On the Nature of Things

The most improbable survival in ancient literature: a six-book poem arguing that there is no afterlife, no providence and no reason to fear the gods, preserved through a thousand years of Christian copying and rediscovered by a book-hunter in 1417. It is simultaneously the fullest account of Epicurean physics we have and one of the great poems in Latin.

Date: c. 55 BC
Author: Lucretius
Region: Rome
Language: Latin

The translation record

1682 English, Thomas Creech First complete English verse version Attested
1864 English, H. A. J. Munro Prose, with commentary; public domain Attested
1997 English, Ronald Melville Verse; in copyright Attested

Where it stands in the argument

Position: Reply — Answers a named earlier work
Form: Treatise
Method: Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
Transmission: Recovered — Lost to circulation and recovered from a surviving copy
Standing: Revived — Out of circulation and read again
Years back to what it answers: 245 years

Lost to circulation for most of the Middle Ages and recovered in 1417 from a single German monastery copy.

What the book says

Six books of Latin hexameter arguing that the universe is atoms and empty space and nothing else. Book One establishes that nothing comes from nothing and nothing returns to nothing, and that matter must therefore consist of indestructible particles moving in void. Book Two describes how they move - falling, colliding, and swerving very slightly from their paths, which is the poem's most famous doctrine and the opening it leaves for free will. Book Three turns to the mind and soul, argues at length that they are material and dissolve with the body, and delivers the conclusion the whole poem is built toward: death is nothing to us, and the fear of it is the source of most human cruelty and unhappiness. Book Four covers perception, dreams and sexual desire, on which it is unusually bleak. Book Five gives a history of the world without gods - the earth forming, life arising, human beings developing language, fire, agriculture and cities, and religion appearing as a mistake about dreams and thunder. Book Six explains thunder, earthquakes, magnets and disease, and ends abruptly in the middle of the Athenian plague, which is where the manuscript stops.

What it argues

That everything is made of indivisible particles moving in void, and that this single claim, followed carefully, dissolves the two things that make human life miserable. If the soul is atoms, it disperses at death and there is nothing left to suffer, so the punishments people fear are inventions. If the world assembled itself from collisions over unimaginable time, nothing is being managed on our behalf, so there is nobody to placate. The poem is unusually explicit that this is its purpose: the physics is not offered for its own interest but as the cure, and Lucretius compares his verse to honey smeared on the rim of a cup of bitter medicine.

What it answered

Epicurus, and only Epicurus - the poem is a transmission rather than a dispute. What it adds is what the Doctrines had removed. Where Epicurus states that death is nothing to us, Lucretius spends the whole third book showing why, with argument after argument, until the reader who is not persuaded has at least understood exactly what would have to be true instead. He also invents the Latin to do it, complaining more than once about the poverty of his own language for Greek technical terms, and coining what it lacks.

How it argues

In verse, at length, and by accumulation. Lucretius rarely gives one argument where six will do, and the technique is deliberate: he is trying to shift a conviction rather than win a point, and repetition from different angles is how convictions move. The poetry is not decoration on the philosophy - the images of atoms as dust motes in a sunbeam, of the plague, of the child at the breast - are doing the persuading, and the greatest passages are the ones where the argument turns emotional.

The moment

The last years of the Roman republic, with civil war approaching and the state visibly failing. The poem is dedicated to Memmius, a Roman politician, and its argument that public ambition is a source of misery and that the wise withdraw is addressed to a class for whom withdrawal was not respectable. Cicero mentions the poem in a letter of 54 BC, which is the one contemporary trace of it; almost nothing else about Lucretius is known.

How it travelled

It nearly did not. The poem was read in antiquity, praised by Ovid and used by Virgil, and then almost vanished. Jerome passed on a story that Lucretius was driven mad by a love potion and killed himself, writing in the intervals of insanity - a report from a hostile Christian source four centuries later that historians treat with great caution but that shaped how the poem was regarded. Two ninth-century manuscripts survived in northern Europe. In 1417 Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary hunting manuscripts in German monasteries, found a copy, had it transcribed, and put the poem back into circulation. It was printed by 1473 and reshaped early modern natural philosophy from Gassendi to Newton.

The strongest objection

That the swerve is a device rather than an argument. Lucretius needs atoms to deviate unpredictably so that human choice is not fixed by the collisions of the past, and he introduces the deviation for exactly that reason, with no independent evidence and no account of when or why it happens. Critics from Cicero onward have called it what it looks like: a physics adjusted to protect an ethics. The modern defence is that indeterminism at the smallest scale turned out to be true, which is a fortunate accident rather than a vindication of the reasoning.

Why read it

Because it is the only ancient philosophical work that is also a great poem, and because the third book on death is one of the most sustained pieces of argumentative writing anyone has produced on the subject. Read it in verse if possible; in prose the reasoning survives and the reason it convinced people does not.

Where to read it

First printed: 1473
First in English: 1682
Digitised: Yes

The text descends from two ninth-century manuscripts and Poggio's lost 1417 copy. Bailey's three-volume edition with commentary of 1947 remains the standard scholarly apparatus.

Dryden's partial verse translation and Munro's prose are out of copyright. Melville, Stallings and Slavitt are in copyright.

Where it stands

Revived twice over: once in the Renaissance, and again in recent decades, both as a subject of classical scholarship and through popular accounts of its rediscovery. Its physics is superseded and its status as the best surviving statement of a lost philosophy is not.

On quoting this book

The Latin is public domain; the English verse translations that convey why it is a poem are in copyright. Nothing is quoted.

Contested

Almost everything about the author. Jerome's account of madness, a love potion and suicide at forty-four is the only biography we have and is widely doubted; it may be Christian polemic against a dangerous book. Whether the poem is unfinished or merely ends abruptly is argued, as is whether the closing plague narrative is a deliberate dark ending or an accident of transmission. The relation between the swerve and Epicurus' own physics is unclear, since no surviving Greek text of Epicurus mentions it. Popular accounts crediting the 1417 rediscovery with launching modernity overstate a real influence considerably.