LUCRETIUS "The Nature of Things"

LUCRETIUS  The Nature of Things  Transl. A.E. Stallings; Penguin Classics, 2007

I had no idea that before 60 BC, Greek and Roman intellectuals had figured out that everything was made out of small, indivisible particles (atomos); that “many things have common elements, as words share letters” (Book I, 197-8).  I had never heard of Epicurus, on whose philosophy Lucretius based his 7000 line poem.  Epicurus lived in the 3^rd and 4^th centuries B.C.E. but his theories came after earlier philosophers, most notably Democritus in the 5^th century B.C.E.  I find it amazing that 2500 years ago, philosophers had already come up with the concept of infinitesimally small indivisible particles, of matter and void, making up everything we see around us.

Lucretius wrote his work as a poem.  He writes in Book I 931ff 
“[…] I teach great truths, and set out to unknot the mind from tight strictures of religion, and since I write of so darkling a subject in a poetry so bright […] I want to coat this physic in rich song, to kiss it, as it were, with the sweet honey of the Muse. […]”. 
I’m impressed by his scholarship but I’m also very impressed by the translator, A.E. Stallings who translated the Latin into English rhyme, heptameter to be exact.  She calls them “fourteeners” saying that their “old-fashioned rhythm and ring will get across something of the archaic flavor of Lucretius’ Latin”.  There are a few times that she has used anachronistic modern phrases but overall being able to read it as poetry seems to preserve some of the original feel of the words.

There are some beautiful turns of phrases (Book I, 143-144)

As I seek the right words and the right poetry to light

Brilliant lanterns for your mind […]

Lucretius’ first principle is that “nothing can be made from nothing”, certainly not by any supernatural power.  Next he says that “Nature does not render anything to naught” meaning that everything eventually breaks back down to its basic elements, things don’t disappear.  Everything is made of atoms “those seeds that abide forever”, the “elemental particles”.  He theorizes that “elements are of eternal stuff linked with bonds of different strengths” – pretty amazing stuff for the pre-electron microscope age.  He explains how  we know there are these particles even though we can’t see them.  These early thinkers also surmised that “there’s also emptiness in things”, that even in hard things like iron or stone, there are empty spaces, that these things are not “one solid mass”.  The universe consists of only 2 things: matter and void. Lucretius argues for the indivisibility of atoms by saying (Book I, 616-620)

[…] since after all

Half of a half of anything can still again be cut

In two, and on and on ad infinitum.  And then what

Will be the difference between the tiniest speck of matter

And all the universe? […]

In Book II (The Dance of Atoms), he writes that “all bodies of matter are in motion" and compares this to dust motes dancing in a slant of sunlight: the random ceaseless motion as well as how this usually occurs below the abilities of our senses to detect.  He also brings in the concept of the “swerve”, the slight variability that allows collisions to occur between atoms and therefore introduces some randomness into the universe that “shatters the laws of fate” (Book II, 254). 

In support of reason, in Book III (Mortality and the Soul), Lucretius writes that he doesn’t think there is any flaw in each human that reason can’t correct (319-322)

But one thing I am certain of, so weak is any trace

Of inborn nature past the power of reason to erase,

That there is nothing fundamentally at odds

With living out our lives so they are worthy of the gods.

 A hopeful and reassuring viewpoint.

I am also impressed by the powers of observation and deduction evident in this work.  Lucretius subscribed to the belief that the way to understand the universe is to observe the natural world around us and then use logic to draw deductions from these observations.  This poem contains many descriptions of natural phenomena with expositions of what we can and can’t deduce from these observations.  Lucretius’ Epicurean viewpoint on religion and the gods seems very brave and revolutionary for the time (or even within the last 200 years).  Early on, in Book I (Matter and Void), he writes (83-84):

[…] on the contrary, it is Religion breeds

Wickedness and that has given rise to wrongful deeds

He then describes Agaememnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, to persuade the gods to send

[…] fair and favourable winds to sail the fleet along! –

So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong

An observation that holds true today where mobs of people are rioting and killing in Libya and the Middle East in the name of the prophet because they feel his name was slighted by some amateur American film-makers.  Where is the logic or justice in this but it is all done in the name of Religion.

