalition and entered the
path of political struggle.
The fight against the nobles was frequently long, stubborn and
difficult. Particularly in the Rome of the first century B.C. the
'nobles' formed a tight exclusive group with an almost total mono-
poly of the magistracies, of government offices, of positions of
political power. The Knights in pursuit of their particular interest
found themselves time and time again looking into this blind, blank
wall of aristocratic privilege. Occasionally one of their number
escaped from the opposition and stormed the citadel of privilege
and power. Such people ( the famous Cicero was one) were called
'new men'; they frequently, indeed, became more royalist than the
king, more jealous of precedent and conservatism, even than the
nobles themselves. But for the generality of the Knights such an
escape was out of the question. As a class they were forced to
carry on a grim and uphill fight against the aristocracy and the
senators. And in order to have a chance for success in their fight
they must have allies. These allies they found among the lower
ranks of society. The peasantry who had lost their lands, and now
were thronging the cities as an unemployed and unemployable mass,
provided a strong reserve of discontent against the noblemen. The
citizens of conquered towns, first in Italy (politely called by the
Romans 'allies') and then in the provinces, demanded the preroga-
tives and solid advantages that came to Roman citizens. The pea-
sants who viewed with dismay the growth of large estates, frequently
added their voices to the clamor of the opposition. Because the
coalition which embraced the various and ill-assorted elements com-
prised the majority of free citizens in the ancient state, the Knights
( traders, owners of handicraft establishments, moneylenders, etc.)
7. It is difficult to find a name to describe this particular interest. The word capitalist has
too many ass~iations with ind!,I.Stry or large-scale ~nance. If an . analogy with tho
:~~:in 1~!'1t~t!~ ~l~~~:·H~r:~~:~ ~6:~~Bn7j~ ;~d H~fi!~~ 1inc~~~ta~~:tod~f
the Renaissance. But here too, the difference between a slave-ownini,:: society and one
based on free labour must always be kept in mind. In Lucretius' time the entrepreneurs
were oddly enouJb (but for good historical reasons) called 'Knights'--odd\y enough
because many of these portly geollemen would have looked uncomfortable on a ho~e.
Perhaps the safest procedure is to call them by their Latin title Equltts and to d~cribo
lh:eir collective economic in.tere~t which so of1en, ln Ibis period, found itself at odds
:=,g:tt::J!'. the cqucsman mterest. Senators were 1pcci6cally forbiddeo by law to
28 LUCRETIUS AND ScrnNTIFIC THOUGHT
called their movement a democratic or pc,pular movement. And,

in order to gain widespread support, the Knights, while they were
in opposition, frequently did make many concessions or at least
promises to the lower orders. Occasionally in their desperation the
democratic movement mobilized and armed the slaves. But such
a mood of desperation was regarded by the noblemen as very bad
form, and in this judgment the leaders of the opposition usually
concurred. Certainly they had no intention of admitting the slaves,
as a class, to freedom or equality. To have done so would have
destroyed the whole economic and social base of classical antiquity.
Whenever they won political advantage or secured the political
victory the Democrats were as quick to put the slaves 'in their
place again' as any noble Tory would have wished. An opposition
leader like Crassus or Pompey was as brutal in suppressing slave
insurrections as the most muscular conservative. Nonetheless, in
spite of these limitations, the democratic movements in antiquity
produced great leaders-like Pericles in Athens and Caius Gracchus
in Rome. In Rome, too, in Lucretius' own time, the greatest of
them all was living his triumphant career, carrying forward the
banner of the democratic, popular, progressive movement and
extending the boundaries of Rome's empire to the Rhine and the
English channel. Julius Caesar was a contemporary of Lucretius.
Lucretius probably did not live to see the temporary triumph of
Caesar's 'People's army' as it swept down on Italy like a thunderbolt
from the North, crossed the Rubicon and swept away the futile mob
of panicked chatter to which the noble senate had been reduced.
Nonetheless all of Lucretius' lifetime was marked by political
struggles, ever on the point of bursting into civil war-the march
and counter-march of contending armies, wars, battles, massacres,
terror and proscription. Of all this Lucretius says hardly a word.
Just a pathetic prayer for peace as he takes in hand his mighty task
'Peace in our time, 0 Lord,' (Or, rather. Our Lady, Venus the
Queen of Love can move her lover, Mars, the God of War.)
Grant me that while I write,
Fierce war on land and sea may sleep and rest.
For thou alone canst grant to monal man
Peace and its blessings;
Since Mars, in arms all-powerful, rules the fierce works of war-
Thy lover, Mars, who often sinks upon thy breast
Comrlctcly overcome by love's eternal wound.
And !i.O, in thy embrace,
His shapely head pillowed upon thy brea.st,
THE TIMES OF LUCRETIUS 29
He gazes on thee, feeds his eager eyes with love,

His whole soul hangs upon thy lips.
Do thou, Divine, embracing him reclined, with holy frame,
Pour out sweet whispered words, 0 goddess famed,
And beg the quiet of peace for Roman folk.
I cannot carry out this task of mine with mind at peace
At such a crisis of my country's fate,
Nor could my Memmius betray his stock,
Or heedless be and fail his country's safety.•
Lucretius' mood is throughout, one of escape, to the serene
tran~ith.C ivory tower. He is, nonetheless, the poet of the
popular opposition now rising into power. The people for whom '-1
hewrcite, -1ne-people whO would sympathize ~ his· creed were /\
almosl all to be found among the Knights, the wealthy section of
the Slave-owning class, whose wealth was founded on usury and the
coiitrofof moveable property; the men who had thrown in their lot
With ·the 'democratic' movement.
· The senatorial oligarchy was so well entrenched that the oppo-
sition could only hope to win power against them by means of the
leadership of one man sometimes called the 'democratic monarchy'.
The democratic movement was driving rapidly to one-man rule.
And on this negative side of the popular program the doctrine of
withdrawal from political activity forms a very powerful weapon
in the hands of autocracy.'
On its positive side Lucretius' poem De Rerum Natura must
have-beena Very powerful weapon against the entrenched nobility,
undermining and weakening the Roman's faith in that old religion
which-w:is-s1l1llrge-a part of the conservative stock in trade."
I. b.R."N. J~ 29-43; Winspcar, R.P.S. 4.
9. For withdrawal or contemplalion as part of the propaganda o( monarchy one might with
profit read an cxtraon.linary article by Pro!. Hans Kelscn, The Phi/owphy of .4.rl.slol/,.
tJnd 1he Hellmic-Maudonian Polley. International JournaJ of Ethics Vol. XLVIll Oct.,
1937.
10. Many examples o( tbc deliberate use of religion for conservative political purposes
leap 10 the mind. Pulling down the red flag that flew over the Janiculum 10 that no
~~~D~u1~~~m~~~~ i~e o~d~:u~c:1v:i~u}~~m;ia~s:d·s,c;~~\ci~vu:iiA~u~~e oc,oc~~~I?~
programme of reform. Polyblus in a famous passaac praises the Roman devotion to
rclig.ion as an instrument for keeping the people in order.
is, !u~~~~P1~~~: t~c ~~:~~c ~f ~~k~lic~;u~ :o~~j~~fo~. ": b~1fc~~nth~{ f~Fs:g!
0 0
very thin11 which among other peoples is an object of reproach, I mean supen.titlon,
which maintains the cohesion or the Roman State. These matters arc clotlled in
such pomp and introduced to such an extent into their public and private life that
nothing could exceed it, a fact which will surprise many. My own opinion at least
is that they have adopted this course for the sake of the common people. It is a
course which perhaps would not have been necessary had it been possible to form
a state composed or wise men, but as every multitude is fickle, full of lawles.,
des!r~s, unreasoned pas~ion, and violent anaer, the multitude must be held in by
inv1.s1ble ierrors and such-like pageantry. For this reason I think, not that the
ancients_ acted rashly and at haphazard in introducing among the people notions
concerrung the gods and beliefs in the terrors of hell, but that the moderns are mosl
rash and foolish in banishing such beliefs. Polybiu9, Hl:s,ory VI, 56, 2
CHAPTER IV
THE FIGHT AGAINST ROMAN RELIGION

Why Lucretius wrote his masterpieces
In many an intensely sincere passage our poet explains what
drove him to verse. I use the word 'drove' advisedly. He is quite
evidently the subject of deep inner compulsions. Human life in his
view is crushed by fear, the fear of death and what is to come after
death. If only mankind can be shown that this fear is needless, then
he can begin to order his existence on the strong foundation of
reason and tranquility. Religion, therefore, is for him the enemy
that he must fight and expose in every conceivable way. The gods
were tyrants. From above they 'lowered over man with visage
grim'-a striking personification of the force that prompted him to
write his pungent poem.
When human life lay foully prone upon the ground
Conspicuous to see,
Crushed by creed and myth, like ponderous weights,
Which like incarnate horror from the sk..ies looked down
And lowered over man with visage grim,
A man of Greece first dared to raise his mortal eyes againat
And even stand and fight.
And him no fables told of gods could daunt,
Nor heaven with lightning flash or thunderbolt dismay;
But only stirred the more the va1orous splendor of his mind.
He longed to be the first to crack the cramping bonds of nature.
And so his splendid strength of soul prevailed.
Outside he went beyond the flaming rampans of the world
And ranged the infinite whole in mind and thought's imagining.
And from his mental voyages to us brought back
Like conqueror crowned in victory, the news of Nature's laws,
Of what could come to be and what could not,
The code that binds each thing, its deep-set boundary stone.
And so religion in its turn is trampled under foot and troddoo
down,
And man is made like god by one man's victory.'
The man of Greece we now bring in for the first time. He was,
of cou~e, Epicurus.• This man was Lucretius' revered teacher and
t t!~"'\e~79.'.odw~~rl/A~tcn:. tt1,o BC
30
THE FIGHT AGAINST ROMAN RELIGION 31
master who had centuries before propounded the system that we

call Epicureanism. To the creed of religion, he opposed the creed
of science, of law, of cause and effect, and of what can come to be
and what cannot 'The code that binds each thing, its deep set boun-
dary stone'. And so by the thought of the master superstition in its
tum is routed.
And man is made like god by one man's victory.
The task is hard, Lucretius knew, to baillsh superstitious fears
from people's minds. It was particularly hard to expound the deep
scientific discoveries of the Greeks in Latin verse.
I know how difficult my topic is-
How hard to illustrate in Latin verse
Profound inventions of the thoughtful Greeks.
Our mother-tongue is ill-equipped with words for topics new.
But still the wondrous worth of you,
The joy I hope to gain from your sweet friendship,
Makes me want to bear all toil,
Labor the still nights through
In search of language and in search of song,
To bring illumination to your mind,
To help you see the heart of bidden murky things.'
He is afraid that Memmius, his patron, even he, will fall away
from him.
Memmius, you too will want to fall away from me,
Even you,
Quite vanquished by the fear provoking words of priests
How many things can priests invent!
Vain myths to sap a lifetime's reasoning
And muddy fortune's every gift with fear.'
Memmius might think that he was entering the impious beginningis
of rationalism and treading a path of sin. To reassure his patron,
he recalls the wicked things that have been done in the name of
religion. He retells in splendid style, the old story of Iphigenia,
of how a father's ambition, blinded by superstitious terror, had led
Agamemnon to put to death his maiden daughter that the fleet
might set sail for Troy. In telling this legend Lucretius plumbs the
depths of human pathos. He deftly contrasts the pomp of the bridal
procession which a girl of her years should enjoy with the sombre-
ness of the procession of executioners. (By ancient Roman rite the
3. D.R.N. I, 136-145; Wimpear, R.P.S. 9.
4. D.R.N. I, 102-106; Winspear, R.P.S. 1 &: 8
bride should be carried over the threshold ol her new home in her
husband's arms so that no ill-omened slip should mar her entrance
into the new life.) So this girl was lifted in the arms of men, but
of executioners and not her loving lord. The hymn which accom-
panies the rite is a hymn of sacrifice and not the clear sweet,
hymeneal chant. The savage assonance which conveys the poet's
indignation can hardly be reproduced in English-a chaste girl
foully slain ( Casta inceste). No translation can adequately convey
the savage sarcasm with which he notices the slaves concealing
their weapons out of deference to a father's feelings (Hunc propter
ferrum cefare ministros). And the passage ends with a line which
is almost a sob. Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. That is
religion, these its 1nonstrous acts!
One fear I have in this long argument-
That even Memmius might think
We're impiously dabbling in profane philosophy
And setting wanton foot on sin's broad way.
Rather religion has itself begot impious and bloody deeds.
Think how at Aulis, Grecian chiefs, picked leaden of mankind,
Stained altars of the chaste and huntress queen
With maiden's blood in obscene rite and wanton sacrifice.
And she, poor girl, the fillets on her maiden locks
Adorning either cheek,
Saw father stand by sacral stone, steadfast but sombre;
The slaves of sacrifice with swords concealed
To spare a father's natural sympathy,
The clansfolk weeping at the doleful spectacle.
In tongueless terror down she fell and swooned.
Poor girl, it could not help at all at such a time
That she had long ere this been first to call him father.
For borne aloft in rough men·s hands, poor trembling girl,
Not tenderly, like bride in husband's grasp,
(To altar led the escort, not to wedlock's home).
No wedding hymn but funeral chant accompanied her,
Who chastely died by wanton act
Just when love's consummation should be hers.
And so she died,
A ~ad and sacrificial victim at a father's blow,
1 hat jealous god, by butchery propitiate,
Might grant auspicious voyage to the fleet,
Thar is religion, these its monstrous acts.'
, DI<." 11•-101,\J."1>11,·.ir,Rrs fi&7
So deeply is mankind dogged by superstitious fears, Lucretius fe1t,

so much is every man a prey to religious terror, scarce any one can
break awny from 'The fear-provoking words of priests'-
How many things can priests invent
Vain myths to sap a lifetime's reasoning
And muddy fortune's every gift with fear!
But, he argued, if only men could see that there was to misery a
fixed ordained end
In some way they'd find strength
To stand against religion and the threats of priests.
But, as it is, no principle is there
No chance to ra11y and stand fast,
Since fear of endless torments makes us shrink from death.
Men fear eternal torments after death. And this is because of
ignorance about the most important topics.
For men are ignorant about the soul.
Was it like body born?
Or did it make its way into our bodies when these came to birth?
Will soul die too, by death asunder torn?
Or will it live to see the shades of Hell, Hell's mighty swamps?
Or will soul make its way
Into the mortal frame of other creatures by divine decree?"
And so, he felt he must correct this ignorance. Men must learn
about natural philosophy. Only in this way can the darkened terror
of the mind be dispelled.
And so we must be clear about the laws of things above,
About the laws that govern sun and moon
About the force that moves all things on earth.
This above all we have to comprehend with piercing mind,
The soul and mind of what stuff they are made.
And so this darkened terror of the mind must be dispelled
Not by the rays of sun or gleaming shafts of day,
But Nature's laws, by looking in her face. 1
Central, therefore, to the poet's purpose is the fight against

eligion. The whole exposition of his philosophy is intended to
,anish the supernatural fears and the terror of torments in the world
D.R.N. I, I 12-116; Wlnspcar, R.P.S. 8.
D R.N. I, 127-131; Winspear, R.P.S. 8.
to come. The philosophy which he expounds and which we shall

examine in subsequent chapters has as its deep practical motive to
banish this fear. Philosophy is for him a medicine---a 'balm in
Gilead to heal the wounded soul'. Against religion he sets up science
and the philosophy of science. The calm, clear apprehension of all
things that comes from an understanding of physics and nature's
laws would, he thought, produce a serenity of spirit, a tranquility
of mind and a release from fear. Many people find this conviction
extraordinary. And yet Lucretius is here at one with the saints
and sages of all ages in prescribing that serenity which comes from
a vision of the whole. Lucretius is unique ( or nearly) in that he
prescribes materialism as the medicine to bring that serenity about.
What is in question after all is not one hour but all eternity
What fate awaits men after death.'
Lucretius was one of the first and perhaps the greatest exponent of
humanism, certainly its most moving and articulate poet. And yet
having said this one must make reservations and dwell on certain
paradoxes. Having politely bowed the gods out of all control of the
universe, of human destiny or the course of natural events, Lucretius
admits their existence yet uses them for other purposes. The para-
dox is pointed up in the very beginning of his poem. The work
begins with a splendid invocation to the goddess, Venus. Venus,
of course, was in Roman legend the mother of Aeneas and so the
founder of the Roman race. Julius Caesar also traced back his
descent to Venus, and so in addressing her as the mother of Aeneas'
clan, Lucretius is also perhaps paying a compliment to the leader
of the popular faction. But Venus was also the goddess of fertility,
the patron saint of reproduction in plants and animals and human-
kind. She makes every creature teem to reproduce its kind. His
pictorial and poetic imagination secs the universe as a perfect
pageant of procreation, particularly when spring comes to the
lands. The winds and clouds flee before her, the patterned earth
pours forth her lovely flowers, birds sing, their hearts smitten with
ber power. Animals go wild with passion and leap over the glad
meadows, swim swift streams. Each thing in joy and eagerness
follows the lusty prompting of this deity of love, to bring forth
offspring, kind after kind.
8 D R.N. l. 10'1); Wlnapear. R../'.S. u,.
Mother of Aeneas' clan, of men and gods delight,

Venus, all-fostering, who under gliding stars in sky,
Dost make to teem ship-bearing sea, fruit-bearing earth;
Since every race of living things, through thee
Conceived, is born and sees the light of sun;
Thee, goddess, thee the winds do flee, and heaven's clouds,
Thee and thy advent;
For thee the chequered earth pours forth her lovely flowers,
For thee expanses of the sea do smile,
And tranquil sky does gleam when bathed in light.
When first the vernal face of day is seen,
The quickening breath of Zephyr is unlocked and strongly blowa,
Then first the birds of air give word of thee,
Thee and thy coming,
Touched as they are in heart with power divine.
And then the beasts of field are driven wild,
To leap gay meadows and to swim swift streams.
And so a captive of thy charm, each thing in bot desire,
Will foUow thee wherever thou dost go to lead him on.
Yes, and through seas and hills and headlong streams,
The leafy homes of birds and grassy fields,
Putting sweet love in hearts of all,
Thou dost make them reproduce their rac.e,
Kind after kind.•
Venus appears to the poetic eye not only as the traditional
ancestress of Rome, not simply as the mistress and the mother of
all procreative powers; she is a very human tender creature to whom
mankind can pray for peace and rest from war. Her lover was Mars,
the mail-tuniced god of battles. Lucretius paints Venus vividly in
her lover's embrace. He begs her to seize this opportunity to pour
out sweet whispered words, influence her lover, bring peace in our
time.
Venus, then, is more than the impersonal principle of fecundity.
She is more than a literary convention, a decorative frosting for the
poetic cake. She is a goddess to whom the Romans pray. She listens
to their supplications, hears their prayers, can, if she will, grant
favours.
Our poet, it is apparent from the very outset of his poem has not
succeeded fully in banishing the gods from his system and the world.
This impression which one gains from the opening lines of the
poem is confirmed as one reads further. In the second book, Lucre-
tius gives a splendid description of the worship of one of the foreign
9. D.R.N. I, 1..J.O; Wlmpear, R.l'.S. I I l
religious cults, then invading the Roman state. The description is so

sympathetic that one suspects the poet of cherishing an emotional
sympathy for the cult which on strictly intellectual grounds he could
not entertain. But here again the concept of earth as the universal
mother and responsible, therefore, for procreation everywhere is
one which, we have seen already, was congenial to his poetic
imagination.
Wherefore the earth alone has been invoked
As Mother of the gods, Mother of creatures wild, Mother of
human-kind.
The Mother of the gods-
ThC learned poets of ancient Greece have sung of her.
They told how seated on majestic throne,
In swiftly moving chariot she drove her team of lions.
Thereby they signified
That mighty earth must rest on air;
That earth can never rest on earth.
And to her care they linked the savage beasts to signify
That beasts, however wild, must by a parent's loving care
Be tamed and softened.
And on her head they placed a crown of battlements,
Because, enthroned on glorious heights she nurtures towns.
And so endowed with this majestic symbolism
Her statue to this day is borne in state through lands of mighty folk.
And various people call on her
As Mother of Ida.
Now Phrygian bands they give to keep her company
Because tradition says from Phrygia
Grain was at first produced and spread through all the world.
And eunuch priests were given her
To signify that those who fl.aunt the goddess' sanctity,
Of those who to their parents failed in gratitude
Are found unfit to bring their living offspring to the shores of ligbL
Taut timbrels thunder in their hands
With hollow cymbals all around,
Trumpets with menace and harsh sounding bray,
The hollow pipe that stimulates their minds
In Phrygian mode.
Weapons they hold in front of them to symbolize their mad and
dangerous mood,
To fill with fear, through power divine,
The thankless minds, the impious hearts of sullen multitudea.
And as she rides through mighty towns
And !.heds her silent benediction over men
They strew her path with silver and with bronze

And dedicate their bounteous alms;
Goddess alike and those attending her,
Aie strewn with roses-thick as snowflakes in a driving storm.
And then an armed band, whom Greeks Curetes call
Sporting mid Phrygian troops, leaping in rhythmic ecstasy,
Rejoice at sight of blood and shake the dreadful crests upon their
heads.
Their name recalls the ancient Cretan band
Who drowned the waitings of the infant Jove--
A band of boys surrounds the baby boy-
And beat in measured rhythm, brass clashing on bras.,,
The while they prayed,
That Saturn might not find him, seize him, tear him with all
powerful jaws,
Inflict eternal wound deep in the Mother's heart.
So this is why with arms they follow Cybele;
Or else perhaps her teaching they exemplify
That men with arms and courage high
Should guard their Fatherland,
And be a guard and glory for their sires.
Yet all of this,
Though nobly told and splendidly set forth,
Is very far from truth.
The gods must pass their lives in everlasting peace,
Their interests far removed from this our world.
The gods through all eternity
Are free from danger, free from grief,
Majestic in their self sufficiency.
They do not need mankind at all.
The gods are not seduced by piety;
Never are gods by anger stirred.
The great round world is not endowed with consciousness,
But, owning many atoms forms,
It can bring forth such varied things so variously to light of sun.'<l
The conclusion which Lucretius reached after this discussion
exhibits one of his rare flashes of humour-a sardonic kind of
humour it is true.
Of course, if you must instead of sea, say Neptune;
Instead of grain invoke the goddess Ceres as its patroness;
Or pray to Bacchus, rather than speak of wine,
Why then, we can't object if one proclaims
Earth as the Mother of the gods.
Only let him not stain his mind with grovelling
Or foul religious awe.
10. D.R.N. 2, 598-6"0: Wiru.pear. R.P.S. 70-72.
Lucretius' scientific system was, as we shall see remarkably ordered,

complete and coherent. And, yet, there is still a function left for the
gods. They are banished from all control, creation or ordering of
the natural universe. They cannot interfere with the majestic pageant
of natural law, the eternal interplay of cause and effect. They have,
in short, none of the functions which we usually attribute to the
gods of religion. They cannot respond to human prayers or alter
the course of nature in response to our supplications. In fact, they
are supremely disinterested in all things human. Their function is
to provide for human beings an example of what life could be if
everyone eschewed avarice, lust and ambition--motives which inter-
fere with human happiness-and followed the life of complete
tranquility. They live an eternity of blissful existence in the spaces
between the stars. There they devote themselves to good wine, good
food and good conversation (for are they not divine?). 'On the hills
like gods together careless of mankind'. Careless of mankind,
because to notice the cares and sorrows of humanity would be rude,
an interruption of the divine tranquility. The gods, as it were, tum
their backs on mankind, devote themselves to a program of self-
development. Nonetheless, in spite of themselves, they must have
an influence on human affairs by providing an example of what
human life might he if we too accepted the Epicurean prescription
of tranquility. As Tennyson well puts the matter in his poem,
''Lucretius":
The gods who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world
Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm! And such,
Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm,
Not such, nor all un1ike it, man may gain
Letting his own life go.
We have spoken of Lucretius and the Epicurean school to which

he belonged as materialists and humanists. And yet a moment's
reflection will convince the reader that we arc face to face with 8
most ingenious paradox. The materialist opens his poem with a
prayt:r to Venus. He opens his last book with a plea to a Muse.
Do thou, 0 clever Muse Calliope,

Repose of men, delight of gods,
Mark out for me the track,
As now I speed towards the white chalk line
That marks the goal.
With you to guide I'll gain the victor's wreath,
While all humanity applauds.u
And the scientific humanist finds a place within this system for the
gods, even if they are not the conventional gods of religion. Faced
with this paradox scholars have given different and contradictory
interpretations.
Some have felt, as we have noticed before, that these inconsis-
tencies within the system of Lucretius point to a disordered mind-
a genius that is very close to madness. Still others, and much more
plausibly, argue that Lucretius was not opposed to religion as such,
but only to political religion-the 'state' cults. Such a view cannot
be rejected out of hand. It is clear that religion in ancient Rome too
often played a political role, that it was an important foundation
stone in the position of conservatism-the rule of the landlords,
the oligarchy, the Senate.
We know, too, that religion was regarded by many thinkers as
a great conservative force. Polybius, for example, as we have seen,
praised the Romans for their adroit organization of religion and
superstition as a support for 'law and order'. Cynical Romans
wondered how one augur could pass another on the streets without
smiling. In the light of this opinion, the words of Lucretius on
Roman augury take on an added significance.
This is the scientific way to know the power of thunderbolts;
The force by which they manage everything.
And not unlock the rolls of Tuscan prophesies
Or seek in vain some hint
Of what the hidden purpose of the gods-
Whence came the winged flash, or where it went,
Or how it made its way through walls;
Came out again the master of the house. 11
Even Cicero regarded religious rites as more useful for the state
than true for the philosopher. Lucretius' master, Epicurus, had
probably directed his polemic against Plato, and Plato's favourite
Tory deity, Apollo of Delphi. Lucretius, himself, claims for the
thought of Empedocles and the traditions of science a higher truth
11. D.R.N. 6, 92; Wimpcar, R.P.S. 251-252.
12. D.R.N. 6, 379; Winspcar, R.P.S. 263.
and sanctity than the mystic utterances w!Jich the Pythian priestess
breathed from the tripod and laurel of Delphi.
Before 1 approach this point, tell destiny, more certainly
More sacredly, than Pythian priestess
Speaking from the laurelled shrine
And tripod of the Delphic god,
I've many consolations to unfold in verse.
So will you not,
Checked by the bridle bit of ancient creed,
Think earth and sky and sun, and sea and moon and stars,
Because divine in structure, must endure
Through endless time.
So you'll not think it right
That man, like giants rebellious, should torments face,
For shaking with his thought the walls of universe
Wanting to quench the glorious sun in Heaven,
Branding immortal fact with mortal speech.
These things are not divine,
Not worthy to be numbered with the gods."
In this passage and in a similar passage in the first book where he
contrasts the thought of Empedocles with the mystic utterances of
Delphi, Lucretius is clearly following Epicurus.
Ancient religion, whether in Greece or Rome, was too often a
kind of established church and a grand supporter of the old status
quo. It is also true that the Epicurean philosophy was eagerly
embraced by the political reformers a.JJ.<;i revolutionaries, like Julius
Caesar. Not the least attraction of the system for such men must
have been that it made short work of the mumbo jumbo of tradi-
tional Roman religion and the hypocrisy of the traditional political
cult. Nonetheless I must record my conviction that those who argue
that Lucretius' opposition to religion was simply hatred of the 'state'
cults have not proved their case.
It seems better to note these paradoxes and inconsistencies in
Lucretius' position and leave them unresolved. Nor, in so doing,
is it necessary to think that these paradoxes are the products of a
disordered mind or an excessive preoccupation with historical
problems that arc no longer fully applicable. The contradictions
after all reflect fully the discordant position of the class for which
Lucretius spoke and to which he made his greatest appeal-a
section of the wealthy slave owning, governing class of Rome forced
temporarily into political opposition and radical revolt. There can
13. D.R.N. 5, 110; Wl111s-,r, R.r.S. 19).
THI! FIGHT AGAINST ROMAN RELIGION 41
be little debate, I think, that Lucretius' opposition to religion, vehe-

ment in the case of Apollo and the state cults, more sympathetic
but none the less firm in the case of the 'popular' mystery cults, was
the deepest impulse of his nature.
And yet this opposition is not an end in itself. Lucretius was not
a kind of village atheist, impishly tearing down people's faith for
fun of the thing. Rather he opposed religion because, for him, it
nurtured fear, fear of the gods, of torments after death; and secondly
because he believed that all the neuroses and passions and insecuri-
ties that dogged and darkened human life flowed from this one
primal fear. Let us examine first the second of these points which
might seem to a modem reader somewhat paradoxical.
Now I must tear up by the roots and cast away
That fear of death,
That fear which sullies mortal life from end to end.
And pours the murk of death on everything.
For though men say disease and infamy
More dreadful are than deepest depths of bell;
And though they say that soul is blood or wind
(Whichever theory they are clinging to),
And so they claim they need not our philosophy,
Yourself can judge that this is done for pomp and arrogano:
Rather than deep belief.
For these same men,
Exiled from country, banished from human sight,
Black with the blackest crime, gnawed by a hundred carei,
Live all the same.
Wherever wretchedness and anguish places them,
They worship all the same,
Butcher their sleek black bulls and give their offerings
To guardian spirits of the dead.
Their troubles turn their minds to creed and cult.
And so it's good to watch men in adversity,
By mounting dangers pressed.
At times like these
Men pour their deepest thoughts from depth of breast.
The mask is torn away, the face remains.
Then too, the lust for power and place and wealth,
These wounds of life are too much nurtured by the fear of death.
Men see that infamy and biting poverty
Are far removed from pleasant, tranquil life,
A kind of lurking at the gate of death.
These things they want to flee, spurred by false fear.
And so in time of civil war they build their wealth.
Their lu-; for gold outruns all bounds.

In piling wealth they slaughter heap on slaughter.
With hardened hearts they gloat when a brother dies.
A kinsman's banquet they both hate and shun.
Likewise from this same fear envy can wear them down.
