 It was the year 45 before the common era. We find ourselves in a pristine villa just outside of Rome. It's quiet here, a place which may come to mind for those searching for peace from the turbulence which was Rome. Here in this villa, owned by an ambiguous individual named Mimeus, we find the man who somewhat come to call the greatest poet and philosopher of Rome. His full name was Titus Lucretius Charus, and what we know of him is very little. A handful of accounts have survived the destructive force which is time, but we also have what can be extracted from his lone work, the Durarum Natura, roughly translated to, on the nature of things. The picture of his life which we crudely stitch together is, at first glance, one of obvious anguish, seasoned with melancholy and spiced with sorrow. But upon deeper analysis, we find that this story may be but a blatant fabrication, grafted onto his legacy by those who wish to see an enemy of religion, defamed. If we can believe the narrative set forth by that most famous poet, Virgil, and his Georgics, we can shed this veil of melancholy which surrounds Lucretius' life. For the words which Virgil chooses when describing him is as if he were speaking of one who knew the ingredients which made for the happy life. If and why our poet did commit to taking his own life, we shall probably never know. If one thing is evident by the work which he left behind, it is the sheer reverence which he held for the fourth century philosopher Epicurus. Much of what the Durarum Natura informs us on can be directly linked to Epicurus' primary work on nature, most notably the physics which saturates each book. The remainder also falls in line with the master's teachings. We may think of Lucretius as a sort of corridor which the teachings of Epicurus travel through. My wish is to imitate, he said of Epicurus in a line in the poem. He was resolved to defend the Epicurian way and to give to Rome the medicine which it did not want, but in his eyes, so desperately needed. Now that we have established what I hope can be called a reliable foreground, shall we proceed on to the work which Professor Shotwell named as the most marvelous performance in all of antique literature. From the various texts which have been left to us, we can say that this is the first work of poetry written in Latin hexameter. We find it in six books, three matching pairs. His primary focus is Epicurian physics, though he does occasionally branch off, but usually stays true to his cause. Beginning in the first pair, he sets his sights on the infinitely small atoms, then moving on to something more relatable to the ancient world in the second, this being the human condition, then finally closing with the infinitely large cosmology. When beginning a subject, he first explains the basic nature of what is to be spoken on. Then, following up in the second book, he details the various phenomena associated with and pertaining to the given subject. Further, you may find when making your way through the books, a constant duality, one side life, the other, death, what he constructs, he also deconstructs. Instead of jumping from book to book, we will move from subject to subject, beginning with physics, then ethics, and finally his thoughts on religion and the gods. We see him first and foremost, echoing the great pre-Socratic atomist-democratists, affirm that there is within the cosmos only body and void. What we perceive around us is but the properties of these two entities. Like Epicurus, he believed the atom to be the elementary unit which makes up all that surrounds us. The cosmos of Lucretius is one of the limitable space, holding within it, the limitable atoms. These atoms, as he predicted, are in continuous motion, only appearing stationary to our eyes, secondary to the enormous size difference. Thus, he explains to his readers by comparing the phenomenon to a flock of sheep, which when observed from afar may seem only as a static white mass, but upon closer examination is revealed to be a living group of organisms perpetually in motion, occasionally even bumping into one another. At this point in the book, we also see, for the first time, his freshly minted atomic swerve. What this attempts to describe is the unpredictable nature of atoms. By Lucretius' account, if this swerve were to be absent, we would be nothing but automata moving about the universe with a deterministic future, doomed to the end which was set in motion eons before. The exact correlation between swerve and free will is a frequent topic of debate, with seemingly limitless interpretations. Toward the end of book one, Lucretius tells us something which I am quite certain would alarm those who saw Earth as the footsdew of God. He proposes that Earth is but one of many worlds, that there is no conceivable way that in an illimitable universe, Earth is the only habitable formation, and like all other things, Earth too will see its end at some indeterminate point, far into the future. Now one might more clearly see why the Romans, particularly those of religious piety, would turn to defaming our philosopher after his death. Moving on, in book three he continues toward outlining the soul and its properties. He begins by stating that the soul is made up of anima, spirit, and animus, mind. The spirit resides throughout the body while the mind is located within the chest. He fights for a corporeal soul, one that to the further dismay of the contemporary pious reader does not wander the Elysian fields after death. This he thought was due to the atomic properties which made up the soul, these being air, wind, fire, and a fourth property unique to the soul. Like the world around us, it must also, by necessity, be destined for dissolution. He was thoroughly prepared, if ever propositioned, to defend this startling claim with a multitude of proofs. When describing the soul's properties, he lays down his theory of simulacra. This theory is meant to explain sense perception. Simulacra are images which come from the world around us and cause vision and visualization. This same theory also applies to what we see in our dreams. He does not believe it possible that what our senses perceive can be wrong or duplicitous, only that our interpretation of the data is faulty. From this section he also describes what can be called a magnificent precursor to Darwin's evolutionary theory. He states that the different parts of our bodies are not what was then thought given to us by God, instead they were adapted to better fulfilled functions which already existed in nature. The Earth too has its process of creation expounded upon here. You will find that he gives more than one explanation for a set phenomena, never quite settling on any particular one, but in no sense does he rely on God or superstition to uncover the mysteries which surround these scientific