Lucretius identifies the supernatural with the notion that the deities created our world or interfere with its operations in some way. His work was an attempt to show through poetry that everything in nature can be explained by natural laws, without the need for the intervention of divine beings. Lucretius's task was clearly to state and fully develop these views in an attractive form. This meant that humans had nothing to fear from them. He argued that the deities (whose existence he did not deny) lived forever in the enjoyment of absolute peace-strangers to all the passions, desires and fears, which affect humans-and are totally indifferent to the world and its inhabitants, unmoved alike by their virtues and their crimes. To do this, Epicurus invoked the atomism of Democritus to demonstrate that the material universe was formed not by a Supreme Being but by the mixing of elemental particles which had existed from all eternity, governed by certain simple laws. Epicurus thus made it his mission to remove these fears and thus establish tranquility in the minds of his readers. This wrath was supposed to be displayed by the misfortunes inflicted in this life and by the everlasting tortures that were the lot of the guilty in a future state or, where these feelings were not strongly developed, from a vague dread of gloom and misery after death. To the Greek philosopher Epicurus, the unhappiness and degradation of humans arose largely from the dread which they had of the power of the deities and terror of their wrath. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna ("chance"), and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities.īackground De rerum natura was written by the Roman poet Lucretius. Namely, Lucretius explores the principles of atomism the nature of the mind and soul explanations of sensation and thought the development of the world and its phenomena and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The poem, written in some 7,400 dactylic hexameters, is divided into six untitled books, and explores Epicurean physics through poetic language and metaphors. 55 BC) with the goal of explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. Opening of Pope Sixtus IV's 1483 manuscript of De rerum natura, scribed by Girolamo di Matteo de TaurisĮpicureanism, ethics, physics, natural philosophyĭe rerum natura ( Latin: On the Nature of Things) is a first-century BC didactic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius ( c.
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