This man, they say, has power,
While that one wins respect and walks in fair renown,
And I, they'll say, am doused in murk and mire.
Some die to win their statues and their fame.
And sometimes through their fear of death
Hatred of life and Jight takes hold of men.
With heavy heart they kill themselves,
Forgetting that the fear of death caused all their woes.
The fear of death makes one man sully honour,
Another crash through friendship's bonds,
Wanton, in short, with every human tie.
Often have men, seeking to skirt the shoals of death
Played false to fatherland and parents too. 16
Lucretius' argument may be summarized in this way: the fear
of death is the primary fear; from this arises the secondary fears
which give rise to ambition, lust, avarice and alJ the other frantic
strivings which interfere with a pleasant tranquil life. Therefore,
the fear of death must be banished at all costs. With this under-
standing we can examine the passages in which Lucretius tries to
dispel this fear-passages which constitute some of the most elo-
quent and highly charged writing in the whole poem.
Death then is nothing, affects us not at all,
Since soul is held to be of mortal stuff.
And just as in the past we knew no ill
When Punic hosts from all sides rushed to war,
When all the earth beneath the lofty shores of sky
Trembled in dreadful battle,
And men could doubt which side was doomed for fall
And loss of Empiry on land and sea alike,
So when we're dead,
When soul and body out of which we're formed, one entity,
Arc torn apart in death,
Nothing can touch our sense at all or move our consciousness
(For we shall not be alive to know)
Even if ocean were with land confused and sea with sky.
Even if mind's structure and the power of sou) have consciousness
Still that can nothing mean to us,
We who're created what we are,
14 DR N 1, ,.2 ff. Winspcar. R.f'.S. 9,- n.
THE FlOHT AGAINST ROMAN RELIGION 43
One creature by the wedlock and the mating of our body to our
soul.
Even if time could collect again our particles of matter after death
Arrange them once agajn as once they were;
If it were given us to live once more,
That fact could nothing mean to us at all.
When once is burst the self-succession of our consciousness.
Even now, we care not for the 'self' that once we were,
No torment for that 'self' e'er touches us.
If one gives thought to time's immensity,
And atoms' motions in their infinite variety,
This you could easily conceive,
That this atomic structure out of which we're made,
Might once have found before
The same exact arrangement of its parts.
But this we cannot grip at all with grasp of memory.
The pause of life has intervened;
The movements of our consciousness
Have wandered far and wide. 16
Lucretius makes fun of the man who shows concern for what
will happen to his body when he's dead.
So when you see a man lament
That after death his body rots away,
Is licked by flame or torn by teeth of beasts,
This you must know;
His words do not ring true,
Some hidden goad is lurking in his heart,
Even while his verbal creed denies
The fact of consciousness in death.
He does not (here's my view)
Fo11ow his verbal creed nor ground thereof.
He does not fully tear his roots from life and throw himself away.
He unconsciously assumes that part of him remains.
For when a man, while still alive,
Pictures his body after death,
Imagines birds and beasts are gnawing at the corpse,
Indulges in self-pity,
His thought has failed to free his sense from that poor corpse,
Confounds it with himself and thinks the body 'he'.
And so he groans that he was born a mortal man,
And does not see that in real death there'll be no second self
To live and mourn the dead and stand in lamentations
While the 'self' outstretched is torn or burned.
For if when dead, it's evil to be torn by teeth of beasts,
15. D.R.N. 3, 50 ff. Winspcar, R.P.S. 126 ff.
Why is it not as bad to lie on scorchbg flames and shrivel up,

Or suffocate in honey when embalmed?
Grow stiff with cold when sleeping under weight of ponderous
slab?
Or feel oppressed and ground by weight of earth above?••
With the courage of a naturalist Lucretius lets his imagination
have full play as he contemplates 'man's fate'.
Lucretius with a profound sympathy of utterance and sincerity
of feeling depicts the joys that make men cling to life-the joys of
home and wife and family and child. The passage has been repro-
duced by Horace (woodenly) and by Grey in his famous Elegy
Writ/en in a Country Churchyard.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn
Nor busy housewife ply her evening care,
No children run to lisp their sires return,
Nor climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
'But', Lucretius concludes, 'You'll want these things no more'. It is
almost as though poet were pitted against philosopher, imagination
against thought. lt is no wonder that some critics have felt a lack of
integration here that verges on the pathology of a distorted mind.
'No more', they say 'no more can joyful home fires welcome you
Nor loyal, comely wife,
Nor children run to be the first to share a father's kiss,
And touch your heart in joyful well-springs of content'.
'No more', they say, 'Can you be prosperous and guard your own'
"Poor wretch,' they say, 'how wretchedly
Has death's accursed single day snatched life's best gifts'.
But this they do not say 'You'll want these things no more'.
Again the philosopher speaks:
Just as you are when lulled to sleep,
So will you be through all unending time,
Completely free from every care and grief.
But the philosopher concludes the argument in cold and unvan-
11..ishab]e reason.
This is the question we must put to him
'What j$ so bad in this?
If mortal creature turns to rest and peace
Why should you waste away in torments of unendins grief?'"
Our poet pictures Nature finding voice and remonstrating with
us for our groans and lamentations at the thought of death. If life
16 DH h'. '· ~70 rr. Wlnspe,11, H.l'.S. Ill ff
J1 D.H N J. 11""4 ff. Wlo~P",r, R.P S 12\1 ff
was good, if all its joys did not slip away like water poured into a
broken vase, why do you not steal away like a banqueter sated
with the banquet of life? Why not with greedy mind, poor fool,
grasp peace and quiet? But if everything you have enjoyed has
slipped away and life is bad, why seek to add more to it? For this
in tum will go for naught and die without giving you pleasure. Why
not rather make an end of life and labour? For as far as I can invent
and devise, there is nothing to please you, nothing; all things are
always the same. If you are still in the prime of life, if your body is
not yet broken and weary with years, yet all these things will come
to you, even if you were to vanquish the ages with your span of life,
even if you were never to die. What answer could we make except
to plead that Nature had drawn a true bill, had expounded a just
and legal case.
Let nature, like a judge, find sudden utterance
Upbraiding one of us in words like these:
'Is death so great a thing then, mortal man,
That you abandon self to sickening grief?
Why do you weep and groan at death?
If Jife was good for you,
And all its joys have not drained off,
Like water poured in cracked receptacle,
And left untasted,
Wby do you not, like a guest at feast of life,
Slip peacefully away, with mind serene, poor fool,
Grasp quiet and nothingness?
But if your pleasures all have slipped away
And life is burdensome
Why add some more which in its turn will slip away
And never give you zest?
Should you not rather make an end to life and toil?
For insofar as I devise and calculate
Nothing is left of pleasure, not a thing.
The same monotonous sameness always, everywhere.
But if you're not by years weighed down,
Nor limbs worn and decayed,
Still all this yet will come to you,
Even if your span of life
Should many generations overpass,
Even if death should never come?'
What answer can we make?
Admit we must that Nature's plea is just,
Her brief well·grounded and we)J.argued.u
18. D.R.N. 3,931; Wi.Dspear, R.P.S. 130.
But, Lucretius goes on, as be pursues bis rational argument, _suppose

some older man began to lament at death, would it not be nght that
Nature adopt a shriller tone.
But if some older man, advanced in years complain,
And mourn his death, poor wretch, more than be should,
Were it not right that Nature grow more shrill:
'Enough of tears, you oaf, check your complaints.
You've tasted every joy of life
And now you waste away.
But you looked before and after
And sighed for what was not.
So· life has slipped away from you hated and spoiled,
And now, before you know, Death stands at your head,
Before you can depart,
Sated and filled with the feast of things.
So now, forget possessions, be your age;
Serenely yield them to your sons, as yield you must.'
Rightly, l think, would nature plead,
And rightly would she shriek and scold.
The old order changes, yielding place to new;
No man goes down to Hell or loathsome Tartarus.
There must be matter that new things may grow.
These, too, will fo1low you when they have lived their life
Just as the things before you died, so die wiJI they.
Life's Jaw still holds that thing must grow from thing
And life is something we can rent, not own."
This is surely the ultimate in stark consolation for the mourner
and the bereaved. There must be matter that new things may grow.
In spite of the splendor of his imagery, the power of his poetry,
the beauty of his language in these passages, qualities which every
one concedes, the argument leaves most readers a little dissatisfied.
The religious reader feels that Lucretius has not fully satisfied him-
self, that he has not banished his own fears, that his debating
opponent is still in a sense himself. They detect some longing for
the eternal, some hunger for immortality that Lucretius with his
own philosophy has not been able entirely to banish from his own
heart. The materialist reader, on the other hand, feels a profound
satisfaction with the account that Lucretius gives of nature's process,
the rise and fall of the generations, of all things living by the death
of what has gone before. Nonetheless this same reader 01ay find
~omc di:,,quiet at Lucretius' wrestling with human fears. He may feel
that to lump all the real, concrete, tangible, material fears that dog
our mortal life under the one abstract general fear, the fear of death,
is too broad, too much the ivory-tower philosopher looking at life
in the very big. After all, it is only in moments of supreme emer-
gency that the fear of death becomes a complete, all-mastering
emotion. For most of the life of the average man, fears are closer at
hand. The rich and powerful fear social and political change, as
another Roman poet Horace well expressed and saw.
Thee goddess Fortune mothers fear,
Mothers of savage kings and tyrants purple clad
Lest with malicious foot you smash the standing column
Lest people in their multitudes together throng,
And call the hesitant to arms, to arms,
Destroy their rule."
The poor fear poverty, unemployment, sickness-all the changes
and chances of this mortal life; they fear for the rise of a tyrannical
dictator who will increase their oppression and destroy their secur-
ity. Men fear the foreign enemy as well as the domestic tyrant.
They dread battle and murder as well as sudden death. Their fears
are many, varied, concrete, near at hand. In all this discussion,
some readers feel the aristocratic side of Lucretius, his remoteness
from real people, his blindness to real problems, his aloofness from
pressing human needs.
After dealing with the fear of death Lucretius proceeds to
demolish the myths of the other world, the torments that await the
wicked after death. Here he has a somewhat easier time. All of these
tortures are here with us in life. They are torments of fear, of lust,
of ambition, love of power. They are the goads of conscience and
the whips of remorse.
And all the stories told of fabled Achcron,
All these are here and now.
For in the ancient tale,
The wretched Tantalus, stiff with the plague of fear,
Shrinks from the mighty rock that hangs in air, over his head.
But rather in this life
An idle fear of gods oppresses mortal men
And each man dreads the fate that Fortune holds for him.
Tityos as he lies in Acheron the vultures gnaw;
And though they search eternally under his mighty breast,
Nothing at all they find of what they search.
And though the outspread frame of Tityos
Covers nine acres with its mighty limbs,
20. Horace, Car. I. 35. ti.
48 LUCReTIUS AND ScIBNTIFIC THOUGITT
Or even all the world:

Yet still he could not bear eternal pain,
Nor always give from his own body, food.
This Tityos is us;
We lie and toss in carnal passions of desire-
Desire, like vultures, gnaws at us,
And bitter pangs of anguish wear our flesh down,
Or cares from other lusts arise, tear us apart.•
Of Sisyphus, the symbol of the politician we have already
spoken. Lucretius, we must emphasize again and again, was opposed
to all the passions which interfere with a 'pleasant tranquil life'.
Punishment is here on earth; 'No man goes down to Hell or loath-
some Tartarus.
Always to feed the thankless mind and fill it with good things.
When seasons of the year return,
Present their fruits and various charms,
And yet be never sated with the fruits of life;
This, I think, is what we mean
When buxom girls pour water into cracked receptaclee,
Which never can be filled.
And then they tell of Cerberus,
Of Furies in their inky Stygian pit
And Tartarus that belches horrid tides of shrivelling beet
From monstrous jaws--
Idle foolish tales of things that don't exist,
That never could exist at all.
But here in life is punishment for evil deedJ---
A monstrous punishment for monstrous cri.mea--
Atonement for sin,
Imprisonment, the horrid hurling from Tarpeian rcx.t.
Blows and the hangman's hook,
Incarceration in the deepest dungeon cell,
Thumb screw and rack and noose,
The pitch that turns a victim's body into living dami.ng torch.
And even if you miss all these,
Still conscience making cowards in advance,
Stabs with its goads, flogs with its whips,
Since human intellect fails to perceive,
The boundary of ills, the appointed end of punishment,
Fearing that retribution for the soul be even heavier after death.
This is the life of hell on earth for roots.
ll. D.R N 3 911 ff Wui..pcar, R.P.S. Ill ff.
Death is nothing. The tales of torture after death are myths for
life's torments here and now. Finally you must tell yourself that
better men than you are dead. Kings and lords of the earth, con-
querors, poets, thinkers, painters and artists, all are gone. Even
Epicurus, greatest of them all, is dead. Do you then hesitate to die,
you who are already half dead even while you are alive, you who
spend the greater half of life in sleep, snore on your feet and never
cease to dream; carry with you a mind obsessed with baseless fears;
never can find out what is wrong with you, oppressed like a drunk-
ard with many a care, and totter around in the blind blundering of
your intellect.
This too please tell yourself from time to time;
Ancus the good is dead,
A better man than you a thousand times, you greedy fool.
And many other kings and potentates are dead,
Who once were great in power, ruled mighty folk,
And that great king who bridged the Hellespont,
And lead his troops from side to side,
On foot, on horse, crossed salty deep, insulting Ocean's waves,
Yet he is dead. He's left the light of day
And poured his soul abroad from dying frame.
And Scipio is dead, war's thunderbolt, the scourge of Carthage.
He gave his bones to earth like any unknown tramp.
And, too, the finest brains in science and in art,
Boon comrades of the Muses;
Homer himself, the peerless, sceptred, crowned,
Is laid to sleep like others.
Even Democritus, when creeping age
Warned him that mind and memory were growing dim,
Of his own will met death, gave up his life.
And Epicurus, too, is dead.
Teacher and prophet, for his life is spent.
(He topped the human race in genius,
Blotting out rivals as the rising sun dims stars.)
Do you then hesitate to die, think it unjust?"
The contempt for the average man that Lucretius here exhibits
is distinctly aristocratic. He quickly goes on to show that he appre-
ciates the haunting dissatisfactions that often accompany great
wealth and power. These passages we have already quoted in
Chapter 2, pages I 8 and 19.
22. D.R.N, 3, 1053 ff. Wimpear, R.P.S, ll5 ff.
Here then is the reason deep and all-<:ompelling for the study
of the material universe. Follow the Epicurean prescription. Study
natural science, eschew ambition, lust, avarice, pride of place. And
most of all come to learn that soul is mortal, that death ends all.
With argument after argument, he pursues this central theme. These
arguments consume most of the third book. And this same passion-
ate conviction accounts for the splendid passage in praise of his
master Epicurus with which the third book opens.
Into thick darkness came of old great light.
You do I follow, you who brought the light,
To show us what is good and bad in human life,
You do I follow, glory of the Grecian race,
And in your footsteps firmly plant my own.
Not that I want to rival you; affection makes me want to imitate.
How can a swallow vie with swans,
Or kids with little tottering limbs
On race track vie with mighty practiced horse?
You are the father of my mind, discoverer of Nature.
From your books, 0 seer renowned,
You give a father's precepts in philosophy.
As bees in blooming meadows suck each flower,
So we your golden words repeatedly,
We feed on them and find them golden,
Worthy of eternal life.
Soon as your thought, born of a godlike mind,
Began to thunder forth on heaven's laws,
Then all terrors from our spirits flee;
The ramparts of the world are torn apart.
I see the atom's pageant streaming through the void.•
Perhaps the most mature statement of Lucretius' attitude to
Roman religion, on both its positive and negative sides comes
towards the end of the second book.
And if you learn this lesson well and cling to it
Ylhy then you11 see
Nature in freedom now, her tyrant lords dethroned,
Accomplish everything by her own spontaneous activity,
Without the help of gods.
For who by holy heart of gods,
(Of gods who in their tranquil peace pass placid years,
A life of caJm)
Who can prevail to rule the mighty sum of infinite universe,
ll. D.R.N. l, ll ff. WiA&pcar, R.l'.S. 94 ff
THE FIGHT AGAINST ROMAN RELIGION
To guide the deep, lo bold in might)' hands the felhi.

To turn around the many firmaments al ODn"",
~·
To warm the fruitful lands with heaven's fires.
Be omnipresent everywhere,
To darken sky with clouds,
And shake the calm expanse of sky with thunJel'\:lap:..
And shoot the thunderbolts,
And sometimes wreck the temples of the gods th('ms1.•lws.
Or rage with might and main through solitary wilJcrncs.~.
And burl the bolt of wrath which often spares the impious,
And does the innocent to death?
And since the morning of creation for the uniV«:"fS('-·
The natal day of sea and earth,
The primal rising of the sun,
A multitude of atoms have been added to the unive~.
Atoms flowed in from every side.
And these the mighty total of the universal power
Has tossed around and brought to union,
That out of these the mighty spaces of the sky might gi,in rre~h
room,
To raise its lofty vault to loftier heights.•
CHAPTER V
THE DEBT TO EPICURUS'

The arguments of Epicurus are designed to banish fear by
revealing the nature of spirit, the mortality of soul. It will be of
interest, perhaps to summarize them in their Lucretian setting.
They are classic in the history of the materialistic outlook. Life,
mind and consciousness are part of man just like any other member.
They are not a 'harmony' of a living body.
Analogy of good health, he argued, is specious. A man may feel
psychologically and spiritually happy though his body is sick; on the
other hand his body may be in good health but his mind depressed.
Dreams, too, suggest that though the body is relaxed and inactive,
the mind and emotions can be busily at work.
Receive the varied impulses of joy, the baseless cares of bean.
Other members, be argued, might be separated from the body
by operation or accident and yet the body could survive. But if once
the spirit, the air and vital beat, have left then the whole body dies.
And so we must give up the metaphor of hannony and leave the
word to the musicians.
Lucretius goes on to argue that Mind (Intellect) and Life or
Soul (Psyche) are held together in unity. Incidentally be does his
best to clear up the confusions in the meaning of the word p,ryc~
which bad been introduced by 'idealist' philosophers. This I have
discussed in the Genesis of Plato's Thought!
The surface plausibility of the argument turns of coune on the
ambiguity inherent in the word Psyche . . . . Psyche means first
and foremost 'life' (not as a universal principle, but individually,
concretely what distinguishes a living body from a corpse); it
means secondly 'reason' as opposed to the body; and as we have
seen, the Pythagoreans had developed the theory of the soul as a
unifying and governing principle, set in opposition to, and
(ideally) in control of the chaos of bodily appetites. And thirdly,
Socrates seems to be smuggling in a third meaning-soul as 'moral
consciousness'. Now only by a conscious confusion of these three
meanings of this same Greek word is there given even a super-
ficial plausibility to the judgment that the 'excellence' of 'soul' i1
justice and that the just life is the happy life.
52
THE DEBT TO EPICURUS 53
For mind or intellect Lucretius u~c~ ,;,,.; word animus. Foe life,
or as we sometimes must translate it 'rn1,J', anima.
Lucretius' second argument against ~he belief in the soul's im-
mortality is that 'Mind' and 'life' ( or 'Soul') are held together in
unity and that the mind is physical.
Curiously enough he placed the mind or intellect in the middle
regions of the breast, on the ground, that the emotions have their
seat here.
Here fear and terror plunge and rear;
Around these parts the surge of joy can give delight.
Mind can act independently of the body but deep emotion will
often result in physical symptoms; a man may faint through sheer
terror. This fact serves for him as an indication that mind is physical.
Lucretius goes on to describe his concept of what kind of matter
goes to make up the structure of mind. The atoms that constitute
this important---even crucial, part of the human totality are beyond
all others small, round, smooth and very mobile.
A heap of poppy seeds gives him his analogy. The round atoms
move more swiftly than atoms that are hooked or jagged. Water
moves more swiftly than honey and he infers that this, too, is the
result of a difference in the atom shapes. There is no difference in
weight, he argued, between a living body and a corpse. This
demonstrates how light and W1Substantial ii spirit.
Just as when bouquet from a splendid wine has passed away.
Or lovely perfume scattered through the air.
And yet no one of these seems smaller to the eyes,
No weight seems lost.
Lucretius now goes on to explain what kind of atoms conjoin
to make up mind. Briefly, he thought the atoms of heat and wind
and air are joined together with a fourth element-the most decisive
of all, for which he can find no name.
Than the fourth principle, nothing could be more mobile and
more fine. This receives the impulses from outside the living creature
and transmits them to the other principles that go to make up spirit,
heat, wind and air until the whole individual is moved. Lucretius
admits that he cannot explain how these four principles are linked
together and blames the poverty of the Latin language. Yet that
they are linked he is convinced and also that the fourth nameless
principle has its seat most deeply placed within the human body.
This argument the modern reader will probably find a little

naive. The sequel goes on to make clear that Lucretius has argued
from a metaphor or analogy. We do apply the metaphor of heat and
cold to temperament but most modems are fully aware that this is
a manner of speaking and that the concept is symbolical only.
Characteristically, he concludes this discussion of the material
nature of the soul by weaving in once again his central ethical
prescript.
J,, Body and soul (or life), Lucretius argues, are inseparable and
inexorably intertwined.
The junction is as close as frankincense and its fragrance. To
tear the two apart would mean destruction for both. Water can give
up heat without being destroyed, but body cannot give up soul
without setting in motion the process of decay and disintegration.
::/ . Body and soul collaborate in the experience of feeling or con-
sciousness.
The eyes, for example, contribute vision not because the soul is
peeping out through them like an opened door. The comparison is
false. A door does not feel pain when opened wide. U our mind
were like doors then 'soul' would see better if the doors were
removed, door posts and all.
The body, Lucretius argues, does not feel without an impulse
of the mind. Some sensations are so slight and imperceptible that
the mind does not perceive them at all.
We do not sense the mist by night
Or thin fine filament of spider's web,
That nets U3 in our walks.
This is because so many things must first be stirred in us before the
atoms of 'spirit', spread as they are throughout the human body, can
be stirred to perception.
All parts of the body, he thought, could be destroyed if only
mind remained unharmed.
Lucretius now begins to come to the heart of his argument.
Mind and soul were born w_i_th the body, ancl with the body they
must die. To~belic.f..ULpewm;il !~mortality is ·ffie iJi3"goD Which
bc7Tffis~ sl~1y:....Body, is as it were, the VaSeOr COilTainerorthc·sou1.
ThC soul is scattered at death as when water trickles away from a
broken container. It will dissolve like clouds or smoke but much
faster because its atoms are so much finer.
Pursuing the argument with a kind of relentless passion, Lucre-

tius argues that mind and soul are born with the body and so it is
fair to assume that they will perish with the body as well.
Disease, drunkenness and epilepsy affect the mind as they do
the body. The cure works on mind and body alike.
Often in sickness that seems at first sight bodily
The mind, too, wanders far astray.
It loses sanity and utters language in delirium.
And often in a grievous lethargy
The mind is carried off to deep unending sleep,
While eyes are heavy, cranium nods.
Because of this close unity of mind, soul and body, what 'J',
destroys one must destroy all.
For pain and disease are carpenters of death
A thing we've come to know by thinking on the death of many
a man.
Lucretius' description of the symptoms of drunkenness and

epilepsy are vivid in the extreme, always with the same purpose, to
convince his readern that physical causes h~v~-~ rri~~tal effect. And
if mind and soul while still within the body pent, are tossed by
gusty waves of malady, how could we think that they would survive
outside the body in the open air exposed to all the stormy winds.
If soul were immortal, it would not lament as now it does, on
f a c ~ but-:Woulii i:ailier rejoice that now the time had come
to-go and leaYe_behind its outworn body as a snake sloughs off its
skin.
And so we see (he concludes in triumph)
That soul and life lack not their birthday hour,
Nor funeral chant of death.
Mind can be healed by treatments just as the body can. But what
can be changed must also at some time experience the ultimate
change-i.e. destruction or death. This too will indicate that soul
is mortal.
The phenomenon of slow death and decay equally proves the_·,.
mortality of soul.
Mind is a part of man like ears and eyes. It could not exist
apart from the body any more than could a hand or eye or nose.
The soul is torn asunder when it leaves the body. Hence it dies.
B o ~ a r the dissolution of. soul.
' The life of the senses is inherently a function of the body. U
the soul could be conceived as living apart from the body, it would
have to live without sensation and without any contact with the outer
world.
Soul or life pervade the whole body. When the body is injured
or limbs lopped off 'soul' too is divided. That which is subjec! to
division is. also subject to death. His treatment here is macabre in
the -extreme.
Men tell how battle chariots, with scythes attached to wheels,
Hot in the wild confusion of a fight,
Can cut the limbs off a man so suddenly,
That severed limb is seen to shiver on the ground;
And yet the power and intellect of man
Cannot feel pain, so sudden is the stroke,
So full his mind absorbed with frenzy of the fight,
With all the body that is left he presses to the fray,
And often fails to know
That arm and shield alike have gone
Dragged by the wheels,
And rolled around by horses' hooves and ravening scythes.
Another fails to see
His strong right arm has gone,
The while be climbs and presses on.
And yet again a man may strive to rise
Though leg is lost,
And at his side and on the ground
The severed, dying foot
Twitches its toes.
Yes,
And even head lopped off from warm and living trunk
Keeps yet the look of life and open eyes,
Until the last faint vestiges of soul have gone.
And thus that living entity, immortal soul,
Once thought a unity,
Is with the body hacked to bits.
So, body and soul alike, are subject to mortality,
Since each alike is cut in many parts.
If soul enters our body at birth, complete and entire, we ought

to have some recollection of an earlier existence.
Tue DEBT TO EPICURUS 57
Then too,
If soul has lived from endless time,
And enters in the body at its birth,
Why is it that we can't recall the time that's past,
Why not preserve a trace of what bas gone before?
For if the power of mind is so much changed,
To have no recollection of the past,
That state I think is very close to death.
U soul entered the body at birth it would not make sense that
10ul should grow as body grows.
Rather the soul would by itself abide alone,
Cooped like wild beast within some hollow cage,
But yet in such a way that body as a whole
Could teem with consciousness.
And so again, again I say,
We must not think that souls can be released from laws of birth
and death.
U souls were grafted in the body from outside, we could not
comprehend the close union of body and soul-both in growth and
decay.
So much that even teeth can have their share of consciousness;
Pain strikes the teeth-a twinge from water cold,
A pang if one should bite a little stone
Concealed within a piece of bread.
So closely intertwined they are,
That souls can never issue forth entire,
Resolve themselves intact from sinews, bones and joints.
The fact that 'soul' cannot change indefinitely but only develop
the proper characteristics of a particular class or genus of living
things establishes its mortality. The creature's temperament grows
as the body grows, dies as the body dies.
Why does violent savagery always attend the fierce breed of lions?
Cunning the fox?
And panic flight is handed down to deer as patrimony from their
sires?
The father's fear seems to excite their limbs.
And other habits of this kind are handed down,
Implanted in the spirit and the limbs from dawn of life.
It must be that a certain temper of the mind,
Determined by its seed and breed,
Must grow as body grows
In every race of living things.
It would be comical to suppose that souls wait around or stand

in line waiting for a body while mortal creatures have sexual inter-
course to bring their offspring to birth. It would be ridiculous to
think of souls brawling as to which should be born first or making
a compact in advance as to which shall have first choice.
There can be no activity of the mind or brain, there can be no
such thing as consciousness, without the appropriate physical ap-
paratus. It might be well to warn the reader that here I have deliber-
ately moderoiz.ed the argument. Lucretius would say no mind
without atomic activity. I have said 'No consciousness apart from
blood or cells'.
We surely cannot think that mind and consciousness
Are linked with every object bodily;
Trees cannot live in air, nor clouds in salty sea,
Nor fish in fields, nor blood in logs, nor sap in stones,
Fixed law ordains where each thing Jive and grow.
So mind cannot ever be without the brain.
No consciousness apart from blood and cells.
The soul doesn't exhibit the necessary qualities which we must
attribute to immortal and enduring things.
Things which are to be immortal must be made so solidly that
they"~att1l'mfulfs from oufsiire,~aSaTCtne eTemal atoms,
or else;mce-vont, re,,xempt-from external blmvs.
iruSiS a fc:irmid.ibIC arra}'-Of 3rg\lriients and it is hard to see
how many of them can be gainsaid. It is no wonder that Lucretius
concludes in something like triumph.
Death, then, is nothing, affects us not at all
Since mind is held to be of mortal stuff.
Fear has been banished, fear of death and the torments after
death. Jhe gods '.&,'.:e__bee_n_b_~dJ:QJIU!)rtably established
in their celesJi;i.l_<1______de.
Which are not shaken by the wanton winds
Nor lashed from cloud with rain.
No snow falls white nor frost assails;
Cloudless the air that covers them,
And heaven bounteously smiles,
While sky is bathed in light.
Nature supplies them all they need for tranquil life
And nothing ever mars 'their sacred everlasting calm•.•
] D R.N. 3, 19, Win.pear, R.l'.S. 94-95.
THE DEBT TO EPICURUS w
If soul is mortal Lucretius argued, there is no need to fear death
and the legends loIOOf ihe formCnts that men might face after death
have proved to be groundless. The poet round1, off hi,; argument
(in the fifth book) by giving an account of the factor~ which have
made men invent religion and devise for themselves these fables.
And this argument Lucretius expounds in poetry of remarkable
majesty and power.
And now the cause
That spread belief in deity through mighty folk,
And filJed our towns with shrines
And prompted men to institute the rites of solemn sacrifice,
Which linger even to this day on festal days and in great places
(Whence even now horror is branded into human hearu,
Compelling men to found new shrines of gods
And celebrate on festal days,)
All this it's not so hard to tell in words.'
From remote antiquity men have had visions in their waking
life, and much more commonly when sleeping, visions that revealed
to them forms of remarkable size and power. And men attributed
consciousness to these forms because they seemed to move their
limbs and voice great utterances proportionate to their power and
mighty strength. And equally men assumed that their life was eternal
because the faces of these visionary apparitions was ever before
them and their forms remained. And men supposed that they far
surpassed men in felicity because the fear of death did not harass
them; and because in their visions these forms seemed to perform
many wonderful deeds, without effort or toil. And then, too, humans
had for long observed the orderly procession of the heavens, the
recurrence of the various seasons of the year, but knew not the
reasons for their order and majesty. And so they created a refuge
for them~~es_by handing over everything to the gods and assuming
tlfat allthings__,v~re governed by their power.