questions. His vision of a young Earth is one teeming with life, though life which was sporadic and transient. Many species would be born into existence only to pair shortly after, this of course shortly in the cosmological sense. The few species which remained reproduced and became eventually what we know and experience today. Again, here we see a marvelous anticipation of Darwin. Civilizations developed only after and when nature prompted them to. Fire and language each had their natural origin, which humans then developed into the innovations which are so vital to our continued survival in a hostile world. Lastly, in terms of physical phenomenon, Lucretius gives us defensible naturalistic solutions to questions which frequently invoke divine inspiration, i.e. lightning, earthquakes, and other equally as devastating natural occurrences. It was also not outside of his code to trample over what was then taught about these disasters by the established institutions of his day. While what we find throughout the Deram Natura is primarily physics, there is also plenty of thought-provoking ethical ideas. After all, he is an Epicurean and is determined to relay, as completely as he can, the philosophy of his long-dead master. For one to achieve happiness, the fear of death must first and foremost be conquered for what is death, Lucretius pondered, but simple annihilation. It would be the height of foolishness to suppose that you, meaning your conscious self, will even be around to concern yourself with the existence which you then lack. It would be far better if we could accept that death is no different from the experiences which so plagued us prior to our birth, see the ending of Book 3 to hear his diatribe on death and the fear that surrounds it. When death has finally been, metaphorically speaking, laid to rest, we may move on to that which frequently causes human beings to suffer needlessly, the ostentatious indulgence of desire. Like the problems of civilization, each answer leads promptly into another problem, so on and on at infinitum. It was Lucretius' thought that Epicurus held the key, not to a supernatural paradise, but to one which was right here, obtainable, if only we just open our ears and extend our hand. He left behind his tetrafarmacos, or fourfold cure. It reads as such, God holds no fears, death no worries, good is easily obtainable, evil easily indurable. For Lucretius' part, he simply wishes, once again, to simply act as the messenger. Of these four statements, he speaks on three in the book. In regard to the fourth, it is nowhere to be found. This, some scholars believe, is likely secondary to the book being unfinished, cut short by his early death. Of all that Epicurus had given mankind, what we should most thank him for, thought Lucretius, was the defeat of organized religion and subsequent freeing of the soul. Though it would be a mistake on our part to assume that Epicurus held no belief in the gods. From what we know of his conception of the gods, he believed them to be constitutive quasi-bodies, as in the theory of Simulacra from which the constitution of the soul is taken, God, or gods, are taken to be maintained by the same. These gods, if to be seen at all, enter into our eyes and minds as visions, imagination, and dreams. Whether what he meant by this was literal visions, or whether it was his way of telling us that the gods were but the innate constructs of our own intellect, remains to be seen, and it is likely to stay that way. Their exact nature was not transmitted through Lucretius. We can only say for certain what Epicurus left us, that the gods should be thought of as blessed and immortal beings who live a life of utmost tranquility, never disquieted by the affairs of humans. Our thought should not be toward the appeasement of these gods, for they will show us no emotion, be it negative or positive. We should instead seek to achieve what has always been theirs, and may well be ours, lasting supreme happiness. It is within the human limitation to be done. Lucretius paints us a clear picture of the supreme human. This picture is Epicurus. It was him that gave to humanity the remedy to all that most disturbs our peace, who, through the clearness of his thought, managed to achieve a state, if not equal, then at least comparable to a god. Within some of the book's poems, it may, at first glance, appear that Lucretius is speaking to those same gods which he so often turned his back. See the poem in book one, where he begins by speaking a prayer to Venus. Thou, Venus, art soul mistress of the nature of things, and without thee nothing rises up into the divine realms of life. Nothing grows to be lovely or glad. The twelve Olympians, to which Venus is a part, are not true Epicurian gods. They are but the projection of different human emotions. Taken in this fashion, we can read his prayer as an aspiration. An aspiration that the Roman Republic would abandon the debauchery which let it down the path which now causes its deterioration, and begin to strive for the peace of soul which the gods should embody. He believed that if this lesson which his poems sought to teach could be learned, then his prayer would be answered, and Rome spared. It is not surprising that, like the later Spinoza, his legacy had for the first few centuries a bothersome fog of atheism. This fog would not deter all, as there were a few who, even in the early days of the Roman Empire, read and accepted as doctrine. What we note today as the Epicurian philosophy is predominantly known to us through Lucretius, as well as through Laertius' life of Epicurus, written sometime between 271 and 341. The Durarum Natura has survived and been transmitted to us in two 9th century manuscripts. O and Q are what they are known by, and we have Poggio Beracciolini, a 15th century papal secretary to thank for their rediscovery. Now, I believe it fitting to end with a few paraphrased lines, and to take from them inspiration as so many before us have. No single thing abides, but all things flow, fragment to fragment clings, the things thus grow, until we know and name them. By degrees they melt, and are no more the things we know. Globed from the atoms falling slow and swift, I see the suns, I see the systems lift, their forms, and even the systems in their suns, shall go back slowly to the eternal drift. Thou too, O earth, Thine empires, lands, and seas, Least, why thy stars, of all the galaxies. Globed from the drift like these, like these Thou too shall go, Boured going, hour by hour, like these. If you found this to be helpful and would like to support the channel, make sure to like the video. And to all of my viewers, present and future, who have taken the time out of their day to join me in learning about these great minds, thank you. Your continued support is not lost on me. Until next time.