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Nicole Feretich
CAMS 497H
April 29, 2014
Lucretius De Rerum Natura
There are and always will be several varying perspectives and theories on the
earth, how it acts/works, and those who dwell upon it. In Ancient Greece and Rome,
many philosophers (Plato, for example) looked at the elements and their causes/origins
from a mythological or (as it can be qualified as) a religious perspective. Rationalist
philosophers such as Epicurus and Lucretius held opinions of the earth on both
microscopic and macroscopic levels that can be labeled as anti-Timaean (in regards to
Platos Timaeus) and anti-evolutionary (in regards to the more modern idea of
Darwinism). Yet, they exhibit a scientific tradition that existed during the era that they
wrote. The Epicurean way of thinking that inspired Lucretius and his De Rerum Natura is
one worth noting for it exhibits a rejection of mythological explanation or divine
causation of the creation of the earth and its inhabitants, and the various workings of the
earth, all while being written in a poetic format that may not have been an acceptable
form of writing during Lucretius time.
Epicurus, who was influenced by Democritus, held interesting viewpoints in
relevance to physical and ethical systems. His physical philosophy describes the basic
components of existence. He was very scientific; he knew of atoms and how they interact
to create bigger existences. As noted by him, atoms move in distinct and speedy motions
while what they create are not as fast in movement. All things come into being through
atoms and, more specifically, their movements or interactions with one another.
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Epicurean thought, in accordance with the idea of atoms, argues for the soul to be
an entire system of atoms that exist within the body, which is another set of atoms
entirely. This scientific reasoning behind creation and life heavily influenced Lucretius;
Epicurean ideas are easily noted in Lucretius writing, specifically when it is about the
human soul and death or immortality.
De Rerum Natura is a didactic poem written by Lucretius as a means of
explaining Epicurean thought to the Roman people. Although, poetry for the Roman
reader is a non-serious activity, so the notion of poetry as labor would thereby be
paradoxical to them (Lau, 1975). He goes about describing atomism, celestial
phenomena, varying physical properties, and fortune or chance all while rejecting Roman
deities and divine causation as a theory of creation. Lucretius also wrote the poem to
Memmius, who may have been Gaius Memmius, as a means of freeing him
(Memmius) from the supernatural fears he held.
There were existing perspectives on the environment and its origins by the time
Lucretius got to writing about it. For example, there was Platos Timaeus that eventually
lead to De Rerum Natura as nearly a response or polemic to it. Plato goes about
explaining things in a mythological fashion while Lucretius describes the creation of the
world (through atoms) to be chaotic, without plan or control (Campbell). Lucretius, in
De Rerum Natura, writes: if I knew nothing of the nature of elements yet, given the
behavior of celestial bodies and from other observations, I would conclude that nature
was not a divine invention intended for us: there is so much wrong with it (pg. 143). He
completely excludes divine causation as a possible reasoning for the creation of the earth,
because he does not believe in it and/or because it is a cause of great fear within people.
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He claims to offer an explanation of every phenomenon observable in the universe, and
with it the prospect of complete peace of mind and freedom from fear (Kennedy).
Lucretius offers scientific background to use against Platos Timaeus, which uses
mythological accounts and exploits the often blurred boundaries and close relationship
between them and scientific cosmology (Campbell). Ovid too, in Metamorphoses,
applied scientific terminology to mythological cosmology.
Lucretius ideas of extinction and furthering of a species can relate to the more
modern ideas of Darwinism. But, it is nearly only relatable due to their similar views on
adaptation. For Lucretius, there was an interaction of chance and necessity (Campbell).
For example, the idea of being human was at first a process (5.1011-27); humans went
from being beast-like to being more settled with families and homes. It led to a
softening, both physical and psychological, that enables them to begin to co-operate
with one another and develop the first societies and language (Campbell).
Lucretius also talked about the creation of monsters on the earth. The earth
throws up creatures at random; some without gender; some without eyes; some without
feet; without hands; without mouths; and some limbs not properly separated from their
bodies and so unable to move (Campbell). This thereby brings about the idea of
extinction and the adaptations of animals to their environments. Animals or beings died
because they had certain mutations that did not enable them to survive the competitive
struggle for life. Only beings with correct attributes would survive, so the species seen
today are those that made it past the first generations of species mutations. Darwin does
not hold this same idea of relying on mutations amongst varying generations as a means
of extinction. Mutations are what allow for natural selection to take place, but for
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Darwin, it is not as quick as Lucretius describes it to be. This may make Lucretius anti-
evolutionary in his thinking.