Even in ancient times the human race
Perceived with waking eye the glorious shapes of gods;
Much more in sleep, they thought they saw
Bodies of supernatural size and form.
To shapes like these was consciousness assigned
Because men saw them move their limbs,
Utter proud words proportionate to their size and mighty strength.
4. D.R.N. 5, 1 ff. Winspe.ar, R.P.S. 236 ff.
Immortal life men gave to them,

Because their face appeared from time to time,
Their form remained.
But most of all because they thought
That creatures blessed with strength like this,
Could not be overcome by any force.
They thought their lot must better be than ours,
Because no fear of death could harass them.
And, too, because in dreams, they could perform
Many miraculous deeds in manner effortless.
And then men marked in due array the ordered laws of sty,
The splendid pageant of the seasons of the year,
But did not know the cause.
And so they sought escape,
By handing all things over to divine control,
By thinking all things ruled by gods' decrees.
They placed the temples and abodes of gods above the sk.y,
Because the sun and moon revolved through sky,
The moon and day and night,
The splendid stars of night,
Night-wandering torches and the flitting flames,
And clouds and sun and showers and snow and winds,
Lightnings and hail and rapid thunder claps,
Those turbulent, tremendous threats.~
To underscore the splendid majesty of these lines, I venture to
quote them in Lucretius' own language.
Per caelum volvi quia nox d Luna videtur
Luna, dies el nox el noclis signa severa,
Noctivagaeque faces caeli flammaeque volanles,
Nubi/a, sol, imbres, nix venti, fufmina, grando,
Et rapidi fremitus et murmura magna minarum.
Nowhere has the sheer majesty of nature's processes been so
well evoked and conveyed.
And then with all the grave and blazing indignation of an ancient
Hebrew prophet, Lucretius goes on to denounce the folly of the
whole invention.
O hapless race of men,
When deeds like this, to gods assigned,
Were joined to petty vengefulneu.
What groans for you, what wounds for ua,
What tears for later ages.
This is not holiness, before the sight of men.
Day after day to crawl up to a stone,
,. D.R.N. ,. 1169 ff. Wi111pear, R.r.s. 2)6 ff.
HE DEBT TO EPICURUS 61
(The ritual veiJ on head)

And never miss an altar;
Nor prostrate lie before the shrines of gods with outstretched palms,
Nor slaughter hecatomb on hecatomb,
Nor weave a litany of vow on vow.
No. Holiness is this: to contemplate with mind serene the whole.
When we lift eyes to great celestial temples of the world,
Aether above, studded with twinkling stars,
And let thought roam on heaven's immensity,
The ordered course of sun and moon and stars,
Then this reflection starts to stir and wake and raise its head,
That this tremendous power of god might turn on us,
This power that moves the constellations
On their endless, restless way.
The lack of scientific thought assails the doubting heart,
No knowledge how the cosmos came to be, and how 'twill end.
How long the ramparts of the universe
Can bear the task of endless, restless journeying,
Or whether, gifted by divine decree with endless life,
And gliding endless down the grooves of time,
They can defy the strength of time's eternity.
And, after all,
What mind escapes the sudden flash of fear, terror of gods,
The thought that now's the time
For some foul deed, for some proud word,
To suffer retribution's torment.
Or when the force of furious wind at sea
Sweeps fleet and admiral and horse and foot in headlong rout,
Does he not beg in prayer the peace of god,
That heaven will bless with calmer seas and favouring winds?
But all in vain, for nonetheless,
He's caught in whirling hurricanes and helpless borne,
To shallow waters and to death.
A mighty hidden force so tramples down
AJJ human strength,
Treads under foot and seems to hold in mockery,
The pomp of power and power's relentless instruments,
The savage axes and the lovely rods.
Again, when all of earth trembles beneath our feet,
Cities are shaken to their fall,
Or threatening rock and quake,
What wonder that mankind contemns itself
And leaves place in its thought
For mighty power and marvellous strength of god,
To govern everything.'
6. D.R.N. 5, 119-4 tr. Winspcar, R.P.S. 237-238.
62 LUCRETIUS AND SCIBNTIFIC THOUGHT
.,,... - Nowhere in all the range of western literature has superstition

been more convincingly derided and assailed. And paradoxically
'!'bough, no writer has ever more fully exhibited one essential ele-
ment in religion-man's reverence and awe for nature in her
splendid pageantry and ordered majesty.
Here then is one paradox in Lucretius' attitude to the religion
of his times----0n the one hand a stem opposition to the conven-
tional and orthodox Roman religion in the name of materialism
and science and his atomic theory; on the other a rather marked
sympathy for some of its more unorthodox manifestations-for
Venus as the symbol of fertility and procreation and for the Mystery
Religions which embodied so much of the social protest in the
ancient world.
The most complete statement of his positive attitude to the gods
is placed by Lucretius near the beginning of the sixth book.
Now since I've entered once for all
The viewless chariot of poesy, 111 venture to explain
How raging storms of winds arise and how they are appeased,
And how all things find peace again
When raging of the storm is stilled.
And all the things which men observe
To happen on earth and in the sky,
And often bang upon events with panic-stricken minds,
And grovel in their intellects through fear of gods
And huddle puppyish minds to earth,
Because in ignorance of what bas really caused the happening
They feel compelled to hand it over to divine dominion
Admit the power of gods.
For even men who've fully learned that gods lead care-free livea,
If ignorant of laws by which things move,
Those things in chief which happen overhead, up in the sky,
They're drawn to ancient creed and cult again,
Imagine savage tyrants overhead, strong to accomplish anything;
Because, poor fools, they know not what can come to be and what
cannot,
The law that binds each thing, its deep set boundary stone.
And so they wander here and there in mind's blind blundering.
Unless you spit all thoughts like these away from you,
And shun to think of things unworthy of the gods,
Unworthy of their peace,
The holy power of gods degraded by your thought
Will often do you harm.
I do not mean that heaven's awful majesty

Can really be assailed by any thought of yours,
And long to visit you with savage punishment;
Rather that you yourself might think
These tranquil beings in their long untroubled peace
Might set in motion mighty waves of wrath.
And then you won't approach the holy shrines of gods
With hearts at peace
Nor be strong to take into your mind,
Like theirs at peace,
Those holy visions of the sacred form of god
That show the shape of godhead to the minds of men.
And you yourself must know,
How far removed from sweet tranquility
That life would be.'
1. D.R.N. VI 48; Wi.mp:ar, R.P.S. 250-1.

CHAPTER VI
HOW MEN SHOULD LIVE

Lucretius' System of Ethics
The six books on Nature represent a tremendous achievement
alike intellectual, emotional and poetic. For a man who died so
young ( as the reader will recall in his forty-fourth year)~ sheer
intellectual labour of so much poetic output must have been prooi-
gious. The poetmmself tells of long night sessions 'working the still
rughts through' (noctes per serenas) when he sought the appropriate
word, the haunting poetic line with which to expound the insights
of the 'Divine Master' for his patron Memmius. The intellectual
passion, the emotional drive must have been deep and compelling.
There is rrt~re_ than a touch of the •evangelical' about Lucretius. He
lfaoinllCh of the fire, the intensity, the energy, the conviction of a
Hebrew prop_h~t of old. Now these are qualities, forces even of the
spirit of man that we usualJy think of as particularly religious. But
\ Lucretius, as we have seen, was a militant combatanL.agaiost the
/)._ su~~t_!lral. He was not a mer~ passive disbeliever, but a warrior
in the arena Of ideas, a protagoniSt in the intense emotion of an
·ami-llieistk CieCd. "Several ageS- and periods of human history have
seen Similar emotions and similar ideas develop around a political
and social program. There was, for example, the American War of
Independence. (Tom Paine leaps to the mind; there was the French
Revolution-a Danton, Mirabeau, a Robespierre.) There was a
profound self-dedication to a political and social ideal, mixed with
antitheism in the Russian revolution-Lenin and his followers.
Lucretius perhaps combined a political with a philosophical creed,
a social evangel with an anti-religious crusade? Nothing could be
further from the truth! Lucretius, like tbe other ancient Epicureans,
despised political or social activity. These men did not see in politics
hope for the salvation or redemption of mankind. All of these
creeds, whether conventionally religious, or less conventionally
social, economic, political in their message, promise a better life,
more happiness, more welfare, whether economic or spiritual for
mankind. What was the promise of Lucretius? How should men live
so as to allow the greatest measure of happiness?
64
How MEN SHOULD LIVE 65
Lucretius' answer to these two questions is twofold-negative

and positive, what to do, what not to do, to attain the maximum
possible in human happiness. Let us look at the negative side first.
What should not man do if he is to live a happy life? To this ques-
tion we have already seen the answer in discussing Lucretius the
man, for Lucretius the man can not be disassociated from the man's
concept of how men ought to live. The answer of Lucretius is clear,
articulate, resolute. Man must not live as most men now do .
. . scurry to and fro
Seeking to find the hidden path of life,
Well-spent, well-ordered
You see them battle with their wits,
Pit lineage 'gainst lineage,
Working day and night with sinews and with mind
To gain the crown of wealth, the pride of power.'
Avarice, ambition and lust, he thought, brought to man no
lasting or permanent happiness. No one, as we have seen, is so
sensitively aware of the haunting dissatisfactions that dog mankind
even in the midst of wealth and plenty and success.
But no man, as we know can 'scape himself
This self will cling to him against his will. 2
The subject matter here is conventional within the patterns of Epi-
curean thinking. The poet Horace who lived a little later than
Lucretius and who loved to dabble in an urbane, worldly-wise way
with Epicurean concepts, expresses the same idea. 'Those who run
overse¥ change their climate but not their minds.''fiiecmrerencc
between the light versifier and the profound poet is a matter of
emotion, intensity of feeling, the articulate realization of human
experience. Man's greatness, well-being and happiness is not to
be found in a multitude of possessions (he uses the scornful and
colourless word 'things'.) Man cannot be sated with a feast of
'things'. He cannot find happiness or a well-nourished ego in wealth
or success or pride of birth. Man's yearning for all these things is an
expression of fear, of insecurity and consequent inner dissatisfac-
tion .. If only man could banish fear of insecurity! And here Lucretius
makes a most remarkable assumption. All jl)ese fears and agonies
and strivings can be reduced to one fear..:._the fear of death. And the ~
fearofaeath is poignant because of the fear of torments after death.
I. D.R.N. 2, 10-14; Winspear, R.P.S. 48.
2. D.R.N. ), 1061-1070; Winspear, R.P.S. IJS.
lf then, Lucretius argued, we can banish once and for all the fear of
endless torments, which men think await them when they die, then
all fears will be done away with and men can live their lives in
perfect peace, happiness and tranquillity. Here then is the reason,
deep, urgent, compelling, for the study of philosophy. "What is in
question is not one hour but all eternity. What fate awaits men after
death." Fear can be banished. The torments of Hell can be over-
come. 0, death, where is thy sting? 0 grave, where is thy victory?
And overcome not by the mystical resurrection of a divine being,
but by the study of science, the comprehension of materialistic
philosophy. To put his point of view briefly, bluntly: Lucretius
belie~e_d_ thaJ !ouhe attainment o,f tran.q.uillity Qlmind.7lieiimst
important single thing_ was the knowledge of physics, the study of
the afon1ic_ l_)l,ilo_s_ophy, Out of this study would proceed the full
emotion--:'lT and intellectual realization of universal law, cause and
C~Ct.-9.PCr,ltil]g_ everyWhCre-iD the uniVersC. Men ·would come to
realize that 'nothing comes to be from nothing by divine decree' but
that all things are governed by order, regularity, consistence, in a
word by natural law. And so he thought that fear could be banished,
all insecurity, all haunting dissatisfactions of human life. And so
mankind embracing 'the passionless bride, divine tranquillity' would
come to live a life that was altogether godlike; because was not that
how the blessed gods themselves lived in the 'inter-stellar spaces'
with fear and care removed? Not then, in a multitude of possessions,
not in wealth, fame, eminence, power could man find his inner
satisfaction. Rather by renouncing all these things could he find an
inner peace. In passage after fervent passage he sings the praises
of the simple life. One thing only the human bemgrequires--an
aDSel1ce of pain in the body, the presence of pleasure in the soul.
As for the luxuries which the wealthy Roman loved, for which be
strove with might and main, Lucretius knew and despised them.
Not to see that Nature asks for nothing
But that, body free from pain and mind from care,
We can enjoy sweet peace of mind and spirit.
Few things we see our body really needs-
Enough to keep us free from pain.
Though these few things can serve up many luxuries--
Plca!.ant enough at limes,
Nature docs not need that.-
If gilded effigies in sumptuous halls,
With flaming torches in their raised right hands,
Do not bring light to midnight feasts;
(ow MEN SHOULD LIVE 67
If gold and silver shimmer not and glint;

If music echo not from panelled and from gilded beam!.
Without all these, in grassy nook reclined-
A stream, a shady tree instead of luxury-
Needing no wealth, men tend their body's needs
And find sufficient bliss,
Spring on the mountains, flowers in every mead,
Tortured by sickness and by fever racked,
Does woven tapestry or deep rich purple glow
Bring healing quicker, as a bed, than peasant's cloak?
And so, since neither fame nor family nor wealth
Can heal your body, can they help your mind?"
In a passage in the Fifth Book Lucretius discusses the origin
of wealth. Characteristically he concludes his discussion with the
following lines.
So if a man would guide his life aright by reason's principles
Plain living with a mind at peace is wealth indeed.
The little that he needs man never lacks.'
But men have longed for wealth and power pre-eminent,
To build a strong foundation under life,
That wealth enable them to live a life of quiet tranquillity,
But all in vain.
While mad to scale the dizzy heights of honour and of fame
They've made the path of life with dangers teem.
Often they think their strivings 've reached the peak,
But envy, like a thunderbolt,
Has burled them down to noisome depths.
Si.nee envy like a lightning flash
Sets topmost heights ablaze,
Whatever is pre~eminent most generally.
Better to be a subject with a mind at peace
Than hold the kingdom's power and kingly sway.
Permit men, then, to sweat away the blood of life,
Worn out in vain;
Fight their way forward on ambition's narrow way.
Vain is the wisdom gained from lips of other men,
Vain fantasy by hearsay, not experience, won.
Such spurious insight cannot help mankind,
It never has, it never will.~
l: ~-~~:: 1,6 !eyW~r~lif"!i~~ ~ve seemed lite mockery 10 millions. Por then
were millions in the Roman empire who lived very close to the subsistence level. Whb
a bland k..iad of 5elf-as.surance, Lucretius never noticed these sLruglina millions. HI.I
Qborutiom were directed 1owards bis own clus.
S.D.R.N. S, 1111 ff. Winspear. R.PS. 234 ff.
Some comments on this outlook may help the student to under-

stand it. Lucretius, like his master Epicurus, has been called a
hedanist. The Greek word hedone means pleasure and so a hedonist
is presumably one who worships pleasure. And for the doctrine of
hedonism, some theologians and idealist philosophers have reserved
their sharpest barbs, their most contemptuous rhetoric. This is (in
Carlyle's phrase) the 'harlot doctrine', the 'ethics of the frying pan.'
Epicure has become synonymous in the English language with one
who has an educated appreciation of the pleasures of the table.
Is Epicureanism a mere wallowing in sensuous activity, a de-
struction of everything that is elevated or noble in life? Our sketch
of Lucretius' views so far should convince anyone that such diatribes
were, to say the least, unfair. The master, Epicurus himself, was a
man of notoriously simple life and habits. 'Send me some Pramnian
cheese', he once wrote, 'that I may have a banquet.' With his
friends and associates in the 'Garden' he provided a model of that
intellectual and spiritual self-cultivation which he and his followers
recommended. 'II faut cultiver le jardin' the French writer exclaimed
(perhaps with conscious allusion to the famous 'Garden' of Epi-
curus). Cultivate the little garden within and depend as little as
possible on the external world. The 'pleasure' that the Epicurean
recommended was not the gay intensity of glutton or libertine, not
the external pleasures of bed or table, of wine cup and guitar, but
the simple internal self-sufficiency that comes from a mind at peace
and the constant refreshment of the spirit.
And yet without adopting the severest strictures of saint or
sage, many people will feel some dissatisfaction with the prescrip-
tions and advice of Lucretius. Consider the passage again that we
have just quoted. An ethical doctrine should be capable of universal
application; it should apply to any situation to give light and guid-
ance. Try this one on some imaginary situations with which we are
all too familiar: African or Asian leaders caught up by winds of
change and yet facing the machinery of repression. Young men
whose career is forcibly interrupted in the interest of military train-
ing, the suburbanite executive desperately trying to 'keep up with
the Joneses' in a period of inflation, men and women who are
suddenly cast on the labour market by the whimsy of an impersonal
economic system. ( Forget all these perplexities---let's go on a
picnic-two or three of us together, by some spring of triclcling
water, under the shade of a great tree, pleasantly we can take care
of the body's needs-particularly when the weather smiles and the

season of the year sprinkles the green grass with flowers.') It would
prove I am afraid, a sorry cvangel.
To many it may sound the note of extreme paradox-that
Lucretius, the materialist poet and philosopher, should be so neglect-
ful of the external world of things. Friendship he did allow and
to this degree the modification of the self-sufficient individual.
Aristotle centuries before had analysed and classified friendship:
(a) with a view to mutual pleasure as e.g. when people go fishing
or dancing or skating together; (b) for mutual advantage as when
men are joined together for profit in a business partnership; (c) for
the good; the comradeship of noble ideal or high endeavour. (And
this last is probably what 'Charity' means in the Christian evangel.)
To this last kind of 'friendship' Lucretius seems too blind. He
begins always with the isolated individual and his task is to bring
them together into an association. Society is for him a series of
isolated individuals, just as nature is· a series of isolated atoms. In
fact, it would not be incorrect to describe Lucretius' ethical position
ana that of the Epicureans generally as 'atomism' in ethics. And
here it might be well to notice an interesting parallel. The rise
of modem capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in
France and England produced very similar doctrines both in ethics
and in physics. In fact it would not be amiss to describe the outlook
there developed as the ethical point of view of the business man.
The financial magnate strives to maximize the returns from his
investments. It is easy for him to present this process to himself as
the maximizing of his pleasures.
And the almost commonplace assumption of the business man
of an earlier century-sometimes articulate, sometimes unexpressed
-was that in maximizing his own pleasures and his own invest-
ments he was automatically doing what was best for society as a
whole. 'Every individual' wrote Adam Smith, the famous British
writer and prophet of the rise of capitalism, 'is continually exerting
himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever
he can command. It is his own advantage indeed and not that of
society which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage
naturally or necessarily leads him to prefer the employment which
is most advantageous to society. And he is in this as in most other
cases led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part
of his intentions.' Today the faith here expressed that the well-being
of the individual entrepreneur inevitably coincides with the well-
being of society, seems a little wistful. Lucretius does not have this
faith. But in a more highly developed society, we may suggest, bis

concentration on the atomic individual might well tend in this direc-
tion. But for our poet, in his day and age, the concern for the well-
being of society was very low. He recommends that in cultivating
the 'little garden within' men should turn aside from society entirely
and take refuge in the 'ivory tower'. We are so used to the concept
of the 'ivory tower' as a concept of escape from struggle that it may
come as a shock to some to find the theory first expressed with so
much poignancy and beauty by Lucretius.
0 sweet it is when on the mighty sea,
The wind stirs up great billows,
One's own foot firm on steady earth,
To watch another's troubles.
Not that we find delight in other's strugglings,
But that it's sweet to look on ills
From which oneself escapes.
Sweet, too, to look
When cavalcades of war contend upon the plain,
And one is safe, oneself.
But far surpassing everything in bliss it is,
To occupy the high serene embattled eminence,
The ivory tower,
Whose muniments are thought and high philosophy,
The wisdom of the wise.
Here you look down and see, like tiny ants,
Men scurry to and fro, wandering here and there,
Seeking to find the hidden path of life,
Well-spent, well·ordered.
You see them battle with their wits,
Pit lineage 'gainst lineage,
Working day and night with sinews and with mind,
To gain the crown of wealth, the pride of power.•
One of my students once remarked that this seemed to her the
most pagan passage in Lucretius. Her word was not perhaps too
well chosen. But her remark will serve to remind us that the view of
man a~ an atomic individual joined to other men like bricks in a
wall, bound together (in its modern form) by nothing but the 'cash
nexus' is not a natural or inevitable view. In tribal life, for the slave
or propertylcss free worker amid the collapse of Imperial Rome, to
the men of the Catholic and FeudaJ Middle Ages, to members of
modem political reform movements it was more natural to think of
fl IJ k N 1, I ff. Winar,a,r, R.l'.S. 41 ff.
How Mt:N SHOULD LIVE 71
society as in some sense organic and men as joined togcth

limbs of the body or the branches of the vine. Howcve
ancient Roman 'Knight', as for his counterpart, the classi
preneur of the nineteenth century, the view of man as an at
of society as a collection of atoms, was perhaps a more natur
of thinking and feeling. As we shall see in the next chapter the s ..
general outlook was applied to the physical universe to create~
famous •atomic hypothesis'. ·~t,-.
We have noticed in a previous chapter that the philosophy ot
Lucretius was particularly congenial to the progressive Romans of
his day-to that section of the governing class which, because it
depended on trade, commerce, investment, banking, usury and
the sJave trade, and not primarily on revenues from land owner-
ship, found itself in direct political opposition to the senate. We
have noticed that the opposition to Roman religion was in part a
political opposition-an attempt to undermine, refute and over-
throw the whole machinery of religious conservatism on which
political conservatism so openly depended. In this aspect of its
nature, therefore, the Epicurean creed appealed to the most vig-
orous and active sections of the progressive movement. It appealed
to great revolutionary leaders like Julius Caesar who must have seen
in it a useful supplement to his own political and military struggles.'
But here we seem to be approaching a paradox. The ethical
creed which Lucretius preached could not approve the political
struggles of a man like Caesar. This was precisely that striving for
material things, the struggle for place and power ( even in the
service of a political ideal) which Lucretius so strongly deprecated.
(Some even think that the picture of a politician which we have
previously quoted 'Who always comes back home beaten and sad'
was modelled on Julius Caesar. Did not Caesar tell his mother
when he set out for election as Pontifex Maximus that he would
come home as Pontifex or not at all? Incidentally, the very fact that
a man of such sceptical temper as Caesar should have been elected
to the highest priesthood of the Roman state is an indication of the
extent to which the realities of Roman religion had decayed.)
Caesar's endeavours were exactly the kind of active life which inter-
fered with the tranquil enjoyment of intellectual contemplation
-Lucretius' ethical ideal. In other words the political leader and
arch revolutionary, the conquering general and successful states-
man could not live in the ivory tower.
7. Fo_r .an ingenious reconstruction in fiction or Julius Caesar's thinking on philosophy ud
reli1.1on see Thorn1on Wilder, Thr ldrs of March. New York, 1948.
And yet in a sense this demar>d for withdrawal from active

political life does express the needs of the leaders of the emerging
revolution. Since the time of the Gracchi it had been clear that the
entrenched power of the 'old families' could only be broken by the
'democratic monarchy'. The democratic coalition was headed for
Caesarism and absolutism. And for absolutism as Hans Kelsen
vigorously points out the morality of withdrawal is, to say the least,
useful.
Let it be sufficient here to recall that the glorification of the
contemplative life, which has renounced all activity and more
especially all political activity, has at all times constituted a typical
clement of the political morality set up by the ideologies of abso-
lute monarchy. For the essential tendency of this form of state
consists in ex.eluding the subjects from all share in public affair,.•
The programme of the democratic monarchy was most clearly
grasped and vigorously expressed by Julius Caesar. Of course the
programme as actually worked out in practice by Augustus, after
the assassination of Julius, represented a compromise with the old
order, the welding together of a new and unified governing class
based on the remnants of the old order, the Knights, wealthy provin-
cials and even freedmen. But this could not have happened until the
decisive defeat of the rule of the old landed aristocracy. Gracchus,
remarked an ancient commentator shrewdly, had 'made the State
two headed'. It was the task of Augustus to remedy this monstrosity
and give the state again one head; but a new head.• This devel-
opment goes far to explain a fact that has been frequently noticed
-the relatively slight influence of Lucretius and Epicureanism
generally after the first century B.C. For the reconstituted oligarchy,
Stoicism proved a much more congCrual creeam- facing a gigantic
aDOWOfld wide movement of popular unrest crystallized in the
i~ing oi the-Galilean.
- There were other Romans of the period who did embody more
perfectly the Epicurean ideal. There was, for example, the friend
and correspondent of Cicero, Titus Pomponius Atticus. Atticus took
a negative attitude to Roman politics; so much so that be retired to
Athens, still the centre of Greek cultural and intellectual life. From
this post of vantage he carried on a long and lively correspondence
with his political friend, the well known Roman orator. As far as
I. HaN Kc!Kn, Th, l"hllmoplty of Arb1r1d, and ,,., H•ll•nk M#IC•donltut l'oUcy. h.le:r-
nation.al Journal of Ethic.a, Volume XLVIII, Oc1., 1917.
9. Cf. A. D. WJupMC and L. Gewete, .A.11,..,,au •11111 ROIIIIM R~lnletk,,a. Wbooada
19)2.
we can judge from the burden of Cicero's replies, all Atticus' advice
on politics boiled down to one admonition of caution, 'For heaven's
sake, don't stick your neck out'. (Cura tuae saluti, ut me amas.)
U Atticus found politics both dangerous and boring, he found
compensation in exactly the way that Lucretius would prescribe.
He was an ardent student of literature, a lover of music, a connois-
seur of all the fine arts and no mean or unskilful collector.
Another example (a little later) was the poet Horace, who
tound his ivory tower in a sylvan retreat,-'hllffiC farm in the
Sabine Hills east of Rome, with five stout tenants to do the hard
work, while Horace devoted himself to all the placid pleasures
-f«x>d in moderation, wine and love likewise (he remained a
bachelor), as well as poetry and literature. Jestingly he described
himself in a letter to a friend as 'a sleek porker from the herd of
Epicurus'. The simple life that Lucretius prescribed was in practice
too often interpreted as the simple life as it is understood in West-
chester County on the Philadelphia Main Line, in Toronto's Rich-
mond Hill, or in Surrey. The exhortations of a Lucretius to the
simple life have a peculiar appeal to wealth long established and
secure.
Here then is our paradox which we can neither minimize nor
tone down. The Epicurean creed appealed historically and indeed
reflected the world outlook of two quite different types within the
Roman governing class whom we may symbolize by Julius Caesar
and Atticus; the political striver and the wealthy escapist. The
paradox cannot be eliminated because it represented perfectly the
paradoxical position of the ancient mercantile 'capitalist'-a revolu-
tionary only when he faced the entrenched and embattled Senate
(the political instrument of landowners and ancient families). All
the time his ears were anxiously attuned to the murmurs of dis-
content from below and the restless stirrings of slave and outcast
and downtrodden-the ancient lowly. The aspirations of this group
found expression in classical times in religious yearning, most fully
in Christianity. (There is evidence, however, that Spartacus was
initiated into the Dionysiac cult.) The religious scepticism of the
Epicurean creed could therefore be a two-edged tool----eapable of
being wielded as well against the conservative religion of the Senate
as against the revolutionary religion of the slave. These and other
paradoxes in the poet of ancient science can be explained by the
political incoherence of the class for which he spoke, rather than by
any madness or incoherence of outlook in the poet himself.
These considerations will help us to reallie how mistaken are

those writers who regard Lucretius as an ancient proletarian thinker
-a kind of classical analogue to Karl Marx.
Lucretius' doctrine of free will reflects the thought and feeling
of the ancient mercantile elements rather than the free craftsman
or slave. The insistence on free will comes most naturally to those
who are themselves in a position to make valid choices. The em-
ployer - merchant - concessionaire could. He could choose to buy
a farm or villa in Athens, or a mansion in Rome. He could travel
abroad if that were his wish, or he could stay at home. Those
choices were real for him. But for a member of the nameless, teem-
ing multitude such choice was an illusion. He was indeed bound by
the iron chains of necessity; he was bound to the land or the work-
shop, literally manacled at night with no hope of escape except like
Spartacus in hopeless and desperate revolt. In bis agony he could
only cry with Saint Paul: 'I am so let and bound by the chain of
my sins that I cannot do the thing that I would'.
The period which created Epicureanism bad created also for
the first time in history a new world fact-the emergence of a world-
wide political order. The empire of Alexander the Great first, and
then the empire of Rome seemed to encompass all of civilized man-
kind and to bring all tribes, races and tongues under the aegis of
one all-embracing law. It is not therefore surprising that the concept
of universal law throughout the universe rose at this particular time
in men's minds--one universal dominance of cause and effect;
dominance which for Stoics and aristocrats was idea, governing
principle (universal providence equals universal law), but for the
Epicureans, matter, the ceaseless falling of the atom stream. More-
over, Epicurus and Lucretius felt strongly that if law were universal
and omnipotent, man's conduct too was governed by law. For every
action in every man there must be a sufficient cause. If in the realm
of physics, they felt, nothing can come to be from nothing by divine
decree, this must be true of human conduct also. And so arose the
doctrine of determinism; the belief that man's actions are deter-
mined by sufficient cause; that man, too, is part of the same nexus
of cause and effect from everlasting to everlasting. The reader may
remember that this doctrine has found expression in an often
quoted limerick attributed, perhaps rightly, to Father Ronald Knox.
There once was a man who said damn
I've just found out that I am
A creature that moves in predeatinate arooves,
In short not a bus but a tram.
