Lucretius

Map of Roman Empire “The opponents of Epicureanism commonly treated it as a dull, drab creed; Lucretius’ assertion is that, rightly apprehended, it is beautiful, majestic and inspiring. In this poem the medium really is the message.”

Epicurus “ On his account we can deduce from the physical phenomena around us that all matter is made up of small indivisible particles - atoms - and that nothing exists except atoms and empty space.”

The Coliseum Lucretius believed that “all events and processes are merely the effects of the movements of atoms. All existence is material; everything that exists is a part of nature, and therefore there can be no supernatural realm”

Ancient Roman Ruins “All pleasures of the senses are inferior to such abstract pleasures as friendship and philosophical contemplation. Accordingly, this philosophy, often caricatured as a religion of sensuous self-indulgence, is in reality rather austere.”

The Buddha Epicureanism and Buddhism teach a similar truth in their understanding that there is no permanent self or soul.

Agamemnon Sacrificing Iphigenia One example given is that of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter “so that the Greeks might obtain a fair wind for their voyage to Troy. He sums this up in a line as famous as any in the entire poem: So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong’” (I.101).

Venus “ Every action, all creation and all destruction are alike the product of the push and pull of atoms, of these elementary particles colliding, cohering or flying apart.”

Mars, God of Strife and War “ So Love and Strife need to be in balance or harmony. But the universe as totality needs to cohere, and so the sum of things, we may infer, is the prevailing of Love over Strife.”

The Tao “T he universe is on one view a balance of strife and love, peace and war, while on another it is the sum of innumerable lesser strifes within an ultimate and unassailable peace or love.”

Philosophy in Poetry “Lucretius cannot instruct us to love nature, the world and the everlasting atomic flux, to be rapt by the romance of universal kinship; he can only achieve his end by writing a masterpiece so powerful in its poetry that we are persuaded to feel the romance and drama of his conception for ourselves. And therefore he embarked on the eccentric scheme of doing philosophy - real philosophy - in verse.”

Hand Holding Sprouting Seed “The ageing and dying of things, he explains, is the creation of other things, and ‘Thus the Sum of Things is every hour/ Renewed’ (II. 74-5)”

Summary In other words, our immortality can never be found as drops, but only as the ocean itself.