Empedocles, in contrast to Lucretius, does not argue for mutation, but that there is
regularity in species. All species that are meant to die out had died out at the beginning of
the earth. So, he too is anti-evolutionary. Empedocles describes creatures to be assembled
from ready-made parts, albeit randomly. Lucretius creatures are created randomly via
atomic collisions. A general idea he had was that humans evolve due to changing
environments but stay the same as a species; Evolving and adapting also mentioned by
Darwin and Rousseau (in Second Discourse, part 1).
Lucretius spends nearly two books in De Rerum Natura speaking about creation.
He speaks of the formation of the world and how all things had a beginning and through
each other more things were formed. Through this, he aims to alleviate the fears brought
upon by the gods. Heaven itself had a beginning and therefore must also have an end,
making it just as mortal as humans. As mentioned previously, Lucretius believed that the
earth was not made through any divine causation or a part of any immortal/divine design.
The only way the gods can have an effect on the earth is through the fear in mens minds
about them; and how it was that the fear of gods found an entrance into mens minds,
and now guards all over the world, shrines, groves and altars and statues of gods (page
140). Lucretius poses the question about how the gods could have created the
world/people without having an original model to work from (pages 142, 143) which is
relative to a topic brought up by Plato and his (tiring) argument of being vs. becoming.
Going off these ideas of immortality and the gods, Lucretius spends lengths of the
books talking of death because reflection on death can remove fear and the sense of
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fragility, rather than increasing them (Nussbaum). Lucretius writes: We poor little
humans have only a brief enjoyment here. Soon it has already been, and one cannot call
it back (3.914-15), That fear of Acheron must be hurled out headlong, that fear which
shakes human life at its very foundations, covering everything over with the blackness of
death, and which does not leave any pleasure fluid and pure (3.37-40). Lucretius made
it clear that whatever can be touched by death, disease or can be affected by an element,
is made of the atoms and void, making it mortal. One of his main points is that everything
is mortal and nothing in the realm of existence can go untouched.
The fear of death is crippling to mankind and, along with the fear of the gods,
must be swept away from the minds of men. When all anyone cares about is their
impending death, everything they do becomes nearly an attempt to make their lives either
worth something to the nonexistent gods, or everything becomes a sign of death. What I
mean by this is: things are only done to leave marks on the earth, and with such a
negative reasoning behind it, the aftermath may not always be good to the earth itself
even if it was an attempt by a person or peoples to survive.
Lucretius, as mentioned previously, goes into the depth of atoms on a microscopic
level (2.700) and also a macroscopic level and goes into the idea of environmental cycles;
Time changes the nature of the whole world; everything passes from one state to
another and nothing stays like itself: all things pass away; Nature obliges everything to
change about (page 159). The earth, too, can adapt and is constantly changing as a
reaction to the people that dwell upon it; the earth cannot produce what she did in
previous generations due to this constant ending and beginning of things.
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A summarizing point Lucretius makes in book 6: In matters such as these you
must take a wide view and a long, long look at things in every direction, and remember
that the sum of things is infinite so that our sky is a tiny part of the whole; It is indeed a
much smaller part proportionally than a man considered as part of the whole earth. As
long as you keep that point clearly in mind you will spare yourself a good deal of
astonishment (page 194).
Lucretius main goals of De Rerum Natura was to expel the fear of death and the
gods from the minds of the Roman people and to also make them (after destroying their
deities) aware of the atoms that created them and everything else. The unconscious nature
of people to run their lives based off fear or other negative attributes leave an irreversible
scar on the earth, thereby resulting in environmental cycles that could either force species
to adapt (according to Lucretius and Epicurus) or become extinct (according to the ideas
of Darwinism). Lucretius used poetry as his means of getting these messages across;
through heavy metaphor and prose, he is able to beautifully destroy any misconceptions
people held about the creation of life and what it means to be.








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Works Cited
Campbell, Gordon. Zoogany and Evolution in Platos Timaeus: The Presocratics,
Lucretius and Darwin. (n.d.): n. pag. Print.
Gale, Monica. Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius, and the Didactic
Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.
Kennedy, Duncan F. Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan, 2002. Print.
Lucretius. The Poem on Nature/De Rerum Natura. Trans. C.H. Sisson. New York:
Routledge, 2003. N. pag. Print.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura William Ellery Leonard, Ed. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura.
N.p,. n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2014
Nassbaum, Martha C. Mortal Immortals: Lucretius on Death and the Voice of Nature.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1.2 (1989): n. pag. JSTOR. Web.