How MEN Snouw LIVE 75
But mankind as a tram-man's every movement dictated to

him by the street rails on which he was forced to move-this was a
view that was highly unpalatable to the Epicureans and the people
for whom they spoke. It seemed to contradict every experience of
the wealthy for whom real choice seemed a natural and inescapable
fact. How then were they to reconcile these two facts of life,
seemingly so contradictory-the universal domination of cause and
effect, and the apparent freedom of man to choose, to select valid
alternatives-in a word freedom of the will? For Lucretius, at least,
the arguments for freedom seemed overwhelming.
Once more, if movement always is to other movement linked,
And if the new comes ever from the old,
As in determinist argument;
If atoms in their swerve do not start fresh
To break the bonds of Fate;
If cause must follow cause from infinite time,
Whence comes free will for living things on earth?
Whence comes this power, I say, snatched from the grasp of Fate
This Will whereby we move wherever fancy prompts?
For move we do,
At no fixed times and no fixed intervals of space,
Wherever mind suggests.
Assuredly at times like this,
Man's purpose is the starting point;
His purpose stirs the motion in bis limbs. 1e1
And so began in classical antiquity the long conflict between
1 Free Will' and 'Determinism', between human choice and scientific
law. It was not until the modern world that this conflict was
resolved when the more progressive thinkers realized that man
became free precisely by understanding and controlling natural law
whether in nature or society. Scientific law is external, obstructive,
alien to our will just to the degree that it is not understood. But
understand it, control it, mould it to one's will and it becomes the
instrument of one's purpose, the expression of one's freedom. I
have explained this to students in this way. On a cold winter morn-
ing my car which should be responsive to my wishes, the instrument
of my will, the vehicle which enabled me to meet my appointments,
refused to start. It seemed like a cold, intractable, alien monster,
thwarting my wish, impeding my desire. But one morning a wise
mechanic showed me that moisture was condensing in the dis-
tributor cap and how to remove the cap and wipe away the moisture.
10. D.R.N. 2, 251 ff. Win.,pcar, R.P.S. 47 ff.
And so the car started. The alien monster was transformed to what
it should have been in the first plr.ce-the instrument and vehicle
of my will, the expression of my freedom, the symbol of man's
control over inert nature. For Lucretius such a resolution of the
paradox was not possible. Science was in its infancy. Social science
(in spite of Lucretius' own great contribution) was almost un-
known. For conservatives and their thinkers, wars, depressions and
economic cycles, hunger and famine seem like incomprehensible
catastrophes which man will never escape. Today the progressive
thinker who wishes to know 'the causes of things' and by under-
standing control them, can analyze the causes of even social events.
Lucretius who yearned as profoundly as anyone in history to know
the 'causes of things' did not belong to a time or class for which
such understanding was possible. For him the paradox had to
remain in the realm of paradox. There was on the one hand univer-
sal law; there was on the other hand human freedom which seemed
like a 'power snatched from the grasp of Fate' (Fatis avolsa potes-
ras). One could only be vindicated by overthrowing another, and it
is not strange that in the last analysis it was 'law' which Lucretius
abandoned. Man is free because not everything is determined.
There is at the heart and centre of the universe an clement of caprice.
For no reason, without any cause whatever, the atoms swerve from
their headlong perpendicular descent. If atoms can act capriciously,
man can do the same. When all the factors are present, when the
pressures external and internal are all brought to bear, he can
swerve this way and that, he can make choices for which the pres-
sures provide no sufficient cause. This famous doctrine of the swerve
of the atoms is one that we shall meet again in the next chapter. For
this moment, it is enough to notice its function in Lucretius' doc-
trine of ethics. Man is free because in the last analysis all nature is
capricious. The apparent reign of ordered uniformity and natural
law must give way to an 'indeterminism', an uncaused event in the
very heart and centre and matrix of all things that are.
The difficulties and paradoxes at which we here glance arc
inseparable from that form of materialism which we call mechanism.
We shall examine this creed again in our next chapter when we
come to examine the world view of Lucretius. Mechanism is the
view that all change is mechanical chang~the change of place, or
position, change impelled by such mechanical forces as heat, energy,
gravilation, etc. Mechanism is not the same thing as materialism
How MF.N SHOULD LIVE 77
which teaches that matter is primary in time and ultimate in analy-

sis; that all things have in the last analysis a material basis. But
modern materialism does not argue that all change can be reduced
to mechanical change. It sees change proceeding at different levels;
at each level something new has been added. There is, for example,
chemical change in which mechanistic elements are present but are
not enough to explain all that occurs. There is biological change,
the growth, development and decay of protoplasm in which, though
mechanical and chemical elements enter, yet it is not fully explained
by these elements. There is also psychological change, the devel-
opment, growth and decay of certain specialized cells in the human
anatomy which enable man to think and feel, compose symphonies,
write plays and plan for the future. And there is finally social change
in which that peculiar animal, man, working with his fellows in
rational co-operation learns to build dams, to create bridges, or
construct every form of social institution. Now psychological and
intellectual change and creation depend on brain cells ( there can
be no thinking without brain cells), but it cannot be exhaustively
explained by a study of brain cells. And, social change depends
upon material and economic forces, but it cannot be fully explained
by the study of social forces. Something new has been added.
Mechanism tends to reduce change at each level to the laws of the
level below; and in its extremest form to see everything as explained
by mechanical change-the transformation of position or energy.
When most people think of materialism and ( criticize it) they are
really thinking of mechanism. And so we frequently find the mate-
rialist being asked rhetorically if any shuffling and reshuffling of
letters (mechanically) could produce the play of Hamlet or any
mechanical combining of sounds could produce the Eroica sym-
phony.
It cannot be denied that Lucretius had strong tendencies to
mechanism in his thinking, checked of course by the sheer creative
power of his poetical imagination and the magnificent insights of
his immortal verse.
This brief discussion of the weakness of mechanism has been
introduced at this point to help us understand the weakness (while
we admire the splendour of its expression) of Lucretius' views on a
very important aspect of human conduct and therefore of human
ethics, namely sex. To say, as many have said, that Lucretius is
cynical and physiological in his treatment of sex is true as for as it
goes. But it does not help us to understand why our poet with his
splendid sensitivity should reduce all the subtle spiritual manifesta-

tions of the love between man and .voman simply to a consideration
of the physical sexual act. Some have supposed that Lucretius'
attitude reflects an unhap~y personal experience. 'He attacks the
passion of sex love' (writes William Ellery Leonard) 'as the des-
troyer of peace, reason and noble aims, like one who has suffered
and wills to suffer no more, and not like one who has merely read
the curt warnings of Epicurus. He seems not to have experienced at
all what sex can itself do in romantic love to organize the per-
sonality, to release reason for noble creative life, to define aims and
establish peace; and with his imagination, and doubtless his memory,
throbbing to the throbbing bodies of lovers in the sex embrace, he
speaks only of a hopeless frustration-forgetting not only the
spiritual rewards in the union itself, but the offspring of whom in
other passages he speaks with such human sympathy and Roman
pride in family."' Perhaps be bad had an unhappy experience-
perhaps this is the origin of the legend 'that some mistress had tried
to cure him' (his wife, says Tennyson, careful of the Victorian
proprieties) (I am quoting Leonard again. And the reader will
recall the poem of Tennyson . ...
Lucilia married to Lucretius found
Her master cold.
whatever the reason, and all this is of course pure speculation, even
if based on the text of the poem and the legend reported by St.
Jerome, Lucretius does rage against the passion of love and does
depict it with a kind of fascination that is strangely naked in its
vividness.
Here then is another paradox which we can neither soften or
tone down. But it does not seem to me to point to incoherence or
madness in the poet's mind; rather, it bespeaks a rich and creative
poetic imagination struggling to burst the fetters of mechanism.
And so love like avarice, ambition, or the fear of death is to be
shunned because it brings disquiet rather than peace, a mental
perturbation not tranquillity.
Tranquillity then is the thing-to be able to view all things with
a mind at peace, with care and fear removed. And yet this very
peace, as every reader feels, is something that Lucretius never really
seems to attain. Argue with himself as he will, that 'Blind goad'
which he deprecates in others seems always to prick: his spirit into
11. Smu.h :inJ Leonard, p. 12
How MEN SHOULD LIV[ 79
a frenzy of fresh activity. The horror which he displays of the

volnera vitae, the wounds of life, seems at times a morbid and a
pathological thing. Every critic has noticed, too, how, in that magnif-
icent passage in the third book (already. quoted) in which he argues
against the fear of death, the joys of living are depicted with a
warmth and vividness of compelling desire, the rational arguments
that are designed to banish the fear of death are pressed with the
chilling pa11or of pure reason. It was as though, within the phil-
osophers, heart were warring against head, as though civil conflict
were raging in the poet's soul. It was as though for him death were
really triumphant, more immortalis as he puts it in a haunting line
-death deathless, death triumphant, death invincible; Mortalemque
vitam cum mors immortalis ademit, when death immortal once has
snatched away our mortal life. This then is the supreme tragedy of
Lucretius-that the poet and prophet of tranquillity preaches a
peace of mind which he can never attain. And perhaps no man can
attain so long as he remains at the point of view of the isolated,
atomic individual and does not lose himself in a social goal, large
enough to embrace all humanity in its purview and scope.
CHAPTER VII
THE WORLD OUTLOOK OF LUCRETIUS
J. Physical Theory and its History: Scientific Method
Lucretius then wrote luminous verse, thousands of bright lucid,
glowing lines with one central intention-to release men's minds
from the bondage liI7liesupernatural, enabling them to live in
tranquillity and peace. Against the mystical view of the world, he
sets up the ratfonal; against godly intederence and capricious
change, he sets up the concept of unbroken law, the universal realm
of ordered change. It was to be either the whimsical, capricious
interference of deities, producing miracles, wonders, unexpected
events, or the ordered majesty of events in orderly succession, the
awe inspiring march of natural forces and inexorable law. It is the
second concept that moves Lucretius to profound emotion, that
provides the essentially passionate dynamic of his creative and
poetical powers. It is the majesty of things that moves him-pro
maiestate rerum. It is the endless yet predictable succession of
nature's movements that excites in him a profound and almost
religious awe. And it is the gradual power over nature that man has
achieved by scientific investigation that moves him to the most
sublime excitement, the most supreme exaltation. And most of all
be feels these moods when he contemplates the profound spec-
ulative achievements of his master Epicurus. Time after time he
comes back to this central theme and writes a hymn of praise for
the greatness of Epicurus' achievements.
The panegyric with which the poem begins we have quoted
already. As Lucretius begins the third book this theme is taken up
once more.
Into thick darkness came of old great light.
You do I follow, you who brought the Jight
To show us what is good and bad in human life,
You do I follow, glory of the Grecian race,
And in your footsteps firmly plant my own.
Not that I want to rival you; affection makes me want to i.mitale.
How can a swallow vie with swam
Or kids with little tottering limbs
On race track vie with mighty practiced hone?
You arc the father of my mind, discoverer of nature.
80
THE WORLD OUTLOOK OF LUCRETIUS 81
From your books, 0 seer renowned

You give a father's precepts in philosophy.
As bees in flowery meadows suck each flower,
So we your golden words repeatedly
We feed on them and find them golden,
Worthy of eternal life.
Soon as your thought, born of a godlike mind,
Began to thunder forth on Nature's laws,
Then all terrors from the spirit flee;
The ramparts of the world are torn apart.
I see the atoms' pageant streaming through the void.'
Books Five and Six also begin with praise of Epicurus.
What talent's adequate and what poetic powers
To match the insight of this seer's philosophy?
Or whose command of words is great enough to match this worth.
Deserve the gifts he's given from heart and brain?
No mortal, as I think.
If I can speak as demonstrated majesty of theme demands,
He was a god, a god, I say, 0 Memmius renowned.
He first brought reason's gifts to man's life's ordering
(!bat which we've come to call philosophy)
His thought has brought the bark of human life
Out of the billows, lodged it safe in port;
Out of the inky black and stress of midnight storm
Placed it in clear and calm and dazzling light.
Could any god accomplish more than this?
Think of the other gifts w.e call d~vine.
Even today earth teems with terror and with savage beasts,
In glades and mighty mountains and deep woods.
Their haunts we can avoid if that's our wish.
But if the heart's not pure what perils and what wars
We have to enter, if we wish or not!
What pangs of care can rive an anxious heart!
What terrors too!
And what of pride and lust and wantonness!
And what of luxury and sloth!
And so the seer who banished all these sins
By words, not arms,
Should we not number him among the immortal gods?
And this the more because he used to speak in good and godlike
words
About the gods themselves,
And by his reasoning reveal the stuff of things.
1. D.R.N. 3, I ff. Wimpcar, R.P.S. 9-4 ff.
I follow in his footsteps, think his thoughts,

And teach by what stern law all thi11gs are made,
And how they must abide in it,
Nor break the strong decrees of time.
At the beginning of the sixth book Lucretius joins together praise
of Athens with a fresh panegyric on his master.
From Epicurus Lucretius had learned of the atomic hypothesis.
And this hypothesis has stirred him to the very depths of his being,
has goaded him to his greatest flights of poetic achievement. And this
phenomenon, as we have said before, is unique in all literature. Not
the majesty of nature's god, but the majesty of nature herself, all
creative and all creating, makes a poet out of a man, provides the
forge and sets the anvil, to hammer out his splendid, musical and
inspiring verse. This is why Lucretius is regarded as both uniquely
and preeminently the poet of science.
Recently, everything from soap suds to bathing suits has been
described by eager advertisers and ardent salesmen as atomic. We
are living in the atomic age we say. Since the atomic bombs fell on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki we have come to feel the sense of a new
era in man's progressive conquest of nature. The great scientific
achievement of our day is the practical demonstration that the atom
can be split, that the atomic hypothesis is not the ultimate picture
of the material constitution of things. Nonetheless, modem physical
science in modifying the atomic hypothesis, still adheres to it in all
its essentials. In the development of the world view of the modem
man of physics, the school of Epicurus has made a most significant
contribution.
The world about us, practically all the things which change on
Earth, non-living and living matter, are involved in a constant inter-
change, of combinations, dissociations, interactions, etc., of chem-
ical compounds and elements in which the atoms of each element
retain their integrity. Nuclear changes which involve the splitting of
atoms are a source of enormous energy, but do not play any
important role in the processes occurring on the planet EARTH.
Nuclear reactions are important in the SUN and stars ( other than
moons and planets). Lucretius, in applying the atomic theory to
many everyday phenomena was essentially correct. The vast bull::
of chemistry, biochemistry, geology (crystalline and amorphous
structures) is ba!ied on the atomic theory. The discovery that the
atom could be split has not altered this one whit. In fact, the earlier
discoveries concerning the structure of the atoms ( nucleus, elec-

trons, protons, neutrons) did not involve the phenomena of nuclear
fission or fusion. The latter deepened our understanding of the
behavior of the chemical elements and their compounds, but we
have retained the essential atomic theory (that elements and com-
pounds are made of atoms).
The one aspect of Dalton's original enunciation which has been
repudiated is the indestructibility of the atom. The rest of his
theory stands, with minor revisions due to isotopy ,9
AU this is true even though the modem scientist would have
scant respect for the scientific method which the Epicureans used to
arrive at their conclusions. Even the best thinkers of antiquity had
only the dimmest notions of scientific method as we understand it
today. We hear very little among them of experimentation, or
controls, or the whole paraphernalia of careful investigation which
enables the modern man of science to make his advances. Exper-
iments in the realm of physics were, in antiquity, rarely mentioned.
We learn of one investigator who, wishing to demonstrate that the
atmosphere was substance and produced resistance, whirled inflated
2. For lhis evaluation of alom.i,;; theory and for the quote whi,;;b. follows I am i~dcbted to
J. L. Morrison, Ph.D., who wu kind enou1h to read lhc book: in manus,;;ript for the
pub~~c discoveries of Lavoisier and Proust were hiJhly si,nificanl, bu! they were
isolated facts in a sea of ipora.nce. Al !be Siar! of lhc 19th ccntul)' nobody had any
ddc.as.iblc ideu about the structure of maucr, of how clemenll 10 to mate up
compounds. The bold theory that amwcrcd these qucstioru came from a most unlikely
individual, an awkward, colorlcu, poorly educated teacher named John Dalton.
D.alton w.as .a plodding, liter.al thinker who had had no formal instruc1ion in physics
or chemistry, but these liabililics turned out to be assets, because !hey meant tbat he
com1antly sou&h-1 simple cxplanalioru for complex phenomena without being hampered
by the misconceptions of other people.
"The atomic theory of maucr emerged from Dalton's crude aUcmpts at piclurioa
the ultimate particles of which gases were composed. He began with the notion of
Democritus and Lucretius thal cvcrylhina was composed of atoms and made this idea
quan1itativc by making the followtna: assumptions:
I. Every element consists of tiny particles called atoms.
2. The atoms of any one element are aU exactly all.kc.
3. Atoms are indestructible; they cannot be divided, created or dcslroyed.
-4. When two or more clements unite to form a compound, their atoms join to&ctbcr
10 malr.e molecules of the compound,
5. In acncral, atoms combine in small numbers. Thus one atom of an clement A may
combine wilb one atom of B or with two atoms or with lhrce, but not wi1h 50
or 100.
'The first four assumptions are sufficient to explain the laws of conservation of
mus and of definite proportions. The fifth Js justified by the simple prcdictlons that
f:n v~io~=d~';!~~~s~cl~~ca:~dftngn~eifot f~[~!itlln:
i:dJ~!:tth~~fhn;~u~~~tcl~"!f~'!
employed in attempting to determine the numbers of various kinds of atoms, even
though be spent much time and effort on this troblcm, because not long afterward
li:~~~dw~:o~1d:~t t;:,i;:-!i
a1g:oJ~~~~ ':t:0~ 0::o!~i~n~~h ~~~';1~~ the atomic
"We may note in passing !hat assumplioru 2 and 3 above arc valid only so Jong
as we restrict ourselves to chemical processes and properties; modern physics had
revealed that all atoms of the same element need not be identical and that atoms can
}!fod~~:c:: i~~~o o::~c ~::~~~at:::liJ::.nu~g~ ~u:~~fun t~r:s rsnC:t
1
always !rue" (Konrad Bales Kr:iusko.!1' and Arthur Beiser, The Physl~al Urtlverse,
McOnw-Hill, New York, Toronto, London, 1960, p. 126).
goat skins around in air. There were experiments in the field of

optics; there was a flourishing tt.ch~ique of chemistry, albeit of a
primitive and empirical kind. Anatomy and medicine produced
some valid experiments. But it was only in dealing with small and
circumscribed problems, where an idea could be brought im-
mediately to the test of practice, that the ancient man of science can
be said to have developed a scientific method. When it comes to the
physical universe, ancient scientists were helpless to bring their
theories to the test of practice. The modem physicist can develop
his theory about the structure, and divisibility of the atom and
proceed to test explosions. The ancient scientist, lacking the tech-
nique of controlled experiment, and being unable to put his larger
theories to the test of practical verification, bad to proceed in a
less spectacular way. He frequently reached scientific conclusions
by methods that were the reverse of scientific. Lacking controlled
experimentation, his best device was observation of nature, com-
bined with reflections or deductions from his experience. Yet
having said this, one should add that this intellectual orientation
produced astonishing results, compared with those thinkers who first
postulated god or the idea, and then tried to deduce conclusions
from their postulate.
The observations which led the Epicurean school to their
conclusions were frequently sharp and acute. (Though frequently
they impress as devices for explaining, teaching and expounding a
system which the thinker had come to believe in for other reasons
than plain, simple, direct observation of things.) Lucretius, for
example, watched the tiny motes and particles of dust dancing in
the sunbeam that penetrates a dark room. This seemed to prove to
him that not all the atoms were joined together to make things, but
that some, as it were, wandered unlinked and solitary.
But many wander through unending space
And have no chance
To meet and link themselves with other atom forms,
Or unify their moves with theirs.
Of these lone atoms exactly as I've said
An image and a likeness ever turns
And presses on our eyes.
For think,
When rays of sun pour through the darkened bouae,
Why then you'll sec,
A million tiny particles mingle in many ways,
And dance in sunbeams though the empty space,
THE WORLD OUTL<X>K OF LUCRETIUS 85
As though in mimic war the particles wage cverla.sting strife--

Troop ranged 'gainst troop, nor ever call a halt;
In constant harassment
They're made to meet and part.
So you can guess from this
Just what it means
That atoms should be always buffeted in mi&hty void
And so,
A little thing can give a hint of big
And offer traces of a thought.
And so it's very right
That you should tum your mind to bodies dancing in the rays
of sun
Movements like this will give sufficient hint
That clandestine and hidden bodies also lurk.
In atom stream.
For if you watch the motes,
When dancing in a sunbeam, you will often ,ee
The motes by unseen clashings dashed to change their course,
Sometimes tum back, when driven by external blows
And whirl, now this way, then now that
Dancing every way at once.
So you may know
They have this restlessness from atom stream.'
The reader who recalls his first experience with a beam of the
sun pouring perhaps into some old and dark and dusty barn ( surely
a familiar experience in every childhood) will appreciate the fidelity
of this description. But to how few of us does such an experience
suggest a reflection on the ultimate nature of the universe.
If Lucretius depended on observation for the material of his
thought, it must be said that his observations were far ranging, his
perceptions extraordinarily acute. Just because, as we shall see in a
moment he believed so strongly in sense perception as the in-
clispensible starting place for all thought, he seems to have gone
through life with senses fully alert. Like Brownings's Last Duchess
'he liked whate'er he looked on and his looks went everywhere.'
To document this point fully a reading of the whole poem and
nothing less would do. Let us quote just one passage in which
Lucretius is arguing for the reality of atoms though the eye can
never see them.
1. D.R./V. 2, 112 IT. WiDspear. H..P :-i· S2 ff
Often are cloth.. bung up on shore to dry,

Where ocean breaks its waves.
Here they grow damp but in the sun grow dry.
Yet human eyes have never seen the moisture coming in,
Nor yet again depart.
The particles of damp are small-
Too small for eyes to see.
Again as rolling sun brings back the rolling years
The ring you wear on finger grows more thin;
The steady drip of water wears a stone;
The curving iron of plowshares in the unmarked lapse of time
Grows smaller in the fields.
The paving stones in streets are worn by feet of multitudes.
Bronze statues by the gateways show their right hand worn,
Worn ever by the passer-by who greets them and departs.
We see these things grow smaller. wear away.
And yet the particles that leave as fleeting moments pass
We never see.
The parsimonious nature of our sight forbids.'
Here is surely a phenomenon unique in all literature, that a poet
should notice details, from washing hung out to dry, to the statues
of the gods, to a ring on one's finger, to the paving stones in the
street. and impress them all into the service of his philosophy. This
he sees and much more. He notices the splendour of the heavens
reilected in a puddle in the streets. He sees hunting dogs who sleep
and dream of the chase; horses that dream of the race course. He
notices and explains a ship that seems to move as you pass it though
it is actually at rest. He notices the shells on the sea shore. the
colours of the peacock"s tail. He has heard the echo of the human
voice carried back from hill to hill, the various sounds emitted by
the birds 'the hawks and ospreys and the pale grey gulls'; he has
observed the various sounds with which Molossian hounds express
their various moods. He has listened to the desolate cow when she
mourns her lost calf. All this he has seen and heard and more, much
more. The reader must notice for himseH.
t Analytical observation is there, careful note of nature in all her

aried way,;, but not at all, so far as we can now know, the modern
echniques of the scientific laboratory.
'Laboratory experiments', writes Leonard, 'with controls and re-
peated verifications, were unknown, so far as I can recall, even in
Alexandria, except in anatomy and physiology. But even some-
times, when a bizarre notion that bad perhaps originated in folk
4. D.R.N. I. JI I R Winspear, R.1'.S. 16 If.
Jore acquired dignified associations with a learned theory, it per·
ai.sted for centuries among the learned, when the most untechnical
trial would have exploded it instantly. Lucretius explains under the
Epicurean theory of vision why the brave lion shrinks in pain and
terror before the domestic rooster. There were caged lions at
Rome, and Lucretius could have had a slave fetch a rooster from
the farm. All he would have needed to do would have been to
shove it inside. The story goes that Cuvier did; and the lion forth·
with-ate the rooster. It is such moments as these that remind w.
not merely how much more we know today, but how different our
habits of gaining knowledge. Still Greek science, without labora.
tories and laboratory apparatus, without organization in training
and staff, without scientific method, anticipated, in the atomic
theory, by its sheer wits the fundamental concepts of the twentieth
century. It won't do to laugh too long at the Greeks.''
Part of the success of the Epicurean school in this process of
anticipation flows assuredly from their al~~ost fanatic devotion to
the validity of sense-perception astheofiginal -source of all knowl·
~::attthnugbt. In oppositiOii-fo-tllC-dCductivc logic developed
by Plato, the Stoics, and the idealist generally, Lucretius put for-
ward and defended the theory of radical induction thus anticipating
by many centuries the Novum Organon of Bacon. Lucretius would
have warmly welcomed the dictum of the British philosopher who
argued Nihil est in intellectu quad non prius in sensu; there is
nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the sense.
Lucretius in his defense of the validity of sensation is perfectly
conscious both of what he is doing and its implications. He pain-
staking;y dis~usses optical illusions of various kinds and endeavours
to put orward .,fri explanation of each. The passage is too long to
quote here. He concludes as follows:
Thus you 'II not lightly think that sense could be impugned
on every side
And found entirely fallible.
To men who're ignorant of sea,
Sea and its ways-
A ship in harbour seems to rest upon the water, fresh or salt,
Crippled and maimed with broken stem.
The portion of the oars above the salt sea spray seems straight;
Rudders seem straight;
But all the parts that pass and sink beneath the ocean wave,
Seem to be broken, twisted round,
Seem to turn upward, seem al.most to float
Upon the liquid surface of the liquid sea.
!.D.R.N. 43.
88 LUCRETIUS AND SclENTIPIC THOUGHT
And when the winds are moving scattered cJouds across the sty
At dead of night,
Why then the splendid constellations seem to meet and glide
athwart the clouds,
And seem to move in heaven's eminence,
On journeys different from their proper way.
Then too,
If one should chance to place a hand over the eye
And press the eye,
By some queer quirk of sight it seems
That everything is double to the view-
Double the lights of lamp with flower of flame,
Double the furnishings throughout the house
In double sets;
Double the countenances of men, their bodies double too.
Then too,
'When sleep has overcome our limbs in bondage sweet-
When all the body lies possessed by sleep profound,
Yet to ourselves we seem awake, to move our limbs;
And though the night is black we seem to see,
Sun and the light of day.
And though the four walls of the bedroom fence us in,
We seem to see new sky, new sea, new streams, new hills,
New plains we seem to traverse and to hear new sound!.
Though night's stem silence ever hems us in,
We seem to answer, seem to converse, though speaking not.
And many other wonders of this son we see;
And all of them would strive to undermine
Our confidence in power of sense.
But all in vain;
We know that most of all these sights are inferen~
Added by power of mind, added by seeing sell,
So that the things the senses never see,
Arc counted seen.
The hardest task of mind is just to separate
The open, clear and certain things,
From dubiow apparitions which the mind supplies itself.'
Lucretius was fully aware that the implications of this confidence
in the power of sense put him into direct conflict with the idealists
and those who held to a te1eological view of the universe. He warns
his friend Memmius against falling into the trap of teleology.
,. D.R.H . •• u• ff. WWi,.u, R.r.s. lSJ ff.
THE WORLD OUTL(X)JC Of LUCRETIUS 89
With all my bean I long that you should shun this fault of
reasoning,
Though prudent fear and foresight in advance
This blunder miss;
Don't ever think that eyes were made
In order that the human race might have the power to see.
What is brought to be creates its use.
Vision existed not at all
Before the light of eyes was brought to be;
Nor did men learn to pray in words before the tongue was
brought to be.
The tongue arrived much before speech;
Ears before sound was heard;
And all the human limbs I think
Were there before their use.
And so I think they have not come to be because of use.
That hands should clash in bloody battle strife.
To mangle limbs and make the body foul with blood;
All this was known before the shining darts
Shot through the air.
Nature made men avoid a wound, a blow,
Before the left arm, trained by art,
Held up a shield.
To lay the weary body down to rest
Is older far than soft-strewn beds;
To slake the thirst was known, long before cups.
And all these new discoveries found to suit the needs of life
Were found, one well believes, for sake of use.'
Lucretius, then, has little patience with the idealist, the ration-
alist, the advocate of teleology. With another school of philosophy
which in this period was gaining adherents-the Sceptics he is no
less severe.
Again, suppose a thoughtful man puts up this argument:
The human mind can nothing ever know.
This judgment, too, must turn out fallible.
For he admits the limitations of the human mind;
Nothing mind can know.
With such a man I'll never join in argument.
He firmly plants his head in footprints of his feet.
And yet were I to grant that he knows this-
Namcly that he knows nothing certainly,
One question I would ask:
Since he has never yet found truth in clear perception of a thing,
1. D.R.N. 5, 822 tf. Wlmpea.r, R.f.S. 170 II'.
90 LUCRETIUS ANI> SciENTIPIC THOUGHT
How can he know what knowledge means?

What ignorance in turn?
What then has made to grow in him
The notion of the true; the false?
And what has made him come to think
That doubtful notion differs from the sure?
But if you really face the facts of things
This you will find:
That the very notion of the true emerges from experience
of the sense;
That sense and sense impressions cannot be gainsaid.
For something must be found of greater certainty than seme
Which of itself can use the true to overthrow the false.
What can be found of greater certainty
Than evidence of sense?
Unless the sense is true,
The power of thought and reason all is undermined.
Or could the power of ears hold court,
Pass judgment on the evidence of eyes'!
Or touch on evidence provided by the ears?
Will taste residing in the tongue refute the evidence of touch?
Not so, I think.
For of the senses each must own
Its proper force and power;
With one we know the soft, the bot, the cold,
With one the various hues of things,
And all that's linked with hue.
The taste of tongue wields its own proper power;
In one way smells arise, but sounds quite differently.
No sense can prove another false,
Nor can a sense pass judgment on itself,
Since all impressions coming from the sense
Have similar validity.
And so what they from time to time perceive
ls true.
