Lucretius Book 1: The Material Cosmos

An Eclectic Humanist

This episode begins our hands-on discussion of Lucretius's Humanist masterpiece, On the Nature of Things. Book One (of six) presents the best surviving Classical argument for a purely material cosmos consisting of nothing but atoms moving in a void. The argument is the first step in both an overall understanding of how the Cosmos works and, perhaps counter-intuitively, a consolation in which the poet eases his friend Memius's fears about death, most particularly the fear of everlasting torment. The calamity against which he argues throughout the poem is religio—translated as both religion and superstition. Accordingly, Lucretius presents a vision of the Cosmos in which the supernatural plays no active role, in which both matter and void are uncreated and infinite, and in which neither the Earth nor any other location is at the centre: a Cosmos of infinite potential in which life is not unique to some privileged location but rather an inevitable consequence of the behaviour of matter over time.

All quotations are from A.E. Stallings' translation, the most beautiful English rendering of this poem that I've encountered, available from Penguin.