The evocations of various phenomena of the time were likewise fascinating:

• garments dyed glowing purple from the murex of the Thessalian tide;
• spikenard bloom;
• Hyrcanian hounds;
• Molossian mastiffs;
• Traitor’s [Tarpeian]Rock;
• overpowering lad’s love [southernwood];
• an ancient Roman physician coating the lip of a goblet with honey to disguise the bitter taste of the wormwood medicine from his patient;
• mountains being “two thousand arrow-shots away” or “five hundred javelin-casts”;
• nymphs and goat-footed satyrs;
• a snake that, touched with human spit, will die;
• hellebore a poison for humans but “which makes goats and quail grow fat and sleek”;
• the “snow-white goose, Protector of the Roman Citadel”;
• a belief that the sight of a rooster was painful to a lion’s eyes;
• Babylonian coverlets; Babylonian perfumes; shoes from Sicyon; Alindan silks;
• the currents of the Black Sea uniformly gliding in one direction;  
• 'snake-handed elephants […] trained by Carthaginians to bear the wounds of wars’;
• Etesian squalls. 

The descriptions of phenomenae that I enjoyed the most were the Avernian lakes, where Lucretius  describes all the places where bizzare things have happened: birds falling dead out of the sky, “wing-footed stags enticing […] serpents from their holes” with their breath; trees whose shade kills people; wells of sweet water in the middle of the ocean etc.

There are references to the Great Flood (the notes refer the reader to Ovid’s Metamorphoses” and Deucalion- the Greek Noah - and his wife Pyrrha), an interesting similarity with Genesis.
So many of these concepts broached in the centuries B.C.E. were on the right track.  In Book V, Lucretius talks about a legend that once “Water lorded it over land”, about genes (Lucretius writes of generative seeds and like breeding like).  When trying to explain the movement of the stars he doesn’t have one single proveable theory and therefore suggests a few, one of which is that the heavens are a great sphere with a flow of air spinning  “the sphere in the direction that the stars are moving in”.  Right idea, wrong sphere.  His writing describes the principle that the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound; noting that you see a distant woodsman strike a massive tree with a double-bladed axe before you hear the sound of the axe hitting the tree.  He is off-base however on how lightening is formed, with his theory that clouds contain “a multitude of seeds of fire”.

He is wrong on several theories or conclusions.  He mentions in Book I (1052-1082) the concept that the Sun might be the centre of the universe with people on the other side of the earth who

when they behold the sun, we see the stars of night.  And that the seasons of the heavens come to us by turns, And when it’s night for one, then for the other daylight burns. […] How can there be a centre to to what’s infinitely vast? And even if there were, then why should anything stand fast? Why shouldn’t it be driven far away instead. […]

Nor is there any spot where bodies lose the force of weight

So they can stand still in the void.

However he concludes that the sun and moon are exactly the same size they appear because their outline is “sharp and clear”.  His description of the “dawn of the world” in Book V (Cosmos and Civilization) reminds me of the Garden of Eden in Genesis: greenery, the creation of all the animals and birds, the Earth giving sustenance and warmth, “but the dawn-time of the world did not bring forth harsh cold and snow, nor too much heat nor mighty winds that violently blow”.  There was the same idea of an easier time, with less suffering that we saw in Genesis.  For Lucretius this dawn-time changed when Mother Earth grew tired “like a woman wasted with long years”.  He talks about the Earth bearing food “more generously” in her prime.  In Book I he writes (1150) “Even now the world is past its prime”.  I wonder what Lucretius would think about the world today.

While Lucretius describes everything as being made of atoms in different configurations he didn’t understand (how could he!) what binds atoms together.  The Democritus/Epicurus atomic theory involved hooks and barbs rather than electronic bonds between positively and negatively charged ions.  The ancients wrote of smooth and rough atoms to explain the different properties: sound vs light, iron vs wood, heat vs water etc.  Still, I find it awe-inspiring that they believed that air, water, iron, flesh, plants etc were all made of the same basic components, just assembled in different configurations with different amounts of void between the atoms and some finite variety of atoms.