And if the power of mind cannot resolve the cau.,e
Why things which close at hand seem square,
Far off seem round;
Still it is better that the poveny of reasoning
Should fail to grasp the cause of either shape
Rather than let a thing that's clearly seen
Slip from the hands;
Rather than violate man's first and basic faith,
Rather than ovenhrow the firm and strong foundation stone
On which being and life alike must rest.
Unless you're bold to trust the evidence of scme
THE WORLD OUTLOOIC OF LUCRETIUS 91
All reasoning will fall away;
And life itself would straightway fail,
Unless you dare to trust the sense,
Avoid the precipice of doubt,
Avoid the chasm of false reasoning
And cleave to what is sound and sure.
Hold fast to this and know it well-
That all the arguments of sceptical philosophers
Are but an empty store of words
Set up in serried ranks against the sense.
It's just as when you start to build a lofty tower
If measuring foundations you should go astray
And if the square is not applied, or carelessly,
Or if the level sags a bit in any place,
Why then the whole great tower must go awry,
Its lines will bulge and sag.
The walls will lean backwards, forwards, out of true.
Proportions go astray;
Some parts will have the will to fall,
And some will fall.
The building was betrayed by faulty judgment at the starting point.
And so your reasoning must go astray
If it arises from the false beginning of false sense.'
So much for Lucretius' concept of philosophical and scientific
method. Now we must see what results he obtained as he applied
this method. We have stressed enough the differences between the
method and outlook of Lucretius and the modern man of physics.
Now we must begin to notice some of the astonishing similarities in
their results. Lucretius and the Epicurean school in general, to a
quite amazing- extent, anticipated the world outlook of modem
s~i-He believed, in the first place, that the whole universe was
a matter of flux, of ceaseless change, some things coming into being,
some things passing away. But the sum of all things, the total store
of matter remained the same.
We see a thing grow small in lapse of time
And flow away as in a stream
When age removes it from our eyes;
And yet the sum of things remains the same.
The reason is
That bodies moving from a thing diminish what they left,
Augment the thing to which they come.
The one grows old, the other waxes strong.
Yet even with the new they don't remain eternally.
I. D.R.N. 4, 469 ff. Wimpear, R.P.S. US ff.
And so the sum of things is ever new

And all things mortal live by ~ive and take.
The generations wax, the generations wane;
In time's brief span all living things are changed,
Like runners in a race pass on life's torch.'
The comparison in this last line is with a torch race. As in our
relay race, the contestants must pass on the torch in their swift
progression from hand to hand. And so in a splendid imagery, for
Lucretius all of life is like a gigantic relay race, individuals, races,
nations, universes even, being born, coming to maturity, decaying
and dying, passing on the torch to fresh contenders. One is reminded
of the magnificent world picture of the German poet Goethe in his
Faust.
Geburt und Grab, ein ewiges Meer
Ein wechselend' Weben, ein gliihend' Leben.
Birth and the grave-an eternal sea
A changing web, a glowing life.
Even universes, we said a moment ago. For Lucretius was very
sure that this universe of ours began in time and will end in time
and that many others of the same kind have come and gone.
Now for the rest, no longer dallying with promises,
Consider first the seas, the land, the sky;
Three natures, triple body, triple form so much alike
One day, my friend, in just one day will hunle down to ruin.
The massive structure of the universe
That lasted many years will fall apart.
I know full well how strange a thing,
Stupendous to the mind is this my doctrine,
That earth and sky will one day fall in ruin.
How hard it is for words like these of mine
To win belief!
It's always so when novel thought assails the mind;
ldeas beyond the reach of sight and touch
Which always give the easiest access to the heart and temples of
the mind;
But speak I will.
Maybe the very fact will bring belief-
Perhaps you'll feel an earthquake, see the earth,
The whole earth, shaken in a moment's time.
May pilot Fortune steer us from this fate;
May thought, not horror, make us realize
The whole might fall one day in rending, sounding crash. ' 4
?o~,:r,t.'N \ 6J1 "ff.~f:;:!r. ~t/s. ~%fs.
For Lucretius, then, everything-from the universe itself to the

tiniest and most insignificant creature in it, is in constant Hux,
subject to continuous and continuing change. The doctrine perhaps
goes back to Heraclitus, one of the first Greek thinkers and one of
the greatest. 'All th~s flow-nothing remains.' You cannot step
into the saE,1~ ~1ve~ ty~·iCI!~ The river will have changed-and you will
haVCChin.ged. A notion so simple, so profound, so central to a
sCICntific view of the universe has usually evoked howls of anguish
whenever it has been propounded. Let us reflect a moment. How
much of our art, our literature, religion and philosophy is devoted
to finding something changeless behind the changing scene and the
flowing tide of events. Many people, and this I think i~__<!!!_i~ul_arly
true of those who have a large vested interest, whether financial,
emotional or ITJ.ifral in the- status quo find the notion of change as
ultllllale,S1mply repulsive and altogether unbearable. They yearn
for someone, something, somewllere, in whOm there is no var-
iableness neither shadow of turning. Perhaps they go to church and
sing feelingly:
Change and decay in all around I see,
O Thou, who cbangest not, abide with me.
Perhaps they try to find the changeless in the shifting sands of
emotion, of love.
Look in my eyes
Wilt thou change t<X>?
Need I fear surprise
In the old and tried
In the good, the true?
Or like the poet Keats they try to find the changeless in an
eternity of art. the everlasting beauty of a nightingale's song or a
Grecian urn.
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy rnelodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new. 11
Or they may find their changelessness in an eternal law which
is ever the same in spite of its various manifestations. The phil-
osophers of the idealistic schools have endeavoured to gratify this
I 1. It is intcrcsti.11.1 10 notice how ortc.11. the words ever and forever and, in general, the
theme of the eternal and the cba.11.geless are evoked. This observation will 1ervo t!)
:c~::,c:~0fac;t /h~l1\t/cmpcramental and perhaps social, between Keats and hi!
yearning in themselves and their followers by inventing 'eternal

values'-the good, the true and he beautiful; or the eternal 'con-
cept' which remains forever lone and self-abiding, scorning the
changing example and the multitude of particulars."
To all these yearnings the materialist philosophers both of
antiquity and in the modern world have given an uncompromising
'No'. For them the only reality is the changing world of matter or
if you like, of matter---<:nergy. Even man's institutions and his
thoughts are a reflection of the changing material scene. The only
changeless entity is the material substratum, the stuff out of which
the world and all that is in it is made. There is no ideal unity beyond
the many, but the unity of the world lies precisely in its materiality.
Let us then establish this as the first observation about the
world view of Lucretius and the school to which he belonged. He
believed that change was the ultimate law of things.
Let us go on to establish a second. Change, he believed was
predictable and uniform and could therefore be studied, observed,
reduced to law. This is, of course, the most basic faith of the scien-
tist. Unless things perform in the same way each time we test them
( all other things being equal), there can be no science, no attempt
to control our world, no attempt to predict or control the course of
events. If the same cause produces one effect on one day and
another on the next, how can we be sure enough of anything to
know or act? There can be no room in the world of the scientist for
surprising and supernatural occurrences, for miracle or caprice.
This aspect of the scientist's creed Lucretius grasped firmly and
affirmed with passion. 'Nothing can come to be from nothing by
divine decree.' For everything there must be a sufficient cause.
Our first beginning must set out from this:
No thing can come from nothing by divine decree.
For you see,
Fear so possesses every mortal heart,
Because so many things are seen to happen, on earth and
in the sky,
For which men find no cause.
They think these happen by divine decree.
Wherefore when we have seen
That nothing comes to be from nothing,
Then more clearly we shall see the object of our search,
'fHE WORLD OUTLOOK OP LUCRETIUS 95
Whence each thing can be created and bow can come to be,
Without the help of gods.
For if evecything came to be from nothing,
Every species could be random borne,
There'd be no need of seeds.
Men could arise from sea,
The scaly race of fish from earth,
Birds could explode from sky.
And beasts, both wild and tame, by random birth, could roam
Plougbland and wilderness alike.
And fruits on trees would never ,tay the same,
But change. All creatures could produce all offspring.
If all things did not have their procreant seeds
How could they have a fixed, a changeless mother?
But as it is,
Because each thing is made from certain seeds,
From these the thing is born and comes to shores of light,
When stuff appropriate to each
And proper elements are there;
All things cannot come from everything,
Because in everything there is a certain hidden power.
Again in spring we see the rose,
In summer corn; the grapes at autumn's prompting.
Why? But that seeds of things together come;
When time is ripe the fashioned thing appears,
When season's right and teeming earth brings forth
The tiny fragile things in safety to the shores of light?
But if they came to be from nothing,
They would suddenly explode to birth
At random times and inappropriate seasons of the year,
Because, you see, there'd be no elements
To keep them from cohering and from birth
Till time is ripe.
Nor need there'd be for space of time for things to grow,
If they could grow from nothing.
Babies would suddenly be men
And shrubs would swift and sudden leap from earth.
But nothing now like this occurs,
Since aJI things slowly grow from proper matter,
As is right,
And as they grow retain their natural kind. a
This is, as we have seen, not only the basic affirmation of his
scientists' creed; it is also what gives Lucretius the strong grounds
of his ethical faith-the conviction that fear and superstition can be
13.D.R.N. I, 150 tr. Wimpear, R.P.S. 9 tr.
banished from men's hearts, that human life can be tranquil, serene
and quiet.
Now for a third point. Lucretius felt that all change proceeded
by imperceptible degrees, as we see in the passage just quoted.
Since all things slowly grow from proper matter,
As is right,
And as they grow retain their natural kind.
Another Roman poet, Horace, put this conviction-that all
change is slow change and proceeds by imperceptible degrees--in
a classic phrase.
Nihil per Jaltum /acit Natura
Nature does nothing by leaps.
. And Ibis leads us 10 one of the central difficulties of mechanism.
For if evh_ry event must.have_its sufficient cause, how can anything
einerge t at is n~w; and because new goes beyond-the f.iC:toi's that
c~t'>On the ollier'1iaiia,·if l!ew things are always emerging
·and going beyond the factors that caused them, how can we still
believe in cause and effect-that for every effect there must be a
sufficient antecedent cause? Either the new cannot be really new;
must be simply a reshuffling of elements already there, an eternal
kaleidoscope of ever-present elements; or if the new is really new,
then we are faced with a continuous succession of uncaused events
-a continuous succession of miracles. The ancient mechanistic
schools leaned to the first alternative. ( Lucretius tried to escape
from the dilemma.) Some of the later books of the Hebrew Old
Testament, written under Hellenistic and Epicurean influence,
express the same thought. 'There is nothing new under the sun.
Vanity of vanities all is vanity.' In similar fashion many modern
schools of mechanistic thought see all changes as simply moving in
great cycles with nothing really new in nature or in history coming
forth. The religious thinkers of antiquity, on the other hand, pre-
served a belief in the realness of the new by their affirmation of
miracle ( even to the extent of abandoning cause and effect, of
neglecting science) and saw all nature and history as a series of
inexplicable events caused by divine interference. And a modem
religious thinker (G. K. Chesterton) has posed the dilemma sharply
when he observed that a miracle is no less a miracle if it takes plac.e
slowly. In other words for Chesterton the essential factor in miracle
is the emergence of the new-precisely something that goes beyond
lhc cause that produced it.
Furthermore, one may ask if everything is in a mechanical

sense, cause and effect, if A is caused by B and B by C and so on,
do we not face an infinite chain of causes without a beginning?
What happens when we get to Z? What started the whole thing
anyway? What in other words was the 'First Cause'? Or, if the
universe isseeri7nl'.~ms otmovement or change, what is the 'First
Mover', what is the nature of the first change?
Perhaps a very short sketch of earlier attempts to wrestle with
this problem will help us to realize how central is this dilemma in
the history of Western thought and, at the same time, will give us a
little background material for understanding Lucretius' attempt to
resolve the dilemma.
In the very earliest days of conscious philosophizing among the
Greelcs, a schoo~eri-callle-fo be_on the western shores of
Asia""'Minor,-thC ialldthat was called Ionia.- fonia, because of its
g'eogiipluc"aJ position, was a great centre of trade between the
Aegean Sea and the oriental hinterland, as well as a centre. for trade
along the coast. Moreover, the country and its configuration made
landed estates relatively less important than elsewhere in Greek
regions (for example and preeminently in Sicily). A great class
of landed proprietors never became entrenched to the same degree
as elsewhere in Greece. It was in Ionia, on the western shore of
Asia Minor (among Greek speaking peoples) that there developed
for the first time in the western world, the mercantile interest-a
class in society, separate from and opposed to the owners of land,
the landlords. And here too the power of the merchants, economic
in origin, frequently translated into political terms, first made
possible the rule of the common man---common compared to land-
lords and aristocrats-the institutions which the Greeks (and we,
too, following their example,) called democracy. (It must always
be remembered that when the Greeks spoke of democracy they did
not include the slaves in its privileges.) ~<JO .the popular move-
ment developed think,e,rs, wi~e men, philosophers whose pulses and
brains-were -stirred by the exciting events of political conflict and
democratic victory. These thinkers first formulated one world out-
look-which iias become classic'-the materialistic way of regarding
th.i!i_gs._ They believed that the material world was the ultimate
ground and explanation of all things. They believed in evolution
rather than divine creation anc! brought exciting observations to
bear to confirm their belief. They believed in change, motion and
progress. But most important of all they had an explanation for the
how of change. The greatest of them, Heraclitus (535-475 B.C.),

believed that change came about Lecause of the clash and struggle
of opposite principles. War, or strife, as he puts it in somewhat
poetical form, is the father of all, the King of all. It has ordained
some men as slaves and some free. Not only the material universe
but social institutions as well were a result of clash, struggle of
opposites. Change, therefore, in every limited process, is self-
explanatory. The oppositions which are to be found imminent in
that process, by their tensions and their intemal strivings, push the
process on. And what is true for every limited process is true of the
universe as a whole. There was no need, Heraclitus thought, to
assume an outside force, a god, to start the whole thing going.
Every process in the universe, and the universe as a whole, was
self-explanatory. Whether whole or part, the strife and tension of
opposites was all that was required to produce change.
Nor was the emergence of the new a mystery to Heraclitus.
Working with the primitive concept of the four elements---earth
(or as we should say) solid matter, air (or as we should say gaseous
matter) water (or liquid matter) and fire ( or energy) he came to
regard fire (energy) as the most universal and most primitive. But
the other elements came from fire when conditions were ripe. The
life of one element was the death of another. The whole universe
was a process-the way up and the way down. Everything, then,
was change or flux, everything in process as a result of tension or
strife. Everything could be explained, in the material or social
universe, without invoking the aid or intervention of the gods.
This first sketch of a scientific world outlook, in spite of
Heraclitus' lack of specific scientific knowledge, in spite too, of the
rather primitive scientific content of his thinking, was amazingly
profound, penetrating and mature. Not until the nineteenth century
of our era did thinkers arise again who grasped so firmly, expounded
so exactly, the essentials of the scientific outlook.
And yet the strange thing about Lucretius is that he treated
Heraclitus with scant sympathy.
I Now some have thought
That fire is basic to the sum of things,
The universe composed of fire alone.
But men who think like this have wandered very far from truth.
And Heraclitus was the chief of these, the tint to join the fray.
Renowned be was for sayings dark,
But more admired by fools,
THE WORLD OUTLOOK: OF LUCRETIUS 99
Than sober thoughtful Greeb who sought the truth.

For m~n of stolid wits are wont to love the more, admire the more,
The thmgs they see
Lurking in twisted words.
Dull oafs like this set up for truth
What sweetly tickles human ears,
What's most tricked out in pretty sound.'•
Lucretius' criticism of Heraclitus boils down to one difference.
H ~ has neglected void or space in things.
· (In passing it is interesting to notice Lucretius' views about his
predecesiors. The idealist he never mentions. Of the materialists he
mentions Heraclitus and Anaxagoras with sharp comment, though
admitting the talent of both. Democritus and Empedocles he men-
tions with an emotion that is close to veneration though he is fully
aware, that from the point of view of his own theory, both these
thinkers left something to be desired.)
The history of ancient materialism is at once a declension from
the system of Heraclitus and a filling in, by observation and the
collection of facts, of scientific detail. These two points will become
clearer if we notice what happened to the system of Heraclitus as it
passed through the minds of his successors. The most spectacular
example of the transformation that the system underwent may be
seen if we examine the work of an Athenian thinker, Anaxagoras.
Anaxagoras lived in an exciting period of history-the golden age
of ancient Greece, one of the great creative epochs of western
civilization-the age of the great leader and statesman, Pericles.
A word or two about this leader and his age will help us to under-
stand its 'official' thinker, Anaxagoras. Pericles put himself at
the head of a coalition-the democratic coalition of merchants,
artisans, peasants and unemployed. Representing (unevenly) the
interests of this coalition, he waged ceaseless political warfare
against the aristocrats and great landowners, built the Athenian
empire as a great trading state and 'alliance' of states; in so doing
he won many important gains and made many important conces-
sions to his democratic followers. But sooner or later the policy of
imperial expansion for which Pericles stood was bound to lead to
war. And it did; war came between democratic Athens and aristo-
cratic Sparta, her great rival. In the stress of the war years, the
coalition that backed Pericles began to break up. Pericles who
represented (as we should say) the right wing of the coalition,
14. D.R.N. 1. UI ff. Wlmpeu, R-'.S. 251.
began to move further yet to the right, began to compromise with

his aristocratic opponents at horn~. His followers ( after his death)
were suspected of reluctance to prosecute the war vigorously enough
against the spiritual home of aristocracy, Sparta. The followers of
Pericles and the left wing segment of the party drifted further apart.
The latter demanded more concessions to the common people at
home, a more vigorous prosecution of the war abroad. The process
went so far that in the time of the supreme agony, collapse and
defeat, many of the old Periclean wing of the 'democratic' party
joined their aristocratic opponents to carry through, so to speak, a
right wing counter-revolution, to subvert the democratic constitu-
tion, to build on the ruins of Athens, a reactionary state.
What has aU this to do with philosophy? The political expe-
rience of Pericles may go far to explain the intellectual convictions
of Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras was the spiritual ancestor of those
thinkers ( and they form a long line, represent a well-<:stablished
tradition) who want to modify materialism and science, who want
to find some compromise between science and 'idealism' which we
have seen to be in an earlier chapter the creed preeminently of
aristocrats and the defenders of ancestral privilege.
For Heraclitus, as we have seen, all process is self-explanatory.
is self-moving, is a result of the clash and tension of opposites.
His automobile is (to use a modem metaphor) self-moving. It
has a motor under the hood and the motor propels the car. But
Anaxagoras (to continue the metaphor) took the motor out of the
vehicle. He removed the dynamic principle which had made the
change run. Instead of the dynamic clash of opposite forces, we find
in Anaxagoras the counter position and polarization of opposite
qualities. But if you once take the motor out of an automobile ( and
it moves at all) there must be some external cause that pushes or
pulls it, that sets it into motion. Heraclitus' motor car had no need
of an external force to explain how it got into motion. He had no
need of a god to start his universe going. Anaxagoras did. When he
asked himself what started the whole process of the universe revolv-
ing, his answer was that it was Mind ( which he thought to be the
fmest and rarest of the material elements). Mind stood outside the
universe of change and started the whole thing going round and
round. Then as though the whole universe were a gigantic cream
separator-to use again a modem comparison--ccntrifugal forces
separated the opposites out-the black went to one pole, the white
to another. (Never completely, because no process of separation
THE WORLD OUTLOOK OF LUCRETIUS IOI
could be complete. There was still some interpenetration of

opposites. There is never snow so white that it does not have some
black.) Notice that the opposites are now passive-they are acted
on by the great whirl; they are not as with Heraclitus, active, push-
ing, striving, contending with each other. Because, in Anaxagoras'
system, the motor has been taken away from under the hood, the
car of the universe is no longer a self-mover ( our word automobile,
of course, a self-mover.) The cause for each event is external to
that event. A is caused by B, B by C and so on. And when one gets
to the end of a whole alphabet of purely external influences, there
is the question what started the whole process anyway. Anaxagoras
was, therefore, the first thinker in the Western world (Arisfotle and
sr.--i=-t10ma:s Aqoinas foUow in the long tradition) for whom the
great problem of philosophy is to find the First Mover, the primary
i.mp~~~ -!l the end of the whole chain of cause and effect that set
t.~r~Jeess _going. If the reader nas-followCd this argument, he
w11Isee immCdiately that this is because Anaxagoras and those
thinkers who followed in his footsteps apprehended all change as
mechanistic, all process as externally caused. Whether the First
Mover is conceived as Mind, in religion or in idealistic philosophy;
or gravitation or some other material force, the essence of the
difficulty always comes back to the same thing-mechanism, the
concept of cause as external, the failure to understand how the new
that emerges can be at once caused and yet really new; to put it in
one phrase the failure to understand qualitative change. That this
problem was painfully apparent to Anaxagoras is quite apparent
from the fragments that remain from his book on 'Mind'! 'How can
hair,' he wailed, 'come from what is not-hair or flesh from not-tlesh?'
How can so simple a thing as the growth of an animal be explained?
Whence came all those new qualities which emerge in the growth
of a creature from infancy to maturity? To get over his difficulty
Anaxagoras assumed that all these new qualities that are ever
emerging were present always in the embryo, potentially present
all the time. And so he developed his rather fantastic notion that
for everything that comes to be, seeds were always present.
Lucretius, as we should expect, looking at Anaxagoras' system
from the point of view of his own more consistent materialism,
viewed such a fancy as worthy of nothing but contempt. In a long
passage which the student migrt like to read-as an example of
Lucretius' polemical power and skill in philosophical conlroversy
-he dealt wilh the nonsensical theory, as it appeared to him.
Now let us search the famous theory of a famous man

Homoeomeria of Anaxagoras.
My native tongue's too poor in scientific terms
To let me name it in the Latin speech
And yet the thought itself is easy to expound.
First what he calls the homoeomeria of things.
You see he thought that bones were made
Of very small and tiny bones,
And flesh likewise of small and tiny bits of flesh;
That blood is made when many drops of blood together come;
And gold again from tiny grains of gold,
And earth from fragments made from little earths;
And likewise fire from fire, water from water;
All the rest he pictures and imagines to himself the same way.
Yet this mighty thinker will not grant
That there is void in any part of Nature's whole,
Nor limit to the cutting up of things.
In both these points he seems to me to go astray,
Just as those others did.
Another fault it seems to me in him is this-
First principles in his imagining arc much too weak-
(lf you could call those things first principles,
Which have a nature like the things they form,
Suffer like them, like them are doomed to pass away,
And nothing holds them from the doom of nothingnem.)
For which of all his principles,
Is able to endure in face of pressures ultimate,
Escape from death when ground between the jaws
Of final devastation?
Fire, you suppose? Moisture or air? Or bones and blood?
Not one of these I think.
For all of them will die
As much as things we see before our eyes
And pass away, by violence trampled down and overthrown.
As witness here I caU what I've proved long before.
Nothing can pass away to nothingness,
Nor yet from nothingness can one thing grow.
And now since food it is that nourishes and rea.n
Our frame corporeal,
From this you know that veins and blood and bones,
Yes and our sinews too,
All these are made from parts of heterogeneous kind.
Or if they hold that all that nurtures us,
Our food, I mean, is made of mingled elements,
In them reside small bits of sinew, bones and veins and blood,
Then they must hold that food--liquid or dry alike,
Is made from parts of heterogeneous kind-

Of bones and sinew, ichor and blood together mixed.
And then if all the things that grow from earth,
Are there potentially in particles of earth,
The earth must be composed of things,
Heterogeneous in kind that rise from earth.
And try this in another field.
The self-same words you'll use again.
Suppose in logs that flames should lurk,
And smoke and ash,
Why logs are then composed of things
Heterogeneous in kind, of heterogeneous things which rise
from logs.
Of all the things which earth can nurture and can rear
The same is true.
And here's a tiny chance to hide

Which Anaxagoras grasps.
He thinks that all things mingled lurk in things
But one stands out-
The one the compound holds the more in quantity,
That's stationed more in front and so stands out.
In this, of course, he's very far from truth.
For were he right then this we'd sec:
When corn were crushed by threatening weight of rock,
Some sign of blood,
Or of the things that in our body lurk, are nurtured there.
Then when we grind the corn and rub it, stone on stone,
Blood should ooze out.
And blades of grass and pools of water too,
Should ooze ,weet drops, in savour like the milk of fleecy beasts.
And when the clods of glebe are crumbled as they often are,
The various kinds of grass and corn and leaves,
Hiding in tiny form,
These should be seen, scattered among the clods of earth.
And when a fragment from a log is broken off,
Then should smoke and ash and tiny flames be seen.
The facts will clearly show it does not happen so at all,
That thing in thing is not so mixed,
But rather atom forms, common to many things
Lurk mingled in these things in various ways.
But often you will say, on lofty hills,
The tops of two taJI trees, grown side by side,
Together rub-under compulsion of the strong south wind,
Until a flame has flashed. a flower of fire is born.
And vet I'm sure that you must know

That ·flame is not implanted i 1 the wood,
But many seeds of heat,
Which flow together through the friction of the trees
And start a fire through all the woods.
But if the flame had lurked there ready made
The fire could not be hid for very long,
But burn the forests all at once, consume the trees to ash.
But don't you see the truth of what I've said before
The most important fact is this-
With just what atoms other atom forms combine,
And how they're placed,
What interchange of motion they both give and take.
And from this atom stuff with little change,
Timber or flame alike can come.
Just as in spelling when the order's changed of letters in a word,
Two different things result-timber and fire.
And now to sum it up.
If you suppose that objects visible and clear to view
Can never come to be without inventing primal principles of
matter similar,
Assuming this, your primal principles wi11 die away,
Or rather they'd guffaw with quivering merriment,
And wet their face and chin with salty tears. 11
Today the invention of the atom bomb excites the imagination
of everyone. Since the dreadful explosion over the cities of Japan,
mankind has been haunted with fear lest other explosions should
blot out other cities and create havoc unaccountable and untold. On
the other hand, the promise that this novel source of energy might
be harnessed for constructive use intoxicates the mind with the
thought of what human life might be on its material side, now that
human control over nature has made so singular an advance. There
is, therefore, or should be a considerable intellectual excitement in
fracking down to its source the famous atomic theory on which in
~he long course of history the new scientific advances of our age
were built. In the dim mists of antiquity we can discern the outlines
of two heroic figures of scientific thinking-the one so shadowy
that we will not even burden the reader's memory with his name;
the other a great and profound thinker whose system has survived
and come down to us only in the barest fragments.,.
i,. n.R.N. t. uo ff. Wimpear, R.r.s. 16 rr.
16. The Jc1cnd 1ha1 Plato tried 10 datroy all n:1aat col?!• of tho work oI Demoatlu aad
1W prevent hu, •Y•tcm from ever bccomaqa k.nown II not Jnhcrcnlly improb.blo.
THE WORLD OUTJ.OOIC OP LUCRETIUS !OS
Democritus, for that was the name of this great father of the
atomic theory, was a contemporary of Socrates (though not an
Athenian), a democrat in politics, a materialist in philosophy. He
was the substantial discoverer of the atomic theory, an achievement
which excited the imagination of Lucretius. Our poet always men-
tioned Democritus with great respect even when he feels compelled
to criticize some details of his philosophy. He speaks of the 'splendid
thought of that great Grecian seer, Democritus'. Even his suicide
and death, Lucretius thought, could teach moral lessons to mankind.
Democritus held that the whole universe was composed and
compounded of atoms and empty space or void. Democritus, as
we have said, was a materialist in philosophy. He did not, like
Anaxagoras, suppose that mind had started the whole revolution of
the universe turning. He did suppose, however, that the atoms
whirled around in an eddy or vortex. (The notion of 'vortex' is
finnly embedded in the speculations of the fifth century progres-
sives. 'Vortex is king', said the comic poet in pouring satirical
contempt on the new education 'and has driven out Zeus'.) But just
what caused this eddy in Democritus' system is obscure. It seemed
to be a result of some external material force acting on the atoms
as a winnowing fan acts on chaff or the waves of the sea on the
pebbles of the seashore.
Epicurus taking up the hints of Democritus added weight to the
qualities of the atoms and supposed that they fell downwards eter-
nally through infinite space. Let us reflect on this suggestion for a
moment. Suppose we picture the universe as though it were a bucket
of marbles (we shall have to modify the image in a moment)
launched into space from a very high place and falling down, down,
down forever. A moment's reflection would convince us that the
marbles will keep their same relative position. They will never
bump into each other. They will never jangle, clash or cohere.
How then can the cohesion and the joining of the atoms come
about? What causes the eddy or vortex which brings the atoms
together? How can the primary universe of matter become the
derivative universe of things? In the discussion that arose out of
Epicurus' postulation of gravitation as the source of motion in the
atomic system, one of the followers of Democritus made an in-
teresting suggestion. He thought that heavy atoms fell more swiftly
than light atoms. (Perhaps he marle some primitive experiment like
dropping a bag of feathers and a bag of stones from a window. The
stones appeared to fall more rapidly.) And so he thought, the greater
speed of the heavy atoms caused them to clash and jangle and jostle
the lighter. And so an eddy was set ~p. The 'Vortex' of Democritus
was preserved and without any external source of motion for the
atomic stream.
A little more observation, of course, would be enough to con-
vince these ancient thinkers that heavy atoms do not in fact fall
faster than light ones. In the system of Epicurus and Lucretius,
there was no room for so unsatisfactory an hypothesis. And so we
come to the famous clinamen or swerve of the atoms which the
Epicurean school used to solve the problem that we have suggested
above-how the atoms come to clash, how a world of things
emerges from the primitive undifferentiated universe of atoms. Let
us return again to our analogy of the pail of marbles. If the marbles
(or the atoms) fall endlessly, eternally through space, they will
never clash and cohere. They will never come together. How do the
atoms come together? Let Lucretius explain his theory. The first
part of the quotation emphasizes gravitation as the force that makes
the atoms swerve. The second dwells on the 'swerve' which makes
them clash.
This is the place, I think to prove to you
That bodies cannot move upward by themselves,
Of their own power.
I fear lest flame deceive you here.
