But, at its heart, “On the Nature of Things” persuasively laid out what seemed to be a strikingly modern understanding of the world. He thought that worms were spontaneously generated from wet soil, that earthquakes were the result of winds caught in underground caverns, that the sun circled the earth. Lucretius, who was born about a century before Christ, was emphatically not our contemporary. Startled by the intensity, I continued, past a prayer for peace, a tribute to the wisdom of the philosopher Epicurus, a resolute condemnation of superstitious fears, and into a lengthy exposition of philosophical first principles. Then you inject seductive love into the heart of every creature that lives in the seas and mountains and river torrents and bird-haunted thickets, implanting in it the passionate urge to reproduce its kind. Next wild creatures and cattle bound over rich pastures and swim rushing rivers: so surely are they all captivated by your charm and eagerly follow your lead. The Roman poet begins his work (in Martin Ferguson Smith’s careful rendering) with an ardent hymn to Venus:įirst, goddess, the birds of the air, pierced to the heart with your powerful shafts, signal your entry. The book, a prose translation of Lucretius’ two-thousand-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”), was marked down to ten cents, and I bought it as much for the cover as for the classical account of the material universe.Īncient physics is not a particularly promising subject for vacation reading, but sometime over the summer I idly picked up the book. Under a crescent moon, high above the earth, two pairs of legs-the bodies were missing-were engaged in what appeared to be an act of celestial coition. On one of my forays, I was struck by an extremely odd paperback cover, a detail from a painting by the Surrealist Max Ernst. They were jumbled together in bins through which I would rummage until something caught my eye. I had very little pocket money, but the bookstore would routinely sell its unwanted titles for ridiculously small sums. When I was a student, I used to go at the end of the school year to the Yale Co-op to see what I could find to read over the summer. Lucretius anticipated the core scientific vision of modernity.

Epicurus on the nature of things