Roman Epicureanism
100 BCE – 200 c.
Epicurus in Latin, argued as a campaign against religious fear and preserved almost by accident in one long poem.
- Active
- 100 BCE – 200
- Where
- Rome, Naples and Herculaneum
- Status
- extinct
- Tradition
- Roman
The claim
Nothing comes from nothing, nothing returns to nothing, and the soul is mortal. Understanding this is what releases people from the terror that religion depends on.
What it held
Lucretius set out to translate a Greek philosophy into Latin hexameters and produced something the school had not had: a work of literature. On the Nature of Things argues the whole system — atoms, void, the swerve, the mortality of the soul, the origin of society — and does it while describing dust dancing in a sunbeam and a cow searching for her calf.
The polemical energy is his own. Epicurus was mild about religion; Lucretius is furious. He opens with Iphigenia sacrificed by her father and the line that religion has persuaded men to such evils, and the whole poem is framed as a rescue.
The school in Italy was substantial. Philodemus taught in Naples and his library, carbonised at Herculaneum by Vesuvius, is still being read — the scrolls are being unrolled digitally two thousand years later, which makes this the one ancient school whose sources are still growing.
How it argued
Exposition in verse, using analogy and observation to make invisible atoms plausible: motes in sunlight, wearing rings, drying clothes, the smell of things at a distance.
What it was arguing against
Religion, explicitly and repeatedly. Also Stoic providence and the belief that the soul survives death.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether Lucretius understood the swerve correctly. Whether the poem is finished — it ends abruptly on the plague at Athens, which many readers have found an odd close and some have thought deliberate.
Common misconceptions
That Lucretius was an atheist. He describes gods, in the intermundia, blessed and uninvolved. His argument is against fear of them, not against their existence.
How it began
Epicureanism reached Italy in the second century BCE and was popular enough that Cicero complains about the flood of bad Latin Epicurean writing before Lucretius.
What became of it
Suppressed rather than refuted. The poem survived in a single manuscript, found by Poggio Bracciolini in a German monastery in 1417.
Lasting influence
That rediscovery is one of the genuine hinges of European thought. Machiavelli copied the poem by hand; Montaigne quotes it constantly; Gassendi rebuilt atomism from it; Jefferson owned five copies.
Why it still matters
It is the most complete surviving argument that the universe requires no purpose and no designer, made two thousand years before the evidence arrived.
Put another way
Wormwood in a cup rimmed with honey, which is Lucretius' own account of why he wrote in verse.
Where to start
Book III of Lucretius, on the mortality of the soul. It is the argument the whole poem exists to make.
The surprising bit
Jerome records that Lucretius was driven mad by a love potion and killed himself. There is no evidence for it and every reason to suspect a hostile Christian source.
In their own words
So much wrong could religion induce.
Nothing can ever be created out of nothing by divine power.
Connections
- Answers
- Epicureanism
- Opposed by
- Roman Stoicism
The verdict
A didactic poem about physics that turned out to be one of the most dangerous books in Europe.