It's true that smiling crops and trees
Are born and grow towards the sky
Although all things by weight are downwards borne;
And flames rush up to reach the roof
And swiftly play on rafters and on beams
But must we think that they do this spontaneously,
Without some driving force?
Just as when blood pours from a wound
And spurts on high and scatters carnage round;
Do you not see
How water pushes beams and rafters up most forcefully?
The more we push them down again-
Many of us at once,
The more it spews them up and sends them back
And from the water they will rise and stand on end.
And yet we do not doubt, as I believe,
That all these things press down so far as in them lies
Are always carried downwards through the void. '
And equally do Hames, when forced by pressure from without,
Rise upward through the airy breeze,
Although their weight is fighting, 100, to bring them down.
Again the nightly torches of the sky, the metcon,

Drag endless tracks of flame across the sky
Whenever nature sends them on their way.
You see the stars and constellations fall to earth?
The sun too from its lofty height in sky
Scatters its heat on every side and sows the field with light;
Down to the earth the sun's beat makes its way,
And thunderbolts fly crosswise through the rain,
And now from this side, now from that, fires burst from the cloud,
Rush to unite.
The impetus of flame is almost always to the earth.
The swerve of the atoms.
I long that you should grasp this point too in our search.
When atoms fall straight downwards through the void,
Impelled by their own weight,
At some chance time and some chance interval in space,
They swerve a bit,
So slightly that you scarce can call it swerve.
Unless they did,
There'd be no clash nor clinging in the atom stream.
Nothing could nature e'er create.
If any think
That weightier atoms swifter through the void are borne
And hence come movements which give shape to things,
In this he's clearly wrong.
When objects fall straight down through water or thin air,
The heavier faster falls, just because the medium
Checks not all things in equal measure equally,
But rather faster yields to heavier things.
And empty space can never, anywhere, check things in flight.
Its nature makes it yield.
And so both heavy things and light
Are borne at equal pace through silent void.
The heavy cannot strike the light by swifter flight,
Nor cause the clashes nor the variant motion-
Nature's way of making things.
And so once more, once more I'm moved to say.
Atoms must swerve the tiniest bit.
If not we're forced to think that bodies sideways fall-
They clearly don't.
This is apparent. this is manifest,
That bodies, of themselves, can never sideways move;
But fall straight down as you y:mrself can see.
But who is there who sees that nothing ever swerves
From straight down movement of its perpendicular path?1'
17. D.R.N. 2, 184 ff. Win.spear, R.P.S. 55 rr.
We have now seen two uses that the doctrine of the swerve
serves in the Epicurean system. It accounts for free will, caprice,
spontaneity, novelty in human conduct (as we saw in an earlier
chapter). It explains novelty, creation, the self-movement of the
material universe. The atomic stream of Lucretius is the self-
explanatory source of change. Like Heraclitus, the car of Lucretius
has a motor under the hood. It has no need of an external source
of motion in order to explain the cosmic process, the process of
change. And so Lucretius, as we have seen; felt able to banish his
gods to the inter-stellar spaces, use them only for purposes of an
example to men, and thus make his atomic theory a weapon against
superstition and the whole machinery of divine interference.
The Epicurean doctrine of the swerve has been ferociously
attacked. The whole thing is a childish fiction, exclaimed the pious
and conventional Cicero (Tota res pueriliter ficta).
This swerving, says Professor Jenkllll, seems but a silly fancy; and
yet consider this: it is a principle of mechanics that a force acting
at right angles to the direction in which a body is moving does no
work although it may continually and continuously alter the direc-
tion in which the body moves. No power, no energy is requiredu
to deflect a bullet from its path, provided the deflecting force
always acts at right angles to that path-an apparent paradox,
which is nevertheless quite true and apparent to the engineer. It is
clear to us that Epicurus when he devised his doctrine of a little
swerving from the straight path of the atom, had an imperfect
perception of this mechanical principle; a little swerving would
bring bis atoms into contact, and a modem mechanician would tell
him that you require no power to make them swerve. 0
Two postulates, then were necessary for Lucretius and the school
which he followed in explaining the physical and social universe-
atoms and space. Granted these two principles, they felt that every-
thing in the universe could be explained without bringing in the
gods or any ideal prindple whatsoever. The atoms (which he called
l by many names) were solid, indestructible, and invisible-so/ida
, pollentia simplicitate.
And so there are established forms or things
To mark off empty space from what is full.
These forms or atoms cannol be dissolved
By blows delivered horn oulside,
II, .. DIMlpaled In deftcctina ~ bullel from Its palh", would be the, formut.uJoa ot •
modern phy1lcl11. I owe lh11 lo my colleaaue, Profea.~or Cyril Ch1lllc..i. Univc™ty of
19. t~':'::·1~ -a:!!;,.A1~:::;,ur,
1
Cpinm-1111 und r-, p 1\4
THE WORLD 0UTLCX>K OF LUCRETIUS 109
And no internal force can reach their heart and break them up;
In no way can they dissolution find.
All this I've shown you just a little while before.
For clear it is,
That nothing could be crushed without the void,
Or smashed or cut in two.
Nor could it take in moisture to itself,
Or spreading cold or piercing fire,
Which brings most things to end.
The more a thing possesses void within,
The more by all these forces it is inwardly assailed,
Begins to break.
And so the atoms solid, free from void,
Must everlasting be.
And if the primal stuff of things,
\\'ere not endowed with power to last for evermore,
Long while ago the things we see,
Would all have passed away, would all have come to nothingness,
From nothingness had all we see been born.
And since I've shown above
That nothing ever can from nothing come,
Nor what's once made to nothingness return,
The atoms must eternal be;
To atoms al the last must all things be resolved,
Providing matter for the things to come.
And so the atoms are of solid singleness
Preserved through time from endless time
To make atl things anew.
Now since to all things kind by kind is limit set

Of growth, maintaining life,
And since by Nature's laws is set for each a principle
What it can do and what cannot,
So that it changes not
So that aJJ things stand fast.
That various birds in due array
Display their species with their bodies' marks,
They must assuredly possess a frame
Of stuff unchangeable.
For could the atoms be subdued and change,
Then nature's Jaws would also be subdued,
The laws of what can come to be and what cannot,
The code that binds each thing, its deep set boundary stone.
Nor could the race of birds and beasts and men,
Kind after kind.
Reflect their parent's ways,

Their manners, customs, even g;.it.
Now more-in atoms which our sense can never grasp,
There is a series of irreducible points,
Of which each point, we may be sure,
Is indivisible and very small.
It never has existed by itself nor will it ever come to be alone.
Since every atom form exists
A primary and single part
Of something else.
And other atom parts and others yet in close array,
Make up the nature of the thing.
Since by themselves they cannot stand alone,
They needs must cling to other atom forms,
And from this unity cannot be torn.
And so the atoms are of solid singleness,
A close dense mass of tiny parts,
Not put together by the union of the parts,
But rather always strong in solid singleness.
At last you must submit, confess

That tiny things there are of nature indivisible.
Since this is so, this too you must allow,
That these atomic shapes are made of solid stuff,
And will for evermore endure.
Again if Nature, creative queen of everything,
Decreed that all things must be broken up
Into their finest parts,
Then none of them she could create again,
Because a thing that's not increased by any parts,
Lacks all the powers which stuff creative must possesa,
Coherence in its various fonns,
The power to meet and parry weights and blows,
The power to move, the powers in short,
By which all things in this our universe are carried on.'"
The poetic imagination of Lucretius vividly pictures to himself
the primaeval chaos and he gives a sublime picture of the universe
as it would be if atoms did not meet and clash:
And now suppose,
The atoms able to create one thing were limited,
And tossed about the wilderness in loneliness,
Whence and where and how, and by what force compelled
10. D.R.N. I, 526 fr. Wlmpear, P.R..S. 14 fr.
THE WORLD OUTLOOI. OF LUCRETIUS 111
Could wanderin1 atoms meet in all that swirling univene,

In all that vast and alien and twnultuous sea
Of tossing atom stuff?
No principle is there to make them meet.
It's like the shipwreck of some mighty craft,
When whirling sea is wont to cast, this side and that,
Benches and ribs and yards and prow
And masts and swimming oars;
While all along the shore the shipwrecked fragments of the ship
are seen,
Warning mankind
To stay on shore, to shun the might and treachery of sea
And not to trust
The winning, guileful smile of windless wave.
And so if you suppose,
That atoms of a certain kind are limited
Then, scattered throughout all time, they must be tempest-tossed
By swirling tides of matter rushing in from every side;
But never meet, never unite, never stay fixed in unity,
Or find increase and grow;
And yet it's clear that all of this occurs--
The fact is manifest for all to see
That things do come to birth and, being born, do grow.
And so assuredly in any class of things you will
The stock of atom stuff is infinite,
From which created things are all supplied.
And so the movements which bring death to things
Cannot always prevail
Or hwy life in everlasting sepulchre;
Nor can the movements that bring birth and growth
Always prevail.
And so from evermore to evermore a strife goes on-
A war of balanced principles of atom staff.
Now here, now there the living force of things prevaila.
Is then in turn subdued.
And with the lamentations of the funeral
Is mingled newborn infants' wail
When first they view the shores of light.
And night can never follow day,
Nor daylight night,
Without pathetic dirge of funeral chant,
Mingled with infants' puling cry.•
:U. D.R.N. 2, 3•" ff. Wimpear, R.l'.S. 61 tr.
112 LUCRETIUS AND SctBNTIFIC THOUGHT
The world then is made out of atoms. These atoms are con-
stantly in motion, making and begetung worlds and everything that
in them is.
Come now, I will unfold and tell
What movement of the atom stuff made things
And broke them down again when made,
And what compulsion's brought to bear on them,
And what velocity's assigned to them
To fall through mighty void.•
A little later in the poem Lucretius feels it necessary to defend
the concept of motion in the atom stream, though things before our
eyes often seem motionless.
Now this you need not wonder at,
Nor ask the reason why
Though all the sum of atoms are in constant, restless motion stirnd
The sum of things seems still.
For all the movements of the atom particles

Lie far from sense and far beneath the view.
We cannot see atomic particles;
Why wonder that their movements are bidden from our eyea1
For many things that we can look upon
Still hide their movements when they're far away.
For often fleecy flocks
Crop the lush pastures on a distant hilt
And every sheep creeps on
Wherever sight of tempting pasture summons him;
Or grass with jewels of dew.
While tiny lambs, their bellies fuJI, butt playfully.
And yet from far all this seems blurred
And seems to lie a single mass of white,
On far green hill.
And then again when mighty legions fill the spaces of the plain,
Stirring up mimic war,
The sheen of weapons reaches to the sky
And all the air is filled with flash of bronze;
The earth beneath is filled with noise--
The clamor made by mighty mass of marching men;
The mountains, smitten by the sound,
Echo the warriors' shouts to stars of firmament:
The horsemen wheel, and in a sudden charge
Make the plains shake with torrent of their headlong speed.
J2. D.ll..N. l, 62 ti. Wi.alp,Nr, R.J'..S. SO ti.
THE WORLD OUTLOOK OP LUCRETIUS I I3
And yet to one observing from a lofty emineoce,

High in the hills,
All seems to rest.
All seems to lie a solid gleaming mass upon the plain.•
The atoms, Lucretius thought, are of many sizes and shapes
and these differences account for differences in quality, texture and
shape in the world of things.
But now returning to the atom stream;
The human race,
The fleecy flocks, the warrior breed of horse,
Horned herds that crop the grass from fields the same,
Beneath the same vast, arching canopy of sky,
Assuage their burning thirst from self-same streams,
Yet live their various lives, and keep the,fonn
And imitate their fathers' ways, kind after kind.
So great the difference in atom forms,
In any grass you will, in any stream.
Now every Jiving creature of them all
Is made of blood and veins and bones and heat,
Sinews and moisture-in a word of flesh.
All these are quite unlike,
As made of atoms differing in shape.
Again all things that burn, that blaze with fire
Hold in themselves at least those atom forms
That cause a fire; which let them shoot abroad
Both light and heat and make sparks fly,
And scatter cinders far and wide.
Now range through other things with piercing power of mind.
You'll find the same.
All hold within themselves the seeds of many things-
Atoms of different shapes.
And certain things have colour, taste and smell assigned to them--
A prime example, fruits.*'
The qualitative differences in the atoms, Lucretius thought,
explain the qualitative differences in things.
Now why the fire of heaven's lightning more piercing is by far
Than that of ours which flows from torch of pine on earth,
This riddle's easy for the mind to read.
The heavenly fire you'd say is made of smaller atom shapes,
Atoms more subtle and more fine.
And so this fire can pass through openings
That fire on earth,
23. D.R.N. 2, 308 ff. Winspcar, R.P.S. 60 ff.
M. D.R.N. 2, 660 If. Winspear, R.P.S. 73 ff.
Rising from logs and offspring of the resin brand,

Can never pass.
And light can pass through lantern's horn while water is repelled.
Atoms of light are smaller far
Than those which constitute the fostering liquid stream.
And wine will swiftly through a strainer run
While sluggish olive oil holds back.
The atoms of the olive oil must larger be,
More booked and more entangled each with each.
And so the nexus of atomic particles can not be drawn apart,
One from the rest;
And each one makes its way
Through single holes of things.
Then too,
The liquid juice of honey and the warm, sweet milk
Are pleasant to the tongue when tasted in the mouth.
But wormwood foul and bitter centaury
Pucker the mouth with loathsome taste.
The pleasant tasting things are made from atom particles
Both smooth and round;
The bitter tasting things are made of atoms hooked
That tear a way by force through organs of the sense,
And break our body as they enter in.
And last of all
Things that the senses find both good and bad
Are mutually at war,
Because, you see
They're made from atoms of a different shape.
And so you must not think
The bitter horror of the shrieking saw
Is made of particles as smooth
As melodics of music which the skilled musicians make,
Shaping the notes while fingers nimbly run across the strinp.
Nor must you think again
That atoms like in shape can pierce the nose,
When men burn corpses on a funeral pyre,
As when the theatre stage is dewed with saffrons from Cilicia.,
While neighbouring altars breathe the scent
Of frankincense from Araby.
Nor can you think that pleasant colours, those which feed the eyee
Are made from self-same atom stuff
As those which prick the pupils, those which make us weep,
Foul sights and horrible to see.
For every shape which ever charms our sense
Has not been brought to be without some smoothness in its atom
stuff,
THE WORLD OUTLCX>I: OP LUCRETIUS 115
Or every sharp offensive shape

Without some roughness in its atom stuff.
And other atoms, too, we must suppose
Not wholly smooth, not altogether hooked with jagged pointa
Arc made with tiny angles standing out a bit.
And substance made from these
Can gently tickle, stimulate our sense, not hurt.
Examples I can give-the lees of wine or endive's taste.
Again that heat of fire and cold of frost
Have atoms differing in their shape is proved by touch.
For touch, ye holy gods, yes touch
Is sense supreme, the body's chiefest instrument,
When something strikes it from outside,
Or when a pain, born in the body gives w hurt.
Or pleasure in the body born
Creates delight in passing out;
As men all know from love's creative act.•
These atoms are of many sizes and shapes and this accounts
for differences of quality, texture and shape in the world of things.
Come now, in order learn of atoms, how diverse they arc,
How differently they're formed with differing shapes.
Not in the sense that few are like in form,
But generally they're not everywhere, not all alike.
Nor should we wonder; atoms so many, atoms limitless,
Ne.ed not always, everywhere, be similar in size and shape.
Then too the race of men,
The v0iceless, sca1y fish that swim the seas,
Glad herds, wild beasts, the various birds
Which haunt the joyful banks, the springs, the pools,
That flit through distant glades,
Take any one you want as specimen;
You'll find it differs slightly from its kind."
Lightning will penetrate where fire will not, because it is
composed of finer atoms. Light will pass through horn (the ancient
equivalent of glass) on the side of a lantern when water will not for
the same reason. Wine will flow through a strainer where oil will
not. Honey or milk is sweet to the taste, wormwood is bitter,
because the former are composed of smooth and rounded atoms, the
latter of atoms more crooked. Of sound too, the pleasing sounds are
of round atoms, the harsh sounds of rough atoms. Condiments and
25. D.R.N. 2, 381 ff. Wlmpear, R.P.S. 62 If.
U. D.R.N. 2. 333 ff. Wimpear, R.P.S. 61 8'.
I 16 LUCRETIUS AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
pickles tickle rather than wound our sense because their atoms arc
not entirely smooth nor altogether hooked. Hard substances arc
composed of hard atoms more closely intertwined.
Once again, things which seem hard, compact
Arc made of atoms far more closely hooked
Are held more closely at their roots
(If such a metaphor I dare to use)
By branching particles.
Of things like these the diamond takes its stand in vanguard rank.
It's schooled to disregard, despise all blows;
And after diamonds come the stubborn flints, the strength of iron,
Sockets of brass which scream aloud
In struggle with the bolts ..,
Fluids are composed of round, smooth atoms. He uses poppy
seed as an example. The sea is at once fluid and bitter. Its atoms
must, therefore, be mixed-some smooth and round, with painful
rough ones mixed in. This explains why it is possible to separate
the salt from the water, why salt water can be frC6hened and
purified if it filters through the ground.
The number of atomic shapes was, he held, limited; the number
of each shape, infinite. Although of things the texture, hardness,
softness, etc. were dictated by the atomic shapes, colour, odour,
taste and temperature are not. Worlds are infinite in number, but
finite in time. Our earth is already in o]d age, has passed its creative
prime.
And so some day,
The mighty ramparts of the mighty universe
Ringed round with hostile force,
Will yield and face decay and come to crumbling ruin.
For food it is which must repair all things,
Support, renew, sustain them.
Yet in the long run aU in vain.
Since when old age has come,
The veins cannot receive sufficient sustenance,
Nor Mother Nature give what aged creatures need.
And even now this earth of ours is old, effete.
Scarce can it now create the tiniest animals,
Though once it could bring forth the various tribec,
And bring to birth huge bodies of wild beasts.•
17. D.R.N. 2, 444 n. Wlnapeu, R.P.S. 64 ff.
11 DR N. l, 1144 ff. Wimpear, R.P.S. 91 fl.
THI! WORLD OUTLOOK: OF LUCRETIUS 117
In all this the reader may detect many crudities, many signs of
inadequate theory or controJ of fact. He may be tempted to compare
modem atomic theories to Lucretius' disadvantage. It would be
more just, I think, to reflect how extraordinary is the insight and
analytical power displayed by the ancient materialist thinkers; bow
keen are their anticipations of the modern world outlook, in spite of
the inadequate scientific apparatus with which they worked, and
their relatively primitive concepts of scientific method.
2. The TMory of Natural Evolution

U in his rendering of the atomic theory Lucretius anticipated
the most advanced thinking of the eighteenth century A.O., in his
concepts of evolution, cosmic, biological, social, he anticipated the
best thinking of the nineteenth. This thinking of Lucretius we
should now examine. And here again the acuteness of Lucretius'
mind, the very sharpness of his observations impels him to rise
above the formal mechanism of his formal philosophy.
We have already quoted in chapter one Leonard's estimate of
Lucretius' relation to modem biological thinking.
Now let Lucretius make some of these points in his own words
( and my translation). First let us consider bis attacks on the theory
~ cre_ation and the divine origin of the universe:-- -
This too it cannot be that you believe,

That holy places of the gods exist,
In some remote abode of this great univcne.
The nature of the gods is very fine,
And from the grasp of human sense
Far, far, removed;
Nay, scarcely to be grasped by power of human mind.
Now since the godhead is thus far below
The touch or blow of human hands
(Nothing can touch which cannot in its tum be touched).
Thus the abodes and seats of mighty gods
Cannot resemble ours.
They're rather rare and fine as gods themselves are fine.
All this I'Jl later prove with bounteous floods of argument.
And then to say that for the sake of man
The will of god brought forth the glorious universe.
And therefore men should praise this glorious work of god,
All worthy of all praise;
Hold that creation always was and always will endure;
To think it impious ever to shake in its eternal haunts

Assail with human arguments or ,:,verwhelm it utterly
What once for endless time
Was by the ancient wisdom of the deity
Established for the human race;
To think all this, pile up a mountainous argument,
ls foolishness, my friend.
What profit could our gratitude ensure to blessed and
immortal gods,
That they attempt a favour for the sake of man?
Or, after all the previous ages of tranquillity,
What novelty could prompt a god to change bis mode of life?
For only those can long for fundamental change
To whom the old was not endurable.
For these immortal ones
Who never felt the pang of pain throughout the past,
Who lived a lovely life,
How could desire for basic change enkindle these?
What was so bad for mortal man if he were never born?
Or did our life lie foully prone in darkness and in grief,
Until creation's primal day had dawned on it?
But once a man is born,
He needs must wish to stay a1ive,
So long as joy of life has hold of him.
But he who never was alive,
Who never tasted for himself the joy of life,
How does it harm some one like this,
That he was never made?
How was the pattern for creating things implanted in the gods?
How came the notion of humanity,
That gods should know and mentally conceive
That which they would create?
How could the power of atom stuff ever be known?
And all the rich variety of things that atom stuff can bring to be
By fresh arrangement of the particles,
If Mother Nature had not given
A demonstration of creative power?
Rather in numbers infinite atoms move in many ways,
Throughout the whole expanse of space
They're beaten and they're buffeted,
From infinite time in blind experiment essay
All movements and all meetings,
And so it is not wonderful that they should come
To this exact arrangement of atomic shapes,
To these same movements out of which
The present sum of things is made.
THE! WORLD OUTLOOJt OF LUCRETIUS 119
But even if I knew nothing of the atom stuff,

This I would dare affirm-
By thinking on the very laws of sky,
And prove with wealth of argument-
The universe has not been made by power divine,
It holds too many flaws.
Of all the earth that's covered by the vast expanse of sky,
A greedy half is held by mountains and the forest homes of beasts,
Rocks and vast swamps,
The sea that holds apart the shores of continents.
Almost two thirds is kept from human use
By burning desert heat or endless frost.
And what remains
Nature's resistless force would choke with weeds,
H constant human toil did not resist-
Men who gain their livelihood
By pressing firmly on the plough,
By constant labour with the restless hoe;
Unless we turn the fertile sod with iron plough,
Subdue the soil,
The crops would not spring up to liquid air,
Spontaneously.
And even when by constant toil we've raised a crop,
The fields are green and all a-flower,
The sun in sky will parch with too much heat,
Or sudden rain wreck havoc, or chill frosts,
Or blades of violent winds in headlong hurricane.
And why should nature rear and nurture savage beasts
To harm the race of man on land and sea?
Why do the changing seasons of the year bring pestilence?
And why does early death stalk everywhere?
The infant boy lies naked on the ground,
Like sailor cast ashore by savage seas,
And lacks all aid for life,
When nature first has cast him forth
By travail from his mother's womb,
And all the place around he fills with piteous wail,
As is most natural-
Since endless troubles face the child in life.
But various beasts both wild and tame
Grow to maturity,
And have no need of childish toys-
The rattle or the rocking horse,
Or kindly nurse's broken baby talk.
120 LUCRETIUS AND SCIBNTIFIC THOUGHT
Nor do they need to change their clothes

To suit the season of the year;
Nor armaments nor lofty walls to guard their young.
The earth herself brings forth all needful things,
Abundantly;
The earth and Nature, creative queen of everything.
Now since the body of the earth and sea,
The soft caressing breezes, summer's heat,
That go to make the sum of things,
All these are made of body that knows birth and death,
It follows that the universe consists of inortal stuff.
For if the limbs and parts of anything
Are made of mortal stuff,
It fol1ows that the whole must too.
And when accordingly,
We see the mighty members and constituent pans of all
the universe
Consumed away and brought to birth again,
We know that sky and earth
Began one day, one day will end.•
If Lucretius is vehement in his opposition to the theory ot
divine creation in the universe he is just as vehement in his opposi-
tion to teleology-a subtler form of the same theory.
With all my heart I long that you should shun this fault
of reasoning
Through prudent fear and foresight in advance
This blunder miss:-
Don 't ever think that eyes were made
In order that the human race might have the power to see.
Don't ever think that thighs or legs, based on the feet
Were made to bend that man might take long steps.
Don't ever think that forearms, joined to upper hands and arms
Were given us as servants either side
That we might do the things that serve our life.
Ideas like this, which men proclaim, are false in reasoning,
Abysmally confound effect with cause.
Nothing at all was brought lo be in all our human frame
In order that the human race might use it;
What is brought to be creates its use.
Vision existed not at all
Before the light of eyes was brought to be;
Nor did men learn to pray in words before the tongue wu
brought to be.
lt. D.R.N. ,. 146 ff. Wini;pa.r, R.r.s. 194 ff.
The tongue arrived much before speech;

Ears before sound was heard;
And all the limbs I think
Were there before their use.
And so I think they have not come to be because of use.
That hands should clash in bloody battle strife,
To mangle limbs and make the body foul with blood,
All this was known before the shining darts
Shot through the air.
Nature made men avoid a wound, a blow,
Before the left arm, trained by art,
Held up a shield.
To lay the weary body down to rest
Is older far than soft-strewn beds;
To slake the thirst was known, long before cups.
And all these new discoveries found to suit the needs of life
Were found, one well believes, for sake of use.
The faculties were born quite differently;
First they evolved themselves and then revealed their use.
Among the latter we observe particularly the senses and the limbs.
And so, again, again, I say you can't, must not believe
That they were made for function of performing useful tasks.•
Having thus faithfully dealt with theories of the origin of the
universe that were prevalent in his times, Lucretius goes on to
expound his own view of natural evolution. This he does systemat-
ically under three beadings; the emergence of the material universe,
the emergence of plant and animal life, the emergence of man and
the historical development of human institutions. Nowhere is the
maturity and the modernity of Lucretius' thought more strikingly
manifested than in the fifth book where he deals with these prob-
lems. Perhaps his first and greatest preoccupation is to explain the
passage from primaeval chaos to the most primitive order.
Come now I will expound in due array,
How meetings of material particles
Established sky and eanh and ocean's deeps,
And courses of the sun and moon.
Assuredly,
Not by design or fiat of foreseeing mind
Did atoms set themselves in order,.d ranks
Nor did they make a compact or arrange
Which movements each should start.
30. D.R.N. 4, Ill ff. Winspear, R.P.S. 170 ff.
Rather the multitudinous atom shapes

From endless time in fashions infinite
Were driven on by mutual blows
Until this very day.
And carried downward by their weight were borne along,
United every way and tried in every way
That so they might create the universe of things,
By joining each to each.
And so it comes about
That scattered as they are through endles.1 time,
Every kind of meeting and motion they explore;
At last and suddenly these atom forms unite
And this their meeting often forms the starting point
For mighty things-
For earth and sky and sea and every race of living things.
The sun that moves on high with bounteous light
Before the joining of the atom forms could not be seen;
No, nor the constellations of the mighty universe,
No sea, nor sky, nor earth, nor air,
Nothing of all the things we know.
The universe was like a new1y risen massive storm
Composed of every kind of atom particle.
The strife of these--confusion in the interspaces,
Confusion in their paths, their meetings, weights and blows,
Confusion in their movements and their contactings,
The strife of these brought wars.•
If Lucretius' concept of primitive chaos is touched with sub~
limity, the same may be said of his picture of the first and primal
passage away from the primitive chaos. The further process of the
evolution of the universe he conceived, as did his predecessors in
the materialistic tradition, as a process of separation in which like
joined with like and separated itself from unlike until the fundamen-
tal structure of the cosmos, earth and sky and sun and stars and
moon were formed.
For owing to their different forms and various shapes,
They could not keep their unity as now they do,
And give and get between themselves
Their proper mutual motions.
Now from this primal mass
A portion would depart, this side and that,
And like began to join with like
And so reveal a world;
ll. D.R.N. ,, -416 tf. Wbupear, R.1'.S. 206 ff.
THE WORLD OUTLCX>lt OP LUCRETIUS 123
And separate constituent parts,

And set its clements apan-
1 mean, divide the deep of sky from lands, and both from sea,
That sea might flow around the solid world,
With moisture sundered from the solid land.
Likewise the fires of sky,
Set by themselves unmixed and kept apart.
At first you see
The various bodies of the earth,
Because tight interlaced with heavy weight,
United in the centre of the primal storm
And occupied the lowest place
And as they met and interlaced
The more they pressed out atom forms
To make the sea and stars and sun and moon,
And rampans of the mightly universe.
For all of these are made of smoother, rounder atom seeds,
Of atom forms much smaller than is earth.
And so the fiery aether rose up first,
Bursting from the comers of the earth through scattered pores,
And, as it rose, took off and bore along uncounted fires.
Jwt as we often see
When first the golden moruing light of radiant sun
Sheds flames of red over the dew-pearled grass,
While pools and running streams give off a mist,
And even earth herself at times is seen to steam;
When all these steams of mist converge above,
The clouds, with shapes now made, weave patterns in the sky;
Even so in primal times the spreading aether all around was placed
With shapes now formed
And spread to every part of universe on every side,
And fenced all other things around in eager, greedy grasp.•
From this primary differentiation, resulting from the process of

separation and the quite fortuituous concourse of atoms, he thought,
emerged the heavenly bodies; in good naturalistic terms he goes on
to explain what force and what cause started the various courses of
the sun, the journeys of the moon, the motion of the stars; the
position of the earth in the centre of the universe, the cause of day
and night, the reasons for eclipses. Perhaps his account of the origin
of the earth will sufficiently illustrate his method, all the more
because more recent science though employing a similar concept of
32. D.R.N. 5, 440 ff. Wl.mpcar, R.P.S. 201 ff.
124 LUCRETIIJS AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
scientific method has made obsolete many of Lucretius' specific

conclusions.
So then the weight of earth, its shape now formed
Sank down;
And all the world sank down like slime or dregs of wine;
And then the sea and air in tum, aether in tum herseJf,
with flaming fires,
Were left unmixed like purest mixture when the dregs sink down.
(For each of these is lighter in successive steps.)
Aether, most liquid and most light,
Is borne along above air's breezes;
It mingles not at all with wind's tumultuous storms.