Lucretius also speaks of there being many “freaks” in the early years including “Hermaphrodites partaking of both sexes” which reminded me of Aristophanes story in Plato’s “Symposium”  where he explains love as being connected to proto-mankind being 3 types of people: man-man, woman-woman and man-woman, and each type was split in half by the gods with love being their eternal search for their missing half.

Lucretius describes some of the advances mankind had achieved, moving from a hunter-gatherer society with people wearing animal skins to a pastoral society wearing woven cloth, living indoors safe from savage beasts; but instead of being at risk from accidental poisonings due to lack of knowledge, and dying of infection due to lack of medical knowledge, the more civilized man now dies of deliberate poisonings or wounds suffered due to more sophisticated warfare and weapons.  He speaks of men dying from over-indulgence rather than starvation.  He describes the development of societal contracts (Book V, 1018-1023):

Then neighbours began to form the bonds of friendship,

With a will

Neither to be harmed themselves, nor to do another ill,

The safety of the babes and womenfolk in one another’s trust,

And indicated by gesturing and grunting it was just

For everyone to have mercy on the weak.

In Book III (Mortality and the Soul), Lucretius writes (54-55)

 […] To truly take the measure of a man,

You must observe him in the midst of trial and tribulation

He speaks about Avarice, blind Ambition, envy and greed and how mankind’s fear of death creates a lot of suffering.  He didn’t think that people should fear death as once we are gone, that’s it, we cease to exist (though our elemental particles remain in the universe) and so there is nothing to worry about as we won’t be there TO worry.

Book III, 1018-1023

[…] the Conscience fears for its misdeeds, and IT applies

Goads and floggings to ITSELF, neither does it surmise,
Meanwhile, that there can be, to all its sufferings, an end,

Nor, at length, a final limit to its punishment,

So it dreads these same oppressions will grow weightier with death,

Until, at last, the life of fools becomes a Hell on Earth.

Lucretius has good advice on how to be happy (Book V, 1117-1119):

But if you’d steer your life by a philosophy that’s true,

The way to be the wealthiest of men is to eschew

High living, and be contented in the mind […]

(Book V, 1131-1136)

Let others wear themselves out all for nothing, sweating blood,

Battling their way along ambition’s narrow road

Because their wisdom smacks of others’ lips, and they pursue

Things that they only know second-hand, rather than through

Their own senses […]

And writes about always wanting more (Book V, 1412-1415)

For whatever is at hand, if we have never known before

Anything finer, it gives us chief delight and reigns supreme.

That is, till something better comes along in our esteem

And ruins the earlier thing that’s now old-fashioned to our mind.

(Book V, 1430-1435)

Therefore the human race is ever laboring in vain,

And fretting the years away in bootless worries. For it’s plain

Man doesn’t realize that even having has its measure;

There’s a point beyond which nothing can increase our real pleasure.

And this is what has by degrees dragged Life so far from shore,

And stirred up from the very depths the tidal waves of War.

His recipe for happiness is simple, Book II 18-22

[…]All your nature yelps for is a body free from pain,

And, to enjoy pleasure, a mind removed from fear and care[…]

And so we see the body’s needs are altogether spare –

Only the bare minimum to keep suffering at bay

Yet which can furnish pleasures for us in a wide array.

He also debunks religion's role in all of this (Book V, 1184-1187)

Moreover, men observed the orderly movements of the heavens,

And beheld the cycling of the year with its returning seasons,

But could not fathom how these came about, and lacking reasons,

Found an escape by handing these things over to the gods

[…]

Lucretius does not have a very high opinion of women.  When he is writing about the development of looms, weaving and spinning he writes (Book V, 1353-1355)

[…] Naturally, at the start

Men, not women, spun the wool – for men in every art

Excel the weaker sex in cleverness by far […]

He seems to have a higher opinion of dogs (Book VI, 1221-1222)

 […] But the clan

Of Dogs was hardest hit, the true and steadfast friend of Man

Given my science background and over 30 years of thinking scientifically, I was very drawn to Lucretius' reasoning.  It seemed a big jump in logic from the writings we've read so far (Genesis, Bhagavad Gita, Plato's Phaedrus, Plato's Symposium) that try to explain the world around us and our purpose but as Lucretius himself said (Book I, 1117):
“One truth illuminate another, as light kindles light”

It's all a progression from there to here.