PATIENT
On the Nature of Things
COMPOSED
c. 55 BCE (approx.)
FORM
A philosophical epic in verse
SETTING
Rome, addressed to Memmius
CHIEF COMPLAINT
How do you stop being afraid of death and of the gods?
HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS
A Roman poet, Lucretius (c. 99–55 BCE), sets out to cure his reader of the fear of death and of the gods, and does it by explaining that the world is made of atoms moving in empty space. The physics is the medicine and the verse is the honey. He follows the Greek philosopher Epicurus, whom he praises as the first to raise his eyes against the terror of religion. The poem argues that death is nothing to us, that nature runs without a designer, and that the way to peace is to understand how things really are.
REVIEW OF SYSTEMS
ATOMS AND VOID
Everything is tiny particles moving in empty space. Nothing else exists, and nothing else is needed. Nothing comes from nothing.
DEATH IS NOTHING
The soul dies with the body, and there is no one left to suffer. The time after death is like the time before birth.
THE SWERVE
A small, unpredictable deviation that starts collisions and leaves room for free will.
RELIGION
Nature without gods. People came to fear the gods out of ignorance, and the cure is to understand how things really are.
TRANQUILLITY
The aim of the whole poem: a mind free from fear, and from the wanting that fear produces.
PHYSICAL EXAM — STYLE & STRUCTURE
- —A philosophical epic in verse, addressed to a friend, Memmius. The argument is the point; the poetry carries it.
- —Vivid images do the persuading: children afraid in the dark, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the plague, the view from the heights.
- —The same idea is put several ways. The death argument appears as a symmetry and as a mirror, so the reader can try each.
- —Calm and argumentative in tone, even about frightening subjects.
- —Science before science: an atomic picture of the world, argued from what can be observed.
ASSESSMENT & PLAN
Lucretius is the Epicurean voice in a room that has been mostly Stoic. Seneca quotes Epicurus often, and Epictetus tells his students to master their fear by changing their judgments, while Lucretius proposes to remove fear by changing their physics. All three have the same enemy: the fear that makes life a misery. A good way in is the death argument in Book III and the mirror of time. For a first read, try A. E. Stallings (Penguin), Ronald Melville (Oxford World's Classics) or Martin Ferguson Smith (Hackett, prose); the full guide quotes William Ellery Leonard's public-domain 1916 translation.