Aether aJlows the air below to churn in headlong hurricanes,
Or brawling shifting storms.
But aether, heedless of this,
Bears its fires along in changeless march.
The Black Sea gives a proof of this;
That sea which ever flows with changeless tide,
Yet ever keeps the even tenor of its way;
And so it proves that aether can flow serenely on,
In one great changeless tide. 31
Even when Lucretius makes what now seems an obvious blun-

der in his physical doctrine, he does this through his very anxiety
to keep inviolate the evidence of sense perception. It is, as it were,
a defect of his very qualities. He thought, for example, that the sun
and moon were not much different in size than they appear to our
vision. And so he is embarassed to explain how that tiny orb can
flood all the world with heat and light.
Nor is the globe or heat of sun
Much larger or much smaller than they seem to human sense.
However great the distances through which the fires can hurl
their light,
Or breathe soft warmth upon our limbs,
Yet in this interspace these fires lost nothing of their flames,
They seem no smaller to our sight.
Just so the heat of sun, the light it sheds
Attacks the organs of our sense,
And floods the place around with light;
It follows that the form and sight of sun are truly seen,
And nothing can you add or take away from that.
J). D.R.N. ,, ,9, n. Wlmpear, R.P.S. 209 tr.
And whether moon with borrowed, bastard lia:ht,

Or with its own, illumines all the world
( Whichever of these theories were the truth)
It's never larger than it seems to us.
Whatever at a distance we observe
These things are seen with outline all confused
Before their size is seen reduced.
Nor must we wonder that that tiny sun,

Can send so great a flood of light
To fill all seas and lands and sky with rose·red radiance,
Bathe them all in blazing heat.
Perhaps it's true that from this single spot
One bounteous source and fount of heat for all the world
is opened up,
That light abounds and sends illumination forth,
Because the particles of heat from all the world
From all sides comes to meet and so pile up.
That from this single source derived,
Their light and heat pour forth.
You've seen how o'er a wide expanse, a tiny stream
Can irrigate the fields and flood the plain.
And sometimes too it comes about that though the fire of
sun be small,
The blazing sun takes hold·of air in hot embrace,
If air is right and ready to be set alight
By blows of tiny rays of heat;
Just as we often see cornlands or heaps of straw
Blaze far and wide when kindled by a tiny spark.
This too could be
That sun, blazing aloft with rosy torch
Holds all around itself much fire with hidden heat-
But not revealed by any radiant light,
And bringing with it surging tides of heat,
Adds to the force sent out by blazing rays of sun.N
So, then, having with the eye of imagination watched the evolu-
tion and emergence of the physical, Lucretius narrows his vision
and fixes attention on this planet. He explains the origins of animal
and vegetable life.
Now I come back to tell of early days on earth,
And earth's soft fields;
And what the earth resolved in earliest pangs of birth
To bring to shining shores of light. entrust to gusty winds.
34. D,R.N, 5, 564 ff. WlDspear, R.P.S. 212 ff.
In early times, then, eanh brought forth the varying kinda

of grass
And foliage glowing green on all the bills around,
And over every plain;
And flowery meadows flamed in radiance of green.
And then to various shrubs was given the power to leap into
the air,
Like race horse on the track when reins are loosed.
And as on any fledgling, four legged beast
Or strong winged birds of air,
Bristles and down and hair are formed,
So earth, new born, raised herbs and shrubbery tint.
And then produced the tribes of living things--
Those various tribes that came to be
So variously in many ways.
For living creatures could not fall from sky,
Nor land born creatures leap from salty sea.
And so we must conclude that man was right
To call the earth his mother;
For from this Mother Earth were all things made.
Even to-day many creatures spring from earth,
N unured by rains and warming heat of sun.
And so it is not wonderful
If, when the earth was young and sky was fresh
More creatures sprang from earth
And larger creatures than the ones we know;
And, after birth, grew great and strong and reached maturity.
For first the winged fowl and all the birds
Emerged from eggs, were hatched in spring,
Even as now the grasshoppers
In summer leave their shapely shells spontaneously
To seek for life and livelihood
And then the earth brought forth the mortal generations of
all living things,
For in the early days of eanh,
Moisture and heat abounded in the fields.
And thus wherever place seemed suitable,
There sprang up female wombs which with their tentacles
Clung to the earth;
And then when time was fully ripe the tiny offspring
opened these
In flight from moisture and in search of air;
And where the tiny things appeared,
Mother Nature turned the pores of earth
And from their open veins compelled a sap to Bow,
Most like the flow of milk.
Just as even now when women bring a child to birth

They fill with milk;
Because the pressure of their nourishment is turned
towards the breasts.
And for these new born, tiny things
Earth gave forth food,
While warmth gave raiment
And the grass a bed,
Abounding with a wealth of soft and gentle down.
But earth was young and so did not produce
Hard frosts, excessive heat or over violent winds.
For all things grow alike, alike put on their strength.
And so again, I say, it's right,
That earth should gain and keep the name of Mother.
Since every creature-man and beast alike
She brings to birth-when time is ripe;
The beasts that revel everywhere on lofty hills,
And all the birds of air with all their varying forms.
But since it needs must be that earth should find
Some end to her creative work,
She ceased to bear like weary women at the menopause.
For time must change the nature of the Universe
A change of form and shape must come on everything
Nothing abides unchanged, all things must move.
Nature is always changing things,
Compelling them to turn themselves around.
And one thing rots away, grows weak with age,
Another grows to take its place,
Leaving its former low estate.
So time must change the nature of the Universe,
A change of form and shape must come on everything;
And earth cannot now bear the things she once produced.•
The following passage reads a great deal like the nineteenth
century theories of natural selection.
It must have been that in the early days of earth
Countless kinds of living things died out
And failed to reproduce their kind.
For all the living things you now see feeding on the breath of life
Must have survived after the first appearance of their kind,
Either through cunning or through valour or through speed
of foot.
And many kinds have proved. their usefulness to human kind,
Have lived and thrived
Because entrusted to the care of man.
35. D.R.N. 5, 780 ff. Wlnspcar, R.P.S. 221 ff.
128 LUCRFTIUS AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
The fierce and savage race of lions through valour has survived,
Foxes through cunning and ttje deer through speed.
But lightly sleeping loyal dogs,
The beasts of burden, fleecy flocks and hornCd kine
Are all, my friend, entrusted to the care of man.
Gladly they shunned the life of savage beasts
And sought domestic peace:
And bounteous fodder these have gained without the toil
of raising it-
The fodder which men give to various animals
To reward their usefulness to us.
To some has nature given neither way of life-
Survival by themselves spontaneously nor usefulness to man,
For which we let them live and feed, be safe, survive,
Under our kindly guardianship,
And these fell spoil and prey to other kinds
All caught in trammels of their luckless destiny,
Until the time when nature had destroyed their race.•
The fables told of monsters, Centaurs, Scylla, the Chimaera, he
rejects and his logic is as interesting as it is unassailable. The cen-
taur of mythology, for example, was said to have been a compound
creature· man in its upper regions but a horse below. Lucretius
rejects the legend on the following grounds.
When three full years have passed a horse is in its prime
But not a boy.
A boy at three will often blindly grope in dreams
For milky nipples of its mother's breasts.
But when the sturdy strength of steeds droops in old age,
Their limbs begin to fail,
Manhood begins for boys at puberty,
And covers boyish cheeks with soft and downy beard.
And so you must not think that Centaurs could evolve or be
Formed from a man and burden bearing beast!'
3. The Growth of Human Institutions

Lucretius has now cleared the ground and is ready for an
exposition of the evolution of man and of human institutions. He
begins with a description of primitive man as he conceived his life
to be.
36. D.R.N. 5, 8'5 ff. Win.pear, R.P.S. 224 ff.
)7. D.R.N. 5, 17! If. Winspear, R.P.S. 225 II.
The human race was harder far in earlier days than now,
As you'd expect, since hard earth brought it fonh.
Its bones within were harder, solider;
Its sinews binding flesh were tougher far.
Its hardy strength could scarcely be assailed by heat or cold
Or novel food or any flaw in human frame.
Age after age, while sun sped through the sky,
They lived their life like wandering beasts.
No sturdy ploughman held his curving plough;
No skill was theirs to till the fields with iron share,
Or plant young shoots in earth,
Or prune high trees with knives.
The gift of sun and showers, spontaneous bounty of the earth,
Was boon enough to please their hearts.
Under the acorn-laden oaks they gained their sustenance;
Or dined on berried arbute,
(These you've seen in winter red;
Much larger were they in the days of old.)
Besides alJ this the flowering youth of earth
Bore other fare as rough, plenty for wretched men.
To quench their thirst the rills and rivers called
As now from mighty hills the water's fall
In loud and solemn tones calls thirsty roving beasts.
Or in their wandering they came to know
The woodland church of nymphs and lingered there.
For they knew
That water gliding there in bounteous flood
Washed the wet rocks and trick.led over mosses green,
And sometimes welled and burst its banks
And rushed o'er level plain.
Not yet did man know how to serve himself with fire.
He had not thought to clothe himself with skins,
Or use the spoils of chase for body's covering.
Men dwelt in woods and glades and hollow mountain caves;
And hid their shaggy limbs in brushwood piles,
When blows of wind or rain forced them to hide.
They could not think of social good
Or know the fine restraint of common codes or laws.
Whatever booty fortune gave the individual seized.
His only learning was to live and thrive himself.
Venus herself joined lovers in the woods in primal ecstasy.
Sometimes a mutual love joined man and girl
Or else the violent strength of male, unbridled lust.
Or else she was by little gifts seduced,
Acorns or arbute or the choicest pear.

Relying on their wondrous strenglh of hand and foot
Men followed hard on track of woodland beasts.
With mighty clubs or stones to hurl.
Most they subdued, a few they'd dodge and hide.
When night came on they laid their naked limbs on earth
Like bristling boars,
And wrapped themselves around with leaves and foliage.
Nor did they look for daylight and the sun with wailing loud,
Or wander panicked through the fields at black of night
But deep in silent sleep they waited patiently,
Till sun with rosy torch brought light to sky.
For since from babyhood they'd learned to know
Light following darkness, turn by turn, and darkness light,
They had no sense of wonder or of fear,
No sense of apprehension lest the sun should ne'er return,
And earth be buried always in unending night.
Their fear was rather this, that savage beasts
Might make night restless for a wretched folk.
They left their homes, abandoned rocky roof,
If foaming boar or mighty lion approached.
At midnight oft they'd leave their leaf-spread couch
To savage and unwelcome guests.
And not much more in early times than now
Did men lament to meet untimely end
And leave the sweet bright light of life behind.
Sometimes a hapless man in early times
Was caught by savage beasts,
Ground by their teeth and gulped down ravenously.
The woods and glades and hills he'd fill with piteous cries,
Aghast while living flesh was buried in a Jiving tomb.
But some escaped by flight, though mangled, tom and maimed.
And these then held their hands over their awful sores,
And piteous in their anguished cries would beg release,
Until in ignorance of how to dress the wounds,
The cramping, griping pains brought death.•
There is nothing of the Rousseauesque mood of admiration for
the noble savage about this description of primitive life. And yet
the basic assumption of the primitive food-gathering horde is one
that modern anthropologists would accept. And, although Lucretius
does not idealize the life of the primitives, yet characteristically he
31. D R.N. 1, 91' ff. Wlnapear, R.P.S. 227 fl.
TlrE WORLD OUTLOOIC OP LUCRETIUS 131
uses what he can imagine of their existence to criticize the institu-

tions of his own contemporary society.
But in remote antiquity, men could escape
The wholesale slaughter of our modern days.
Never were thousands at a time enrolled in warlike hosts
By thousands in a single day to meet catastrophe.
Nor were great liners, with their complements of passengers
and crew,
Dashed on the rocks in early days.
The sea would often rise and rage,
But idly, rashly, vainly would it roar,
And then lay down its idle, empty threats in turn;
No man was coaxed to death
By winning, guileful smile of windless wave.
The treacherous art of navigation was as yet unknown.
In ancient times the lack of food brought men to death;
Now, overabundance lays them low,
These ancient savages in ignorance poisoned themselves;
But now with knowledge, forethought, skill,
Men hand the poisoned cup to their associates.•
Civil society, Lucretius believed, began with the institution of
monogamous marriage and the development of stability in relations
between the sexes. This theory is, of course, hardly adequate. And
in fact at this point Lucretius seems to jump over a number of
stages in human evolution-the old stone age economy, for example
based on hunting, fishing and collecting.~ He has little to say, too,
about the domestication of animals except as implements of war.
On the other hand, he fully appreciates the importance of the devel-
opment of speech as the essential tool of human co-0peration, at
anything but the most primitive level. In giving an account of the
evolution of language, Lucretius feels the need to argue once again
against the teleological or miraculous theories which were so prev-
alent in ancient philosophical schools. In passing, it is interesting to
compare Lucretius' direct formulation with the poetic imagery of
Shelley whom in so many ways Lucretius so much resembles. For
39. D.R.N. 5, 999 ff. Winspear, R.P.S. 229 ff.
40. "There is in fact no such thing as the Stone Age. There was a Stone Age in England,
in Palestine, and in New Zealand, and it still el.ists in parll of New Guinea. bu!
chronologically, as periods of absolule time, lhey are all different. On the other band,
the severaJ Aaes are everywhere homotu.ial, to use a term proposed by T. H. Huxle)'.
Each. that is, always occupies the same relative position in the sequence wherever
the full aequence it available. (ID New Zealand, for example,_ the sequence b In-
complete, since the Bronze Age is totally missing.)" cf. V. G. Ch1lde, Socia/ Ernlutlun,
Henry Schuman, Inc. New York 1951, p. 20.
Shelley" speech was represented as the gift of the semi-divine,

though rebellious, demi-god Prome,heus.
He gave men speech and speech created thought
Which is the measure of the universe.
This is Lucretius' account.
Nature compelled our early ancestors to utter various sounds
And use worked out the names of things .
Just as you see with children growing up:
Their very speechlessness
Compels them to gesture, with their fingers point
At things before their eyes.
And so to think that someone summoned everything,

Assigned a name to each,
To think that men have learned from him the names of things,
Is foolishness, my friend.
How could this first inventive man
Mark off the names of everything,
Give out the sounds of vocal utterance-
A thing which no contemporary could do?
If others had not uttered speech, communicating thought,
How did he get the notion of its use?
And whence was given to him this early power
To know, imagine in bis mind just what he wished to do?
Nor could one man keep many down, compel them to his will,
And make them learn the names he'd given to things.
(You know yourself it is not easy to persuade and teach the deaf
What they should do;
The deaf would not put up with you,
Would not allow the sounds of words not understood
To batter at their ears so long in vain.)
And if the human race, with voice and tongue so strong,
Should for diverse emotions utter different sounds,
What is so wonderful in this?
Even domesticated beasts who've never learned to speak,
Even wild beasts give out a different noise,
When fear or pain or joy grow strong within. 111
~1huf!
41. t1:e:i:if~ofi~:s1 1~7£:e~~~~ of Islam", where he answen bb erlties In advance,
"I cannot conceive that Lucretilll, when he meditated that poem whose doctrin•
;'~! i~~~:~ :,a~a;:i.;J:' w~:::~~y!~:I o~n~u~i~~~=~d .:~O:Ch:~u1;ebb~o?:
impure and ~uperstnious noblemen of Rome miaht affi-. to what he should
produce.''
He abo refers lO Milton in the same context. See "Thr Srlrclrd l'~try and l'ros• o/
Sh.r/lry"', Modero Library Edition, Random HoUIC, N.Y. 19!11, p, 441. See al8o lbl4.
"A Dch:nse of Poetry", pp. !108 and !II J.
41 D R.H. !!, 1021 ff. Winspear, R.P.S. 211, ff.
To illustrate his point Lucretius describes the different sounds

that dogs, horses and birds give to express their various moods and
emotions. Incidentally this whole passage is a remarkable example
of Lucretius' skill as a controversialist, as well as his distrust of
ideal explanations for any phenomenon, great or small ... The origin
of fire in similar fashion he explains in naturalistic terms. Again it
was not a semi-divine Prometheus who stole fire from the gods,
concealed it in a wand and filched it for the benefit of mankind,
even though Lucretius' younger contemporary, Horace seems to
have believed just this. 'The bold son of Iapetus by an evil trick
brought fire to men. And after fire had been brought down from its
heavenly home, disease and a new regiment of fevers swooped
down on earth and what was ere this the slow necessity of death
far removed, hastened its step."'
Lucretius' account is much more sophisticated.
Here I'll anticipate your silent questioning
'Twas lightning's flash that first brought fire to man,
And from that source all heat of flame is spread abroad.
Even to this day we see that many things burst into flame,
Sparked by the fire from heaven
When heaven's blow has brought the gift of beat.
Again, when branching tree is lashed by winds,
Sways to and fro and surges with its boughs against another tree,
Fire often flashes forth,
Induced by friction of a bough on bough.
In either way fire may have come to man.
The sun taught men to cook their food,
To soften it with heat of flame.
So many things they saw grow mellow in the fields,
Quite beaten by the blows and heat of sun.
And men pre-eminent for intellect and strength of mind,
Would daiJy show their fellows how to change their ways,
Adapt themselves to novelty and fire."
43. cl. Erns1 Cassirer, An Enay on Man,. Yale, New Haven, 1944, Cb. B, "Lan11:1a1e".
See pp. 149-150 of Cassi.rec for tJ:te d1slincuon between emotional and propoaitional
language and for the role of Dannn in this connection.
Also: ''As Professor L. A. White has aptly upressed it "Animals (and this includes
t~.p~~e'd:::r:f1~th':p~r:~~ /\:fotion.a.1 Jltnals, but not as symbols" (Franz
Jacobs & Stern, Ou1/i11e of Amhropology, Barnts & Noble, New York. 1947 (pp.
273-274) also make the useful point, as follo1n:
"Claims that the earliest words were sound imitative (onomatopoetic) or emotion.-
determined-namely 1he well-known "d.Jna-dona", "bow-wow" or similar theories of
the origin of the languagc----caMot be substantiated. The dynamic processes of cba.n,e
!:.J:::·j~·r:,•:::i~~n':i°~~mcr~~~~:;taia than. UC the Crude i.nllial TCDtura,
44. Horace, Od~J I, Ill.
4S. D.R.N. :5, 1091; Winspear, R.P.S. 231.
It is interesting to note that Lucretius here gives two theories of

the origin of fire without committing himself to either. Here, as so
often, his interest is philosophical rather than strictly scientific. He
is not concerned which of two naturalistic theories his readers
should accept as true, so long as they do not toy with an idealistic
explanation. In Lucretius' thinking the development of the use of
fire seems to have increased the scope for human inequalities. 'Men
preeminent for intellect and strength of mind' began to emerge from
the horde. This emergence leads him directly to reflect on the origin
of private property. And this leads him to a sketch of political
history based, in all probability, on his knowledge of the Roman
past-the rise of kings and their overthrow in an era of revolutions.
Now kings began to lay out cities and to choose
Sites for their citadels, to give protection to their persons
And a place of refuge,
And flocks and herds and fields were parcelled out,
As individual holdings,
Given to men pre-eminent in bearing talent strength,
(For comeliness was vital then, strength of physique prevailed).
Then came a fell invention, property, the power of gold.
This undermined the power of strong and noble men.
The faction of the rich quite generally
Sucks in a man though strong and nobly born.
So if a man would guide his life aright by reason's principles,
Plain Jiving with a mind at peace is weaJth indeed.
The little that he needs man never lacks.
But men have longed for wealth and power pre-eminent,
To build a strong foundation under life,
That wealth enable them to lead a life of quiet tranquillity;
But all in vain.
While mad to scale the dizzy heights of honour and of fame,
They've made the path of life with dangers teem.
Often they think their strivings reach the peak,
But envy like a thunderbolt has hurled them down to
noisome depths.
Since envy, like a lightning flash,
Sets topmost heights ablaze,
Whatever is pre-eminent most generally.
Better to be a subject with a mind at peace
Than hold the kingdom's power and kingly sway.M
46. D.R.N. ,, IIOI; Wi111peu, 11..1'.S. 234.
The moralizing praise of the simple life into which Lucretius

here launched is, as we have seen, characteristic of Lucretius and
the Epicurean school. Lucretius goes on to deal with the era of
revolts and revolutions.
And so the kings were kilted,
The ancient prideful majesty
Of thrones and sceptres trampled down.
The glorious majesty that hedged a king was stained with blood,
Crushed neath the people's feet,
And mourned its ancient high estate now losL
The object once of fear, it now in squalor Hes.
The ancient polity, I say, is trampled down.
Each single man, self centred now
Plays his own hand, seeks gain for self alone.
To check all this
The cleverer men established magistrates
And founded laws that subject folk might willingly obey.
The human race, wearied with passing life in mutual violence,
Lay faint from feuding.
And so spontaneously it would submit to statutes
And the woven web of laws;
On this account they tired of mutual retribution.
And so it comes about that fear of punishment
Has come to spoil and spatter every joy of life.
His individual deeds of violence hem a man in,
Returning, like a boomerang, on him from whom they sprang.
Nor can he pass his life in peace and quietness,
If once his deeds of violence
Break through the common accepted pacts of peace.
And even if he hides his sins from all mankind, all gods,
Still lurks the fear that some day they11 be known.
Often a man, by talking in his sleep or raving in delirium,
Has bared an ancient crime which he'd kept hidden long."
Lucretius now passes by a natural transition from the topic of
conscience to the origins of religion and the development in belief
in the gods-a theme which for him was perhaps more congenial. It
is noteworthy that he is compelled by his own basic philosophical
belief in the infallibility of the senses to admit that there is some
objective correlate for the sensations of superhuman beings which
men have had from time to time. Men have had these feelings from
time to time; they have dreamed dreams and seen visions. There
'-1. D.R.N. J, 1136; Wl.lupear, R.P.S. 231.
must, therefore be something in the actual world to cause these

visions and experiences. The modern theologians who argue from
the 'universality of religious experience' to the existence of god
have a respectable ancestry. The passage describing the devel-
opment of religion has already been quoted in Chapter 5.
Even in ancient times the human race
Perceived with waking eye the glorious shapes of gods;
For mighty power and marveHous strength of god,

To govern all things?
Lucretius seems to have some inkling of the importance of the
discovery of minerals-gold, lead, copper and iron. He sees that
these metals particularly bronze and iron led to the development of
more effective tools and more efficient weapons. He perceived, too,
that these discoveries brought great advantage in the waging of war.
The modern reader misses, perhaps, the deeper appreciation of the
social meaning of these discoveries in making possible more
effective agriculture, in leading to the possession of a surplus in the
hands of chieftains and leaders, the possibility in tum of the insti-
tution of slavery which increased the surplus in geometric propor-
tions and finally brought to an end the more primitive tribal life
which our poet had already pictured to himself. When Lucretius
has given us so much it is idle to complain that he does not give us
more-particularly as the deeper social effects of these discoveries
are even in our own day not everywhere fully appreciated.
Now for the rest:
Copper and gold and iron were found,
The weight of silver and the usefulness of lead,
When fire bad raged through mighty hills
And burnt a vast extent of forest land:-
Either when the lightning flash from sky had set the woods ablaze,
Or when the tribes were waging war through forest glades,
And set the woods alight to frighten and dismay their enemies;
Or else, because enchanted with the richness of the land,
They wished to clear the fertile fields,
To make a pasture of the country-side;
Or else they wished to put the game to death,
Enrich themselves with booty of the chase.
(Hunting with pits or flames developed long before
Men learned to fence the grove with nets
Or scare their game with dogs.)
THE WORLD OUTLOOJ. OF LUCRETIUS 137
However that may be,

Whatever caused the flaming beat to eat away the woods from
deepest roots,
(The woodlands crack and crash the while most dreadfully)
And bake the earth,
Then streams of gold and silver, copper and lead
Trickled from the boiling veins
And gathered in the hollow places on the ground.
And when primaeval men had seen these nuggets afterwards,
With brilliant colour, hard and shining on the ground,
Charmed by their beauty and their smoothness they would pick
them up,
And notice how their shape was moulded by the shape of earth's
contours.
And then a thought came creeping in their minds,
Perhaps these metals might be melted by the heat
And take the form and shape of anything-
Be shaped and hammered out to form the sharp fine tips and points
Of arrows and of spears;
That so they might make weapons for themselves and tools;
That with these tools they might fell forest trees,
Hew timbers, plane beams smooth,
And bore and punch, drill holes.
At first they tried to do just this with silver and with gold
Just as much as with copper's sturdy penetrating strength.
But aIJ in vain of course.
The power of gold and silver bad to yield,
Nor equally with copper could they bear the cruel toil.
And in those days copper was valued, gold despised as useless,
Too soon blunted in its poor dull edge.
But in our days the opposite is true:
Gold is most highly valued, copper is despised.
Just so the rolling series of the centuries
Changes men's estimates of things.
What once was valued finds neglect in turn,
What once despised is daily more esteemed,
Bursts into sudden blaze of fame.
How iron was found, my Memmius,
You yourself can learn quite easily.
Men used as weapons in the days of old
Their hands and nails and teeth;
Then stones; and branches torn from forest trees;
Then later :fire and flame when fire was known.
After that was found the power of iron and bronze-
Bronze before iron;
For bronze is easier to work and comes in greater quantities.
With bronze men worked the soil;

With bronze they mingled wa·,es of war, dealt out great wounds,
And seized both lloclr.s and fields.
No wonder;
Men unarmed and naked had to yield to those who carried arms.
Then bit by bit the iron sword made its way,
The brazen sickle came to be despised.
With iron men ploughed the soil.~
The discovery of minerals leads Lucretius to a most interesting
account of the development of weapons of war. Warfare, of course,
was for Lucretius an utterly irrational part of that striving for
position and power and wealth which his Epicurean creed taught
him to despise.
The use of weapons evened up the tides of dubious war.
And long before with chariots and with horses yoked
Men faced war's perilous opportunities,
They'd come to mount in full array a fiery hone.
To guide the steed with reins,
And deeds of valour do with strong right arms
Men learned to yoke two horses to a chariot much before four,
And climb in full array into a car equipped with scythes.
The men of Carthage taught the elephant-
The frightful elephant with turrets on its back,
Grim beasts with snaky hands,
To bear the wounds of war,
And throw confusion through a mighty martial host.
And so grim discord brings to pass thing after thing.
To plague and panic men at arms;
And day by day Discord increased the terrors and the fear of war.
Other devices men have tried in striving for the victory.
Bulls they have launched against the foe or savage boan.
Some have sent before their marshalled host
A screen of raging lions,
Schooled by armed teachers, savage pedagogues,
To keep them in control, bind them in chains;
But this device was all in vain.
The lions' hearts grew hot in the confused affray;
Tossing their tawny, awful manes they charged
The squadrons of the cavalry-both sides alike.
Nor could the horsemen soothe their frightened mounts,
Nor with their bridles make them face the foe.
The maddened lions seemed to leap on every side,
And hurl themselves against the faces of their advenaries,
.... D.R.N. 5, 12-41 ff. Wlnspear, R.l'.S. 2)9 rr.
Or catch them in unguarded moments from behind;

Then, faint as they were from wounds, the savage beuts
Twisted and threw them to the earth,
And gripped them with their curving claws and powerful bite.
Bulls too would tum and rend their masten and their friends,
Gash with their horns the flanks and bcl1ies of the hones under-
neath,
And snort and stamp and rage and paw the ground.
The wild boars too with strong and savage tusks
Slew their allies.
The weapons hurled at them would break,
Lodged in the bull's tough hide,
(The boar's own red blood would stain the spears)
While horse and foot fell tangled to the ground,
Tangled in one fell heap.
Horses would swerve in order to escape the savage teeth,
Or rear and beat the air with frightened feet,
But all in vain;
With severed tendons they would fall
And in their headlong crash would strew the ground.
Men thought to tame the creatures in advance-
Thought they were tame enough to do their will;
But in the heat of battles' clash
Fury burst forth in creatures maddened by the wounds, the shouts,
the panic, flight.
Confusion raged through all their ranks;
Nor could the soldiers rally any of their beasts.
The various kinds would scatter, hither and yon.
Even as now the elephants, cruelly mangled by the steel,
Scattering in headlong rush,
Bring deadly harm and peril to their friends.
The passage ends with a characteristic avowal of the irrationality
of wan; and programmes of armament-a passage which rings with
contemporary significance.
If indeed men really acted so,
For my part I can scarce believe
That men would not imagine in advance what the result would be,
If humankind gave all its mind to this grim task
Of bringing to perfection all the arts of war.
Perhaps this picture of warfare's development
Is what might happen in the various worlds that make our universe,
Rather than what occurred in one.
Perhaps men did all this

Not so much in hopes of victory,
But despairing of themselves and of their cause,
Outmatched in numbers, lacking arms,
They thought to give their foemen cause to mourn
While going up themselves in one transcendent, glorious suicide.•
The origin of clothing is briefly sketched. First came plaiting of
garments. Weaving came late after men had found how to smelt and
use iron.
From nothing else can treadles smooth be formed
Spindles or shuttles or the sounding rods.•
In this passage he hints of an awareness of the economic factors
that lead now to the supremacy of the male in organized society
and in other cultures of the female. Lucretius cannot rise above his
time and his society and he unhesitatingly affirms the innate superi-
ority of the male. But even so he does not go as far in this regard as
St. Paul.
The account of the evolution of agriculture is brief but very
picturesque. Here again one suspects that Lucretius' only interest
is to refute supernatural and theistic interpretations which were
strong both in the state cults and the 'mystery religions'.
Nature herself, creative Queen of everything,
Gave men a pattern how to sow and graft.
Berries and nuts would fall from trees,
And then, when time was ripe, put out their shoots in swarms.
From Nature, too, men learned to graft a wand to parent stem,
Plant shrubs in soil.
And various ways they learned to till their smiling fields
Domesticate both fruits and beasts
By care and constant tending.
And day by day they beat the woodland back,
Back up the mountain slopes and made the valleys yield a place for
crops.
That so they might on hill and plain
Have meadows, pools and streams,
Corn lands and vineyards that bring joy to men,
And grey green belts of olive trees,
Checkering the landscape over hill and vale and plain.
As even now you sec the countryside
Made beautiful with various charms,
Where men have made it gay by planting trees,
And fenced it in around with fruitful shrubs.•
'9. D R.N. !I, 1196 ff. Wlmpcar, R.r.S. 241 I!.
!10. D.R.N. !I. D,1 ff. Wm.spear, R.f>.S. 141 ff.
,1. D.R.N. 5, 1161 ff. Winspear, R.1'.S. 244 ff.
THE WORLD OUTLOOK: OP LUCRETIUS 141
His account of the development of music is equally picturesque

and also, in intent anti-theological.
To imitate the liquid notes of birds
Man learned long, long ago,
And much before he'd learned to sing in company sweet songs,
To entrance the ear.
The west wind whistling through the hollow reeds
First taught the country folk to breathe through scrannel pipes.
Then bit by bit they learned the sweet lament-
The elegies that flutes poured forth,
Their holes by fingers stopped.
lbrougb pathless glades the sweet sound made il3 way
And forest deeps, through fields by shepherds left,
And lovely resting place.
So bit by bit time brings all things to view
And reason raises it to shores of light.
These tunes would soothe their minds, delight their ears,
When they lay stuffed with food.
(That's when all pleasure brings delight.)
For often as we've said, in grassy nook reclined
A stream, a shady tree instead of luxury,
With no great wealth they tend the body's needs,
And find sufficient bliss,
Spring on the mountains, flowers in every mead.
Then you'd hear jokes and talk and pleasant laughs,
(The rustic muse was strong),
And life was gay and mirth made garlands for their heads
Of flowers and leaves.
And round they'd dance
With random step and clumsy limbs.
With heavy foot their rhythmic tread would beat on Mother Earth,
This made them laugh in merry mood.
All things like children in the childhood of the race,
They found both strange and new.
So to the wakeful came the solace of sweet sounds
To guide the erring voice through many a tune,
Follow the endless windings of a song,
To pipe on reeds with curling lips.
Even today
Policemen and sentries hold this old tradition fast,
Have learned to keep the rhythm of a song,
But find therein no greater bli(.s
Than woodland folk of earth-born men
Found long ago.u
52. D.R..N. ,, 1379 If. WJmpear 244, R.P.S. ff.
142 LUCRETIUS AND ScJENTIPIC THOUGHT
After a short (and characteristic) piece of moralizing on the

mutability of fashion and in praise (again) of the simple life the
fifth book ends with a splendid panegyric on the slow creative
process by which man has come to master his physical environment
and establish science.
The watchful wardens of the firmament, the moon and sun,
Traversing with their light the whirling vault of sky,
Taught men that seasons of the year revolve,
That all things move by some fixed plan,
In fixed and due array,
And now fenced in with mighty walled towna
Man lived bis life.
The land was parcelled out in plots and fenced and tilled.
Then ocean's level wastes bloomed with the sails of ships.
Men learned to make a compact,
Seal a bond between allies for mutual aid.
Then poets first began to sing immortal songs in glori0115 verse.
(The alphabet was new when first the poets sang.)
Therefore our age knows nothing of the past,
Except where science points out the scattered bits of evidence.
And so man made his way.
Experience, the tireless search of eager mind,
Has taught him many things-
Of ships and walls and laws, weapons and roach,
Of how to till the soil and how to dress;
And all life's prizes, life's deJights,
Pictures and songs and statutes finely wrought.
He's learned them stage by stage and bit by bit.
So step by step time brings all things to view
And reason raises it to shores of Hght.
Thing after thing grew clear in human hearts
Until man's art assailed perfection's peak.•
The sixth book should be passed over rather lightly in an
introduction to Lucretius. There is a splendid introduction in praise
of Epicurus which is important as affirming once again the funda-
mental moral import of the Epicurean creed.
In days of old
'Twas Athens, Pandion's town, of glorious memory
That first gave fruitful crops of grain to wretched men,
And fashioned human life afresh
And laid down Jaws.
'3. D.R.N. ,, 1436 fl. Wlmpear 247, R.I~. a.
And Athens, too, first gave to mortal men sweet aolacea,

By giving birth to that great man,
Gifted with mighty intellect,
Who once poured forth the sweet thoughts of philosophy,
From lips that always spoke the truth;
Whose glory when the light of life was quenched
Noised abroad of old,
Is now made equal to the sky.
For when he saw that man had everything
Which nature really needs for human life,
Existence for the human race as far as possible assured,
And men exulting in their power,
With wealth and honours and renown,
Proud of the reputation of their young;
Their hearts at home were no less anxious in despite of reason,
And care harassed their lives,
And made them moan aloud in dire complaint;
He came to see
That fundamental fault lay with the human vase,
That its corruption tainted all the mind and soul within,
Corrupted all that came within the vase from outer life,
Even life's best rewards.
Partly because the vase was cracked and full of holes,
And never could be filled,
Partly because its evil corrupted everything within.
And so with words of truth he purged the human heart,
He set a limit to desire and fear,
Described the highest good for which all humans strive,
And pointed out the straight and narrow path
By which we reach the highest good.
The various forms of evil flitting everywhere through human life
Produced through natural chance or Nature's laws,
(If Nature thus ordained or willed)
AU this he showed;
And also how to raise the siege against the foul array
And from which gates
The beleagured self should issue forth and fight.
He proved that all in vain
Mankind allowed the gloomy waves of care to toss and roll within
the heart...
For an appreciation of the architectonic structure of the poem
it is interesting that this the !act took begins with an Invocation
to the Muse Calliope just as the first book had begun with an Invo-
cation to Venus.
54. D.R.N. 6, 1 JI. WJ.ospear, R.P.S. 241 If.
Do thou, 0 clever Muse Calliope,

Repose of men, delight of gods.
Mark out for me the track,
As now I speed towards the white chalk line
That marks the goal.
With you to guide I'll gain the victor's wreath,
While all humanity applauds.•
But for the most part the book is taken up with the naturalistic
explanation of various natural phenomena, winds and storms and
thunderbolts, waterspouts and earthquakes, clouds and rainbows,
volcanoes and the flooding of the Nile, magnets and hot springs
and places that prove fatal to birds. In all this Lucretius' purpose
seems less to arrive at scientific truth than to rule out a supernatural
interpretation. He gives a number of possible reasons, for example,
for the flooding of the Nile. It seems a matter of indifference to him
which you should pick as the true one only so long as you do not
regard it as a case of divine interference.
Many strange things occur for which it's not enough to give one
cause.
Several of these we cite but one must be the actual cause.
If you should see a man lie dead before your eyes,
You'd be doing right to name all possible causes for his death
That you might hit the one.
You could not prove
That he had died by violence or from cold,
By poison or disease;
We know that one of these has caused his death.
Of several natural wonders could the same be said.•
He concludes his discussion of places that are said to be fatal to
bird or beast with the following comment:
Yet all these come about by natural law;
The cause of the event can easily be seen.
So that you do not think it possible
That in the place there is a gate of Hell,
And so believe that guardian spirits of the dead
Lead souls below and bring them to the shores of Acheron."'
The poem ends with a discussion of disease, a discussion which
culminates in a description of the great plague which ravaged
Athens in the early years of the Peloponnesiao War. Lucretius'
s,. D.R.N. 6. 91 ff. WinSJlear, R.P.S. 251 tr.
:56. n.u.N. 6, 70) If. Win~pcar, 277, R.P.S. ff.
:57. D.R..N. 6, 760 ff. WlnaJ>"t 279, R.P.S. ff.
treatment of the subject draws heavily on a famous passage of the

Greek historian Thucydides but Lucretius adds many macabre
touches of his own. Once again for an appreciation of the architec-
tonic structure of the poem this passage is important. Its significance
has been well brought out by Leonard and Smith in their edition
of the poem.
The whole ending of the poem presents a terrifying picture
of the vanity of religion, of the belief in divine providence, and
the due performance of ritual. ..... .
There is something utterly horrible about this final scene, the
follt desperately scurrying about and fighting for the burial of their
beloved-as if Death really did concern them-and preserving to
the end this one supreme and unrewarded pieta.f, the concern for
their dead. The spring-like radiance of triumphant Venus, which
opens the poem has yielded in the end to the awful will of Death.
Such a conclusion would probably have appealed with a special
force to a poet whose temperament is marlted by a profound and
brooding melancholy.•
The passage, though too long to quote here in full, is one that
every student of Lucretius should read; but perhaps it would not
be right to let Lucretius end on this note as though disease and
death should have the Jast word. Lucretius' achievement was
stupendous, how stupendous perhaps only men of very recent
generations can fully realise. It is, after all, so recently that we
have come to an appreciation of the scientific outlook, not only in
the natural sciences, but in the social sciences as well. Lucretius is
the only thinker of classical antiquity ( at least of those whose work
has survived), who anticipated the modern outlook of both the
natural and the social sciences, and who at the same time, enunci-
ates with great articulation something of the philosophical outlook
of the men of science. There are some thinkers who win recognition
in their lifetime, some whose recognition takes centuries, and some
millenia. Lucretius is a prime example of this last class.
51. Smith and Leoaard, p. 166.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
BAILEY, CYRIL. Epicurus: The Exton/ Remains. Clarendon Press, Oxford,

1926.
BAILEY, CYRIL. The Greek Alomisls and Epicurus. Clarendon Preti,
Oxford, 1928.
BAILEY, CYRIL. De Rerum Natura, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1950.
BARNETT, LINCOLN. The Universe and Dr. Einstein, Mentor Books,
New York., 1950.
BURNET, JOHN. Early Greek Philosophy. 3rd ed. A. C. Black, London,
1920.
DEWITT, NORMAN WENTWORTH. Epicurus and His Philosophy.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1954.
DUFF, J. WRIGHT. A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the
Close of the Golden Age. T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1914.
FARRINGTON, BENJAMIN. Science and Politics in the Ancient World.
Oxford University Press, New York, 1940.
FARRINGTON, BENJAMIN. "The Gods of Epicurus and the Roman
State." The Modern Quarterly. Vol. 1, No. 3 (1938). pp. 214·232.
GAMOW, GEORGE, One Two Three . . . Infinity. Mentor Books, New
York, 1953.
HADZSITIS, GEORGE DEPUE. Lucretius and His Influence. Longman.,,
Green and Co., New York, 1935.
HICKS, R. D., trans. Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers.
2 vols. Heinemann and Putnam, London and New York, 1925.
LEONARD, W. E., trans. The Fragments of Empedocles. The Open Court
Publishing Company, Chicago, 1908. All translatioos of Empedocles are
taken from this version.
SMITH, STANLEY BARNEY & LEONARD, WILLIAM ELLORY. D,
Rerum Natura, University of Wisconsin Press, 1942.
LESSING, LAWRENCE P. Understanding Chemistry, Mentor Books, Now
York, 1959.
MASSON, JOHN. Lucretius, Epic11rean and Poet. John Murray, London,
1907.
146
NOTES ON THINKERS MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK'
ANAXAGORAS
Anuagoras, a Greek. philosopher, was born at Clazomcnae in Asia
Minor in .500 B.C. Migrating to Athens he became an intimate of Pcriclca
and could easily be said to be lhe intellectual spokesman of his circle and to
have formulated its ouUook on the theoretical side. Anaxagoras was perhaps
the most germinal of all Greek philosophers. He anticipated the views of
~ose who postulated a First Mover to set in action the physical universe. This
Fust Mover he called 'nous' or 'mind'. He also anticipated the Aristotelean
doctrine of actuality and potentiality. His point of view seems to have been
founded on biological observation. As a friend of Pericles be was under
constant attack and was charged with impiety. "Ibis was a not uncommon
charge brought against the more progressive thinkers of Greece.
AlllSTO'ILE
Perhaps the greatest aamc ia Greek philosophy. He was born in 384 B.C.
in lbrace and is said to have been a tutor of AJexandcr the Great. In any
event, bis father was court physician at the Macedonian court and all his
life he seems to have been very close to the Macedonian interest. For
twenty years be studied under Plato and only seems to have broken with the
Academy after Plato's death and the appointment of Plato's nephew
Spcusippus a, Head of the Academy. It is impossible in a sentence or two to
summari.zc the philosophy of Aristotle. Although in some minor details he
broke with his master, Plato, be kept for the most part a similar teleological
and idealistic approach. It is very probable that Aristotle's association with
the Macedonian court influenced to a very great degree his theoretical
formulations. In the crisis of relations between Athens and Macedon he
voluntarily withdrew into exile explaining that the Athenians should not sin
against philosophy twice. He died in 322 8.C.
BACON
Sir Francis Bacon, the brilliant philosopher and essayist, was Lord
Chancellor of England. His birth took place in 1561. He was trained as a
barrister but is chiefly remembered for the books he wrote. Bacon could be
described as the theoretician of the Renaissance in England. His great work,
the Novum Organum, was published in January 27, 1626. It is a passionate
plea for the reorganization of knowledge both as regards method and
regards content. It represents a definite break with scholastic tradition which
was still dominant in the universities of England at the time. Ironically
enough his death was probably brought on by bronchitis as a result at an
attempt at scientific experiment carried on in the snow. This was on April
9th, 1626.
CAESAR
Julius Caesar was equally eminent as general, statesman, orator and
writer. He was born in t02 or 100 B.C. Caesar was the leader of the revolu-
donary forces in the Roman Republic through a long life time. In the
l. Tho data pcrt.alo1aa: to clu&lcal riaurea are mainly approl.imate.
147
course of this life time be added a new empire to Rome through his conquest
of Gaul, and immeasurably widened the horizons of the Roman people by
his invasion of Britain. His two greatest works were the commentaries on the
Gallic War and the Civil War. The latter was completed by a successor. He
was assassinated on March 15, 44 B.C. after succcssfulJy taking over the
Roman State and destroying the power of the entrenched oligarchy.
CICERO
Marcus Cicero was a well-known Roman orator, writer and philosopher.
He was a student of both rhetoric and philosophy. At the age of 26 he
entered political life more or less on the progressive side. Elected Consul
for 63 B.C. he went over to the side of the nobility. With more or le.u
oonsistcncy from that time forward he supported the cause of the conserv-
atives-although he carried on a respectful flirtation with Caesar as long as
the latter was alive. He turned bis attention particulacly to philosophy during
the period of Caesar's ascendency and his philosophical works may be
regarded not only as personal consolation in his own misfortunes but also u
the expression and systematization of the conservative outlook in Roman
politics. Perhaps best known as an orator, bis collection of letters is one of
the most exciting collections ever written and one of the most intcrestina
series of documents for the interpretation of Roman history and Roman life.
He met death by a"assinatioo at the hands of Antony's soldiers. Antony
be had mortally offended by bis series of Philipics or Orations against
Antony.
DEMOCRITUS
To Democritus belongs the enormous credit of having first founded the
Atomic Theory if we except the rather shadowy figure of Lcucippus. Thi.a
theory has, of course, influenced very profoundly the development of scien-
tific thought in the West. In putting forward this theory he seems also to
have grasped quite firmly the concept of universal natural law. He was born
at Abdera in Thrace about 460 B.C. Anecdotes told about him emphasize
his serenity, his opposition to superstition in all its forms and his firm,
democratic attachments. He left behind works on ethics, physics, astronomy,
mathematics, art and literature, but these now exist only in very frag-
mentary form. There is a story preserved by Diogenes Laertius that Plato so
hated Democritus that he bought all the books or his that be could find to
burn them. The failure of Democritus' books to survive in anything more
than fragments seems more than accidental.
EMPEDOCLES
The Greek philosopher and poet was born in Sicily in 490 B.C. H.iJ
acquaintance with medicine and natural science won him a reputation as a
wonder worker and insured for him a position of hero at his death. Hi.,
philosophy, which is c:tpressed in verse, seems to be a compromise between
that of Pythagoras, from whom he adopted the theory of transmigration,
and the moral and ascetic doctrines connected with it, and the cosmological
tradition with his theories of love and strife or attraction or repulsion as the
motivating force in nature. He died about 430 B.C.
NOTES 149
EPICURUS
Epicurus, the Greek philosopher and founder of the Epicurean school,
was born in 342 B.C. He carried forward the work of Democritus and
based his theories on the Atomic Hypothesis. His interest, were, however,
ethical rather than c.osmologica1. His emphasis oo serenity seems to have
been carried through into the conduct of his own life and in spite of
considerable physical suffering he never lost his own sense of tranquillity.
His writings were remarkably numerous and comprehensive but here again
only fragments of a few letters survived. He died in 268 B.C.
HERACLITUS
One of the leading representatives of the so-called Ionian School in
philosophy lived from 53.5 to 415 B.C. Heraclitus was before all things the
philosopher of the dux. He believed that all things arc in continuous proccs.,
of ehangc and that nothing remains. That is, that there arc no eternal
verities behind the flow of events. Heraclitus is significant not only for his
affirmation of the fact of change but because he put forward a theory of bow
things chan&e. Change for him wa.s strife or tension and the continuous
formation and resolution of opposing tensions. His great work, On Nature,
was written in the Ionian dialect and is the oldest monument of Greek prose.
But here again only fragments remain.
HORACE
Horace, the well-known Roman poet, was bom December 8, 65 B.C. He
was the son of a freed man, an auctioneer, and his early life was marred by
poverty. He bad, however, obtained sufficient distinction to bold an impor-
tant position at the battle of Philippi and describes in comic dismay his
rather unheroic conduct at that time. Returned to Rome be took to the
writing of poetry and was in time taken up by Maeccnas and his circle,
Varius, and Vcrgil. He became a convert to the Augustan revolution and
many of bis poems are intended to support and even propagandize for the
program of Augustus. Perhaps no Roman poet reflects his personality and
his own Jifc so vividJy as Horace in his poems. He died on November 27th,
8 B.C.
PLATO
One of the two most influential of Greek philosophers was born in
Athens, 425 B.C. In the exciting days of the civil war he was caught up in
practical politics on the counter-revolutionary side and as he tells this him-
sell devoted himself to the cause of the bated Thirty Tyrants. After the
condemnation and death of Socrates he found it well to go abroad for some
time and travel to the various centres of Pythagorean and Eleatic influence.
Returning to Athens he founded the Academy as a centre of Philosophical
Research and as an organizing centre for inter-civic politics. He made three
visits to Sicily in the interest of advancing bis political ideals and his
followers arc to be found active all over the Greek world intervening in
political affairs in a variety of ways. Plato died in 348 B.C ..
PYTHAGORAS
Pythagoras, the first man to call himself a philosopher, was born in
580 B.C. in the island of Samos. Finding the rule of the sercaUed Tyrant,
Polycrates, unpalatable to his convictions he left for the far western confines
of the Grecian world and settled in Italy. Here he found much more
congenial environment and was able to organize a caucus of young nobles
who took over the government of the city not only in Croton but in many
other cities of Magna Graecia. The Society of Pythagoras can be regarded
not only as a philosophical and semi-mystical society, but also as an active·
organizing force for the establishment of landed aristocracy throughout
Sicily and Greece. He died in 504 B.C.
VERGIL
The famous Roman poet was born on October 15, 70 B.C. After
devoting himself to rhetorical, philosophical and physical studies he returned
to Rome and began writing poetry. In his early youth he seems to have
leaned to the Epicurean side, but his mature works are tinged with a Stoical
outlook. His fame as a poet was established by the Eclogues, rather artificial
dialogues between artificial shepherds praising the life of the countryside. The
Georgics, a great didactic epic in four books, was intended to praise the life
of the farmer and to assist the reconstruction of Italian agriculture which
was one of the favourite projects of the Emperor Augustus. His great poem
is, however, the Aeneid, which was projected as the Roman rival to Homer
and a great patriotic epic designed to present the Roman people as, as it
were, a chosen folk. When he died on September 21st, 19 B.C. as a result of
a sun stroke the poem was still in rough form and Vergil is said to have
given instructions that it should be destroyed. Fortunately, for literature,
these instructions were not carried out.
INDEX
Acberoa 20, 47, 144

Aeneas 34 If.
Africa 2S
Agamemnon 31
Alexander the Great 24, 74, 147
Alexandria 86
Anaxagoras 7, 9911., !OS, 147
Aaaximander 9
Antony 148
Aquinas see St. Thomas Aquinaa:
Apollo of Delphi 39, 40
Appia.n 2S
Aristophanes
Aristotle vii, 7, 8, 69, 101, 147
Atticus, Titus Pomponi111 72, 73
Augustus, Emperor 72, 149, ISO
Avogadro 83
"Axiochus"
Bacchus 37
Bacon, Sir Francis 87, 147
Bailey, Cyril '· 4, 5, 8, 10, 146
Barnett, Lincoln 146
Beiser, Arthur 83
Bentham, Jeremy
Bibulus 29
Bithynia 19
Boaz, Franz Ill
Boyle, Charles I
Browning, Robert 85
Burnett, John 146
Caesar, Julius 5, 20, 28, 29, 34, 40, 71, 72, 73, 147-141
Caesarism 29, 72
Cales 26
Calliope 39, 143, 144
::o.ssircr, Ernest 11, 133
:atallus 19
151
152 INDEX
Ceres 37
Challicc, Cyril (Profcs,or) 108
Chesterton, G. K. 96
Childc, V. G. 131
Cicero, Marcus s, 16, 18, 19, 27, 39, 72, 73, 108, 148
Cicero, Quintus 5, 16, 18
contemplative life 29, 72
Crassus, Marcus 26, 28
Cuvier 87
Cybele 37
Dalton, John 1, 83
Dalzell, A. (Professor) 5
Darwin, Charles 3, 8, 133
Delos 24
Delphi 40
Democrats 28
Democritus 11, 18, 49, 83, 99, 104, 105, 148, 149
DeWitt, Norman Wentworth 146
Diodorus Siculus 13
Duff, J. Wright 146
DeLacy, P. (Professor) 4
Egypt 25
Empedocles 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 18, 39, 40, 99, 148
Ennius 18
Epicurus I, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 18, 19, 30 ff., 39, 40,
49, so, 52, 68, 73, 74, 78, 80 ff., 105, 106,
108, 142, 143, 149
equestrians 27
emergence of the new 96
Farrington, Benjamin 146
Gamow, George 146

Gibbon, Edward 23
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 92
Gracchi 72
Gracchus, Caius 25, 28, 72
Grey, Thomas 44
Guissani vii, 6. 10. 14
INDEX 153
Hadzsitis, Georsc Depue 146
Hanseatic 27
Hardy, W. Gcorae (Professor) I
Heraclitus 18, 93, 98 ff., 108, 1'9
Hesiod 9
Hicks, R. D. 146
Hobbes, Thomas I, 9
Homer 22, 49, ISO
Horace 44, 47, 6S, 73, 96, 133, 149
Hume, David I
Ida 36
Ionia 91
Iphigenia 31
Janiculum 29
Jove 37
Justice 9
Keats, John 93
Kcben, Hans (ProfCS10r) 29, 72
Kitto, Humphrey Davy Findley
(Professor)
Knights 27 ff., 71, 72
Koerner, Stephen (Profe.ssor) I
Krauskopf, Konrad Bates 83
"Kuriai Doxai" 11
Latifundia 24
Lavoisier, Antoine L. 83
Leonard, William Ellery vil, 2, 3, S, 6, 8, 9, 18, 78, 8611., 117, 14S,
146
Lessing, Lawrence P. 146
Leucippus 148
Lucretius
and experimentation 83 ff.
and free will 74 ff.
and quietism 28
atomism in ethics 69 ff.
familiarity with
aristocratic life 18
fear of death 41 ff .
. . madness of 16 ff.
154
on Ambition 20
on anthropology
on archaeology
on atomism senerally 82fr., 108fr.
on avarice 20
on change 93 fr., 111 fr., 127
on conscience 135
on development of 14
agriculture
on evolution 2, 117 ff.
on fashion 142
on imperfections in nature 4
on love 20fr.
on metallurgy 13, 136 fr.
on origin of agriculture 140
on origin of clothing 140
on origin of fire 133, 134
on origin of language 131 fr.
on origin of music 141
on origin of private property 134
on origin of religion 59 II.
on paleontology
on primitive society 9 fl.
on religion JI fl.
on revolution 12, !JS
on scepticism 89
on science, development of 142
on scientific truth 144
on sensation 87 ff., 115, 124
on sex 77
on swerve of the atome !OS fl.
on teleology 2, l, 7, 8811., 120, Ill
on tranquility 34 fl., 78 ff.
on the gods 11711.
on the position of womm 140
on the "soul" 52 fl.
on warfare 13, ll7 I!.
originality of 5 ff.
primaeval chao~ 1101!.
transition to civilization 11
universe is mortal 92
void 108 ff.
INDEX 155
Mac,cenu 149
Mardiros, M.A.. (Professor) I
Masson, John ts, 10s, 146
mechanism and materialism 76 If.
Memrn.ius 5, 19, 29, 31, 32, 64, 81, 88, 137
Mill, John Stuart I
Mintumae 25, 26
Morely, John 15
Morrison, J. L. (Dr.) 82, 83
Neptune 37
Newton, John 1
novelty 961f.
onomatopoea 133
Ostia 25
Parthenon 23
Pericles 28, 99, 100, 147
Peloponnesian War 144
Phidias 23
Plato vii, 9, 11, 18, 39, 87, 94, 104, 147, 148,
149
Polybius 29, 39
Polycrates, Tyrant 150
Pompey 28
Posidonius 13
Prometheus II, 132, 133
Proust, Marcel 83
Pythagoras 148, ISO
Rhodes 18
Robin, Leon
Rousseau, Jean-Jacque, 9, 11
Rubicon 28
Science, ancient prejudice against 23

Seneca 13
SheJley, Percy Bysshe 131, 132
Sicily 8, 25, 97, 149, ISO
Simplicius 8
Sisyphus 20, 48
Smilh, Adam 69
156 INDl!X
Smith, Stanley Barney 145, 146

Socrates 52, 105, 149
Spartacus 25, 73, 74
Speusippus 147
St. Augustine 13
St. Jerome 16, 17, 78
St. Paul 74
St. Thomas Aqu.inu 101
Stoics vii, 3, 17, 18, 72, 74, 87
Strabo 24
Sulla 24
Slavery 22, 24 ff.
Tantalus 47
Tartarus 46, 48
Tennyson, Alfred Lord 16, 17, 38, 78
Thucydides 12, 145
Tityos 47, 48
Tory 28
Troy 31
Umbrian 26
Uscner vii
Varius 149
Varro 13
Venus 34 ff., 62, 143, 14S
Vergil 149, ISO
Velleius s
Vico II
Vortex 105, 106
Westermann, William Linn 24, 25, 26

White, L. A. (Professor) 133
Zeller, E. (Professor)
Zeus

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Books by Alban D.

Augustus and Roman Reconstruction

Who Was Socrates?

The Genesis of Plato's Thought

The Roman Poet of Science

AN EMULATION BOOK [I[] HARVEST HOUSE, MONTREAL

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-17242

Copyright ~ Canada 1963 by Harvest House Ltd.

Printed by The Runge Press Ltd., Ottawa

The Originality of Lucretius

II Lucretius, The Legend 16

III The Times of Lucretius 22

IV The Fight Against Roman Religion 30

V The Debt to Epicurus 52

VI How Men Should Live 64

VII The World Outlook of Lucretius

Suggestions for Further Reading 146

Notes on Thinkers Mentioned in this Book 147

Thereafter, it is cited simply as

THE ORIGINALITY OF LUCRETIUS'

But to return to the argument. When, in the latter half of the

Lucretius produced much that was notably original on this topic.

9. ~ :~1~c~~c~,r!v1l~~\'.,~9~,( ::~~::: ~~~e:~~1 ::~~1~8~n~~·~~:;!.~~e~~°':!

Velleius in Cicero De Natura Deorum. "Cicero's arguments arc

The infant boy lies naked on the ground,

Leaving aside this passage as doubtful in its influence, there

But for the high-wrought ecstasy of fantasy and feeling in the

Empedocles has been often described as an 'evolutionist'. 'First

Ground by their teeth and gulped down ravenously. .

lion.• Man learned to make houses and clothes, to warm himself

32. D.R.N. 5, 1091-1104.

But whereas the interest of Epicurus in this discussion is pri-

all this. It must ~mbody. Lucretius' own reflection on the f:ili:

sequence of ancient. society so often repeated, from the miiitary

Lucretius deals with the discovery of metals and puts in their

Surely on the subject of Lucretius the thinker the judgment of

LUCRETIUS, THE LEGEND

Return from pacings io the field, and ran

intensity, an intense preoccupation with thou;;llt and ,insight and

the sale of the famous Garden of Epicurus. History and particularly

And lover's passion even at possession's hour

THE TIMES OF LUCRETIUS

fast increasing ratio which made possible the commercial society

of the great numbers of slaves that had been concentrated in the

Heavy manual labor, such as grinding meal in . bake~es, was

for wan and expansion in order to bring in a plentiful supply of

called their movement a democratic or pc,pular movement. And,

He gazes on thee, feeds his eager eyes with love,

THE FIGHT AGAINST ROMAN RELIGION

master who had centuries before propounded the system that we

So deeply is mankind dogged by superstitious fears, Lucretius fe1t,

Central, therefore, to the poet's purpose is the fight against

to come. The philosophy which he expounds and which we shall

Mother of Aeneas' clan, of men and gods delight,

religious cults, then invading the Roman state. The description is so

They strew her path with silver and with bronze

Lucretius' scientific system was, as we shall see remarkably ordered,

We have spoken of Lucretius and the Epicurean school to which

Do thou, 0 clever Muse Calliope,

be little debate, I think, that Lucretius' opposition to religion, vehe-

Their lu-; for gold outruns all bounds.

Why is it not as bad to lie on scorchbg flames and shrivel up,

But, Lucretius goes on, as be pursues bis rational argument, _suppose

9. ~ :~1~c~~c~,r!v1l~~\'.,~9~,( ::::: ~e:1 ::1~8~n·:;!.e°':!